September 5, 2008

1. Says U.S. 'Housing Bubble Has Popped'

A report on housing prices by Global Insight says that although prices for single-family homes are still heading downwards across the country, the rate of decline has gone down and "extreme overvaluation of house prices is essentially non-existent."The only states that had extreme overvaluation in the second quarter were Hawaii, Washington, Oregon and Utah.

The country's housing prices are down 4.8%, falling in 152 of the 330 metropolitan areas included in the study. This is an improvement from the 6.6% decline seen in the first quarter of 2008 and the drop off seen in 295 (89%) of the 330 areas in the fourth quarter of 2007.The most severe losses are in California, Florida and Michigan. Indeed, 43 of the 50 worst metropolitan areas are found in these three states.

Still, though the numbers paint an improving picture the report says "real estate markets are not ready to recover. The building and financing excesses of the boom years have yet to be worked off. There remains a huge inventory of unsold homes on the market with foreclosures adding more daily."

The House Prices in America study looks at 330 of the top metropolitan real estate markets in the United States, representing 78% of the country's housing units.

By Megan Ainscow - CEP News Ltd. 2008


2. Fannie Mae Discontinues Home Keeper Reverse Mortgage Product September 3rd, 2008 by admin Published in FHA, News, Products, Reverse Mortgage


Today Fannie Mae announced that they would be discontinuing their Home Keeper reverse mortgage product. With the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 being signed into law, there is no real need for the product. Below is a copy of the announcement from FNMA.
As you are aware, Congress passed, and the President signed into law, the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (HERA). Among many other things, HERA increased the loan limits for the FHA Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) product and authorized HECMs for home purchase.

Note: Until now, Fannie Mae had the only home purchase Reverse Mortgage. With the new Housing Bill, Congress authorized FHA to provide purchase money -revese mortgages. GDB

3. Flu Shot Does Not Reduce Death Rate in Elderly

Fri Aug 29, 12:44 PM ET�NEW YORK (Reuters Health)

While influenza vaccination does provide protection against catching the flu, it does not have a major impact on death in the elderly, contrary to what some studies have suggested, a new study suggests.

In prior studies, an impressive 50 percent reduction in death from any cause had been noted in elderly people who got a flu shot, but some researchers were skeptical of this degree of benefit, suggesting that it may have been the result of the “healthy user effect.”

The new study supports this line of thinking. The study included more than 700 elderly people, half of whom had gotten a flu shot and half of whom had not. After controlling for a variety of factors that were largely not considered or simply not available in previous studies, the researchers concluded that any death benefit “if present at all, was very small and statistically non-significant and may simply be a healthy-user artifact that they were unable to identify.”

Healthy User Effect

“The healthy-user effect,” study chief Dr. Sumit Majumdar of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada explained in a statement, “is seen in what doctors often refer to as their ‘good’ patients — patients who are well-informed about their health, who exercise regularly, do not smoke or have quit, drink only in moderation, watch what they eat, come in regularly for health maintenance visits and disease screenings, take their medications exactly as prescribed — and quite religiously get vaccinated each year so as to stay healthy

Such attributes are almost impossible to capture in large scale studies using administrative databases.”

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