Bits Bucket for March 29, 2013
Post off-topic ideas, links, and Craigslist finds here.
The California labor market is on fire! Unemployment is all the way down to 9.6%, several years after the official end of the Great Recession. Boo-yah!
]]>Huawei will setup back door spyware in their telecom equipment
]]>Big time.”
They are not doing that, they are placing data centers on site , going out and back in with data is not desired.
At least thats what fast talking marketing guy was telling us our high speed data chips where going to be deployed. In the basement of big Bank buildings.
]]>Heart “i-n-s-i-d-e-r” info.
]]>+1 I totally agree.
The unrealized benefits are scalability and continuity of operations. Rapid growth often involves lots of waste as consultants are called in late well *after* TSHTF. A natural disaster or riots can quickly drag a firm’s IT infrastructure to its knees. Working with a services provider and data center is a smart move, IMHO.
]]>Examining the home price boom and its effect on owners, lenders, regulators, realtors and the economy as a whole.
Listening to an econ talk podcast now where they’re discussing “intention economics”, about how modern commerce is about driving demand toward supply. How all the data about consumers is used to target them and subtly influence them. there are some positives (reduces search costs, for example) but also issues over freedom to contract, privacy, etc.
The guest is from Harvard’s Berkman Center, it’s definitely not a one sided discussion, they very much explore the technical underpinnings and work through how this will play out in the future depending on some key decisions.
Econtalk dot org is the link if anyone is interested.
There is a podcast with schiller from 2-3 years ago available as well.
link please?
See above.
Very interesting discussion but why is the audio so bad for the guest?
I expect better from Harvard.
(((shakin my head)))
Especially given that it’s the Berkman Center for technology/internet…
I think Russ Roberts usually records these from his house in Maryland using Skype. The only in person interviews he used to have was when it would be Don Boudreaux or Tyler Cowan when Russ was a prof at George Mason. Now I think he’s only affiliated with Stanford/Hoover Institution/Library of Economics and Liberty.
Spook, look up his podcast with Thomas Sowell, it was pretty good. He also has done podcasts on the “prison industry” and other offbeat topics like trying to purchase a car in the Laurel, MD area (about the economics of what is really reflected in a car price from a dealer).
You really expect better from Harvard? They gave us the Kenyan-born Sharia Law gay rights President *and* a First Lady who is illiterate and yet uber-elitist.
You really expect better from Harvard?
No I don’t. Outside of Obams, they also gave Bush and Gore.
Harvard is a joke!
Agreed, P is clearly the cream. Bill Bradley should’ve been the nominee instead of Gore, he would’ve prevented the travesty of the Bush years because he’s not a robotic, sycophantic moron. And Joe6Pack would’ve connected with Bradley because of his Naismith Award, Olympic Medal, and NBA hall of famer status.
I think that Glenn Beck traced our current problems back to Woodow Wilson, a former president of Princeton.
Well if Glenn Beck says it, it must be so.
Obviously schools produce people on both sides of arguments, so my “P is superior” was tongue in cheek. For example, Alito went to P, but so did Sotomayor and Kagan. Anthony Kennedy went to HLS, but so did Scalia and Roberts.
Joe and people get mad at me for calling him Ohbewanna!
You really expect better from Harvard? They gave us the Kenyan-born Sharia Law gay rights President *and* a First Lady who is illiterate and yet uber-elitist.
aNYCdj, please never change. I was laughing at loud at this for a solid 2 minutes. It made my week.
———————————
Joe and people get mad at me for calling him Ohbewanna!
You really expect better from Harvard? They gave us the Kenyan-born Sharia Law gay rights President *and* a First Lady who is illiterate and yet uber-elitist.
“…how modern commerce is about driving demand toward supply.”
Didn’t the Soviets try something like that, e.g., western goods are illegal, but our outdated junk is available to comrades? Put another way, are consumers “pulled” or “pushed?”
What are your local cable company choices?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0ilMx7k7mso
Within the city of Tucson, our monopoly is called Cox Communications, comrade.
Nice link….Thanks Joe….
driving demand toward supply
That’s what John Kenneth Galbraith talked about back in the 1960s. He wrote several books about it.
Galbraith was writing about macroeconomics, but I do see what you’re saying. This is microecon and it’s a lot different, it’s about datamining and how the technical underpinnings of the internet relate to our basic societal functions & laws.
Watching Rental Watch come here and talk about pent up demand, lack of inventory, etc is really painful. That thread yesterday was very try-too-hard. The attempt to discredit Schiller in particular was pathetisad.
Try harder next time.
Try harder at what?
Hey Joe,
Do you think there is zero recession and unemployment in IT jobs. Especially in DC area and other metro areas of the country?
Also, the way things are it doesn’t look like the demand for these IT jobs would go down and demand for RE/rentals would be high at least in metro areas due to these high paid IT workers. More so now when the excess inventory has been hidden and houses again are getting multiple bids.
A friend of mine in Silver Spring wanted to buy a Single Family house and looked at one like 4 months back listed at 460K. He finally got it after fighting with with multiple bidders for 550K. Shocking to me that bidding made it high by 90K especially in a sequestered hit area.
Looks to me as long as these IT jobs that pay $100 per hour stay, all RE would stay as it it. DC area has a lot of high paid workers both federal and state employees plus all the high paid contractors.
Martin,
The specific point Shiller made (that RW disagreed with) was that the demand/price support was artificial.
Maryland/DC/NoVA prices are ridiculous. In the last few weeks I posted pictures of about 2 dozen major projects that I see daily between my work & Union Station (a ~10 block strip of Massachusetts Ave and New York Ave). It’s insane.
The thing to remember is that this can’t go on forever, defense spending has to be cut at some point, right?!?! I mean, most of this that we’re seeing is private “invisible hand of the free market” contractors going wild.
Wait until you can buy for 3x median income multiple. Except in the very desirable areas (where people only carry a mortgage for the MID anyway!) prices will have to fall, it’s just a matter of when.*
* This is my biggest disagreement with RAL. I don’t think prices will fall uniformly, there are some areas where lots are scarce and rarely become available, e.g. Bethesda. And places like West Friendship where because of zoning (to keep out undesirables) most lots are 3+ acres and even newer lots are 1 acre and where attached product is nonexistant.
The two threads that I wrote on yesterday were:
1. LPS data that shows a very SLOW digesting of the most delinquent homes (but that you need to look with more granularity when the full data comes out in the next week or two); and
2. That looking at a 100 year “inflation adjusted” home price graph without regard to how measures of inflation have changed over that 100 years is incredibly problematic.
And just for the record…I HAVE contacted Shiller directly about my concerns with CPI and how the methods have changed. Initially he replied that he had considered alternative methods of CPI, and asked if I could share with him my analysis.
So, I sent him back his own spreadsheet with a very simply variable added…which allows the user to increase or decrease an inflation bias starting in 1980, when the monkeying with the indexes really started. A change of just 0.5% makes a HUGE difference if you are trying to draw conclusions from his data.
Since the Boskin Commission in 1996 caused changes to CPI that affected the reported rate by up to approximately 1.3% per year, you can see that 0.5% isn’t outlandish.
Shiller has not yet responded back to me. Perhaps I’ll try him again.
Fortunately or unfortunately IT job growths will continue. For one thing businesses are convinced that speding IT is the way to go about reducing overall costs. Of course it’s not black or white. It may work for one company but the same may not work for another. Second thing is cheap money from Fed. The small money left over (after playing the wall street casions) will trickle into social media and other latest technical hypes because of the low cost of entry in starting an IT company.
One thing that could hurt IT is consolidation. The US Gov’t is moving a lot of it’s operations into Amazon’s hands (cloud BS.)
Microsoft will keep a lot of people employed due to it’s bad software, of course.
Cloud BS? And here I was, thinking I was the only one who held that opinion.
The cloud isn’t BS, the only thing that kind of stinks in most people’s eyes are the “cost savings” associated with it. For mid/large companies, the cloud is often going to cost more than on-premises hardware.
The reason, IMHO, that companies continue to push towards the cloud is that they simply cannot recruit the people to run an internal DC. Those people are far too expensive and you need way too many specialized folks to run even a moderate size DC. Kind of the same reason that people have GM build cars using robots rather than build them at home. It’s too expensive to get someone to program the robot for you, and the device itself is very pricey and has a limited usable lifetime.
The “push” to the cloud, IMHO, is driven primarily by labor shortages in the IT industry. If you could hire good people for 50-80K to do DC work, you wouldn’t see as much desire. However, as it currently stands, even a SMALL DC is going to require at least 5 people (network, storage, server, applications, infrastructure) with an average fully loaded salary >100K each.
Owning computers is becoming much like owning a Gulfstream. Yeah, it’s nice, but it’s so blindingly expensive that it’s only for those who are totally price insensitive.
The network cloud used for critical data is a bad idea that will bite us all in the but.
Big time.
“Owning computers is becoming much like owning a Gulfstream.”
Uh… no. This is market(ing) BS eaten up by the gullible.
“Uh… no. This is market(ing) BS eaten up by the gullible.”
For some companies, I would agree with you. For a lot of SMBs, it makes no sense what-so-ever to own hardware anymore except for very corner case situations. If you look at a cloud that costs 35K a month, or even 50K a month, there’s no way you can hire the very base minimum people to do the care and feeding of that infrastructure (forget about power, cooling, space, etc) for MRC associated with the cloud.
Now, large enterprise; fed government.. Here, I agree with you. A lot of the companies adopting cloud have data centers that rival the cloud providers. They have 1000s of servers and PB of data. These guys should not be looking for a utility model, there’s no savings in “scale” and they already have 24X7 support staff wrapped around their infrastructure (probably at a lower cost). Interestingly, this is where most of the market is today in cloud; it’s the people who benefit the least financially who are the fastest to “suck it up” and move it to the cloud.
When you’re looking at very small shops (5-25 servers/VMs), the cloud is a no-brainer. Costs to do it “right” locally (redundant everything, enterprise grade hardware, etc) is many times the cost of doing it in the cloud. That’s no marketing BS, that’s the reality, I see it every day. Spend on IT goes from 1M/year to 300K/yr (hardware costs) all the time for these smaller customers.
I think the Gulfstream analogy is a good one. The only way to have a jet make sense is to keep it in the air moving all the time (lowering the cost per hour flown). Same thing with servers. Buying an infrastructure and loading it to 15% of capacity is a huge waste of money, and yet, it’s very common with small/medium size customers. Storage arrays that can support 500TB of data that have 50TB online; massive overallocation; this is what the cloud helps with. If you’re going to buy and use 50 blade servers and 500TB tomorrow, you’d be better off owning it. If you think you might get there 3 years from now, but today you need 50TB of storage and 10 servers, that’s a whole different ballgame.
Just the very basic infrastructure, a tier 1 or 2 SAN and core switching is going to run >1M bucks. And that’s before you’ve done anything; no people costs, no racks, no management, etc. A lot of customers who were looking at a 1M dollar refresh are running on clouds for 20K/mo. The breakeven is “never”, but the time the purchase would start to cost less than cloud, the hardware would be EOL and need to be replaced.
I agree with you that the technology is grossly overhyped, and, also, I’d agree that in many cases customers don’t see much/any cost benefits. But it does have it’s place; a very high percentage (60%+ would be my guess) would see huge cost benefit moving to the cloud.
Until the company they are using has a massive date breach and they are blamed for not having their own infrastructure which they could have held to a higher level of protection. The cloud companies are such huge tempting targets where the medium sized business wouldn’t have been worth hacking at all.
“For some companies, I would agree with you. For a lot of SMBs, it makes no sense what-so-ever to own hardware anymore except for very corner case situations. If you look at a cloud that costs 35K a month, or even 50K a month, there’s no way you can hire the very base minimum people to do the care and feeding of that infrastructure (forget about power, cooling, space, etc) for MRC associated with the cloud.”
+1 I totally agree.
The unrealized benefits are scalability and continuity of operations. Rapid growth often involves lots of waste as consultants are called in late well *after* TSHTF. A natural disaster or riots can quickly drag a firm’s IT infrastructure to its knees. Working with a services provider and data center is a smart move, IMHO.
The network cloud used for critical data is a bad idea that will bite us all in the but.
Big time.”
They are not doing that, they are placing data centers on site , going out and back in with data is not desired.
At least thats what fast talking marketing guy was telling us our high speed data chips where going to be deployed. In the basement of big Bank buildings.
It won’t be Huawei equipment in these Big Banks if the US government has it’s way it will be CISCO
Huawei will setup back door spyware in their telecom equipment
Martin:
Talk about mental health problems overbidding by $90K on a freakin house, that’s some wacko friend, I’ll bet he never thought of renting.
I could see overbidding on a mint 57 T bird convertible..but a house?
And just how long would that MINT ‘57 T convertible remain mint in NYC?
good point but i wouldn’t be living here with a car like that gimme and open road and no speed limits….
t i wouldn’t be living here with a car like that gimme and open road and no speed limits….
Says the guy who ‘can’t’ leave NYCity because his girlfriend can’t drive.
Or is the car enough to make you dump her?
One man’s T-bird is another man’s house. Literally.
But I’ll bet in a pinch i could sell the T bird quicker and maybe even a little profit.
I was never into cars. I appreciate a good looking high performance car, but my concern is just getting where I need to go.
And I thank those that have nice cars and keep them shiny. When you are riding in your car you don’t get to see how nice your own car looks. But those of us driving next to you do.
Silver Spring is a huge area with some nice enclaves (near Takoma) and some trashy areas (New Hamp), but in general, it’s an endless swath of cold-war 3/2 ranches and 4/2 suburban split-levels. Are those really going for $550K now?
I was going to say the same thing about Silver Spring having nice and not-nice areas. Silver Spring has a nice older area, it’s near Wisconsin Avenue/Bethesda.
New Hampshire Ave runs through Takoma. (Easy to tell, all the park benches and bus-stops are painted lime green, pink, and other gaudy colors.) I think you probably mean Georgia Avenue, not New Hampshire Ave. Silver Spring is where Discovery tv networks are based and that is definitely off of Georgia Avenue.
Shoulda said Takoma Park, not Takoma. But I still wonder what enclave is giving up $550K houses. I saw one last spring that was for sale for $525K: 4-level split with nice finishes. But it still was a 4- level split, not a Craftsman or a Tudor Revival like near the Takoma Metro.
The “nice area” near Wisconsin/Bethesda is Chevy Chase. You have to get further east to get to Sliver Spring. There are nicer parts of Silver Spring. There are also some very mediocre ones.
I’ve been eyeballing the DC area. I think I wouldn’t mind moving up there from Norfolk, but wonder what the future is. I’ve heard traffic is obnoxious, but I’d be looking around Ashburn where all the beautiful datacenters are.
I travel up there quite often to visit one of them for work, but would want a detached sfh in my future if I moved up there.
Look at Culpeper. A few DCs out there, cheap, and a nice area (IMHO) as long as you don’t have to go to downtown Washington. I thought about moving up there, primarily because of housing cost.
“Do you think there is zero recession and unemployment in IT jobs. Especially in DC area and other metro areas of the country?”
Martin, I predict Rasmussen is about to release an extensive poll asking people all over the country in all lines of work how they think the economy is doing and if hiring is up at their place of work.
So you may have your answer soon enough.
“Martin, I predict Rasmussen is about to release an extensive poll…”
Heart “i-n-s-i-d-e-r” info.
‘pent up demand’
for most people in usa, the only thing there is pent up demand for is for jobs with health insurance that pay more than 500 a week.
I want opportunity, I dont want your job. Quit regulating the little man out of business.
Not going to happen, big businesses want open immigration and lots of regulation on businesses.
Big businesses are savvy and pay a lot of money to outside accountants and lawyers who help them game the current regs and propose new regulations for congress and agencies to rubber-stamp. They are represented on K Street in DC. They can now write checks in unlimited amounts because “corporations are people too, my friend”.
Our government picks winners and losers every day, it’s both parties and it’s disgusting.
want open immigration and lots of regulation on businesses.
Isn’t that a position of a certain political party, too?
does that mean i’m destined to be a wage slave for the man?
In the same vein…..
Caught In The Cyprus Crossfire: Small Businesses Suddenly With Zero Cash
One of the prevailing false conventional wisdoms about the Cypriot cash confiscation is that it primarily affected rich, tax-evading individuals of Russian origin. Alas, those same individuals are likely to have been least affected, as subsequent discoveries of capital control breaches by the “richest and best connected” reveal, while increasingly it appears that the uninsured depositors on whose back the nation of Cyprus was bailed out are small and medium corporations, who had been parking cash for net working capital purposes with Cyprus’ banks, cash which is now gone forever to feed the creeping insolvent Euro-monster, and which can’t be used to fund such day to day business activities as payroll, purchases, and business operations.
does that mean i’m destined to be a wage slave for the man?
Only if you are lucky, you will be a wage slave for the man. If you are VERY lucky than you will work for the government.
Isn’t that a position of a certain political party, too?
——————————
Both.
Exactly joe. I’ve been trying to get this message across for years.
People keep blaming gov when it’s the big corps USING the gov to restrict competition.
But you can’t fix our kind of stupid.
the uninsured depositors on whose back the nation of Cyprus was bailed out are small and medium corporations, who had been parking cash for net working capital purposes with Cyprus’ banks, cash which is now gone forever to feed the creeping insolvent Euro-mon
Interesting to watch the Germans completely muck up the handling of the economic crisis, the euro, and the European banking system. Is there some subtle goal they are pursuing that most of us can’t perceive, or are they just making ‘no mistakes but the largest’, which is what I think Churchill accused them of.
By most accounts in many areas, there is just that, low inventory and high demand. That’s what is driving the recent uptick in prices. I don’t like it anymore than the next guy but why the hate on RW?
Sometimes the truth can he painfull.
The only painfull [sic] thing will be when people lose alot [sic] of money.
Most areas aren’t that desirable to people who can actually afford a house, so there shouldn’t be demand for houses that are more than 3x median income in the area. Most people shouldn’t be buying a house, but are sheep/suckers.
You disagree that the housing market right now is based on artificial support? Really?
There is only a shortage because of something called shadow inventory. Demand is pretty weak.
I wish RW well, he’s in the real estate business though, so take it with a grain of salt. A massive grain of kosher salt. He will make money not because he’s filling a true need, but because modern Americans are largely suckers.
I never said anything about artificial support, or the lack of it, etc.
RW was posting here long before he invested in RE. Disregarding him solely based on his RE holdings is rather narrow minded.
Standing by his misrepresentations is your problem, not joe smiths.
I’m not disregarding him, merely pointing out his RE puffery.
‘Puffery’? If you say so.
He brings a lot of data is what I see mostly.
You’ve value misrepresentations. Good for you but you’re in the wrong place.
You know what they say about data/statistics, right?
Economic data is ripe with half truths, overstated “trends” and so forth.
The correct use of economics, IMO, is descriptive and naturalistic, not normative or predictive. Hayek, Friedman, and others would agree, btw. Unfortunately, economics — esp as used by business — has been bastardized by our age of CNBC convincing everyone that they can be an expert if only they study the “data”.
Actually ibbots, I’ve been on the RE investing side of things for a bit over 15 years now. It’s just that during the bubble, we avoided residential RE like the plague–HBB was one of the few places that I could keep sane while everyone around me was talking about “insatiable demand”, and “permanently high plateaus”. Post crash, we stepped back into the residential market–primarily buying land on the cheap.
“buying land on the cheap”
LOL
Uh huh…. and you’re going to find out just how bad you got ripped off.
So now the truth comes out. You have a stake in the direction of prices, hence your incessant stream of lies on a daily basis.
Thanks for walking into that one.
I think Rental Watch’s objection was that the CPI calculation is flawed and variable, thus long term (housing) price graphs are going to be flawed.
But, regardless of the accuracy of that point, one can see that in spite of a percent or three difference, that the price growth for the last 30 years has been extremely dramatic, going parabolic starting in the late 90s.
Caution though: Looking at things in the aggregate can hide important details.
One has to wonder why the increases in prices. Well, one has to look at Lew Ranieri and the advent of mortgage securitization. This allowed lenders to separate themselves from repayment risk, creating a core perverse incentive in the debt markets. That perverse incentive was to create as many big loans as possible, minimize costs associated with creating the loans in order to get the largest possible profit. This model blew up in the late 2000s.
However, instead of forcing losses on market participants, and winding down the system, the Fed and government stepped into save the system. It was in politicians interest to do so. The Fed also believes the system is worth saving.
The core driver behind bad debt in the world today is the ability of lenders to separate themselves from repayment risk, because of the perverse incentives that creates. AND, instead of the market forcing discipline on this flawed system, governments and central banks step in to save it because they believe it’s in their interests.
Are there other factors involved in house prices? Certainly. Population growth and raw demand. BUT - I remember researching Baltimore City’s population growth through the height of the bubble. It had, and has been been consistently losing population for decades. Yet prices were going parabolic. 30,000 dollar rowhomes selling for nearly 300K dollars, that sort of thing.
So - maybe CPI is flawed by a few percent. But even if totally true, one can still see the parabolic price increases. And one can still see the global debt crisis caused by the generation of bad debt, enabled by the lender’s ability to shed repayment risk and government guarantees of private debt and backstops of private companies.
The CPI flaws compound annually.
A 1.3% understatement for 15+ years makes for a big difference (from just after the Boskin Commission).
Including or excluding this understatement is the difference between concluding that home prices are still way above the inflation adjusted “normal”, and concluding that we are at an inflation-adjusted trough.
And PW, I’ve never hid the fact that we bought land post crash. I’ve simply been sharing data that are the key drivers to our thinking.
And you paid massively inflated prices.
And you have a stake in the direction of prices.
What’s odd here is we all see your inability to see your own corrupt thinking.
http://www.lincolninst.edu/subcenters/land-values/metro-area-land-prices.asp
Download the spreadsheet and study it, especially inland CA (Sacramento and San Bernardino markets). Land values reached NOMINAL ~30 year lows in the inland CA markets during this crash. Since due to NIMBYism and land constraints near the coast, this is where the faster growing markets have been located, and where faster growth will resume.
Yet little new land has been processed for entitlement during the crash…as growth resumes in these markets, there will be an imbalance of supply/demand for approved land in these markets.
You’ll note a tick up in values starting in Sacramento and San Bernardino in Q2 and Q3 of 2012.
“Economic data is ripe with half truths, overstated “trends” and so forth.”
Data are just data. Only until they’re organized into some form do they gain value and have useful purpose. The issue boils down to who is organizing these data.
BTW, Neuromance, I don’t object to the flawed nature of the CPI calculations–I object to their variable nature.
If the flaw is a consistent flaw, then over time, the trendline created may not be correct in absolute terms, but it will be based on relative terms, and you can still draw a conclusion as to where we are relative to the trendline.
When they start changing how CPI is calculated in the middle of a data series…that becomes problematic with respect to where the trendline should be.
“Land values reached NOMINAL ~30 year lows in the inland CA markets during this crash.”
And they were still massively overpriced but you paid it anyways.
And now we know why you’re here for the last 18 months lying about the market.
“…CNBC (et al) convincing everyone that they can be an expert if only they study the “data”.”
Data that you are only getting PART of.
Which is where the Internet comes in. And even then, you still have to sort through a lot of BS.
The whole model works now because rents are rising. In a market with parity, rents and buying monthly outlays are largely equal, with the difference being the opportunity for appreciation. If we are going to cherry pick data, lets look back at 2001-2003 when rents were rising, and then subsequently collapsed for at least 8 years, as people bought and then there became a glut of rentals. The rental market has only changed in the last two years to being a landlords market, and I expect this will change in the next year as the reos to rentals come back on the market and force the next turning point.
I hate to inform you bud but inventory isn’t “low”. Further, demand isn’t high either.
Now you can choose to be truthful here or face ridicule.
PW : could you define “inventory” — boy, i think i just kicked a hornets nest…. all in jest of course.
And RW does bring data to back up his assertions.
He brings BS that fits into your realtor dogma.
“I hate to inform you bud but inventory isn’t “low”. Further, demand isn’t high either.”
But if that inventory isn’t being offered up for sale, then how does it figure in to the equation?
It means don’t buy.
nice bob and weave Pimp, i used to know a HOA management guy who could deflect anything thrown at him, nothing would stick, used to call him Teflon man.
You got the right answer…. You just don’t like it.
It means don’t buy is exactly the answer.
Especially if you don’t know how to shop.
Bingo
Did I ever use the words “pent up demand”, “lack of inventory”, etc.?
No.
But I think it’s important that whenever someone trots out a 100 year inflation adjusted graph, that they actually think about how the measure of inflation has changed over that timeframe…without critically thinking about the very measure that is key to the graph, you are just another sheep being led around by the BLS.
Yeah you do.
And when you trot out your lies, do you really thing you’re going to get away with them here?
You’re a glutton for punishment boy.
for joe smith, times piece on law firms billable hours:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/opinion/the-case-against-the-law-firm-billable-hour.html
I can remember discussions in the press of eliminating billable hours ever since my first job as a paralegal out of college. Despite this, I have never been at a firm that didn’t use billable hours. The closest was at my last job, where we were mostly paid on a per-file basis because it was a large volume of the same cases. However, we still billed on a per-hour basis for anything out of the norm, although the billing rate was low because of volume. (I mean low by law firm standards, not by real life standards.) At my current job we use billable hours but with incentive fees for meeting certain (outcome based) goals. For the top firms (such as my current job) it’s a quality advantage, the top clients will still pay. They have billions in play, a couple hundred thousand bucks for a case here and there is really not that much to them in the big scheme of things. The regulatory/investigative/legal issues make it such that they need aggressive representation.
The only pushback I’ve had on any billing at my current job was on research charges for a brief. Apparently I had selected time-based billing rather than transactional. Over the course of 3 days, I had Lexis open for almost 10 hours by only ran 35 searches. Bill was approx $1500. The partner on the case called me, I nearly sh** my pants. Oops. Luckily, here just said something about “writing down the charge for the client”, so he probably only billed them for half. I think the bill for that brief was still something like $25k since there were 3 associates (one is a former Scalia clerk), 1 junior partner, and 1 equity partner on it. Associates at 350-600/hr, partners at 700+/hr before discounts. (They always discount, every bill I’ve seen has some kind of discount on it, usually 5-10%).
partners at 700+/hr
Makes me laugh. They must drop golden nuggets with every sentence they finish.
Gold nuggets. Stupid Maxipad!
Most expensive partner I’ve ever worked under was Mary Beth Forshaw who was billing at a shade under $1000/hr. back in 07. (I was in LS at the time, spent the summer at STB.)
I’m not going to lie to you, she was worth it to the clients. One of the best at what she does, and in what she does, the pools of money at stake are enormous.
The way partners really make money isn’t just on their own billable time, it’s on how much work they can bring in and parse out to associates and of counsel.
Partners at places like Wachtell Lipton probably rake a lot more per hour because they’re being paid by the underwriters of deals. And the work they do is very innovative. (You could argue that the innovation is bad because it serves the wishes of the .01%, of course.)
Second best probably Mary Kay Vyskocil. Also worth $1000/hr.
Both of them you named are women. Do they also provide other “services” beside legal?
How inappropriate!
partners at 700+/hr
some are worth it…most aren’t. Was on call the other day with a big NY tax partner at a big law firm. He was an idiot.
same firm though a few years back…worked with one that was the smartest frackin tax person I have ever met…worth every penny. He ripped a part a Deloitte tax memo in 15 minutes that two DT tax partners (and staff) spent several hours reviewing and preparing.
Both of them you named are women. Do they also provide other “services” beside legal?
——————–
Not much to look at, to be honest.
If I named the big players at current job, all 3 are men. And I don’t know their billing rates, I have only seen bills out of the corner of my eye.
One other thing - my intuition when I started working at law firms is that they would want to see you bill as few hours as possible to accomplish a certain thing. I was very wrong. The most important thing is to turn in something very clean, well-cited, and thoroughly reviewed by a lot of people. If it takes you 100 hours to research & write a 25 pg brief, that is completely fine, even encouraged. More, not less, is the rule of the land.
The same thing applies to specificity. I would get yelled at if I wrote long, tedious descriptions of how I spent time. It’s completely fine to write somenthing like “Prepared proposed redactions of __________ and conferenced with ______________” and put in 6 or 7 hours for it. The most important thing is, don’t make any glaring mistakes.
The losses on law firms’ billable hourse will be utold.
this time four years ago we were clocking 60+ billable hours a week for regional CPA firm. accounting for your whole day in 10 minute client billable increments sucks. never again!
That would stink but I only have to bill 1800 hrs/yr, so I’d never have to account for 50 hrs/week. Full bonuses are based on 1800 hrs, so as long as you hit that, you’re good. Out of 50 hours in the office (on avg) I account for 37-40 most weeks. And the rare exceptions are kind of awesome, because if I’m that busy it means I’ve been billing 10-12 hrs/day to the same matter and the description is very simple, something like “Prepared ______________ for review by __________; conference with ____________ re ______________; researched __________________ for [brief/comments/protest] at [GAO/ASBCA/Ct of Fed Claims].”
Subpoena responses are even easier. I’ll sit and look at documents for a week straight and yet we’ll only produce a few dozen. It’s a think of beauty and it eats a lot of hours. Computers are good at searching and sorting the documents but they can’t come up with plausible reasons to redact or deny production of certain documents. If someone could invent a program to do this, they would make billions of dollars. They could call it the charlatan app. I would download it immediately.
The other good thing is 5 clients are 80% of our work, so it’s a lot less client #s to remember, I only need to remember matter #s, but I have a cheat sheet for that, kind of like the spreadsheet I keep with RAL quotes.
I usually type out billing gobbledygook on the MARC train while listening to 2chainz and googling for MILF videos.
Billable hours - reminds me of a story.
So a middle aged lawyer is walking down the street and BAM! hit and killed by a street sweeper.
So he gets up to the pearly gates and St Peter is there to greet him. Well, the lawyer is pretty miffed and registers the following complaint with St. Peter
“Look St. Peter I am not ungrateful to be here but what the heck? I am a hard working, honest 46 year old man, with a beautiful wife, great kids, living the dream, why me, why now???”
St Peter looks at his clip board and says “D’you say 46 years old? There must be some mix up. According to your billable hours, you’re 98!”
Some great maps/graphs.
People vote with their feet and move to places with better opportunities.
Lord help you if you own a house or property in a deep blue progressive state or city.
You can’t take it with you, you can’t sell it and you will be taxed to oblivion.
—————————–
And the least free state in America, is…
03/28/2013 | Erika Johnsen
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/03/28/and-the-least-free-state-in-america-is/
George Mason University’s Mercatus Center just released the third edition of their comprehensive “Freedom in the Fifty States” study, ranking “the American states based on how their policies promote freedom in the fiscal, regulatory, and personal realms.” The researchers calculated in factors ranging from the states’ levels of government spending and debt, tax burden, property rights protection, and health insurance freedom all the way to their policies on alcohol, tobacco, gambling, marriage, and firearms. North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma took the top five freedom spots, while Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Jersey, California, and New York came in 46th through last place.
Gotta’ love federalism, am I right?
Among the 10 fastest-growing metro areas last year were Raleigh, Austin, Las Vegas, Orlando, Charlotte, Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio and Dallas. All of these are in low-tax, business-friendly red states. Blue-state areas such as Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Providence and Rochester were among the biggest population losers.
This migration isn’t accidental. Workers and business owners are responding to clear economic incentives. Red states in the Southeast and Sunbelt are following the Reagan model by reducing tax rates and easing regulations. They also offer right-to-work laws as an enticement for businesses to come and set up shop. Meanwhile, the blue states of the Northeast, joined by California, Minnesota and Illinois, are implementing the Obama model of raising taxes on businesses and the wealthy to fund government “investments” and union power.
we too live in a “right to work” state. except our state is better educated than any of the states you listed. and our state is the healthiest in the USA.
not everybody wants to be a “winner” in the race to the bottom.
Isn’t your state also a sanctuary state? What’s that gonna do to your stats in the long run? (Hint: it won’t be pretty)
Colorado is the thinnest state in USA because of the large number of highly educated and the year round outdoor lifestyle that many here enjoy.
the lesser educated Sons of Aztlan keep moving here and they and their kidz are driving up the proportion of fats. and Colorado doesn’t have black people.
Charles Koch sits on the board of the Mercatus Center.
I didn’t bother to read any of that screed.
http://www.drudgereport.com/
Only if Soros or Buffet…….
Why the strawman cr*p?
I would read a report from anyone, if I had the time. However, it does help to know when a hack from EITHER side is the primary underwriter of the report. Only a hopeless, prolish puppet-watcher would put stock in something produced by political hacks. (This is one of America’s problems.)
It is trendy to be against The Koch bros. that’s why.
Way to make your point and then refute it.
Yes, North Dakota’s got oil and Tennessee has scenery, but I don’t see people flocking to South Dakota, New Hampshire, or Oklahoma.
So where are they moving? Raleigh, Austin, Las Vegas, Orlando, Charlotte, Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio and Dallas. Funny, none of those cities are in North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma. North Carolina has a moderately high income tax and Texas has outrageous property tax. I think it has more to do with a mild year round climate in NC and tax breaks for businesses in Texas.
When articles like this appear in the UK press - you know the game is over.
——————————-
Global warming: if only we’d listened to the experts, eh?
Telegraph (UK) | March 25th, 2013 | James Delingpole
Sir John Beddington, the government’s retiring Chief Scientist has been doing the media rounds today, telling anyone who’ll listen how “Climate Change” is still a serious problem about which we should all worry greatly. Has he looked out of the window recently?
Looking out of my window just now, I noticed that the Northamptonshire landscape was completely blanketed in Dr David Viner. Just like it was yesterday. And the day before that, when we rescued two orphaned lambs from the frozen fields. Which isn’t something you normally expect in March, is it?
I’m sure I know what Beddington would say in reply to this. “Weather is not climate.” No, indeed. But it’s an argument which would surely carry a lot more weight if Beddington and his alarmist brethren hadn’t spent most of the Nineties and Noughties citing the hot summers and mild winters as evidence of man-made global warming. Later, as we know, they amended their scare-phrase to the more inclusive “climate change”.
This is what I find so puzzling about Beddington’s media circus antics today. If I were in his shoes, if I’d been involved in promulgating a disgraceful scam whereby the global depression was prolonged and deepened, where thousands of people died in artificially induced fuel poverty, where some of the world’s most beautiful scenery had been ravaged with wind turbines and solar panels and I had then been found out by events, the very last thing I’d be doing was traipsing round the BBC studios crowing about my achievements. What I’d actually be doing is retiring to my study with a bottle of whisky and my trusty service pistol, there to do the only proper and decent thing a chap should do when he has brought shame on himself and caused untold suffering to millions.
global climate change is real
it is man-made
and it is irreversible
What ever happened to GLOBAL WARMING???
Climate change? Who doesn’t agree with that?
The climate has always changed.
There used to be a mile deep glacier on top of the land of NYC.
Alaska used to have rain forests and crocodiles.
The ISSUE is do we used the excuse of global warming (err, I mean global climate change) to massively expand government and massively raise taxes?
It is a ways to an end for all liberals and progressives.
you politicized this, not me.
and we don’t give a sh*t either way because we don’t have kidz.
but you do, and their future is sh*t. and their kidz future is sh*t. it’s gonna get worse, and then it’s gonna get more worse. and we’ll do our part to help make it worse, because we’re not an al gore hypocrite about the environment.
I can’t tell if you talking about an ever expanding government that destroys liberty, freedoms and economic opportunities or not…
but you do, and their future is sh*t. and their kidz future is sh*t. it’s gonna get worse, and then it’s gonna get more worse. and we’ll do our part to help make it worse, because we’re not an al gore hypocrite about the environment.
I can’t tell if you talking about an ever expanding government that destroys liberty, freedoms and economic opportunities or not…
The problem is where were you when Bush and Cheney did the same thing?
The problem is where were you when Bush and Cheney did the same thing ??
Cheerleading thats what 2-fruit was doing…
A male cheerleader, just like his friend W aka “43″.
This is the age of things that we know are true, because voices of authority tell us so.
everyone reading this blog will likely be dead before things get really bad. but for those several generations from now, life will not be fun. enjoy the die-off, loosers!
I agree that climate change isn’t going to screw us in the next 50 years, but when you and I are 65, if we leave our enclaves we will be surrounded by slack-jawed white trash teabilly spawn and other assorted detritus.
I think that is the far larger problem over our lifespans.
we are very much looking forward to burning half a tank of gasoline this weekend to spend several hours skiing and riding chairlifts powered by electricity from burning coal. and by doing so contribute to continued global climate change that means future generations will not have any snow to ski on.
you’re welcome.
Unfortunately I tend to agree with you Joe…I think the wealth gap, lack of real middle class opportunity are the driver…
It’s global warming, by God; until it isn’t! -
and it is irreversible
If so, why bother bringing it up at all, or getting involved in discussions about it? Might as well complain that we’re all bound to die.
2banana started this thread topic, and we replied.
we care not to politicize this but those that do seem to split into:
nanny-state, control-freak, al gore, liberal bedwetters who think selling carbon credits will save the world
and invisible hand of free market, drill baby drill, capitalist koolaid drinkers
they are both Loosers. the problem is too many people. and since people will continue to breed until the planet can’t support all of them, that’s why it is irreversible.
that’s why it is irreversible.
I would term the process “self-correcting” as that’s what it does, one way or the other.
“selling carbon credits”
I think this is a bastardization of the true liberal dream. Carbon credits were a political compromise with the free marketers.
It may not have been too late to do something when Carter was in office. It may not have been too late when carbon credits were first proposed.
In terms of people breeding and their impact on the planet, we should be encouraging all forms of birth control. Free birth control and free abortions on demand.
I suspect many of the climate change deniers among the religious right understand this. If they can successfully deny the impact of humanity, they will not have to deal with fighting the proposed solutions that they find unpalatable.
They have allied with the industrialists in this fight, who do not want to have to absorb the externalities of their products.
Worlds SECOND angriest black man clears up global warming:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnpWJGzAqpo
Who’s the first?
Samuel L Jackson?
Hell no, Sam Jackson only plays one on tee-vee.
This guy has to walk around in the “real world”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0sk4yGaEk8
I am a skeptical of the whole EIC, but Delingpole is a joke, a reactionary of a writer.
Two points:
1) Years ago, I heard Limbaugh state that global warming couldn’t be real because God wouldn’t let anything to humanity. That was the gist of the quote. I immediately tried to think of counterexamples, as is my wont, and thought of things like Spanish Flu, WWI and II, the Black Death, historic floods. So sure, perhaps humanity won’t die it, but the change can be quite catastrophic.
2) Global average temperature is an average of temperatures taken around the world. One locale can be colder than average. However, other locales can be hotter than average, resulting in a warmer overall average. So a particular region can have a snowy and cold winter, yet global averages can continue to increase.
While it is eminently possible that this point escapes those of limited schooling and/or intelligence, I suspect that commentators who ignore this point are merely being intentionally obtuse.
the best thing anyone can do for the environment is to not breed more kidz.
goon, I am adamantly opposed to overpopulation, but not at all opposed to responsible family formation. My mantra is “If you can’t feed ‘em, don’t breed ‘em”. In other words, if you require gobmin assistance as a permanent lifestyle component to raise a family, you shouldn’t be breeding.
Unfortunately, the US seems hellbent on suicide by immigration (both legal and illegal) by admitting members of immigrant groups known for prodigious reproduction.
Look at those countries, and wake up and smell the coffin. It’s unsustainable.
“Hell is other people” - Jean Paul Sartre
We are most concerned about high altitude and high latitude animals’ loss of habitat and extinction.
The role of humans within the global ecosystem is like cancer.
The role of humans within the global ecosystem is like cancer.
———————-
Just to see him argue this with you, I wish that Dio aka nick papagiorgio aka AQ Dan hadn’t been banished.
“Hell is other people” - Jean Paul Sartre
And the best way to decrease global warming is to put on a condom, but don’t expect immigrants from Mexico, India, China or Africa to agree.
Too many people. Way, way too many people. And awfully resentful looking people, I might add.
See you at the party, victor.
KEYYYYYYRASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSH!
That was the sound of housing prices and rental rates crashing through the floor in your neighborhood.
There ain’t nothing left but the cryin’ and a smoldering moon crater.
Goon, a good article from David Brooks today about how today’s college graduates (even at top schools) have changed from the pre-9/11 cohort.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/opinion/brooks-the-empirical-kids.html?src=me&ref=general
“In sum, today’s graduates enter a harsher landscape. Immediate postgrad life, Buhler writes, will probably bear a depressing resemblance to Hannah Horvath’s world on “Girls.” The hit song “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis “is less a fashion statement, more a looming financial reality.”
Confused about those kidz shopping at thrift stores but that the world of Teen Mom 2 or Honey Boo Boo is considered “distant”.
Perhaps what they mean is that the Yalies’ post-grad contact with poors is limited to urban poors (see also recent Times pieces about hipsters getting pushed out of Williamsburg now taking over Bushwick) and not the poors like in those TeeVee shows.
And it looks like the quality of journalism has changed over the past decade as well. Can’t they just say that graduates will have a tougher time finding a job and the job will pay less and the graduate will be paying loans… without resorting to soul searching about “the pain of the crisis” and pop culture tripe like
the hit song “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore etc…
The HIT SONG? Jeeze, Dave, who’s paying you for freekin’ product placement. (And yes, I had to make sure that it was Brooks who wrote that and not the pretty young thing he was quoting.)
Brooks is an opinion columnist, not a reporter. The standards are different.
Shopping at a thrift store is great when there are a lot of people around who dump their nice things after a season or two. Not so great if everyone is keeping stuff for a decade or more and then donating it with shredded linings and wear along the cuffs.
I like to go to certain places in Hampden (hipster neighborhood in Baltimore) where they have a critical mass of 2nd hand store/antiques/thrift shop places. It takes a while to find the perfect thing you’re looking for, but that’s the point - you’re looking for a high quality, interesting item, not the absolutely cheapest POS you could get from Walmart. I usually buy nothing, but when I do it’s just one or two things that are high quality, whereas I see Walmart shoppers leaving with multiple carts and I wonder where all that stuff goes? They must be hoarding.
It’s been like this after every recession over the last 35 years.
Bitcoins: this time it’s different? Discuss.
If the value gets to a certain level people will just build ASIC/FPGA array to compute them (if they haven’t already.)
Bitmining is the new moonshining in these here rural parts….
Yeah, but nobody has asked if it is the mark of the beast or something yet, have they?
http://www.realtytrac.com/content/foreclosure-market-report/q1-2013-foreclosure-inventory-analysis-7653
Good stuff…I’ll be looking through this with interest…
And don’t forget the 20-30 MILLION excess empty housing units ontop of those.
pssst….. I’ll remind you.
http://www.realtytrac.com/images/reportimages/RealtyTrac_Foreclosure_Inventory_Analysis_Q1_2013.pdf
Here is the PDF of the full RealtyTrac report.
Note the difference between judicial and non-judicial…pages 3 and 4.
It’s not the return on my principal. Just want my principal returned. Tick tock, tick tock.
“Just want my principal returned.”
Wow, the unrefined are becoming demanding aren’t they? Hehe.
Pardon me, I must locate my jar of Grey Poupon.
MIAMI (AP) — President Barack Obama was promoting a plan to create jobs by attracting private investment in highways and other public works during a visit Friday to a Miami port.
The president chose to flesh out details of his proposals in a speech at the port, which is undergoing $2 billion in upgrades paid for with government and private money
Corporatists winning on so many levels. Socialize the risks and costs privatize the profits.
Obama was born in Kenya.
No. But his daddy was, and his daddy was never an American citizen. I think that makes the s.o.b. ineligible for the office he holds, and boy, he sure is proving it.
We went to Gander Mountain at lunch yesterday (they stock new ammo shipments on Thursday mornings) and it was picked pretty clean. The gun counter clerk told us that the line usually forms at 8:30 for when they open at 9:00.
Goon, its like that everywhere. Major shortage. I know it sounds crazy, but I think we are the frogs in the pot of water. The optimist in me says that there will be cheap, cheap ammo in the years to come if collectively people realize they hoarded something only good for killin’ and scarin’ and woundin’ and target practice and not much else. The doomsday in me says that I will not be gettin’ to the choppa.
not sure how obama being born in kenya and my anecdotal tale of retail ammo shortage are related, other than that they both warrant sharing and discussion
It’s much better to be born a millionaire, at least as far as being a “good President”. If only we had some more millionaire, silver-spoon Presidents! They always know how to be a good steward of our human and natural resources, they always “fix sick companies”, they implement fairer tax codes, never favor well-organized big business interests, and they can really relate to how the day’s issues affect rank and file Americans.
**snicker**
if you’re racist against black people, then ‘obama born in kenya’ is effective. and if you don’t like muslims, then ‘obama born in indonesia’ works.
but the part about him trying to take our guns away is now unfortunately true.
oh please, he wants universal background checks and limits on the same guns as Clinton’s “Assault Weapons Ban”. not the most important issues, IMO, but not totally crazy either.
This was not found at Drudge but it is about Miami and 10 billions!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dZDgTfR-d4&feature=player_embedded
Miami 2020 (English)
Video illustration of ten billion dollar boom coming to Downtown Miami.
When a user googles “the housing bubble”, guess what site is number one?
So what do you think happens when an uninformed person comes here for the first time and see a bunch of lies like “inventory is low”?
They get taken to school, that’s what happens!
They subscribe to RentalWatch’s newsletter?
just googled that, this is awesome.
don’t know what you mean STB, but the reason i come here is for the fair and balance take on things..
“Fair and balanced”? Maybe you should be watching cable news. You’re going to get truth here…. and it’s looking like you don’t like the truth.
“So what do you think happens when an uninformed person comes here for the first time and see a bunch of lies like “inventory is low”?”
Where’s the pimp?
“Where’s the pimp?”
The Best Of Kramer - The Pimp - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_zKCUG20xs - 208k -
+1 Good clip!
The ocean spanning Cat 3 hurricane
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/03/28/incredible-storm-spans-atlantic-ocean-coast-to-coast/?tid=pm_pop
Banning big gulps and 15+ round ammo clips will prevent storms like that in the future. And the real reason most black people don’t like to swim is because the ocean is racist.
Would you guys finally get this straight? Big Gulps were never going to be banned. They aren’t servered in restaurants so they aren’t part of the original regulation. Never.
From the comments section:
“We have nothing to base our assumptions on, even the floods and earthquakes recorded in the Bible don’t have a long enough history for us to understand patterns etc. ”
Sadly I am not making this up.
I think we found where AQ Dan aka Dio aka Nickpapagiorgio went after his HBB ban.
ehh….. no way was Nick AQD or Dio.
I think he’s making a joke.
it doesn’t strike anyone else as interesting that the “3″ of them (all had hard ons for kicking brown people out of the country) disappeared at the same point in time?
Uh-oh.
The Day After Tomorrow?
Everyone Wang Chung tonight…
————–
PROFESSOR: Everyone Should Get A Reverse Mortgage Immediately
TBI | 3-29-2013 | Jeff Brown, AOL Real Estate
Is this a good time to get a reverse mortgage? Yes — even if you don’t need one.
That’s the recommendation from Jack M. Guttentag, an emeritus finance professor at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
On his website, The Mortgage Professor, he says homeowners old enough to have a reverse mortgage — 62 or older — should think about getting a reverse mortgage credit line now, even if they won’t use the money for years. Reason: Today’s low interest rates make reverse mortgages something of a bargain, allowing you to borrow more if you lock in before rates rise.
A reverse mortgage is a loan against the homeowner’s equity, which is the current value of the home minus any debt against it, such as a mortgage or home equity loan. Like an ordinary mortgage, the reverse loan charges interest, but the borrower makes no monthly payments. Instead, the debt, plus the gradually growing interest charges, are paid off when the borrower moves permanently, sells the home or dies.
Retiring casino exec selling condo for $9.8 million
…. and I’m selling my 10 year old 200k mile Honda Civic for $35,000.
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-california-jobs-unemployment-20130328,0,2841094.story
“”California has seen steady job growth for much of the last year. Year-over-year payroll growth was 2%, stronger than the U.S. as a whole.”
That year-on-year growth number is just shy of 300k new jobs.
There were about 60k starts (single and multi-family) in the state for the entire year 2012 (from the Census). Through 2 months in 2013, there have been about 11k starts…this is approximately 2x the level of 2012 for the same time period. However, during the first two months of the year, CA has added approximately 45k jobs (direct from the BLS)
Per RealtyTrac, there are only approximately 29k vacant housing units in the foreclosure process in CA (link above). Compare this to FL, that has 90k vacant housing units in the foreclosure process.
What’s really going on in California
California imposed a new law on banks innocuously called “Homeowners Bill of Rights” which forces banks to switch over to a judicial foreclosure process, which they can opt to do on their own, but takes a year or more to renegotiate contracts and compensation structures for the foreclosure law firms who do all the leg work for the banks. And while those changes are being made… it makes it appear that foreclosures have slowed down dramatically in the state.
The reality?
Defaults (undeclared) are spiraling upward that yet have to pass through the foreclosure pipeline.
The truth?
In the absence of the corrupt re-jiggering of housing inventory, California is still the highest foreclosure state in sheer volume and percentage.
The low-down?
Resale housing is still massively overpriced as a result of unprecedented interference by individual states and the federal government. The market distortions will be removed and the down draft will continue allowing the market to correct.
With millions of excess empty houses and housing demand at 17 year lows, housing prices a long way to fall. A very long way to fall.
“”California has seen steady job growth for much of the last year. Year-over-year payroll growth was 2%, stronger than the U.S. as a whole.”
The California labor market is on fire! Unemployment is all the way down to 9.6%, several years after the official end of the Great Recession. Boo-yah!
Sad
Posted: 4:45 p.m. Friday, March 29, 2013
Bus aide accused of stalking and bullying 5-year-old
By Alexandra Seltzer
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
A 37-year-old Port St. Lucie bus aide was arrested for allegedly stalking and bullying a 5-year-old, according to Port St. Lucie Police.
Daneta McPherson of Fort Pierce was arrested Friday on stalking charges.
Police investigated allegations that McPherson bullied a 5-year-old bus-rider. She would yell at him and threatened to take him home with her.
“The barrage of verbal attacks on the child by McPherson would leave the child frightened and in tears,” a news release read.
The bullying happened both on the way to school and on the way home from school multiple times.
The state Department of Children and Families and the St. Lucie County School district security reported the incidents to the police Dec. 7.
Police were given video surveillance from the bus which showed McPherson’s behavior.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/ - 118k -
Stalking? Sounds perilously close to intent to kidnap to me. Wonder if she ever took even one step toward carrying it out. Grabbing the kid’s arm could be enough.
Not from Drudge:
More than $1 billion dollars worth of a digital currency known as “bitcoins” now circulate on the web – an amount that exceeds the value of the entire currency stock of small countries like Liberia (which uses “Liberian dollars”), Bhutan (which uses the “Ngultrum”), and 18 other countries.
So what is a “bitcoin,” and why would anyone use it?
Unlike traditional currency, bitcoins are not issued by a government or even a private company. Instead, the currency is run by computer code that distributes new bitcoins at a set rate to people who devote web servers to keep the code running. The bitcoins are then bought and sold for regular U.S. dollars online.
‘They buy gold, they put it under the mattress, or they buy bitcoin.’
- Tony Gallippi, the CEO “BitPay.com,
Bitcoin is in high demand right now — each bitcoin currently sells for more than $90 U.S. dollars — which bitcoin insiders say is because of world events that have shaken confidence in government-issued currencies.
“Because of what’s going on in Cyprus and Europe, people are trying to pull their money out of banks there,” Tony Gallippi, the CEO “BitPay.com,” which enables businesses to easily accept bitcoins as payment, told FoxNews.com.
In Cyprus, the government is considering taking a percentage of all citizens’ bank accounts to solve its fiscal woes. That has led Cypriots — and other Europeans worried about the same thing happening to them — to take their money out of banks.
“So they buy gold, they put it under the mattress, or they buy bitcoin,” Gallippi said.
Bitcoin demand has also increased, Gallippi says, because last week U.S. regulators issued the first official guidelines for private digital currencies. Prior to the regulations, the legal status of the currencies was in doubt.
“Now people can see that it’s not illegal, that it’s not banned,” Gallippi said.
Bitcoin is controversial because the currency can be exchanged anonymously online — it is in a sense the digital equivalent of using hard cash — and so some have criticized it for facilitating online drug markets. On the site known as “the Silk Road,” for instance, users pay bitcoins for illegal drugs and other forbidden items.
BITCOIN TARGETED BY CYBERATTACK
Just as Bitcoin explodes beyond the $1 billion mark thanks to Europe’s debt crisis, the emerging virtual currency was dealt a setback this week after a key exchange was hit by a powerful cyber attack that caused delays.
Read more at Fox Business.
In a 2011 letter to the Attorney General, Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) argued for strict enforcement.
“After purchasing bitcoins through an exchange, a user can create an account on Silk Road and start purchasing illegal drugs from individuals around the world and have them delivered to their homes within days,” the Senators wrote. “We urge you to take immediate action and shut down the Silk Road network.”
But the Silk Road is still running, and a recent study estimates that $23 million dollars of illicit items are sold for bitcoins on the site every year.
The regulatory guidelines issued last week by the government agency known as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), however, will not stop that.
The regulations say that digital currencies like bitcoin are to be treated essentially as foreign currencies. Companies that exchange digital bitcoins for real money will have to comply with the same regulations as traditional currency exchangers — namely, they must verify the identity of anyone exchanging money for bitcoins and report large transactions to the government.
Using bitcoins to purchase goods, however, is specifically exempted.
“A user who obtains convertible virtual currency and uses it to purchase real or virtual goods or services is not… under FinCEN’s regulations,” the guidance reads.
Some bitcoin defenders say the use of bitcoins to buy illegal items shouldn’t obscure the legal uses.
“With any technology… Criminals are going to use it for something, and regular people are going to use it for something,” Gallippi said. “You can’t ban cell phones just because criminals are using them to do drug deals. You can’t ban e-mail just because people are using them to do phishing scams in Nigeria. You have to start just prosecuting people who are committing crimes — you can’t just completely wipe out the new technology.”
Gallippi says one reason to use bitcoins for legal transactions is a lower risk of identity theft.
“If you are buying something online and you have the choice of paying with a credit card or bitcoins – think about what you have to do to use a credit card. You have to fill out this whole long form, name, address, account number, sometimes more… coincidentally, that’s all the info a thief would need to steal to pretend to be you.”
Between that, bitcoin’s anonymity, and worries about conventional currency, bitcoin demand is as high as ever, according to Alan Safahi, who runs “Zip Zap” – a company that facilitates cash deposits at stores like CVS and Wal-Mart for transfer to a site that can convert the money to bitcoins.
“We’re processing millions of dollars a month. We’ve seen tremendous surge in activity,” he said.
Contact the author at maxim.lott@foxnews.com.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/03/29/digital-currency-bitcoin-surpasses-20-national-currencies-in-value/#ixzz2Oz66CIm6