The daily headlines are alarming: homeowners are falling behind on mortgage payments at an increasing rate; foreclosures are up steeply. Has the situation ever been this bad before? Well yes, said Jay Brinkmann, chief economist of the Mortgage Bankers Association.

The heady rush of taking real estate investment trusts from public to private has evaporated in today's credit-market crunch. And so, it's time to face a new reality, says New York attorney Robin Panovka, a renowned expert on REIT mergers and acquisitions.

The collapse of the subprime residential real estate market last summer has Wall Street investment banks and international financial titans reeling.

Knowledge@W. P. Carey recently taped a discussion about the subprime market between Jeffrey Coles, chairman of the finance department at the W. P. Carey School of Business, Anthony Sanders, professor of real estate and finance at the school and Steven Davidson, vice president,

A first-time homebuyer with limited earning power and a sketchy credit history would seem to have little in common with a blue chip corporation. But thanks to some creative investment vehicles they've now been tied together.

Like ripples from a pebble pitched into a pond, the federal law passed to combat white-collar crime has resulted in booming demand for the specialists who can comb through financial records and follow a trail of evidence.

A controversial regulation creates a "safe harbor" from antitrust laws for certain aspects of the relationship between suppliers and group purchasing organizations (GPOs) in the healthcare industry.

The dollar has been in sharp decline in recent months — the greenback is now worth less than the Canadian dollar, and against the euro, it has lost 60 percent of its value since 2001. A doomsday scenario has the U.S.

The ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite claims an impressive 95 percent market share. Yet since 2000, a free suite of software that includes spreadsheet and word processing programs similar to Excel and Word has evolved.

In Part 2 of our five-part series on the subprime market, real estate finance Professor Anthony Sanders maps the occurrence of subprime loans in the metro Phoenix market.