As the previous post mentions, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit was in town yesterday to speak at Washington University. He also visited with employees of the CitiMortgage division in O’Fallon, Mo., and announced some updated results for the company’s foreclosure prevention efforts. In the…

St. Louis lacks resilience in the way it has responded to mounting mortgage foreclosures, a new academic study says. The study, published by the MacArthur Foundation, says that while local non-profit groups have ramped up their efforts,

The weakness is that the resources…

Some politicians think the Federal Housing Administration is the solution to the nation’s housing problems. Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., thinks it’s a “powder keg” that could explode if Congress keeps pushing it to relax lending standards.

Bond issued a statement for…

When I blogged about David A. Noyes & Co.’s attempt to choose the greatest financial innovation of the last century, I dismissed 401ks and IRAs as mere tax gimmicks. So guess which innovation won the poll? Noyes says in a…

John Quargnenti, the rehabber whose financing problems were a subject of a column last October, may be back in business soon thanks to a rule change at Fannie Mae. Bloomberg reports:

The company will expand its limit for investor and second- home…

Economist Paul Christopher doesn’t buy the Bush administration’s forecast of a strong economic rebound, nor does he think we’re headed for a repeat of the Great Depression. Christopher, the global macro strategist at Eclipse Capital Management in Clayton, thinks the economy will…

While the real Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are working on a program to cut beleaguered homeowners’ mortgage bills, the St. Louis Blues have invoked the firms’ names in announcing a “bailout” promotion of their own.  As part of a…

Harry Markowitz, a Nobel-prize-winning economist, is one of the fathers of modern portfolio theory, and you can pretty much draw a straight line from his theoretical work to the financial engineering that underlies the derivatives market. So, when Markowitz weighs…