•  The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury dove yesterday morning, coming within a hair of its 52-week low of 3.1%.  But by the end of the day we were receiving price increases from our lenders.  The european problem is not fixed and the new home sale's report was juiced by the expiration of the tax credit.  Single-family existing home sales jumped 7.4% in April following a similar rise in March as buyers rushed to meet the deadline for a federal homebuyer tax credit.  If you didn't grab a lower rate you may still have the opportunity in the future.  BUT DON'T WAIT TO START!  Get the process rolling.

•  If this is supposed to be an employment-led recovery, then it's going to be a long, slow slog from the bottom, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association's chief economist.

•   Home prices fell 3.1% in the first quarter on a seasonally adjusted basis from the first quarter of 2009, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency's house price index.  This is slowing from previous quarter's rate of drop.  Perhaps a kind of stabilization is in the cards...

•  Defaults on multifamily (apartment) mortgages held by U.S. depositories climbed to a record 4.6% in the first quarter, almost twice the year-earlier level, as more borrowers failed to repay loans in a timely fashion, according to Real Capital Analytics Inc. Commercial real estate is still feeling the pinch.

•  The Mortgage Bankers Association's chief economist is hopeful that last week's run-up in the Libor index could be the spark needed to light a fire under the refinancing sector.  It's unfortunate, but bad news is good for mortgage interest rates.  The calamity in Greece and now the problem with banks in Spain prompted this latest mini refi boom.

•  For a better understanding it's always good to look "under the hood"...

Last Friday's jobs report indicated there were 290,000 new jobs added with expectations that there would be 180,000.  On the face of it, that looks like great news.  But, as with anything reported by the someone other than yourself you have to dig into the details.

Of those 290,000 new jobs, 66,000 are temporary census jobs.  Another 188,000 of them were due to the government's hedonistic adjustments due to assumed "birth" and "death" of new businesses.  That makes net job creation somewhere around 36,000 (290,000 - 66,000 - 188,000).  No where near expectations.

Now, no where have I seen it discussed whether expectations figure in the temp census jobs and the Bureau of Labor Statistics "fudging" the numbers.

As Paul B Farrell on MarketWatch says it now seems Buffet may be in denial regarding the greedy Wall Street culture that got America into its current mess :

• Praising Moody's "business mode," and by inference all rating agencies that blindly rubber stamped Wall Street's toxic debt, setting up the last meltdown;

• Defending Goldman Sachs bad behavior despite the fraud suit and a possible criminal indictment (while hiding his own conflicts of interest as a big investor in both Moody's and Goldman);

• Praising Goldman's CEO Lloyd Blankfein ... by far Wall Street's greediest fat-cat banker who paid himself $68 million of his stockholders profits last year;

• Defending Goldman with a bizarre argument that Goldman is no more guilty than the other Wall Street banks, a tacit approval of the bad behavior of all Wall Street banks in the Goldman Conspiracy;

• Worse, ol' Uncle Warren also tried deflecting attention from Wall Street's corrupt business model by blaming government regulators for the meltdown, another example of Uncle Warren's blind denial, ignoring the fact that in the past year Wall Street spent over $400 million on lobbyists and campaign cash to make absolutely certain regulators, Congress and the Obama team all played along with Buffett's songs that guarantee Wall Street controls Washington regulators;

• Ironically, all this comes from a man who once lectured Congress on "Moral Integrity: I want employees to ask themselves whether they are willing to have any contemplated act appear on the front page of their local paper the next day, read by their spouses, children, and friends ... Lose money for my firm and I will be understanding; lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless".

Read the whole story entitled Buffett defends Goldman, joins greed Conspiracy.

It is said that pointing your readers to another web site is not a good strategy.  There are just some bits of information and certain points of view we feel are too important to not share even if they reside on another web site