Who would President Barack Obama or President John McCain choose as the next U.S. Treasury secretary? With the election still more than four months away, Republican candidate McCain and Obama, his Democratic …

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It’s Friday night about 8:00 and I just returned from the IMN Distressed Real Estate Conference in Las Vegas. I want to give you some initial impressions this evening, basically just a skeleton outline and over the weekend and probably into next week I will try and add some flesh to these bones. …. No one has any idea when we will reach a bottom simply because no one knows how many classes of real estate are going down. The most optimistic guess was 2010 but most wouldn’t even hazard a guess. Some of the grey hairs think 5 or 6 years. The problems in the residential side are quickly spilling over to the commercial real estate market. … The Indy Mac performing loan sale that was reported to have been done at about 60% of asking price has fallen apart. Most of the bids at the 60% level were withdrawn after further due diligence. The actual prices the stuff went for is between 20% and 45%. By the way Indy Mac had current appraisals supporting their asking price. The Wall Street Wizards are proving to be particularly inept at working out real estate problems. Essentially, they don’t know anything about operating real estate. On top of that, many of the banks don’t have expertise so there seem to be a lot of bad decisions going down (much more about this later). Things are going downhill so fast that deals that were struck 3 months ago need to be restructured. Sobering stuff, found via FinancialArmageddon.

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“Watch this video and you’ll get a better sense of the systemic mortgage fraud that infected the US these past few years. ”

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Discover Financial Services , the credit-card company spun off from Morgan Stanley, rose as much as 4.7 percent in early trading after second-quarter profit beat some analysts’ estimates.

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London, June 27: Mergers and acquisitions bankers are bracing for more job cuts as volumes fail to recover from their first-quarter tumble, according to preliminary Thomson Reuters numbers released on Friday, …

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I really don’t know how to say this. You may be surprised at how the words just don’t flow because this isn’t happy talk. It’s just reporting.Here in title insurance land, we’re the survivors. We’re the ones who are still here pumping out policies and helping those folks still in mortgage lending […]

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” CEPR’s Dean Baker - “It would be the height of foolishness to create a house price support program to try to sustain the bubble” ”

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“What follows is an analysis of data from the California Association of Realtors from “TC” who tracks the data month by month and is looking at things from perspective of percent declines from the peak.”

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“The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting Real estate market threatening Georgia banks.”

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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said Sunday that billionaire steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal has been elected as an independent director at the world’s largest investment bank.

Mittal, who is chairman and chief executive of the world’s largest steel producer, ArcelorMittal SA, joined Goldman Sachs’ 13-member board Saturday and will serve on its Audit, Compensation and Corporate Governance and Nominating committees.

‘Lakshmi Mittal has reshaped a global industry and, in the process, has engineered new modes of production, identified unrealized value and sparked remarkable growth,’ Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein said in a written statement. ‘He has a keen understanding of the global economy, having operated in virtually every corner of the world.’

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