Americans really know how to overspend. Bankruptcies, mortgage delinquencies and credit card debt are all up, but some of that debt isn’t their fault. Predatory lenders are the cause of many subprime defaults, and they’re also hurting consumers in the wallet, too.
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Insurance fraud investigators say they are bracing for an outbreak of home arsons set by cash-strapped homeowners looking for insurance money to escape from foreclosure.
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Back around 1980, about the time that Canada’s R-2000 standard for super energy efficient homes was being introduced in response to the “energy crisis” of the 1970s, two economists issued papers that became known as the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate. Daniel Khazzoom and Leonard Brookes argued that improvements in energy efficiency worked to increase, rather than decrease, [...]

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Multiple factors have contributed to the current slump in the housing market — a slump that has been proclaimed the worst in the past 16 years. One of the major causes of the current slump, however, can be attributed to the fact that more and more people have been using their homes as ATM machines. [...]

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