Bits Bucket For November 14, 2010
Post off-topic ideas, links, and Craigslist finds here.
The Housing Bubble
Examining the home price boom and its effect on owners, lenders, regulators, realtors and the economy as a whole.
About Me
Name:Ben Jones
Location:Northern Arizona, United States
To donate by mail, or to otherwise contact this blogger, please send emails to: thehousingbubble@gmail.com
PayPal is a secure online payment method which accepts ALL major credit cards.
Links
-
June 2025 M T W T F S S « Sep 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Photo Submission: hbbphotos@gmail.com
View the HBB Photo Gallery *updated 4/13/2008
Regulators shut down 2 banks in Georgia, 1 in Arizona; makes 146 US bank failures this year
WASHINGTON (AP) — Regulators on Friday shut down two banks in Georgia and one in Arizona, bringing to 146 the number of U.S. banks that have succumbed this year under the burden of bad loans and a tepid economy.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. took over the two Georgia banks: Darby Bank & Trust Co., based in Vidalia, with $654.7 million in assets, and Tifton Banking Co. of Tifton, with $143.7 million in assets. Also seized was Copper Star Bank, based in Scottsdale, Ariz., with $204 million in assets.
Uh-oh, Scottsdale. I thought they only shut down hick-town rural banks?
Three banks here and three banks there, and pretty soon your talking about real numbers!
“your” = “you’re”
“The elite class in America knows the language of finance, banking, currency and economics. Because American schools leave students financially illiterate, even after graduating from college, they cannot properly manage their money and must rely upon the often self-interested misdirection of financial advisors, stock brokers, and bankers.”
~~ Financial Literacy~~
>Bill Sardi slams bankers pretty hard in this piece, but he raises an important point - the general illiteracy of the American public in matters of managing money and credit. “Begin now to teach your children how to wisely manage their money,” he writes. “Stop this ongoing ‘banks win, depositors lose’ game that is now being practiced.”
“Begin now to teach your children how to wisely manage their money,”
It’s hard to teach something you don’t know how to do yourself.
Remember several years ago a lot of people thought they were being smart because “real estate never goes down”.
same thought occurred to me.
A poor or uneducated parent may not know anything about money, but can teach things like honesty, work ethic and discipline, and those things will apply to all facets of a child’s life.
If the poor kid decides that wealth is a worthy goal, those lessons can be applied to it’s acquisition and enjoyment.
The born wealthy child might learn all there is to know about money, and possess lots of money, but not be taught all those other lessons.
Who can say which child is more likely to enjoy a productive, happy life..
I’m not too sure honesty lead to the acquisition of wealth now a days…
.. which means you, being an honest person, have no chance of becoming wealthy.
So, why even bother starting a business. It’s hopeless from the start. Futile. A wasted effort. Doomed to failure.
There is money in honesty. Some of the most successful rich people I know are honest to a fault. Dishonesty catches up in a few years. If the people at Enron were honest they would still be multimillionaires rather than doing time in Jail.
“Some of the most successful rich people I know are honest to a fault.”
I’m glad to hear some still exist. I have yet to meet one. But I will be the first to admit that’s anecdotal. My general observations and analysis regarding the lack of ethics these days are on based on news and research.
There is a lot to this, unfortunately. When I was in high school, the only preparation that they gave people was telling them how to manage a checking account. Nothing to do with how compound interest works, or anything beyond any of it. Most kids would have absolutely no interest in this stuff at that time. Back then credit cards were a rarity however.
And a lot of the problem is that people actually believe what the salespeople tell them. A lot of the time it helps to try and understand the deal from the standpoint of the person offering it to you. What is their risk, what is their upside? Why are they pushing that deal instead of something else.
But a lot of the hatred of the banks is due to the shenanigans that they pull. The trick where they reorder transactions in order to maximize fees (for the case of overdraft). Of when they sit on payments for a day or two in order to ensure that they can add a hefty late fee. They work the system at every opportunity in order to increase revenue.
it aint like customers don’t deliberately screw their banks.
May 17, 2010
Alleged check-kiting incident cost Pinehurst Bank $2M
Pinehurst Bank, one of the most undercapitalized banks in the Twin Cities, lost $2 million last year due to one customer’s alleged check-kiting activity and related loans designed to help the customer, according to one of the bank’s 75 shareholders.
That loss represents 38 percent of the bank’s total 2009 loss of $5.2 million.
—–
And then they threw out the bank’s CEO.. I think that bank eventually went under.
“But a lot of the hatred of the banks is due to the shenanigans they pull.”
The OBVIOUS solution to avoiding a bank’s shenanigans is to STOP GIVING THEM YOUR BUSINESS.
But the “Please Sir, may I have another?” crowd doesn’t seem to catch on to just who it is that has control over their money.
(Hint: It’s not the banks: The banks can gain control over their money ONLY if it is turned over to them.)
(Hint: It’s not the banks: The banks can gain control over their money ONLY if it is turned over to them.)
The Fed is giving them hundreds of Billions of dollars to go and invest in various money skimming schemes. I can’t stop that.
The government is rigged to give “investment banks” free money. Win or lose, they get taxpayer funds.
All Hail Goldman!
Every customer of every bailed out bank shoulders some blame for the existence of the behemoth scum.
Most kids would have absolutely no interest in this stuff at that time
Lots of people maintain this indifference well into middle age, as if it were a sign of virtue.
Lots of people maintain this indifference well into middle age, as if it were a sign of virtue.
So true. Ignorance is bliss. The sheeple who continue to vote for the Republicrat grifters who enable Wall Street’s systemic looting are proof positive of this. Passive as Hindu cows as they shamble into the voting booth, then genuinely bewildered when the only “change” they see is for the worse. Complete zombies, all of them.
I have to say, I am not indifferent to all this, but apart from taking personal responsibility and making sure they don’t get to play with my cash (At least the part I have control over), where do you begin? The courts and elected officials on BOTH sides are bought and paid for. If one were to go after them with a public relations blitz, they would immediately have some Judge order a cease and desist or worse.
So like the rest of the sheeple, while I can see the damage and crimes being comitted, what exactly are we do do?
For starters, stop backing Establishment Republican and Democrat (Republicrat) political candidates and refuse to give a dime to either party. Only support candidates who supported Ron Paul’s bill to audit the Fed, and who are on record as opposing TARP and other bailout schemes. Actively support candidates such as RP or Alan Grayson who are standing up against systemic corruption, even if you don’t agree with them on all issues. Cancel your subscriptions to mainstream media magazines and newspapers that are propaganda outlets for the corporatist elites.
Anyone who voted for McCain and Obama - a vote for the status quo - also needs to accept their own accountability for the direction this country is headed in.
That was more than I ever got from the school system. I was fortunate enough to see my mother work with a budget book almost daily and my father balance the checkbook and add up the budget book at the end of every month (that was their method of making sure that he had a grip on the family budget even though she did nearly all the household purchases). I’ve come up with my own method that doesn’t involve quite as much direct traking of $x on food, $y on transportation, etc. but still controls the total very effectively. I don’t know if a two day unit in 7th grade math could possibly been as effective as seeing their good habits day in and day out starting as soon as I was old enough to notice mom’s funny blue book with all the little boxes in it.
I once was offered a job teaching math in an inner city high school. I didn’t take it as I was offered a job in my field making two and half times as much money before the district got me a contract with the salary information officially filled in. I had every intention of teaching the kids financial literacy - not through the official curriculum, that would have been pretty well set and not very flexible. But I intended to require a year long project from every kid using math to analyze the cost of something that they cared about: figuring out how much their family could save on groceries by using coupons and shopping sales vs. not bothering; what is the real complete cost of buying and having a car; compare the complete costs of various forms of entertainment from going to first release movies to playing video games at home and all sorts of others; the cost of saving up for a big purchase vs. using a credit card, a personal loan or a rent to own place. I was really looking forward to it. I thought it would make a good college application essay or a really wonderful answer to the classic interview question “describe something hard that you once had to do and how you accomplished it.” Sigh, I really wish I had been able to try that. It was the right decision to take the other job, but it would have been nice to see what the kids would have done with the assignment.
Are your parents also my parents?
The similarity in how our parents acted is striking. My parents even taught us kids how to enter amounts in their legers.
I was not allowed to touch the book. My allowance went into its own box but when I spent the allowance, it wasn’t included. Guess I was SIV since any major debts I incurred would have gone into the family budget.
Of course, my mother’s own private accounting system drove my dad nuts. She entered spending on the day she spent it, and then, if she had put it on a credit card, it got included again when she paid the credit card bill. She refused to understand that she was entering the same amount twice and that the only part of the credit card bill that should be entered on the day it was paid was the amount of interest or fees included in that bill, if any. My dad tried to talk her out of it, but she flat out refused. Dad learned to live with a budget book that showed us “spending” (that includes amounts moved to savings accounts) more than he made every single month. He knew how to back out the double counting, of course, but he still hated it.
I just have my salary deposited in my savings account and move a set amount to the checking account every month. After I pay rent and a few other monthly bills, whatever is left over can be spent in cash or on cards the rest of the month. Or not, which lets the checking account amount build up for big spending months like buying airplane tickets for Thanksgiving, other holiday spending, or paying car insurance bills twice a year. Works for me now, but when I was paying student loans, I used the budget book.
And credit cards back then were hard to get. When I was in grad school I applied for a Shell Oil cc because there was a Shell station down the street where I got my car serviced (1974 Gremlin—don’t get me started) and I thought it would be handy to have. It probably would have had all of a $200 limit on it, but I was still turned down. And to think—in 2005 I would have been able to get a $500,000 mortgage.
“And credit cards back then were hard to get.”
Have to disagree with you on that. When I was I college, oil companies would send me credit cards when I didn’t even apply for them.
I guess it’s all relative.
This weekend should have been a red letter weekend. I got the last payoff statement, stating ‘Balance = $0.0′, from my last credit card. Bills incurred during the course of a very bad divorce, after a very bad marriage. Have been scrimping for four years to get rid of all the debt.
Basis for comparison: Daughter, out of house, is backsliding on getting cracking with her dissertation. I had been hounding her. She finally told me to go to h*ll. Can’t say I didn’t deserve it, particularly given how hypervigilant I am in other matters. I did apologize. Been a month.
What is worth more? To me, knowing that I had an unsullied relationship with my daughter. Or any relationship at all, for that matter, given the circumstance.
Don’t berate yourself, Jane. Daughter is probably feeling guilty enough as it is about the unwritten dissertation, but it’s a scary world out there once it’s finished and submitted–with no further excuse to be “dependent” and much to defend. Maybe the divorce et al affected her more than she’s letting on and this is her way of avoiding leaving you? She’ll come around….
Congrats on your credit card payoff! You must be feeling pretty relieved at this point. Hang in there and be proud of yourself for surviving and flourishing; I’m betting your daughter is. Why not call her and invite her to lunch to celebrate? (And don’t mention the #%$@*! dissertation.)
And pay cash.
ahansen, thank you so much for the support. Regrettably, she is not taking my phone calls. Sigh. Neither is my younger son.
I think I have done what I can for now, without compounding the problem. I’ll reach out again after Thanksgiving.
Because of the debt grind, all I have done since escaping is to work and read. I can’t say that I’ve been reading the most uplifting matter. “The Collapse of Complex Societies” kind of thing. And figuring out how and where to get 40-acres-and-a-mule-with-running-water-a-woodlot-a-cave-some-pasture-and-a-hill-to-backstop-my-erratic-shooting. Where I can rock on the porch with my 12 gauge on my lap, smoking my corncob pipe, having a clear view of the road whilst tending the still and listening to the turnips grow. Sadly, I’ve killed every house plant I have ever tended and must take it on faith that I will be able to figure out still-wifery. (I take hope because I have always had magnificent and calm animals, despite starting out somewhat snarly when I got them. Until this past couple years, I thought I was good with kids too).
And feverishly doing supply-demand functions in an effort to figure out how on earth to get my younger son through school without taking out debt or hitting capital. I love the kid, but he is as hard as a box of rocks and blithe as all get out. He is above the law of large numbers kind of thing. Naturally, I have taken every opportunity to discuss, and to give him articles about debt cum enslavement. Not been well received. Consequently, he isn’t talking to me either.
I may need to go through the motions of renouncing my ascetic hermit mode. Could be in a rut.
Not to be a drama queen about it, but this will be the first time since they have been born that I haven’t been with at least two out of three of the kids over a holiday. This year, it’s because the eldest is on the other side of the world, and the other two are incommunicando.
While being relentless has enabled me to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads, and gotten the older two eddumacated without debt, at this point I have a rather prominent “F” as a Mommy. Not certain it was a good trade off, but I didn’t choose the circumstances. OTOH, I chose not to keep my mouth shut.
Thank you again for the show of understanding. You are gracious to extend it.
YIkes, honey. If you read this, contact me by email.
dee vee ess enn tee tee at bee enn eye ess dot net
Never ask a Barber if you need a haircut and expect any answer but “You could use a little trim”
“real estate never goes down”.
Reminds me of the line in “Pirates of Penzance”
What never! Well hardly ever!
OOPS! that would be “HMS Pinafore”. I knew that did not sit right.
Just watch COPS and you will see what the real America is like in fly over country. Yet when I lived in South Carolina they were so proud of being near the bottom
So the majority of New Yorkers and Californians are financially literate? And do you really think “Cops” paints a picture of typical life in America?
What about those “Real Housewives” shows. I guess they show typical life as well.
Maybe. I fall into the trap sometimes and think COPS is a barometer of what America is all about - toothless white methheads, skanky streetwalkers, hoods of color, alcoholics, and crazies.
COPS is not about showing the Brady Bunch family. So you only see the garbage side of America.
Well, yeah. If you want to film for a real-life crime show then you need to do your filming in a high-crime area.
You won’t get much footage in a low crime area.
I’m waiting for the “COPS in Manhattan” episodes.
Sorry our crime rate is very low for a big city…..
you need to go to crack heven and trailer parks
There are a thousand Bernie Madoffs in Manhattan working on Wall Street.
But they are not going to mug you and break into your car steal the radio for drug money…….
There are a thousand Bernie Madoffs in Manhattan working on Wall Street
The south has always been proud of ignorance. And always will.
~ Money And Man ~ A Survey of Monetary Experience
The last edition of this valuable book was 1977. Amazon has 5 or 6 used hardcover copies for $37.19. Well worth it, for the author, Elgin Groseclose, penned a beautifully detailed history of men and money that causes dozens of “Aha!” moments for the reader. The first version was published in 1934.
“You cannot increase purchasing ;power by printing more pieces of paper, imprinted as so many dollars, or increase of bank deposits by federal fiat. Behind each of these units of purchasing power must be a substance - and it is to the nature of that substance to which politicians and economists should address themselves.”
Money and Man.. It’s available free online.
http://mises.org/books/money.pdf
d/load is about 14 meg.. PDF
..“You cannot increase purchasing ;power by printing..
I searched the PDF for that quotation, but it’s not there. My guess is the online version is the 1934 First Edition and the quote was added sometime later.
Whatever this author’s opinions, it’s only one of many. There was very little agreement as to the causes, cures, or prevention of a repeat of the GD even in that day, when economists had the added benefit experiencing it first hand.
That said, the historical information in the book is most interesting.. like leather money.. i never heard of that before.. Paper is a relatively new invention.
..“You cannot increase purchasing power by printing…..
That’s true for the “economy” as large. It only dilutes the value of the money in circulation. However, if you are the FIRST IN LINE for the “new money”, then you have definitely increased your purchasing power.
You can go out and buy up assets at current market price and then sell when the inflation created by the increase in money supply effects the rest of the little people.
The “little people” lose purchasing power. The Banksters will be buying up new villas in exotic places.
This is stealing in ways that the American public cannot understand.
There are times when money must be diluted.
For instance, lets say there is a total of $100,000,000 in circulation.
If you cut down a forest and build 1,000 homes, you’ve got about $100,000,000 dollars worth of new assets.
Your money supply is suddenly way too small. You need to double it or you will have serious deflation.
People’s money would double in value. A loan made before the homes were built would cost the borrower twice as much to repay (because one dollar now has twice as much buying power as it did before).
—–
so, basically.. A country’s money supply needs a way to expand and contract to match changes in the quantity of it’s material wealth.
So when our output is generally less than it was a few years ago (less building, fewer services provided, the tragic closing of “Ye Olde Pirate Candle Shoppe and Scrapbooking Emporium”, the money supply should be less than it was back then?
yeah polly.. Now you’re gonna say the money supply should be shrinking, not expanding.
However, millions of new homes, thousands of condo towers, and plenty of other assets were newly born or expanded during the bubble, and all that trumps whatever candle shoppes were destroyed.
—
please gimme a break here. I was only illustrating the basic concept. Reality is immeasurably more complicated.
if you are the FIRST IN LINE for the “new money”, then you have definitely increased your purchasing power.
Yes, this is called the Cantillon effect. This is why price inflation often leads to (or adds to) gross inequities in the distribution of wealth.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel
Ireland Urged to Take Aid by Officials Amid Debt Crisis
Germany is pressing Ireland to seek aid before a Nov. 16 meeting of European finance ministers to calm market volatility and win agreement on making investors help pay for future bailouts, a German government official said.
While European officials have spent the week insisting that the EU would come to the support of Ireland should it become necessary, both Merkel and French Foreign Minister Christine Lagarde have increased pressure on Ireland in recent days. On Wednesday, Lagarde made the clearest statement yet that France supports Germany’s position on debt restructuring for crisis-ridden euro zone countries.
Merkel’s Tough Stance
“All stakeholders must participate in the gains and losses of any particular situation,” Lagarde told Bloomberg television.
Merkel, for her part, has refused to soften her stance. In Seoul on Thursday for the G-20 summit, she said “we also need creditors to be involved in the costs of restructuring. … We can’t constantly explain to our voters that taxpayers have to be on the hook for certain risks, rather than those who make a lot of money taking those risks.”
Those darn soak-the-rich socialists, don’t they understand how the free market works? If the big boyz get scared then they shut down the economy. We must bail them out and keep them super-rich, for our own sake.
Need the creditors to be involved? FIne if you want. Saying that is a way to say that you are going to have at least a partial default. But the creditors, by and large, aren’t the ones who made most of the money. It is the middlemen who made all the money. Whining about creditors taking part of the loss doesn’t cause the investment bankers much of a headache. As a matter of fact, they may make a bundle on the restructuring.
After the (also very wealthy and well-connected) creditors lose their arses on highly-rated paper, they’ll go after the banksters for us. The beast will eat itself, and we’ll get to watch the spectacle.
Got popcorn?
Um, we are talking about Ireland’s foreign sovereign debt here. The likelihood of any securities law suit even being brought (never mind being successful) is about nil.
I was referring to Merkel’s more general statement (which I had highlighted) about creditors needing to take a hit along with, or preferably instead of, the taxpayers.
From you original post -
“Lagarde made the clearest statement yet that France supports Germany’s position on debt restructuring for crisis-ridden euro zone countries.”
That isn’t talking about slice and dice MBS, CDO stuff. That is a reference to foreign sovereign debt - the money a country borrows. I used to do those deals all the time. They are the most boring bond issues in the world. We could turn a tranche take down in 24 hours. The bond authorizations tool a little longer because the corporate lawyers had to do a little reseach about the basic stats of the country - % of population that was literate, % of population that had college education, main exports, etc. That info went into the prospectus as part of the disclosure of how risky it was to lend to that country.
sure.. cause Ireland (among others) owes Germany a ton of money, and a default will be real bad news to Germany.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
PIIGS can’t fly. Here’s why
“Portugal owes a great deal to Spain — and Spain, in turn, owes a great deal to France and Germany. And if you really want to scare yourself (or a European policymaker), look at how much Italy owes its neighbours.” Let me get into a little more detail.
Italy owes a whopping France $511 billion or 20% of its GDP. It owes Germany $190 billion. Spain in turn owes Germany $238 billion and France $220 billion. Ireland owes $184 billion to Germany and $60 billion to France. Portugal owes $47 billion to Germany and $45 billion to France. And the smallest of them all, Greece, owes Germany $45 billion and France $75 billion…
Good thing all those countries share a long history of peaceful relations!
i know why Germany was such a big lender. They wanted to export all the products they manufacture, and lent the EU money to buy them.
But i see here that France the other huge lender. What’s up with that? Did the EU countries need a loan to buy.. wine?
France seems to export much of the same stuff they import..
Chemicals, aircraft, machinery..
But pharmaceuticals, beverages and iron and steel are not listed as an import. Those things are majorly exports.
“What’s up with that? Did the EU countries need a loan to buy.. wine? ”
Don’t kid yourself. The French manufacture pleny of stuff. For instance: Renault, Peugeot and Citroen cars are sold all over Europe.
ok.. cars..
Italy manufactures cars too:
* Abarth (road and race cars)
* Alfa Romeo (road and race cars)
* Bandini (road and race cars)
* Birel (karts)
* B Engineering (road cars)
* CRG (karts)
* Dallara (race cars)
* De Tomaso (road cars)
* Ferrari (road and race cars)
* Fiat (road cars)
* Fornasari (sports cars)
* Lamborghini (road and race cars)
* Lancia (road and race cars)
* Maserati (road and race cars)
* Minardi (race cars)
* Moretti Motor Company (road cars)
* Nardi (road and race cars)
* Osella (race cars)
* Pagani (road cars)
* Pininfarina (car body styling, prototypes)
* Qvale (road cars)
(wikipedia)
But they owe France roughly $511 billion according to that article.
Most eye glasses are made in Italy.
The car brands were but an example. It Italians also make wine, btw.
Perhaps the debt is for covering Italian budget deficits.
In the creditor-debtor relationship, it’s becoming increasingly clear which one wears the knee-pads.
you know the old saying..
“When you owe the bank $1,000, they own you.. BUT..
For those that don’t know about history … Here is a condensed version:
Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in the winter.
The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalysts for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups:
1 . Liberals
2. Conservatives.
Once beer was discovered, it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That’s how villages were formed.
Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to BBQ at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement…
Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live off the conservatives by showing up for the nightly BBQ’sand doing the sewing, fetching, and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement.
Some of these liberal men eventually evolved into women. They became known as girlie-men. Some noteworthy liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, the invention of group therapy, group hugs, and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that conservatives provided.
Over the years conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass for obvious reasons.
Modern liberals like imported beer (with lime added), but most prefer white wine or imported bottled water. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu, and French food are standard liberal fare..
Another interesting evolutionary side note: most of their women have higher testosterone levels than their men. Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are liberals. Liberals invented the designated hitter rule because it wasn’t fair to make the pitcher also bat.
Conservatives drink domestic beer, mostly Bud or Miller. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, engineers, corporate executives,
athletes, members of the military, airline pilots and generally anyone who works productively.
Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.
Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to govern the producers and decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the liberals remained in Europe when conservatives were coming to America . They crept in after the Wild West was tamed and created a business of trying to get more for nothing.
Here ends today’s lesson in world history:
It should be noted that a Liberal may have a momentary urge to angrily respond to the above before forwarding it.
A Conservative will simply laugh and be so convinced of the absolute truth of this history that it will be forwarded immediately to other conservatives and to more liberals just to piss them off.
And there you have it. Let your next action reveal your true self…..I’m going to have another beer.
Where do libertarians fit in? A libertarian is not a modern liberal and not a conservative.
The libertarians are the ones who record all of this history stuff and keep it organized on shelves.
The libertarians were busy predicting the downfall of the hunter/gatherer economy due to government interference in the markets. And in only 100,000 years, they were proven correct.
In fact, the prediction worked so well, they’ve been using it ever since.
Mmmmm, beeerrrr.
I would agree with most of this, except for the implication that corporate executives work productively.
Let schedule a meeting and discuss that.
Liberals invented twist off beer caps !
It’s amusing how often the chest-thumping, gay-baiting, he-men conservatives are found in a hotel room with a rent-boy. Is the modern conservative movement based in a large part on denying its own latent homosexuality? It sure seems that way.
A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time. - H. L. Mencken
Sad but true.
Guess who came over on the Mayflower?
Not sure about the latent part.
Another hilarious installment in alpha-sloth’s version of history. Reagan was gay, the 80’s were a time of economic downturn, WWII was a period of prosperity… what else?
Reagan was gay…
“For seven and a half years I’ve worked alongside President Reagan. We’ve had triumphs. Made some mistakes. We’ve had some sex…uh…setbacks.” —George H. W. Bush in 1988
Straight from the horse’s…uh…mouth. Surprised you agree with me on this.
Cool! You can not only rewrite history, you can make up quotes too!
Why else are conservatives obsessed with sexual behavior, in particular, that of gay men?
“I like men…I like to be manhandled…I like you.”
-Fletch
$14 billion windfall for senior citizens?
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — When House Democrats return to Washington on Monday, a top priority will be putting a $250 dollar check in the mail to 58 million Social Security recipients.
Democrats plan to vote early in the lame-duck session on a bill that would provide Social Security recipients with a one-time payment, according to the office of Earl Pomeroy, a Democrat from North Dakota who authored the legislation.
~ Handout
I would recommend they means-test before distributing the checks, but that effort would cost us lots of money..
How about this. Distribute it on the honor system.
Let it be known that the money is intended only for people who need it. If someone wants the $250, they’ll have to ask for it.
A healthy percentage will not ask.
The dead people and cons will all request theirs.
How’d that work for the last tax incentive? Or TARP? Or the BP payouts?
You’re lucky if the honor system work at your country club.
Just in time for Christmas. Those old geezers are each getting eachother a new iPad touch. The apple store will smell like ben-gay.
$250? iPad? I don’t think so.
More like the prescriptions they had to put off earlier this year.
So what seems to be becoming a $250 annual payoff to seniors isn’t really the cost-of-living increase that the Feds say Social Security recipients won’t be receiving because we’re in a deflationary economic cycle?
Ain’t life grand? And ain’t it transparent?
Latino kids now majority in state’s public schools ~ SF Gate
Latinos now make up a majority of California’s public school students, cracking the 50 percent barrier for the first time in the state’s history, according to data released Friday by the state Department of Education.
Almost 50.4 percent of the state’s students in the 2009-10 school year identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino, up 1.36 percent from the previous year.
In comparison, 27 percent of California’s 6.2 million students identified themselves as white, 9 percent as Asian and 7 percent as black. Students calling themselves Filipino, Pacific Islander, Native American or other total almost 7 percent.
The offspring of hard working immigrants, hard at work in Las Vegas.
http://www.mynews3.com/story.php?id=31896&n=5037
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/
Southwest USA, meet your future.
Wow….Did you see all the bullet holes in the wall ??
Let us review the results of this mass migration to California by “latinos”:
Three states have above average college graduation rates but below average high school graduation rates: California, New York, and Rhode Island. This educational inequality is particularly pronounced in California which ranks fourteenth for college graduation rates but forty-eighth for high school graduation rates.
Got that. California is just about last in high school graduation rates.
More that 10% of the population has less than a 9th grade education.
Let’s bring some more across the southern border to vote themselves more benefits.
More that 10% of the population has less than a 9th grade education ??
When my daughter was getting her first graduate degree she had to intern at a impacted school with lots of Latino’s…She would tell me stories about how difficult it was to teach some of these youngsters because she could not effectively communicate with them…She would enroll one of the bi-lingual students to communicate with them so she could be sure they understood what the subject matter was…In very little time she said they fell so far behind the class that there was not much she could do…So, I suppose like most teachers, you taught to the middle core pace of the class…
SC Dave,
When I taught ESL over 14 years, I tried every possible aim: high. low, middle, shared time. Eventually I aimed at the 2/3 upper, or 67th percentile of the class. Always a compromise, but the best I could fine tune it, with the greatest degree of inclusion and success.
Latinos have the highest public school dropout rate of all groups.
No one seems sure as to why, yet.
I think you mean educators haven’t figured out a reason that doesn’t make them look bad.
No, it’s endemic across all regions. North, south, east, west, flyover country.
Most likely it’s the same problem that blacks have: poor neighborhoods and the culture that goes with it.
Pretty simple, actually. They don’t have a culture that values education.
I have had several Latino elderly patients over the years who worked as housekeepers or in the fields and don’t really get the need for higher education. They would speak disparagingly of their grandchildren who went to school, implying that they should be out working to support the family. But those who have grandchildren who are successful professionals finally understand and embrace it
I have one patient whose entire family works in the fields, including him. His mother is a third generation farm worker. He just started engineering school at Cal State Sacramento. We are all so proud of him.
Higher education (meaning anything past middle school,) is all-to-often seen as an impediment to generational cohesion in recent hispanic immigrant families–a shame on the family even,–where girls are not supposed to be educated but are expected to start pumping out grandbabies once they turn 15. Boys are supposed to get shop or field jobs or go into the military to support those new little citizens, as well as contribute to the care and feeding of madre and padre and any other cousins who have managed to find their way to the family homestead from points south.
The well-intentioned college counselors at Foothill HS in Bakersfield CA. used to despair that 2/3 of each year’s class dropped out–in spite of a FREE International Baccalaureate program being offered for gifted kids, (only four students out of 700+ bothered to get the degree, which normally cost 32K at private schools around the state,) and only ONE kid out of the entire class went on to an out of state four-year college. (Mine.) Pathetic. The culture just wasn’t into it….
In 2002 I literally had to sneak one of my Mexican “son’s” entrance applications onto my web account because his parents wouldn’t let him even apply to college. A brilliant and flamboyant young man, he ended up snagging a rare four-year scholarship to St. John’s Annapolis– and his parents refused to give him their blessing or even come to his graduation four years later. (But Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’conner–his longtime hero– actually signed a personal letter of congratulation for him that day, so some of the sting was ameliorated for him.) He’s now in medical school. Maybe they’ll change their tune when he gets his MD? He worked three jobs for four years to graduate, and managed to read and discuss the entire great books bibliography required of all their students. He loved it, thrived in that setting…but he was the exception, had huge determination, and had some extraordinarily supportive Anglo friends to get him through. Still, can you imagine? His parents didn’t speak the language and tried to keep him from leaving, so he wouldn’t set a “bad” example for his younger siblings?
Yikes. Shameful.
Retail Sales Probably Rose, Production Rebounded as U.S. Recovery Sped Up
Retail sales probably rose in October for a fourth month and factory production rebounded, adding to evidence the U.S. recovery picked up at the start of the fourth quarter, economists said before reports this week.
This is the strangest “recovery” I’ve ever seen. Prices going up, incomes going down and sales $ going sideways.
This is the strangest “recovery” I’ve ever seen. Prices going up, incomes going down ??
You likely were not a working adult yet…We have seen it before…1974-75…Stagflation…
Except incomes didn’t go down then, there was little outsourcing.
Incomes and hiring also didn’t rise to meet inflation.
It’s called “stagflation.”
China’s 4 Largest Banks to Halt Developer Loans Until Year-End, Paper Says
China’s four biggest state banks will not issue any new loans to property developers for the remainder of the year, the state-run China Real Estate Business reported, citing unidentified executives at the banks.
Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., China Construction Bank Corp, Bank of China Ltd. and Agricultural Bank of China Ltd., had met their allotted loan targets for the year, according to a copy of a report e-mailed to Bloomberg News by the newspaper today. Approvals of new loans had ceased since the end of October, the paper said.
From grocery stores to gas stations and most other consumer stops in between, price inflation is shaping up to be the biggest economic story ahead. Whether it’s how much you’ll pay for home heating oil or a loaf of bread, don’t believe the non-hype: Even if traditional measures of consumer prices aren’t yet showing major increases, consumers know what they see. CNBC.com
Sarah Palin had the gall to tell an audience nearly a week ago that more inflation was in the air and the Federal Reserve’s announced intention to inflate some more was not a good thing. This prompted an outburst of criticism from liberal and conservative pundits alike who contend 1/ She has no business commenting on economics; 2/ The official inflation rate is running less than 2 percent; and 3/ If the Fed doesn’t inflate the economy can’t recover.
The lady from Alaska just won’t quit driving commentators crazy. They know what’s best for the country and they will not have this bumpkin from the wilds of the north country inserting herself into the national conversation about the nation’s monetary future.
She has no business commenting on economics ??
Got that right…She should just stick to things she knows best…Killing animals and having babies…To watch this hawker suck money out of all these neocon worshipers is funny…
I sure missed out on the back & forth last week on Palin & the neocon’s…But two quotes still have me laughing;
Ahansen;
How, pray tell, can a chirping nitwit have a “position?”
Exeter;
neocon is short for “New Conservative”
Just slightly right of Stalin and Mussolini.
“She has no business commenting on economics ??
Got that right…She should just stick to things she knows best…Killing animals and having babies…To watch this hawker suck money out of all these neocon worshipers is funny…”
And I suppose all Latinos should just shut up and just dance around the sombrero while you, the sharp eyed bigot, eat quiche in a trendy little spot.
There ares no bigger hypocrites than you, ahansen, and exeter. You have perfected the liberal conceit of enlightened superiority through applied prejudice.
You practice exactly what you pretend to abhor.
Kudos to you Cobalt!
Judo’s why Rancher…Because Cobaltblue can make a personal attack ?? He/AShe need not attack me, lets see coalbaltblue make his case for Palin if different then what I suggested…
Thank you, Cobalt.
Sarah pAlien is unquestionably the bottom of the barrel of rightwing know-nothings. And here hypocrisy reaches new heights every time she makes the mistake of talking.
I agree. Bigot is the apt term to describe people who behave in such ways.
As this economy continues its meltdown, expect the “enlightened” Political Class to get what’s been long been coming to them. Alinsky and Soros followers (and others of enlightened superiority, as you say) are going to be neutered. There will be no room, time or patience for such nonsense.
It’s not Joe- and Jane 6-Pack who have decimated this economy. They know it, and have begun to act.
Alinsky and Soros followers (and others of enlightened superiority, as you say) are going to be neutered.
Free vasectomies? Isn’t that socialism?
Or are we gonna string ‘em up, and cut their nuts off? Yee-ha! Is that the obedience to the Constitution that the Tea Party is always saying we need?
And I suppose all the working classes should just shut up and grovel at the feet of the corporate elite, while you, the double talking neo-con excuse and apologize for the neo-con war machine and their insane domestic policies.
There ares no bigger hypocrites than you, RunJoeyRun and Rancher. You have perfected the authoritarian/conservative conceit of enlightened superiority through applied prejudice.
You practice exactly what you pretend to abhor.
See how that works Cupcake?
+1 Cobalt
It’s not a conceit if it’s the truth….
I generally approve of any political activism that shakes up the establishment and gets the public invloved in the debate. But I oppose groups that don’t put the best interests of this country first, like the Neocons. I don’t really know that much about Palin, but her sudden “rise” can be explained if you look a little deeper:
“Before there were Tea Partiers, there was Sarah Palin. The summer before John McCain put the Alaska governor on the ticket, she had been “discovered” on a Weekly Standard sponsored summer cruise to Alaska. She hosted Standard editor Bill Kristol and others at a luncheon in the state capitol, where she impressed them as a raw political talent. Kristol’s subsequent touting elevated her onto McCain’s vice presidential short list. One AEI staffer described Palin as a “project,” adding “[s]he’s bright and she’s a blank page. She’s going places and it’s worth going there with her.”
“For the neoconservatives, this alliance has paid off. Palin has become neoconservatism’s reliable vector into the Tea Party world. She reliably echoes neoconservative talking points about war with Iran. When addressing the Tea Party Convention in Nashville last February, she hit neocon talking points by citing Ronald Reagan, “peace through strength,” and “tough action” against Iran. She declared that the United States needed a foreign policy that “reflected our values” and denounced the alleged policy of treating terrorism as “a mere law enforcement matter.” Wearing an Israeli flag pin, she charged that President Obama was causing “Israel, our critical ally” to question our support by reaching out to hostile regimes.”
http://original.antiwar.com/scott-mcconnell/2010/11/11/how-the-neocons-are-co-opting-the-tea-party/
Yeah…Lets not confuse cobaltblue with the facts Ben…
Anyone who knows anything about ordinary Tea Partiers understands that one of their heroes is Barry Goldwater.
Those who know nothing assume that Sarah Palin is their mouthpiece. She is not. Nor does she believe that she is.
Tea Partiers generally do not like neocons, who have progressive leanings.
I haven’t heard the Tea Party saying anything about ending the Global War on Terrorism.
I don’t think there is any Tea Party agreement on foreign policy. I would guess that half are Neocons who can’t wait to start a third war with Iran, and the other half are with Ron Paul and would bring everyone home.
Again, that’s the problem with the Tea Party. They need a platform so the rest of us can figure out where they stand. They seem to spend a lot of time on whether we should have Sharia law in the US, and yelling how we should preserve Social Security for the elderly while getting rid of it at the same time.
http://www.theteapartyplatform.com/
Maybe some Tea Partiers on the HBB can tell us:
End Afghanistan or no? Democrats would say yes, Republicans would say no.
End SS or no? Democrats would say no, Republicans would say yes.
End Medicare or no? See above.
I found a Tea Party platform adopted by Maine Republicans last spring.
There are same specifics:
Outlaw abortion, marriage between a man and woman.
Arrest and deport illegals.
Keep Medicare, but repeal Obama care.
Gut the UN.
Well defined term limits.
Audit the Fed.
The rest is generalities.
http://paintmainered.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=2731571:Topic:31119
Keep medicare? Friggin socialists!
You’re going to get many different geographic incarnations of “Tea Party” during the coming decade. Get used to it.
Yeah, it actually does make sense, as ludicrous as it sounds at first. Remember that Tea Party groups wants smaller government federally, with more political decisions made locally. This would explain your difficulty in nailing down “one size fits all” platform positions.
It also explains why there isn’t a formal “Tea Party” party.
It also explains why it’s a movement that will be difficult to stop. It’s why today’s Republican leaders both fear it and marvel at it. It’s why a Rove and Gingrinch don’t wholly support it, and why Palin is trying to both acknowledge and glom onto it simultaneously. It’s why she openly supports the movement but repeatedly makes it a point to say she’s not part of it. (Smart move on her part, politically speaking. She “gets it”.)
It’s why I personally hope to see a similar movement pop up among JFK-minded Democrats. It’s time. Their leaders don’t represent them any better than Republican leaders represent republicans.
Our Political Elite do not understand how to run our lives better than we do. They cannot. And we know it. Tea Partiers simply are the people who have decided to act, and get educated civically.
And in what kind of creepy insane gulag world are “*political decisions* made locally”????? “Political decisions” are made by political parties as a part of the election process. When the election is done, so are “political decisions”.
You neo-cons desperately need a refresher course in civics.
What are you talking about exeter? His point is that the Fed gov’t’s role should be reduced so that some of the power/decisions flow back to the states. Why shouldn’t the S&L gov’t have more power? You know, that Tenth Amendment stuff?
I can fully appreciate why you don’t understand. Try reading it again and *think*.
“Why shouldn’t the S&L gov’t have more power?”
Because we are all redneck, missing chromosome, cousin marrying, gay hating, racist flag wavers. How can we possibly be trusted to make decisions in our best interest when we are too ignorant to know what’s good for us? C’mon…we don’t even know how to eat let alone vote.
Just slightly right of Stalin and Mussolini………
Unfortunately, you, like many others are very confused about left and right, conservative vs. liberal.
Stalin was a socialist (liberal). Hilter was a Socialist, cum fascist.
Ditto Mussolini.
the Control Freaks are Socialists, like Obama.
People in the conservative camp are for LESS Government.
People on the left are for MORE government mandates, like Healthcare control.
You really need to understand which side of the fence you are on.
the propaganda from the left is that the Less Government side are the “meanies” who want to deprive people of things the government should provide for them. We want to take away their healthcare, social services, housing, starve children, blah, blah, blah.
In reality, the Government merely steals from working people and gives to the “others” in the form of “redistribution”. This is leftist.
It is Obama that wants 16,000 more ‘fascist’ IRA agents to fleece the people so he can give money to the people who have been deprived of it. He wants more draconian plans to “control” the people.
The people on the right want government to leave them alone to go about their lives. More freedom is not “fascist”.
The people on the right want government to leave them alone to go about their lives ??
Yeah right….What about womans rights ?? What about gay rights ?? And why is it right or left ?? And there-in the problem I have with the right (neocons)…Its there way or the Highway…Thats why I left the Rep. party…
If you like to see the political universe in terms of dualisms (left vs right, liberal vs conservative), that’s your hangup, but I for one don’t have to play along. Let’s look at the article above and see if we can get to the meat of the matter:
‘Many have hailed the midterm elections as a victory for the Tea Party. The dramatic Republican Party gains in the House, the increasing self-identification of voters as ‘conservative,’ and the widespread disillusionment for politics as usual…less analysis has gone into understanding the significance of the Tea Party on the politics of U.S. foreign affairs. .. Tea Partiers, particularly those at the grassroots level, have voiced few positions on international issues. Nevertheless, the emergence of this new political force will impact the national discourse on foreign policy.’
‘A case in point is the sharp contrast between what appear to be core Tea Party beliefs and those of the neoconservatives, the political faction most closely associated with the drive to attack Iraq and a vanguard force in hawkish policy discourse…At a March 2010 Cato Institute forum, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) both concurred that nearly all GOP congressmen believed invading Iraq was a mistake.’
‘neoconservatives have positioned themselves as an ally of the movement by flattering it. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol … closed an editorial critical of the Left with a Tea Party shout out: ‘Those of us on the pro-Tea Party wing (dare I say pro-American wing) of the American public need not respond to the left in kind.’”
” There is clearly a certain slipperiness here: Kristol has edited a major conservative magazine for fifteen years which has never backed smaller government, and indeed touted “big government conservatism” as the vital and necessary direction for the conservative movement.”
This is what bugs me; why isn’t the MSM making it clear who is behind Palin? Another false dualism, the two party system, makes it possible that she could be in the white house some day. That these monsters that call themselves Neocons could be sitting that close to controlling the US military again should be setting off alarms in the media.
Allow me to cross up your black and white world on another thing: Obama has sold us out to the military industrial complex as well. Why are we still in Iraq? Just yesterday, it is quietly noted in the press that “we’ll” be in Afganistan until at least 2014. The Democrats ran partly on ending the “Bush wars,” and they’ve failed us too.
The Democrats ran partly on ending the “Bush wars,” and they’ve failed us too ??
I agree Ben…Now, we have lost our chance to do so…
14 years is a long time to be at war.
Peace becomes unusual.
“Stalin was a socialist (liberal). Hilter was a Socialist, cum fascist.”
Wrong and wrong. Nice try though.
Both were who were strict authoritarians. Conservatives are authoritarian by definition, ALWAYS.
You government hating neo-cons will not get away with revisionist history. Not here.
That’s too funny. National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, etc. At the very least, he certainly started out on the left.
What’s funny is that you cherry pick the word “socialist” from a label used to describe an ardently anti-communist anti-socialist regime.
Strike 2.
“Wrong and wrong. Nice try though.”
Socialists, Communists, Fascists are the ultimate Authoritarians. They have to be, only a small minority of any population would willingly subscribe to any of those isms, the rest have to be re-educated, jailed or killed.
And wrong again.
All European states are of socialist of some type or another.
Strike 3. Guess what?
Diogenes, what is your stand on the military? Should it be cut? Should we walk away from Afghanistan?
My position.
We should never have gone into Afganistan in the first place.
Yes, we should get out.
Afganistan is not threat to the U.S.
Unless someone can come up with a compelling reason to be there, other than “taking the war to them”, we should not be “nation building”. Taliban groups don’t have fighter aircraft, freighters or tanks. They can’t bring the war to us.
And no, we can’t have a war on a concept< “terrorism”.
We have wars with nations, once declared.
We have become the world’s policemen, and i would rather put the troops on the border, defending this place, rather than other places.
“1/ She has no business commenting on economics; 2/ The official inflation rate is running less than 2 percent; and 3/ If the Fed doesn’t inflate the economy can’t recover”
The First Amendment gives the hockey mom every right to comment on economics, and also protects our right to mock her relentlessly.
I’m starting to see that inflation is very uneven across the nation right now. Some places are seeing only 2%, others places are seeing 20%+.
Unfortunately, I live in one of the higher areas, although it seems to have leveled off for the time being. But the recent increases over the last year have been brutal.
“Food inflation is getting very bad and that’s just bad news for the majority of consumers who are still stretched.”
~Nicholas Colas, Investment Strategist
Yep. Those with cash get to buy even as prices go up.
Those without cash get to watch.
my guess is congress will have to raise the monthly food stamp grants $200 a month wont go far when milk is $8 a gallon
“will have to”?
What “have to”? The next Congress is going to have a hard time raising the debt ceiling to just keep spending on that sort of program where it is. The growth in programs to address basic poverty issues is almost all about more people being eligible. You aren’t going to see an increase in the amount people can get. Just ain’t going to happen.
And in the Zimbabwe hyper-inflation, those with two trillion dollars got to ride the bus, and those without two trillion dollars had to walk.
Yep, cash is king, in even in Zimbabwe.
I would expect gold to be super king in Zimbabwe.
Barter is king in Zimbabwe.
Yesterday at Costco, i noticed a few higher prices. They seemed to be those same items as went up in other stores… like butter and bacon were jacked up. Coffee was higher.
I’m not sure about meats. They always seem to be “too high” to me.
Otherwise prices seemed comfortably familiar and nothing (aside from coffee) I bought was notably higher.
A few places that do economic analysis have done their yearly check on the cost of serving Thanksgiving dinner to 10 people. One found an increase of about $0.53 cents total. The other found an increase of about a penny.
I admit that a few of the things I buy seem a little higher. A lot isn’t. Going to a big box club store where there are never sales is not the way all people shop. I shop sales. The good sales prioces are, perhaps, a little less common, but they still happen. If I had a dry basement and an extra freezer, my food costs wouldn’t be going up at all. As it is, I live in an apartment so I think they may have gone up a very small fraction.
i bought a small Haier chest freezer for about $150 at Target.. or was it Walmart.
Anyway, it’s virtually identical to this one at Amazon dot com:
“Haier HNCM053E 5.3-Cu-Ft Chest Freezer”
Dimensions: 22.1 x 29.3 x 32.6 inches
Doesn’t weight much. A big man can carry it in his arms.
This thing is deep and holds a lot.. and it’s so quiet you can’t hear it running without pressing an ear against it.
no frills.. no interior light.. gotta manually defrost once a year or so.. Temperature control is there (but never needs adjusting) No indicator lamps to tell you it’s plugged in.
——
At least half of my shopping is geared towards taking advantage of this added freezer space. Steaks last years at sub zero temps. Everything freezes rock solid.
Haier makes an even smaller one:
Haier Freezer - White (3.5 cu. ft.).
Butter and Milk seems to bounce up and down over time at CostCo. I am not sure these are inflationary pressures or short term market fluctuations, most likely a side effect of the FED’s new $600 Billion adventure.
“Food inflation is getting very bad and that’s just bad news for the majority of consumers who are still stretched.”
~Nicholas Colas, Investment Strategist
When I first glanced at this post I thought it said “Nicholas Cage, Investment Strategist”.
Stranger things have happened.
Rep. Charles Rangel’s Ethics Trial Approaches Monday
Harlem Congressman Faces 13 Counts of Alleged Violations
A two-year ethics scandal that saw embattled Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., lose his powerful position among House Democrats but not his bid for reelection will come to a climax when he faces an ethics panel Monday on Capitol Hill.
The ethics trial promises to be a spectacle. Rangel, 80, a former New York City prosecutor, likely will represent himself as he faces the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. The proceeding is formally called an adjudicatory hearing.
Rangel stands accused of 13 counts of violating House rules but has emphatically denied any wrongdoing. Rangel allegedly failed to reveal more than half a million dollars in assets on financial disclosure forms, improperly obtained four rent-controlled apartments in New York City and failed to disclose financial arrangements for a villa at the Punta Cana Yacht Club in the Dominican Republic.
Meanwhile, Tom Delay was caught on tape this last week openly acknowledging he knew about the campaign fund swaps.
It amazes me how crooks can get re-elected. I was happy when William Jefferson of Louisiana lost his bid for re-election to Republican Ahn Cao in 2010. Of course, Cao was a two-year congressman and was defeated last week by Cedric Richmond, Democrat.
Credit Fears, QE2, Elections Prompt Muni Selloff
Investors sold off long-term municipal bonds in the past week, sending a shiver through a normally stable market.
On Friday, yields on consulting firm Municipal Market Advisors’ index of AAA-rated 30-year municipals were up 15 basis points—or 0.15 percentage point—from the prior week. That is the sharpest move in 18 months, said Matt Fabian, managing director at the firm.
Analysts and investors attributed the decline in price, which moves opposite to yield, to a number of different factors. They include mounting fears about the stability of municipalities’ finances, the fate of the Build America …
“Analyists and investors attributed the decline in price, which moves opposite to yield, to a number of different factors.”
The root cause behind these “different factors” is THERE IS NO MONEY.
Who in their right mind would want to lock up their money long term at these rates?
Combo, FWIW I think you are making a fundamental mistake (One that I also made earlier in my life) of falling in love with any asset class or particular investment. Does anybody think they are smart enough, or more importantly, connected enough to stroll amongst the ashes picking up assets for pennies on the dollar?
Sure, some will get lucky. Most wont.
Don’t deceive yourself with rudimentary “follow the money” scenarios.
The only politically acceptable way out of our debt is inflation.
‘Does anybody think they are smart enough, or more importantly, connected enough to stroll amongst the ashes picking up assets for pennies on the dollar?’
Maybe not how you characterize it, but if you work at it, have some resources and courage, yes.
“Sure, some will get lucky. Most wont.”
This reminds me of a lady who used to work for me. She was a reliable, hard worker, who brought a ton of experience to the job. She approached me one day and said she deserved a raise. I knew she was right, but being young and foolish, I thought I could bluff my way out of it. I said, if I give you a raise I’ll have to give everybody a raise. She replied, I don’t care about them, I deserve a raise. I gave her the increase and also for the two or three other employees that deserved more pay. These people weren’t lucky; they worked hard and wanted to be compensated for it. I wanted them to keep working there.
Good for you Ben - it always seems to pay off for the employer too to keep good people.
I believe in finding the right person to do the job. Pay them more than they can earn somewhere else. Treat them with respect then get out of their way and let them do their job. This recipe has done well for us. We have the same people working for us for decades. I can’t stand micro- managers.
Sure, some will get lucky. Most wont.
Two quotes to keep in mind regarding luck:
“Luck is the residue of design.”
and
“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it”
Your mileage may vary.
Ben/Michael,
I have always been a firm believer of
Luck = Hard Work + Opportunity.
I think we are in general agreement.
I think trying to time this dollar collapse will be like catching lightning in a bottle. The Boyz will see to it.
Better to be early than late, imo.
“Combo, FWIW I think you are making fundamental mistake (One that I also made earlier in my life) of falling in love with any asset class or particular investment.”
I haven’t “fallen in love” with any asset class or investment. I merely interpret unfolding economic events as warmed-over history.
When bubbles inflate a lot of money is borrowed into existence to finance the inflation of these bubbles. When bubbles deflate then a lot of the money that went into financing the bubbles vanishes back into thin air from whence it sprung into being.
IMO we are still in the deflating part of this latest bubble episode; We won’t always be deflating but right now deflating is what our economy is now doing, and with this deflating a lot of money is vanishing from circulation, which means cash is the best place to be.
Cash will not ALWAYS be the best place to be; IMO we are but a year or two away from being offered (once again) a chance-of-a-lifetime stock buying opportunity.
My plan is to wait and watch for P/Es to go below eight, then I’ll get out of cash and get into stocks. Until then I’ll fire up some popcorn, kick back, and watch as events unfold.
Combo,
I truly hope you hit a home run.
Be careful.
There is an interesting interactive infographic at the NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html
You get to check various boxes and you get to see the effect that each would have on the deficit.
Thats pretty cool JackRussell…Nice find…
Three bedroom town house next door to me and just like the one I am renting sold for 649K…I’m paying $ 2,500 a month for rent…and live close to Tyson’s corner in Vienna, Va.
You got yourself a much better deal. $649k. Property taxes, insurance, HOA, interest, and principle probably mean $5,000 or even $6,000 per month for the buyer.
And they probably only put 3% down…it’s still crazy out there.
Sounds like you’re right where I used to live. I was in the Hallcrest Heights TH community right off 123 and Hallcrest/Lewinsville. We loved the THs and neighborhood, but just too expensive. Our rent was $1900 (2004) so you might want to look around. Insane area to be in - everyday, literally, I’d see some sort of exotic car in my 15 minute commute to Reston. Ferraris, CarreraGTs, SL600s, Maseratis, etc. It was funny when I moved b/c I hadn’t realized how desensitized I had become to seeing what are pretty ‘rare’ cars on a daily basis. The money down in the Tysons/Great Falls/Potomac area is just crazy.
No problem when you and your significant other have fire-proof government jobs that pay waaayy above what J6P makes in NYCB’s flyover country.
My three most well-off groups.
1. Wall Street banksters
2. Federal government employees
3. Retirees over age 65
I’ve modified #2, as state and local government jobs aren’t as secure as they used to be. Maybe that situation will trickle up to the federal level as well, but I’m not holding my breath.
Whoops, not NYCB, NYCdj.
3. Retirees over age 65 ??
I sure see a lot of them in my RV travels…
However, in my own personal experience, the SS check is basically sustenance for both my mother & MIL….Neither were slackers by the way…Both worked in whatever way they could for 40 years or so…Both met the same fate with their spouse though in different ways…My father died early leaving mom a forty something widow…MIL husband bolted, never to be seen or heard from again leaving a wife and three children behind…
Let’s see what the calculator says…
20% of 649k = $129.8k
80% of 649k = $519.2k
$519.2k mortgage at 4% for 30 years, monthly p&i = $2,478.74
As Bill mentioned above, to that you must add real estate taxes, insurance, and HOA fees.
Renting for $2,500 a month sure looks a lot better than buying.
You’re making awfully big money to even consider dropping $2,500 each month on rent.
Nothing beats a federal job paid by taxpayers, eh?
Actually, working in an area where anything less than a 2 hour commute means paying an outrageous amount of rent stinks. I don’t recall his family situation, but $2500 bucks would be a 2 bedroom apartment in my nice enough but not all that special 18 story apartment building. To get a three bedroom town house for that much is being frugal.
+1. I don’t get the personal attack, esp when someone is adding some RE content and info to the blog too
Perhaps if we shrank government, rents also would shrink.
Just an idea.
That anyone being paid by taxpayers can justify paying $2,500 a month rent (or mortgage, or anything else) is beyond me. Those that are PAYING YOUR SALARY spend a great deal less than that.
If anything, the situation ought to be reversed.
In this day and age, there’s no reason why federal government workers should not be dispersed around the country, working in less pricey environs.
Looked at a house yesterday. Really nice hood in Hobe Sound Fl. 2,556 total sq. ft. 2,157 living, 3bed 3 bath w/ den could be 4th, 2 car garage, pool yr. blt. 1990, HOA $150 a quarter, nice big lot, last sale $247,000 4/5/2002
The first time I saw it listed at $275,000 1/15/10 it has incrementally dropped $260,000,250,240,230 and is now listed at $215,000 and I am thinking about making an offer. Needs a little work but all of it can be done after we moved in. Fits all of my criteria except for HOA, but at $50 a month and as nice as the hood is I can live with it. It`s not CBS it`s wood frame, I can hardy board the exterior and stay vigilant on mites. Price, I had always figured $170,000 but with interest rates where they are and planning on probably 10 years in the house, WTH. I am tired of giving $1,700 a month to deadbeats. Any advice?
This might work.
http://www.platprops.com/real-estate/r3079695/8009-se-orchard-hobe-sound-fl-33455/ - 64k -
It’s very nice. $100/sq ft. Not bad. Too bad it’s a short sale. Find out if it was owner-occupied, what their hardships are, how many and how big the mortgages are. Don’t get into a bidding war. Make your offer and step away if another one comes in.
Your competitors are being subsidized. Stick built. $100+ per ft2. Replacement cost probably <$50.
$1700/mo rent should always pencil out better than buying $200K.
You do what you want to do.
Debt is slavery.
I was thinking that he could pay cash or make a huge down payment, since he is, after all, an HBBer. A small 15-year mortgage would be much less than $1700/month, even with taxes, repairs, and insurance.
Any advice?
Interest rates are a give away right now…As long as you accept the possibility that it could go down further in price AND you feel comfortable about your employment, why not ??
“As long as you accept the possibility that it could go down further in price”
You should have seen the look on the realtors face that showed us the property when I said, even if I buy this house I fully expect it to be worth less next year. Of course she told me I was wrong, just like every other realtor has for the past 6 years.
Ask her how much it would sell for if interest rates went up to 8% because it was harder or not possible to get a Fannie/Freddie/FHA loan.
If it’s such a steal the realtor should buy it. Put your money where your mouth is.
If I was looking to buy that house I’d want to know what are the real estate tax and insurance costs. It’s very close to the coast and south Florida is prone to hurricane hits.
I looked at the aerial photo on the linked website. What’s the story with the vacant land behind the house, Jeff? In the short to intermediate term I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that land being built on, but what about 5-10 years in the future? Can you live with a residential or commercial building behind the backyard?
From the pictures it looks like a nice house.
“I looked at the aerial photo on the linked website. What’s the story with the vacant land behind the house,”
I asked the same question and it is currently a nursery, according to the realtor ( because they never lie) if it is ever sold it can only be 1/2 acre home sites. Taxes are currently $3,500 a year, county assessed at $270,000 so that would go down. I have not checked on insurance yet but I do know it`s cheaper in Martin County than Palm Beach County.
It may be that residential homes are the highest and best use for the nursery parcel, so you may be okay.
Zoning can be changed to permit the land use to be something other than the site’s current entitlement. It takes lawyers and money, among other things, to change the zoning.
Be careful expecting lower property taxes Jeff. Yes, the county will lower your assessed value but they will also adjust your millage to compensate. Property taxes are, imo, the single biggest wildcard. If you can absorb future tax increases I say why not.
I do think you should try to sweeten the deal further though.
Thank you all. I am thinking $205,000
In the movies, when two guys are standing face to face and both have a gun pointed at the other, why is it that neither of them ever pulls the trigger?
Mutually Assured Destruction?
i dunno if a reflex action will pull the trigger or not.
Once in awhile they WILL both shoot, but the guns are invariably empty. Click! … Click!
if i ever make a movie, one guy is gonna pull the trigger and the other will fall dead.. just to break tradition.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPFRZDotAQc - 142k -
I especially like it when each guy, in order to show he means business, THEN decides to pull back the hammer.
Because it’s a movie.
And the twits who write & produce such movies know nothing about firearms or their proper use.
Having lots of experience shooting handguns, I’m always amazed at all those guys in “action movies” who take a one-hand shot at someone at 200 yards and drop them with one shot.
Even in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly check out those revolvers. They use cap-and-ball Colt model 1851’s, yet the actors are shown with metallic cartridges.
John Milius is a gun nut so his films tend to be more accurate. Check out his The Wind and The Lion some day - a favorite of mine. It’s not accurate history, but it’s the way Theodore Roosevelt SHOULD have been, damnit!
Medicare pay cuts
Payments could be reduced 23 percent by Dec. 1 unless Congress acts
WASHINGTON — Breast cancer surgeon Kathryn Wagner has posted a warning in her waiting room about a different sort of risk to patients’ health: She’ll stop taking new Medicare cases if Congress allows looming cuts in doctors’ pay to go through.
The scheduled cuts — the result of a failed system set up years ago to control costs — have raised alarms that real damage to Medicare could result if the lame-duck Congress winds up in a partisan standoff and fails to act by Dec. 1. That’s when an initial 23 percent reduction would hit.
Neither Democrats nor newly empowered Republicans want the sudden cuts, but there’s no consensus on how to stave them off. The debate over high deficits complicates matters, since every penny going to make doctors whole will probably have to come from cuts elsewhere. A reprieve of a few months may be the likeliest outcome. That may not reassure doctors.
“My frustration level is at a nine or 10 right now,” said Wagner, who practices in San Antonio. “I am exceptionally exhausted with these annual and biannual threats to cut my reimbursement by drastic amounts. As a business person, I can’t budget at all because I have no idea how much money is going to come in. Medicine is a business. Private practice is a business.”
Among the medical professionals, Atlas is shrugging.
So who will doctors treat? J6P is lucky if he has a high deductible health plan. The last time I was at the Dr’s office almost all the patients were on Medicare. J6P can’t afford to see the doctor anymore.
All of the breast cancer surgeons will treat only the breast cancer cases that happen when women are younger and on private insurance. They will not be able to sustain a practice on this number of patients, so they will retire. The US will have a tremendous shortage of breast cancer surgeon until the hospitals they figure out they can change the business model of having doctors in private practices with the ability to admit patients their hospital and hire the surgeons directly. Then they hospitals will sponsor a bunch of H1B visas for immigrant doctors who had their medical school training at public expense in other countries and who will be paid good salaries but much less than Dr. Wagner is accustomed to earning. Medical costs in the US will go down.
Don’t forget that the AMA is the gatekeeper as to who cab practice medicine in the USA.
We know a gal who was an MD in Lithiania, before moving to the USA. It took her YEARS to get certified to practice in the US.
And in those intervening years, it will be very hard for people on Medicare to get treatment. But if the world knows that half of the US doctors retired early in a snit over reimbursements, they will come and get themselves certified. And I would expect the hospitals to take the lead on this.
And the AMA would have a lot less power if they couldn’t keep gobs of their members from causing a collapse in the number of practising medical specialists. If their restrictions cause the breast cancer death rate to increase by 50% through lack of specialists to treat the disease, they they won’t have power for long.
Colorado, you’ve been sold a bill of goods by your Lithuanian doctor friend. AMA is a professional lobbying organization, and has nothing to do with licensing or board certification. Your friend simply has to pass the board examinations required of every US-trained doctor, and then do a residency, which is a paid job. Yes the exams are hard, but everybody has to pass them. And residency is hard, but everybody has to do it. So she should shut up about the AMA and study for her exam. By the way, I am not a member of the AMA. Dues are too expensive.
“Medicine is a business. Private practice is a business.””
Whereas your life is cheap.
If that’s how you see things, why not work for no pay yourself?
Oh, I see - your time and life have value. How odd, then, that the doctor’s doesn’t.
It’s not the doctors, but the insurances companies that have driven prices sky high.
Get back to me when your insurance company turns you down for that treatable-but-you-can’t-afford-it terminal disease that bankrupts you and your family before you die form it.
Don’t think it will happen to you?
We’re not talking about materialistic consumer products here. We’re talking about life and death.
If she wants to drop her Medicare patients, she is allowed. I know some people to don’t accept Medicare and do just fine. Ron Paul doesn’t either. Nobody is forced to participate in Medicare. I like to accept Medicare, and I make a little less than people who don’t. No biggie. Don’t let physicians’ hysterics influence you too much.
Nobody is asking her to work for nothing. She can drop her Medicare assignment.
“As a business person, I can’t budget at all because I have no idea how much money is going to come in”
Welcome to the real world Dr. Wagner.
Notice that she posted this in her “Waiting Room”. Why? New patients don’t “walk in” to a doctor’s office; they call first, or let the GPs know that they aren’t going to accept any more Medicare referrals. Neither of these methods requires the posting of crappy little signs on the wall.
Poor little cynical me thinks this is a ploy to goad her existing patients into making “don’t cut my Medicare” calls to their local Congressman.
For once, I’d like to see a sign in the doctor’s office saying “I can’t afford my BMW, Trophy Wife, and 5000 square foot McMansion, if Medicare payments are cut, so please call your Congressman.”
For once, I’d like to see a sign in the doctor’s office saying “I can’t afford my BMW, Trophy Wife, and 5000 square foot McMansion, if Medicare payments are cut, so please call your Congressman.”
That’s along the lines of what I think. Downward income pressures will be everywhere shortly. And the doctors are just going to opt out? Why don’t they pass along the downward pressure to their suppliers? Sell the waterfront home, buy again in 5 years for 1/2 what they paid 5 years ago? Organize against big pharma to make healthcare more affordable? Nope instead the poor will pay the price to ensure doctors’ lifestyles don’t have to change like everyone elses…..Nice.
I call her bluff. From what I understand Texas has the highest rate of uninsured in the country. Medicare reimbursement is better than none. Maybe she has a fancy practice in the suburbs with lots of private insurance. In California, Medicare reimburses just as well as most insurers, and surgeries don’t require pre-authorization. Every year Medicare cuts to doctors loom, and every year it doesn’t happen. Maybe this year it will.
‘Texas has the highest rate of uninsured in the country’
That may be, but if so it’s a little misleading. Some of the counties along the border are the poorest in the US, and govt paid medical care runs 80-90%.
Canada’s coming housing bust
FORTUNE — America may be on the ropes, but its neighbor to the North wants everybody to know that, in contrast, it’s doing just fine.
Canada, once known mainly for its Mounties, maple leaves, and muscular peacekeeping presence, now can crow about how it managed to avoid the financial crisis that devastated many of the economies of the Western world. For instance, not one Canadian bank failed during the crash and only one reported a loss.
As David Rosenberg, economist for Gluskin Sheff, told Fortune earlier this week, he couldn’t “recall a time, ever, where on the fiscal, economic, or political basis, relative to the United States, the downside risks were as limited and upside potential so compelling in Canada as is the case today.”
All of this rings true, for now at least. But Canada still faces some stiff odds if it plans to slip through the crisis with nary a scratch. CIBC recently reported that Canada was likely to see its economic recovery squeezed next year, with a still-overvalued loonie falling to 93 U.S. cents and growth rates averaging “no better than 2% over the next few quarters.” Canada’s economy, said CIBC, was shifting “into a new phase of greater uncertainty.”
One problem is that it’s hard not to catch a close neighbor’s cold. Although bolstered by a heavy trade of natural resources, 75% of Canadian exports end up in the United States, so Canadian trade will likely suffer if American consumers don’t begin spending again. “At the end of the day, the Canadian economy just can’t fight the gravitational pull of sluggish U.S. activity. End of story,” Doug Porter, deputy chief economist at BMO Capital Markets recently wrote.
Barry’s passing out waivers to big corporations and unions,imagine that…
Obama White House Hands Out 111 Obamacare Waivers- Hides It on Website
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Uu_tI0hTw
link
Old news, wmbz. What are there - upwards of four to five dozen corporations that now have brokered deals to avoid falling prey to ObamaCare?
Perhaps getting a job flipping burgers at McDonald’s ain’t such a bad deal after all.
As I’ve said before, any corporate leader with a brain in his or her head will hire their own in-house doctors and support staff. I don’t know if it’s possible to have a captive medical departments - with offices located 35 miles offshore - but I’d sure give it the good old Boy Scout try.
“Hides It on Website”
You mean a website than can be seen by anyone in the world?
That some durn good hidin’ thar!
Big German protests pressure Merkel before CDU meet
BERLIN (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of people marched in cities across Germany on Saturday to protest against government policies and social inequality, a day before a key meeting of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU).
German union umbrella group DGB, which organized the demonstrations, said nearly 100,000 people had marched in Stuttgart, Dortmund, Nuremberg and Erfurt, voicing their displeasure with Merkel’s coalition for offloading the costs of the financial crisis.
“We don’t want a republic in which powerful interest groups decide the guidelines of politics with their money, their power and their influence,” Berthold Huber, head of IG Metall, Germany’s largest trade union, told demonstrators in Stuttgart.
He demanded higher wages and the introduction of a mandatory minimum wage to give workers a share in Germany’s economic upswing, which is outpacing those of its European partners.
..We don’t want a republic in which powerful interest groups decide the guidelines of politics with their money, their power and their influence,..
Could the leader of a massive Union, capable of getting 100,000 people to demonstrate at the drop of a hat be any more of a hypocrite?
Only if those 100,000 people aren’t average blue collar citizens.
Here in Idaho there’s a plum job going begging.
http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/11/13/1417306/wanted-indian-reservation-liquor.html
What could be more of a “sure thing” than selling liquor to the Indians?
What’s the catch?
You can only get animal pelts in payment.
No catch. But you would have to run a “contract” liquor store for the ISLD in the small town of Worley next to lake Coeur d’Alene.
The “Idaho State Liquor Dispensary” runs monopoly state liquor stores here in Idaho. But in small towns even the state realizes it’s a waste of taxpayer dollars to erect and staff a state store staffed with civil servants. So they let mom-and-pop general stores sell liquor as a “contract” store.
Whoever gets this contract will have the only liquor store for about 30 miles in any direction in prime tourist country. There’s a huge Indian gambling casino right outside Worley - biggest in Idaho IIUC.
“The United States will do its part to restore strong growth, reduce economic imbalances and calm markets. “A strong recovery that creates jobs, income and spending is the most important contribution that the United States can make to the global recovery.”
G-20 ~ B.Obama
I thought those days were over…still promoting the consumer based economy.
It’s all we’ve got. Well that, and casino high finance markets.
Not much in-between.
As usual in the banking business, it looks like the high-level crooks are gonna get away with their systemic crime operation once again.
Banks escaping big foreclosure class actions
By Dan Levine
SAN FRANCISCO | Fri Nov 12, 2010 7:19am EST
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Lenders snarled in the legal thicket over shoddy U.S. foreclosure procedures have so far avoided national class action lawsuits from homeowners, largely because borrowers cannot demonstrate economic harm, according to plaintiff lawyers.
Several large plaintiff firms circled around banks when reports of problems with foreclosure affidavits snowballed in late September.
But as servicers like Bank of America Corp, Ally Financial and JPMorgan Chase attempt to resolve a 50-state probe into their practices — and other legal challenges — big class action lawyers have taken a pass on diving into the mess.
“We looked at this up one side, down the other,” Joseph Cotchett, of Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, said on Wednesday.
Ultimately, the firm decided it would not file suit over the affidavits, Cotchett said, because most borrowers are actually behind on their payments.
That makes it too difficult to make a claim for serious damages, he said. “It’s about as basic as that,” Cotchett said.
…
‘Lenders…have so far avoided national class action lawsuits from homeowners, largely because borrowers cannot demonstrate economic harm, according to plaintiff lawyers. Ultimately, the firm decided it would not file suit over the affidavits, Cotchett said, because most borrowers are actually behind on their payments.’
Getting away with systemic crimes? I beg to differ, I’m as critical of banks as anyone, but if the ambulance chasers don’t see an angle, there ain’t one.
‘reports of problems with foreclosure affidavits snowballed’
That’s about all it was; a media created non-event.
I beg to differ on the “non-event”. It’s created a lot of “do-over” fever in the foreclosure process as they were halted or reversed.
I had my contract canceled by Freddie-Mac because a bank-chasing lawyer filed a recovery suit. I know of one other house that was taken back and the owner removed 3 days after closing. This was a financed buyer and the paperwork hadn’t been finalized before they pulled the plug.
So, there have been some repercussions. The event is a stalling operation in foreclosures, whether the facts are real or imagined.
As you point out, there are some real effects with respect to gumming up the works in the foreclosure process. However, as I have pointed out a few times already, the robo-signer scandal is only slowing down the back end of the foreclosure pipeline (the proverbial rectum) without slowing down the front end (the proverbial mouth). I imagine the digestive system is getting pretty backed up, as so far as I am aware, there has been no commensurate slowdown in the rate of defaults to accompany the latest foreclosure moratoriums. In the mid run, all these homes going into default will eventually come back on the market as used home inventory.
The real issue of foreclosuregate isn’t people who’ve paid their mortgages getting kicked out anyway- those cases, while revealing of the banks’ lax paperwork control, were exceptions more than the rule. Nor is it the issue of people somehow getting free houses because the banks had no right to foreclose on them, despite their not paying their mortgages. And those are the issues the class-action lawyers are seeing little profit in, as I understand the article.
The real, and still unresolved, issues are:
Who owns the mortgages, where are the notes, and where’s the chain of title that proves that?
Are the securities based on these mortgages legitimate?
Who was responsible and aware of the policy for the signing of false affidavits?
That’s where the interesting lawsuits are going to be, as I see it. The idea that undeserving people were going to get their houses for free was just how the MSM framed the issue. There are much larger and more serious issues still to be answered.
Forgot one: Was MERS a system devised to avoid following the law?
I find it a little hard to believe that MERs is actually noncompliant with the state property laws, but it is certainly possible. I just think the system would have asked for some sort of official sign off by the enforcement people in each state. Maybe they didn’t. Or, more likely, maybe they didn’t comply even with the procedures that were determined to be OK by state enforcement officials. This opera is still in the first act. Early in the first act.
“Early in the first act.”
Thanks for weighing in, Polly. The HBB has definitely skewed my perspective; I am constantly amazed by the number of reasonable people who have not even heard about robo-signers or Burger King boys just yet. Case in point: My sister (an attorney) visited us this weekend; she was quite appalled by Taibbi’s latest Rolling Stone article, which I shared with her.
Footnote: My sister campaigned for Obama in 2008. She is deeply disillusioned at this point.
..largely because borrowers cannot demonstrate economic harm, according to plaintiff lawyers…
score one for me.. Musta been about a week ago..
That’s exactly what I proposed as the hypothetical reason a high court might set a precedent, and all of these robo-suits suddenly become moot..
The FB has to be damaged, or suffered a loss of some kind, or there is no basis for a lawsuit.
John Wasik
Bleak fall of the $100 billion mortgage bubble
Oct 29, 2010 13:05 EDT
We’re entering the “Bleak House” period of the mortgage bubble. The action has shifted to the courts. Worse, it will drag on for years and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
As with Dickens’ mid-19th century tale of the English legal system, lawyers become enriched and families and communities get shattered one court file at a time.
So, what will the courts discover in our mortgage mayhem? That thousands of documents were ill prepared and possibly fudged because Wall Street couldn’t wait to get their hands on them for securitization. It was all about the bond market, stupid. Mortgages literally became back-of-the-envelope ways to get rich.
How much will this cost investors, banks and middlemen? I’ve seen estimates of $100 billion, although it certainly will be more if it swiftly envelopes mortgage and title insurers like Ambac, Assured Guaranty, MBIA and others; banks like Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, et al; and mortgage servicers and ratings agencies like S&P, Moody’s.
To see what’s going on, I visited the nation’s largest unified court system in Chicago’s Cook County. To say that the chancery court, where foreclosures are heard and decided, here is swamped, as it is in other cities, is like saying the Pacific Ocean has a few drops of water.
As two lawyers argued over a lawnmower and surge protector, an exasperated judge reminded them that he alone had 7,000 cases in his docket. Cook County may see its backlog of foreclosures grow to more than 50,000 this year. I can’t imagine what Miami, Phoenix or Las Vegas courts look like.
Frequently, those who are losing their homes in foreclosure come in without representation and get burned. A woman who had lost her job as a psychologist’s administrator went before a Chicago judge without a lawyer to tell him she was attempting a short sale for less than the mortgaged value of the property. She was granted a continuance. The judge wished her “good luck.”
But what about those who don’t show up in court? Are the banks waiting for them and the unrepresented millions to slip through foreclosures that may not withstand full legal scrutiny?
There is some counseling from homeowners and paltry legal aid in Cook County — the judge hands the homeowners a piece of paper and a referral, but the lawyers don’t actually defend clients, who typically can’t afford counsel. The banks know this, of course, since countless homeowners don’t even show up and get ruled against in default judgments. Some homeowners were foreclosed upon even when they were on top of their payments.
…
If deadbeat homeowners can get foreclosed, shouldn’t investors be able to “foreclose” on deadbeat banks? Certainly too-big-to-fail banks have the collateral to back their defaulted payment streams? I am having trouble understanding why too-big-to-fail entities should get different treatment in the eyes of the law. Is it pretty much just because they are soo very big? Recall that dinosaurs were really, really big — but then they went extinct!
ANALYSIS-Mortgage investors will have trouble fighting banks
Oct 21, 2010 08:54 EDT
By Al Yoon and Matthew Goldstein
NEW YORK, Oct 20 (Reuters) – Houston attorney Kathy Patrick represents a group of powerful mortgage investors trying to wring money out of Bank of America, but many legal experts say her chances of winning are slim.
For the second time in two months, the Gibbs & Bruns partner has sent a letter to a big bank trying to get some measure of financial relief for her clients who hold $16.5 billion of home loans packaged into bonds.
The investors say that many of the loans they bought should never have been sold to them in the first place, because they fell short of bondholders’ stated standards. They want the bank to buy back bad loans.
The bank said it is not responsible for the poor performance of the loans, and outside experts agree.
“Investors are taking a low percentage pool shot,” said Janet Tavakoli, a Chicago-based derivatives consultant who has been a long-time critic of the way banks packaged and sold mortgage bonds during the housing boom. “This will be a long drawn out process and (Patrick) could easily get stonewalled.”
If so, then bank stock investors are panicking needlessly. Bank of America’s shares have fallen nearly five percent over the last two days, on fears that Patrick and her clients, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and BlackRock Inc, will force the lender to buy back billions of dollars of bad mortgages.
Patrick sent her first letter in September to officials at the Bank of New York Mellon Corp, the trustee for the investment vehicles that issued the mortgage bonds, and it failed to get much attention.
Bank of New York took no formal action and Wall Street investors hardly seemed to notice.
On Oct. 19, Patrick sent her second letter, this time to Bank of America. The letter puts the bank on notice, and if investors do not get what they want, they can declare an event of default, a prelude to suing the bank.
…
This is like the Iran-Iraq War - I hope they both lose. These stupid, greedy “investors” helped inflate the bubble and drive up costs for homebuyers. And BoA was one of the worst when it came to systemic fraud.
On a more serious note, the Statesman reports on how renters are dealing with foreclosures. Some lenders are even being smart and leasing the REO month-to-month with the existing renters here.
Homes that were purchased as investment or rental properties from 2004 to 2006, before home values dropped, make up a large percentage of distressed properties now as the owners have come to owe more on them than the properties are worth, experts say.
I long suspected it was the out-of-town speculators who were a major source of the troubles.
Some local lenders are leaving properties on the market and allowing occupants month-to-month leases, she said. A few are removing homes from the market and signing one-year leases with renters while they wait for home prices to improve. She estimates there are about 90 homes in Idaho in this position.
http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/11/14/1418037/valley-renters-caught-up-in-foreclosures.html
Realty Q&A
Oct. 29, 2010, 12:01 a.m. EDT
When it’s smart to walk away from a mortgage
You’ll lose your credit rating, but sometimes it makes sense to mail in the keys
By Lew Sichelman
Realty Q&A is a weekly column in which Lew Sichelman, a nationally syndicated columnist who has been covering the housing market for more than 35 years, responds to readers’ questions on real estate.
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Question: I could use some guidance. I bought a condo in Orange Beach, Ala., for $500,000. The developer has since gone bankrupt and is auctioning off all the remaining units for $200,000. I want out.
Stellar credit rating, resources to pay it off, still working. What should I do? What programs are there to refinance? My current rate is 6.25%. Should I “strategically foreclose,” short-sale, what?
Answer: You are about to lose your shirt, and your credit rating.
…
This kind of thing makes me mad. There are plenty of folks who simply cannot afford (and never could) their home. Many lied on apps etc, but here we have a guy who knowingly took his chances and lost. Now he wants to dump his loss on you and I rather than taking his own lumps.
This idiot would be rubbing his profit in our faces as renters if prices had continued to go up exponentially.
People that act this way are no different than banksters, IMO.
It’s the classic game of musical chairs. Play until you win or screw someone else so as not to lose. Changing horses in mid-stream is the name of the game for most individuals.
I just wish is were the Banksters getting the shaft, but they are bailed out with our money while living high on the hog.
If it is a recourse mortgage, he should have to pay anyway, but only the difference between the sale of the foreclosure and his debt. Sounds like he would be ineligible to get out of the debt through bankruptcy.
If it is a non-recourse mortgage then his deal was to pay the debt *or* give up the collateral at his sole determination. That is what non-recourse means. If you don’t like it, don’t be a lender in a non-recourse state.
Article published November 14, 2010
Experts say Fed action not likely to push mortgage rates even lower
By KENNETH R. HARNEY
WASHINGTON POST WRITERS
WASHINGTON — When the Federal Reserve recently rolled out its plan to pump $600 billion into the credit markets, many homeowners and buyers might have figured that with mortgage interest rates likely to fall again, they should postpone the loan application they were contemplating.
But haven’t 30-year fixed mortgage rates been hovering around 4.25 percent, the lowest on record since April 1951? Aren’t 15-year mortgages just above 3.6 percent? How much lower could rates go?
Housing economists generally don’t anticipate significant direct impact on mortgage rates from the Fed’s move.
David Crowe, chief economist of the National Association of Home Builders, said the likely effect would be restraining increases that otherwise would occur over the coming year as the economy warms up. Amy Crews Cutts, deputy chief economist for mortgage giant Freddie Mac, said the $600 billion might only “tweak” rates downward.
Which raises the question: Does it make more sense to wait for a rate bottom that might not materialize, or to lock in rates now?
…
Which raises the question: Does it make more sense to wait for a rate bottom that might not materialize, or to lock in rates now?
Which is what this whole “housing bubble” was all about to begin with.
When you can buy a house at 1% interest, or zero percent, negative amortization, or a “pick-a-payment”, then the PRICE of the house is irrelevant. This “lower cost” regime is what led to the mania and the massive increase in housing prices.
What does this mean going forward? Locking in a low rate means nothing if you plan on selling your house 5 years from now, which used to be the typical turn-over rate. If you buy at current prices and interest rates go UP, guess what the price will need to do?
That’s right. Prices will need to adjust DOWN, to compensate for a higher monthly payment.
Additionally, the deficit commission is proposing eliminating the mortgage deduction. that will put downward pressure on housing as the real cost will increase.
So, locking in a low rate is great, so long as you don’t anticipate the need to sell anytime in the near future. A change in plans could cost you a whole bunch of money. It may be better to rent.
What doesn’t seem to get any play in these discussions is the possibility that the Fed cannot ultimately succeed at keeping the Great Credit Bubble aloft. If those promises to pay in the future depend on scarcer monies, the current interest “rates” might be crushing.
Felix Salmon
Shedding no tiers
Eat your heart out Matt Taibbi
Nov 12, 2010 15:54 EST
This is without a doubt the funniest video ever made about the Fed, quantitative easing, and Ben Bernanke. Make sure you’re in a place where you can laugh freely, and press play:
LOL
perfect. idiocracy is upon us.
I have a dumb question that’s been bothering me this morning…..
China owns a whole lot of US government bonds. Right now they pay squat for interest.
The DaGong credit agency, which presumably responds to orders from the Chinese government, recently lowered its rating of US bonds.
Normally, lower ratings means purchasers of new bonds will demand higher interest rates. If the Chinese demand higher interest rates, however, won’t this devalue the pile of existing bonds they hold?
Could we wage economic war against China by raising the interest rates paid on bonds and thus crush the value of the bonds China already owns? Perhaps we could buy back our bonds at a steep discount?
“Could we wage economic war against China by raising the interest rates paid on bonds and thus crush the value of the bonds China already owns?”
My guess is that this program would be politically unpopular, as it would cause plenty of collateral damage here at home.
here’s the thing..
We ourselves own about 4 or 5 times as much US debt as all foreigners combined do. (IIRC, but can’t find recent stats.)
China owns around $1T of the $13T total.
so, who’s gonna be hurt more?
Exactly my point!
‘Ireland’s young flee abroad as economic meltdown looms…Mark Ward, president of Tallaght’s student union, says that 1,250 students are leaving Ireland every month. Ward said: “The government’s to blame for bankrolling the banks who were lending to their property developer friends. They all thought the party would never end.”
“Greystones is a wealthy Wicklow seaside town whose most famous resident is Sean FitzPatrick, the former chairman of nationalised Anglo Irish Bank. Emer O’Brien, an interior designer, and her architect husband Killian are struggling to repay their mortgage. “It is awful, a bit like waiting for a bomb to explode but simply not knowing when,” she said. “I don’t think anybody has any faith in any of the politicians to fix this problem…Of course, a lot of people would be heading across the Irish Sea or the Atlantic if only they could sell their houses, but we can’t do that either. So basically we’re stuck on the Titanic as it goes down.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/14/ireland-economic-crisis
With just a slight change of wording, look what you can get:
“Of course, a lot of
peopleCalifornia home owners would be heading across theIrish SeaCalifornia desert or theAtlanticPacific if only they could sell their houses, butwethey can’t do that either. So basicallywethey’re stuck on the Titanic as it goes down.”“Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place
(Such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
They’re living it up at the Hotel California
What a nice surprise
(What a nice surprise)
Bring your alibis”
Mirrors on the ceiling, the pink champagne on ice
And she said, “We are all just prisoners here of our own device”
And in the master’s chambers they gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives but they just can’t kill the beast
Last thing I remember I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
“Relax,” said the night man, “We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like but you can never leave”
Plenty of people left California.
They intentially and gleefully sold to the greater fools (who now cannot leave California some 30 years after the Eagles’ hit), then moved elsewhere and ruined local economies for lifelong residents in Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, Utah and Colorado.
New Yorkers and folks from D.C. did the same to people in the Carolinas and Georgia.
If you’re smart enough to get out early, more power to you. But to move elsewhere and ruin local economies is beyond the pale.
How dare they move someplace and be wealthy.
Wealth is great.
Creating yuppie wealth enclaves, complete with infrastructure paid for by less-wealthy locals, isn’t. It’s malinvestment.
Those who spend their lives working to create wealth locally see their efforts destroyed by those moving in from outside, whose economics often are wholly different.
Worse still are those who move in, grab the best land on the cheap, then form a cartel of sorts to keep locals out (through ordinances, development laws, environmental regulation).
It’s no wonder why so many locals resent outsiders.
Co, I could understand if you were angry at Californians who did this at the height of the bubble. But the people who are leaving California now have no equity. They’re folks like jetson boy, who is sick of waiting for prices to come down in the Bay Area. Or people who can’t find jobs. I think that your anger is misplaced. Not to mention paranoid - you actually have evidence of a bunch of ex-Californians who moved en masse to your community and took it over?
REhobbyist,
I think the anger is at the equity locusts, the flippers who did damage in California, and when that dried up, moved to other states to do more damage.
I don’t think there’s necessarily anger for those that have always been priced out of California housing leaving for other areas or for those leaving to look for work though the job market is still tough in most places.
Of course, imposing growth where it isn’t wanted poses lots of different challenges and may elicit a range of reactions, some quite hostile.
During the bubble, a lot of places were transformed in ways that weren’t welcomed and weren’t necessary. I would be surprised if there weren’t more than a little resentment at those changes.
So true, I left but the bad dream has not left me.
Low-Skilled Workers Struggle For Jobs In Las Vegas
by Adam Burke
November 14, 2010
Weekend Edition Sunday
Across the United States, we’re hearing about green shoots of economic recovery, but Las Vegas is still quite literally a desert. At 15 percent, the city’s unemployment rate is one of the nation’s highest.
A week ago, Lorraine Valdez lost her job at a printing company. For her, it was the latest in a series of employment woes that have hit very close to home.
Reeling off a list, Valdez says, “My sister just got laid off. My daughter. My son. My boyfriend. Myself. There’s like 10 people, just immediate family, that are looking for work.”
…
My (imaginary) little 12 room motel with the palm trees.. cactus garden and pool, somewhere on the outskirts of Vegas, is getting cheaper by the day.
The Shady Palms… nah.. probably taken already.
The Silver Palms.. Pets welcomed.
Reeling off a list, Valdez says, “My sister just got laid off. My daughter. My son. My boyfriend. Myself. There’s like 10 people, just immediate family, that are looking for work.”
Doesn’t matter if it rains or freezes as long as they have their plastic Jesus.
Silver…
http://www.youtube.com/user/SGTbull07#p/u/12/KGpi1gxtAOY
I never had much interest in demonizing Greenspan but the lying thug was on Meet The Press. Not only is he master of the obvious, have no doubt in your mind, he is a housing inflationista.
If you want to get pissed, watch it.
OK, you fix the deficit!
This is a great exercise in the NYT today. It makes cutting look do-able.
Enjoy!
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html
REhoppyist …thanks for this post it’s a great outline of the proposals .
When I add up the billions in cuts proposed and some of the programs it
would affect it makes the Tarp bail out of 700 billion and all the other unseen bailouts that actually add up to trillions to the banking Industry even more unacceptable .How in the hell did Congress even pass something like the Tarp Bill ,especially without any requirements attached to it for most part and no real proof it was the only alternative ? It just boggles the mind .
I really don’t like some of the cuts in benefits to people that serve our Country and it’s not like the income of the Armed service people are that high to begin with .
Did you do some clicking? It’s fun to decide what your priorities are to reduce the deficit. I had no trouble - matter of fact, I created a surplus!
Right REhobbyist …….everybody will have a different opinion on where the cuts should fall .
* The Wall Street Journal
* REVIEW & OUTLOOK
* NOVEMBER 15, 2010
Fan and Fred’s New Boss
Another ‘affordable housing’ advocate.
On Friday President Obama announced his intention to nominate Joseph A. Smith, Jr. to serve as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Given that these two toxic mortgage giants have consumed $151 billion—and counting—of taxpayer funds, it may seem strange that the President is only now selecting their overseer a full 15 months after the job became vacant. But in our era of super-sized government programs, perhaps $151 billion isn’t enough to hold Washington’s attention any more. That’s not even a year of ObamaCare, once the plan is fully imposed on the U.S. economy.
But let’s stick to one fiscal disaster at a time. Given previous comments by Mr. Smith, taxpayers may soon be longing for the return of acting FHFA director Edward DeMarco. The Journal reports that, at a 2007 Senate hearing, Mr. Smith blamed predatory lenders and a lack of federal regulation for the housing crisis. Blaming the bankers and calling for more bureaucracy will earn Mr. Smith plenty of new Beltway friends, but if he remains unaware of the myriad steps regulators took to inflate the credit bubble and misallocate capital into housing, then no one should expect him to drive reform.
Mr. Smith has also suggested that Fannie, Freddie and government agencies such as the Federal Housing Administration “devote their primary attention to affordable housing for all Americans, particularly the subprime market.” Having witnessed the housing crisis, could Mr. Smith really be suggesting that Fan and Fred dive deeper into subprime lending?
…
Troubled California begins $14bn bond sale
By Nicole Bullock in New York
Published: November 14 2010 19:43 | Last updated: November 14 2010 21:10
California on Monday kicks off about $14bn of debt sales, hoping that investor desire for yield will outweigh concerns over the US state’s fiscal trouble in a weak market for local government debt.
The Golden State is the starkest example of the financial difficulty facing US local governments. Worries are mounting of a possible rise in defaults or a reassessment of risk in the $2,800bn municipal bond market, hitherto perceived as a safe place to invest.
California’s plans to sell its debt come just days after Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state governor whose term ends in January, called a special session of the legislature to address a state deficit projected to be more than $25bn over the next 18 months.
…
“…investor desire for yield will outweigh concerns over the US state’s fiscal trouble in a weak market for local government debt.”
Do the FT writers believe there are greater fools out there who cannot connect the dots between QE2 and artificially low bond yields?
I guess it was P.T. Barnum who said, ‘There is a sucker born every minute.’
Marilyn Cohen, founder of Envision Capital Management, a fixed-income portfolio manager, urged caution for clients who already own a lot of bonds from California, the largest issuer of state debt. “Some of us had the hope that [lawmakers] would really deal with the problems and they didn’t,” she said.
——–
“Some of us had the hope” that Calif politicians would really deal with it..?
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Comedian-Wrestler Couple Keep Florida Home for Free in a Foreclosure Limbo
By David McLaughlin - Nov 14, 2010 9:00 PM PT
Comedian Lynn Moore and her husband, retired pro wrestler “Cougar Jay,” were on the verge of losing their St. Augustine, Florida, home when PNC Financial Services Group Inc.’s foreclosure hearing was canceled last month.
Moore, who runs a comedy club under the stage name Jackie Knight, and her husband, whose real name is Dion, last made a mortgage payment in mid-2009. She said they need to stay put until at least January, when Dion, 50, expects to receive a federal education grant they can use to rent a new home.
They are among the hundreds of thousands of Americans who dwell in the limbo between homeownership and eviction as banks and courts sort through foreclosure cases. Questions over the legitimacy of mortgage documents used by banks such as Wells Fargo & Co. and Bank of America Corp. have triggered litigation nationwide. As a result, foreclosure proceedings have been delayed, buying time for homeowners in default.
“If they tell me I have to be out before then, I’m going to be in big trouble,” said Moore, 63, who has faced foreclosure since March and tried to negotiate lower payments. “I’m going to have no money and no place to go.”
The delays mean people like Moore, who inherited her mother’s house and the $2,200-a-month mortgage payments that came with it, are lingering in their homes for free and longer than would be possible otherwise, in some cases for years, as lawsuits drag on.
‘Slow-Moving Animal’
“It’s a slow-moving animal and, in the case of foreclosures, there are a multiple of defenses to a foreclosure action,” said Chae duPont, a Miami attorney who defends homeowners and hosts a radio show about mortgage law.
…
Questions could slow foreclosures in Florida
At Orlando courthouse
Barbara Leach, right, an attorney for a lender, waits for foreclosure hearings to start on the 11th floor of the Orange County Courthouse in downtown Orlando. (RED HUBER/ORLANDO SENTINEL / November 15, 2010)
By Anthony Colarossi, Orlando Sentinel
November 15, 2010
By the end of June, a towering backlog of foreclosure filings piled up on the court system in Orange and Osceola counties — the legal paperwork equivalent of a tidal wave.
Only three of Florida’s 20 judicial circuits had larger backlogs than Orange-Osceola’s 9th Judicial Circuit, according to state court data. Nearly 40,000 foreclosure filings log-jammed the system in those two Central Florida counties. The situation didn’t make anyone happy — from mortgage lenders to distressed and uncertain homeowners to the few judges assigned to hear the cases.
But then an infusion of state funding created the so-called “rocket docket,” a mechanism for retired, senior judges to get paid to chip away at the backlog. The mission was clear: Move the cases through the system quickly so the residential properties could be resold to borrowers capable of making their mortgage payments.
The program appeared to work here. The 9th Judicial Circuit reduced its backlog by 15 percent during the first quarter the special funding was made available, the numbers show. That reduction is in line with the decrease seen statewide between early July and Sept. 30. And it put this circuit on pace to meet the state court system’s “aspirational goal” of reducing the foreclosure backlog across Florida by 62 percent within a year.
However, several recent issues have further exacerbated the foreclosure crisis statewide and here in Central Florida — problems that are likely to slow the pace in disposing of these cases.
First, the state Attorney General’s Office started investigating a number of large law firms representing lenders and suspected of “fabricating and/or presenting false and misleading documents in foreclosure cases.” The AG’s office also started looking at individuals hired to notify homeowners when their cases go to court. Meanwhile, major lenders, like Bank of America, temporarily suspended foreclosures last month so they could review their documents.
Suddenly, the term “robo-signing” — the practice of signing foreclosure documents en masse without careful review — became part of the recession-era lexicon, a new vocabulary word to describe the latest wrinkle in Florida’s real-estate crisis.
The New York Times reported on the volume of foreclosure cases shooting through Florida’s “rocket docket,” citing, in particular, the 1,319 cases handled in July by senior judges in the 9th Circuit.
The question now put to the court system is a frightening one: Did the combination of senior judges charged with moving foreclosure cases rapidly along and the questionable paperwork concerns unfairly or improperly put people out of their homes?
“The paperwork issues have really thrown a monkey wrench into the whole plan,” said Craig Waters, a Florida Supreme Court spokesman, who commented on the numbers and concerns of the Office of State Courts Administrator. “We need a clearer idea of what is going on with this issue…”
…
Bursting of housing bubble still claiming victims
November 15, 2010
Nothing has been easy about digging out of the rubble left behind in the Great Recession. Two years after we first started to hear about how the nation’s biggest banks had gambled on huge risks involving subprime mortgages, the banks deemed too big to fail have done very nicely, thanks largely to the much-vilified but largely successful TARP.
The nation’s millions of beleaguered homeowners haven’t been so lucky. It’s not just risky borrowers who defaulted on those iffy “subprime” mortgages, but millions of Americans who through no fault of their own have lost their jobs and the means to pay on their houses.
In North Carolina, we’re on pace by the end of this month for a record number of foreclosures, breaking last year’s record. The N.C. Justice Center, a nonprofit advocacy group, estimates North Carolina will see 70,476 foreclosure filings, erasing the previous record of 63,286 homes reclaimed by lenders. In Western North Carolina, we’ve already had 3,918 foreclosure filings this year and could reach 5,244 by the end of the month, according projections.
Buncombe County ranked 14th in the state with 1,108 foreclosure filings this year and a projected total of 1,477, which would top last year’s dismal count of 1,168.
…
Lenders Face Lawmaker Wrath Over Foreclosures
By Dave Clarke and Joe Rauch
November 14, 2010
WASHINGTON/CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (Reuters) - Banks under fire over their foreclosure practices face twin hearings in Congress this week, at which they will come under renewed pressure to find ways to keep borrowers in their homes.
The hearings on Tuesday and Thursday will include the first appearances by executives from major lenders like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase since the furor over sloppy foreclosure paperwork erupted in September.
Banks are accused of having used “robo-signers” to sign hundreds of foreclosure documents a day, a fiasco that has reignited public anger with banks that received billions of dollars in taxpayer aid during the financial crisis.
Lenders will be pressed on whether the paperwork problems are further evidence that modifying loans is a better alternative to eviction.
“Foreclosure should be the last option and we need to examine barriers to mortgage modifications,” Democratic Senator Tim Johnson, expected to lead the Banking Committee next year, said in an emailed response to Reuters.
Other witnesses at Tuesday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing include Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, who is leading a 50-state probe of foreclosure practices.
Miller’s testimony will be closely watched. A settlement with lenders could include fines or commitments to loan modifications.
Bank of America and JPMorgan were among banks that temporarily suspended foreclosures pending internal reviews of their practices, but have since begun to resume sales of foreclosed properties.
…
Lenders face more resistance from borrowers in foreclosures
By Katy Stech
Monday, November 15, 2010
Three years into the foreclosure crisis, determination is brewing among a small but growing number of homeowners who have decided to fight for their properties.
With a newfound consciousness of their rights as property owners, more Charleston area homeowners are retaining lawyers to represent them in procedural foreclosure hearings. They’re also uncovering new ways to identify loopholes in the notoriously disorganized mortgage industry, and they’re taking those grievances before judges who might be inclined to stall or even dismiss a questionable case.
Debbie Kidd (right) director of the Homeownership Project, works with Joe Parker at the Homeowner Resource Center in North Charleston. Kidd helps clients to assemble their financial paper work and budget so that the center can represent them while working with lenders to prevent a foreclosure on their house.
Meanwhile, the legal community, which has focused largely on counseling lenders through the foreclosure process, is slowly learning how to take on these cases on behalf of homeowners. They’re getting help and encouragement from nonprofit groups that insist the extra effort can at least stall a worthwhile case, buying precious time that could allow an out-of-work homeowner to find a job and get caught up on their payments.
“No doesn’t mean ‘no’ to a lender. It means ‘no’ for today,” said Mary Regan of Family Services Inc., a North Charleston nonprofit that offers free foreclosure counseling. “We go back over and over and over again.”
…