There are thousands of sources out there – that’s probably your issue, you put in a search and get too many answers?
Firstly, ‘sub-prime’ is not a market category, it’s a group name for dodgy mortgages, or one whole market sector. If you want to know the answer you really need to know the difference between ‘sub-prime’ and ‘ninja’ loans (No Income, No Job, no Assets), and the actual real names they have.
I would recommend using this site – Mike Shedlock’s economics blog. Search it for sub-prime or mortgage. He does very good explanations, uses a lot of graphs, and links to other sites that have the actual stats for the things he discusses (and he’s American):
Could not add site address – google Mike Shedlock and you will get it.
You can also get good indicators form other sources like the %age of home ownership in a country. America’s home ownership was stable as a %age for a long time – it started going up a lot over the last 6-8 years. This was a ‘boom’ – it was actually a spike in lending to people who couldn’t afford houses, which is now reverting to the normal %age number. Really rough numbers: the number of extra people was something like 62% then up to about 67% of the population, so maybe only 5% of the population; 5 of 67 makes it about 8% total in ‘dodgy’ mortgages.
Unfortunately markets move at the margins, so an 8% selloff of houses smashes all the prices, causing much bigger drops than 8%. Imagine if 8% of all car drivers suddenly decided not to drive any more – cars would become much, much cheaper.
There are thousands of sources out there – that’s probably your issue, you put in a search and get too many answers?
Firstly, ‘sub-prime’ is not a market category, it’s a group name for dodgy mortgages, or one whole market sector. If you want to know the answer you really need to know the difference between ‘sub-prime’ and ‘ninja’ loans (No Income, No Job, no Assets), and the actual real names they have.
I would recommend using this site – Mike Shedlock’s economics blog. Search it for sub-prime or mortgage. He does very good explanations, uses a lot of graphs, and links to other sites that have the actual stats for the things he discusses (and he’s American):
Could not add site address – google Mike Shedlock and you will get it.
You can also get good indicators form other sources like the %age of home ownership in a country. America’s home ownership was stable as a %age for a long time – it started going up a lot over the last 6-8 years. This was a ‘boom’ – it was actually a spike in lending to people who couldn’t afford houses, which is now reverting to the normal %age number. Really rough numbers: the number of extra people was something like 62% then up to about 67% of the population, so maybe only 5% of the population; 5 of 67 makes it about 8% total in ‘dodgy’ mortgages.
Unfortunately markets move at the margins, so an 8% selloff of houses smashes all the prices, causing much bigger drops than 8%. Imagine if 8% of all car drivers suddenly decided not to drive any more – cars would become much, much cheaper.