The state is an epicenter of the housing bust and the foreclosure crisis.

The asset backed commercial paper market came to a standstill and the special investment vehicles set up by banks to get mortgages off their balance sheets could no longer get outside financing.

But, in America s home mortgage market, this is much less common.

Small wonder that when the sub prime market blew up, these markets also froze.

In Mexico, the market for new low and middle income housing has grown rapidly, thanks to the creation of a market for residential mortgage securities in 2003.

Some, observing the crash of the sub prime mortgage market, say, Don t worry, it is only a problem in the real estate sector.

But that is precisely why a government managed mortgage market is dangerous.

Moreover, the US housing market appears to be stabilizing....Overall, the US mortgage market has remained resilient, although the sub prime segment has deteriorated a bit more rapidly than had been expected.

Credit risk in the mortgage market is being assumed by the government, and market risk by the Fed.

Because banks would need to accept higher risk, a secondary market for mortgages is necessary.

This shadow system includes structured investment vehicles (SIVs), conduits, money market funds, hedge funds, and investment banks.

One sure way to reduce the savings rate in China would be to develop an American style mortgage market there.

A year ago, however, with the subprime mortgage meltdown of August 2007, I became certain.

That time is over, as the breakdown of the American mortgage securitization market has shown.

This brings us back to the US Treasury s plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to unclog the sub prime mortgage market.

The fact is that the European economy has been affected more by sub prime mortgages in the United States than by a carbon price in Europe.

Hence, the Fed s intervention in the housing market is really an intervention in the government bond market the purported switch from buying mortgages to buying government bonds is of little significance.

Pension funds, mutual funds, and investment banks are all long in the stock market.

An interest rate rise might take the heat out of the mortgage market, but it will also chill the rest of the economy.

Business coverage gained prominence in the 1990s, with wider investment in the stock market.

The stock market dropped sharply. Home prices fell 40 , completely wiping out the equity of one third of all homeowners with mortgages.

America s mortgage market remains on life support the government now underwrites more than 90 of all mortgages, and President Barack Obama s administration has not even proposed a new system that would ensure responsible lending at competitive terms.

China s real estate investment accounted for 10 of GDP, and slower investment growth in the sector necessarily reduces import demand, directly and indirectly.

The negative impact of the fall in real estate investment since 2010 has been deeper and longer than expected indeed, almost all categories of imports that fell by 10 or more in August were related to real estate investment.

What started with subprime mortgages spread to all collateralized debt obligations, endangered municipal and mortgage insurance and reinsurance companies and threatened to unravel the multi trillion dollar credit default swap market.

Market fragmentation in the more diversified economies is often due to intraregional investment priorities in non tradable sectors, particularly real estate.

The second was investment in buildings, once again centered in the US, driven by the housing boom.

The staff saw the relaxation of lending standards in the US mortgage market, but noted that borrowers at risk of significant mortgage payment increases remained a small minority, concentrated mostly among higher income households that were aware of the attendant risks.

The entire sub prime market is largely a decade old innovation the word sub prime did not exist in any language before 1994 built on such things as option adjustable rate mortgages (option ARM s), new kinds of collateralized debt obligations, and structured investment vehicles.

Thus, although delinquency rates have risen slightly in Mexico since the mortgage market was created in 2003, only about 5 of mortgages are between 31 and 60 days late. Only 2 are between 61 and 90 days late.

It is that their economies could be dragged into much deeper crises than those that will be experienced at the epicenter of the sub prime debacle.

Microeconomic factors for investment site selection included the corporate tax structure, trade and customs regimes, the labour market situation and financial infrastructure.

Americans don t seem to realize that their sub prime mortgage meltdown has all too much in common with many previous post 1945 banking crises throughout the world.

After all, when the global financial crisis erupted in 2008 from the bowels of the American subprime mortgage market, global investors responded by fleeing to the US, not from it.

Perhaps the buy on dips confidence index has slipped lately because of negative news concerning credit markets, notably the US sub prime mortgage market, which has increased anxiety about the fundamental soundness of the economy.

According to preliminary reports, annual investment growth in 2012 reached roughly 14 significantly higher than the GDP growth rate, which accelerated in the fourth quarter as a result of a strong rebound in investment in real estate and infrastructure.

Hot money moves out of the sub prime market into food and other commodities, and suddenly poor city dwellers in the Philippines, Peru, and Cote d Ivoire are faced with terrible hunger.

In August 2007, some German banks, at the earliest signs of difficulty because of their exposure to US sub prime mortgages, started to talk only of 1931.

A typical adverse selection problem arises when banks can t tell the difference between a good and bad investment a situation analogous to the insurance market.

The housing recession the worst in US history and worsening every day will eventually see house prices fall by more than 20 , with millions of Americans losing their homes.

After financial implosions, such as the collapse of the dot com bubble in 2000 or the sub prime meltdown of 2007 8, such views appear arrogant.

Lower interest rates worked (a little), but for the most part by encouraging households to refinance their mortgages, not by stimulating investment.

The reliance of modern banking regulation on risk weighting is nowhere more important than in the mortgage market. If regulators get it wrong, the entire edifice could collapse yet again.

Long before the emergence of the sub prime mortgage problem, Citigroup was damaged by the behavior of its London traders, who tried to manipulate the European government bond market, and by its Tokyo traders.

Although the concept of selective investment was not a new one with the demand side of the investment market having a long history of those wishing to control the effects of their investments, what began to develop at the turn of the 21st century was a response from the supply side of the equation.