And now the Wall Street Journal is reporting Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chair Sheila Bair is suffering through this housing market as well. Her home in Amherst Massachusetts—where she was once a professor—was listed and then pulled off the market.

After listing the five-bedroom property in April, the couple cut the price to $745,000 less than three weeks later, then reduced it again before withdrawing the listing. Ms. Bair’s real-estate agent, Stephen Feldman, of Prudential Sawicki Real Estate, declined comment. An FDIC spokesman said Ms. Bair decided to remove the listing and wait for the market to improve on the advice of her real-estate agent. The family will continue to lease the house to its tenants. Ms. Bair and her family currently rent a house in Maryland.

Interesting that all these stories are about administration officials in finance/economy-related positions.

Image by Wikipedia Commons

Tim Geithner…Out on the town it appears

First, we learned that Ben Bernanke’s childhood home went into foreclosure (no Mom and Pop Bernanke were not the current owners), and now the AP’s reporting that Tim Geithner’s New York home is also suffering through the usual downturn tribulations.

Back in February, Geithner listed his home—in Larchmont New York outside of Manhattan—for $1.635 million.  The listing went through an initial price drop, then in late May, it was rented out for $7,500 a month. Not too shabby, right? Well, it turns out “it probably falls a bit short of the monthly mortgage payments on the Geithners’ two loans totaling $1.25 million, plus $27,000 a year in property taxes,” according to the A.P.’s story.

So that, and he’s got the toughest job in the world.

Image by Jay Tamboli, Flickr Creative Commons

The big news from this morning was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s hearing. Before the Joint Economic Committee this morning, he testified that recovery is on the horizon, likely starting late this year. Here’s what Bernanke had to say about the housing market, according to a transcript posted online.

The housing market, which has been in decline for three years, has also shown some
signs of bottoming. Sales of existing homes have been fairly stable since late last year, and sales of new homes have firmed a bit recently, though both remain at depressed levels. Although some of the boost to sales in the market for existing homes is likely coming from foreclosure related transactions, the increased affordability of homes appears to be contributing more broadly to the steadying in the demand for housing. In particular, the average interest rate on conforming 30-year fixed-rate mortgages has dropped almost 1-3/4 percentage points since August, to about 4.8 percent. With sales of new homes up a bit and starts of single-family homes little changed from January through March, builders are seeing the backlog of unsold new homes decline–a precondition for any recovery in homebuilding.