Mind Over Market

Financial author Robert Stowe England tells the story of writing his new book, Black Box Casino , at the Mortgage Bankers Association 98th Annual Convention and Expo at the Hong Kong Room at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Chicago on October 10, 2011. The comments were followed by a book signing. The event was sponsored by Titan Lending, IDS, and Depth PR. The story of writing the book was also told the following day, October 11, at Barnes & Noble's DePaul Center Bookstore in downtown Chicago at DePaul University's Loop Campus. That event, too, was followed by a book signing. Read more about the book at this link:

"You can't understand the United States at all unless you understand what's going in Europe," Greenspan stated in an interview on CNBC's Squawk Box October 7, 2011. "I think we have been through a remarkably elaborate program to try to find out whether the single currencies work," he said. Like others, Greenspan thought it would work in the beginning because the markets bought into the idea it would work. This could be seen in the pricing of the currencies in countries like Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal as they moved toward currency union. As the date of currency union approached in each country, the spread in interest rates of local currencies above the German bund would narrow dramatically from a level of a hundreds of basis points. "I said and thought the markets are assuming that the Greeks and the Italians and the Spaniards and Portuguese are going to behave like Germans, and that's what [the markets] were telling us,"

This YouTube video is a recording of a RTL-Z Dutch television program of October 7, 2008. The Dutch news program plays an audio recording of President Bush in a speech in 2002 when he calls for increasing lending flexibility for blacks and Hispanics so that poor people "can have a house as nice as anybody else." He set a goal of 5.5 million new homes for minorities by 2010 to close the "homeownership gap" between whites and minorities. This was to be achieved he said, through new initiatives from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make it easier for people with poor credit histories to qualify for a mortgage. President Clinton got the ball rolling and ramped up relaxed lending standards with a National Homeownership Strategy in 1995. As part of that, Fannie and Freddie introduced a raft of programs that made it easier for people with poor credit and little or no money down to obtain a mortgage.