PBS released an 11 minute and 38 second video about moral hazards in the mortgage market.

IndyMac Bank was recently seized by Federal regulators, who are doing everthing in their power to prevent over-leveraged mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from failing.

This parody Bird & Fortune Financial Adviser video really captures the essense of the modern banking system.

The subprime mortgage crisis was also covered in this funny but curt slideshow titled The Subprime Primer.

According to a BBC interview with Citigroup’s CEO Sir Win Bischoff, house prices in the UK and the US are likely to fall for another two years…but then again, they are part of the same banking system that never saw the initial collapse coming.

Hitwise’s Robin Goad posted about how mortgage calculator terms have began capturing a larger portion of the UK mortage search market recently.

The US based growth in demand for mortgage calculator searches was largely on the demand created by the sharp lowering of the Federal Reserve funds rate from 5.25% to 2.00% during the September 18, 2007 to April 30, 2008 time period.

As a website that publishes in the space we had a pulse on the search volume changes and reasoning behind them

• the lowered Fed funds rate lifted search volume
• eroding conumer confidence, a glut of housing inventory, and falling real estate prices have made people far more comfortable sitting out buying a new home until the pricing trend reverses

The Bank of England has lowered rates much slower than the United States, lowering from 5.75% to 5% over the course of 5 months from December 6, 2007 through April 10, 2008. In spite of their rate cuts, UK mortgage rates have reached 8 year highs amid higher inflation.

For fifty years we simply believed that home prices would always increase, and then one day it was no longer true. Many people are looking, but few people are buying right now.

We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy, and to be greedy only when others are fearful. - Warren Buffett

Surely amongst the chaos and fear in the markets there is lots of opportunity. Are you a contrarian investor? Or is it best to wait until you see market stability before investing?

Some of our website users have requested that we offer a mortgage calculator download so they can calculate payments offline. So we did just that. Hope you like it!

Since many real estate brokers and agents install our mortgage calculators in their sites we have looked at a cross range of sites in the space and determined that there were many recurring marketing issues holding many of them back from their full potential. To help out on this front we decided to create the online real estate marketing guide.

We recently created a free Mortgage Calculator plugin that you can easily install in any Wordpress blog in under 5 minutes!

How it works:
Hit the calculate button and see the results in real-time on your site. This helps you keep your site visitors focused on your site and your inventory - instead of sending them elsewhere.

If you look at the left sidebar of this blog you can see it in action, and here is an image of the calculator in use

Download WP-MortgageCalculator Now:
You can download WP-Mortgage Calculator here now!

Installation instruction for WP-MortgageCalculator:

This free calculator installs in the sidebar of your Wordpress blog as a widget. The calculated results appear directly on your website, so you keep your readers engaged and active on your website!

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Step 1: Unzip the WP-Mortgage Calculator package and
put in it in your plugins folder located at
wp-content -> plugins

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Step 2: after unzipping the files upload them to your remote server using an FTP program.

The (4) files included in this package are
mc_calculate.php
mc_linktext.php
mortgage-calculator-logo.gif
mortgagecalculator.php

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Step 3: log in to your WP admin panel, located at
/wp-admin/

Click the plugins link, which will send you to
/wp-admin/plugins.php
and enable the Mortgage Calculator Widget.

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Step 4: For older versions of Wordpress, inside the WP admin panel click on presentation. Then click on the Widgets sub-menu item. If you are using Wordpress 2.5 you should click on Design then Widgets.

Drag the Mortgage Calculator and any other needed widgets (categories, archives, links, pages, etc.) into Sidebar 1.

Click “Save Changes” and your Mortgage Calculator should be live.

Can’t see widgets? Your Wordpress theme may not be widget aware. To make it widget aware you need to ensure your theme has a functions.php file and that your sidebar is theme friendly. This Automattic page describes how to make themes widget friendly.

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Want an easier way to install a mortgage calculator on your site? Perhaps you could try using one of our other linking options - like posting HTML into one of your blog posts.

Have questions, comments, or feedback? Leave them below.

Thank you & enjoy!

TechCrunch covered news of the new Zillow mortgage marketplace:

Borrowers submit just the essentials - what type of loan they need, where they’re located, their estimated property value, their credit history, etc - without divulging any of their contact info. Then certified lenders make offers that can be compared side-by-side.

Think of this new Zillow launch as LendingTree in reverse, where the borrower picks the lender.

Last year Yahoo! warned of lowered guidance due to a weakness in the financial and automotive markets. That weakness seems to be growing by the day. In Media Biz Paul R. La Monica highlighted the following about the online ad markets:

• Countrywide was the #4 online ad buyer in July of 2007, with an estimated online advertising spend of $34.8 million.
• Another mortgage provider by the name of Low Rate Source had an estimated spend of $46.3.

The mortgage crisis is hitting many businesses not even connected to mortgages.

Oneida Limited, a dinnerware and flatware maker, recently had to yank their plans to offer $120 million in high-yield bonds as the credit markets froze up seemingly overnight.

Firms in fields as diverse as wireless, restaruant, and motorsports have blamed the mortgage market for poor performance. Asian stock markets have also been hit hard of late.

If you look at the 30 day trend at housing watch, MLS listing prices are down in all but 2 of the featured markets.

The ugliness is likely to only get worse as this meltdown spreads to other markets and the government starts getting more aggressive with market regulation. Rep. Brad Miller talked about how bankruptcy laws are robbing American home owners of their houses

Clip Syndicate also featured a great video with Andrew Busch of BMO Capital, discussing foreclosures and the pending meltdown of the subprime mortgage market, how it is effecting other markets, and how he is seeing increased attention from the Illinios government.