Out on Phoenix's suburban fringes, where cement mixers are fast colonizing what's left of the hay and cotton fields, the day is winding to a close. The home hour has arrived.

Historians will look back at innovations in financial risk-spreading as a major development of the late 20th century. A mortgage used to be another name for a loan from a bank, but that era wound down fast when Wall Street invented "securitization," or financial risk management, to use the jargon, in the 1970s.

Trading in the shares of a large U.S. mortgage company was suspended Monday, and the largest insurer of home loans in the United States said its stake in a business that underwrites and invests in mortgage securities may be worthless.

Sales of the securities - used to pool bonds, loans and their derivatives into new debt - dwindled to $3.7 billion in the United States this month from $42 billion in June, JPMorgan Chase said Monday. The market is "virtually shut," the bank said in a report last week.

July 11 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Treasury Department's top domestic-finance official and a Federal Reserve governor said investor losses from subprime-mortgage delinquencies aren't posing broader risks to the financial system.

Senate Democrats are calling for legislation that would protect people who are victims of predatory loaning. Thousands of people risk losing their homes as their mortgages payments begin spiraling upwards.

NYTimes article providing a good summary of the state of the mortgage market as of early 2007.

California has been one of the nation's largest markets for subprime mortgages in recent years, but with default at an all time high many lenders are suddenly facing bankruptcy.

Alt-A mortgages, a step up from subprime, present a real threat to the US economy. According to this article, the mortgage implosion will hit sometime in 2009.

A chart showing very clearly when the teaser rates on subprime mortgages are set to end, meaning that early low interest rates will balloon to much higher ones. At these times the default rate is expected to increase.