The Housing Bubble

Eurozone to Greece: “You need to meet these preconditions to get your next bailout installment.”

Greece to Eurozone: “We can’t meet the preconditions; what are you going to do about it?”

Eurozone Set To Struggle Over Greek Bailout
by The Associated Press
LUXEMBOURG October 3, 2011, 05:31 am ET

LUXEMBOURG (AP) — Finance ministers from the 17 euro countries will grapple over Greece’s ever-worsening debt crisis, a day after Athens revealed its deficit will be higher than previously promised.

Meeting the budget targets is a precondition for getting the next euro8 billion ($10.8 billion) installment of the country’s first, euro110 billion bailout.

Although the ministers have already said they won’t decide on the next payment at their meeting Monday in Luxembourg, Athens’ pre-emptive announcement that the targets will be missed is set to put the issue high up on the agenda.

The announcement will also force the eurozone to decide whether they will go ahead with a second euro109 billion rescue package tentatively agreed in July. Germany, among others, has been pushing to reopen that deal.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information.
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No Rise in Home Prices Until 2020: Bankers

Published: Saturday, 1 Oct 2011 | 8:49 AM ET
By: Karina Frayter, CNBC Markets Producer

Home prices are unlikely to recover before 2020 and mortgage defaults will persist for years, says a survey of bank risk managers out Friday.

The survey conducted by the Professional Risk Managers’ International Association for FICO, found that 49 percent of respondents do not expect housing prices to rise back to 2007 levels for another nine years. Only 21 percent of respondents said they would.

In addition, 73 percent of surveyed bankers say they expect mortgage defaults to remain elevated for at least another five years. And 46 percent believe mortgage delinquencies will increase over the next six months.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/44735283/No_Rise_in_Home_Prices_Until_2020_Bankers - 149k -

MORTGAGE RATES CONTINUING FREE FALL
HOUSING MARKET IS REAPING BENEFITS
Published on March 6, 1993, Page E10, Article 1 of 1 found, 352 words.

** It’s a simple recipe: Add lower mortgage rates to a big supply of unsold houses, and the housing market starts heating up.

Lenders in the Sacramento area said Friday that the recent decline in fixed-rate mortgages to a 20-year low is drawing in more potential home buyers. Particularly welcome are first-time buyers who have been priced out of the market but are now coming back in.

“Refinancings are reaching the feeding-frenzy level again,”…

House Is Gone but Debt Lives On

By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG
OCTOBER 1, 2011

LEHIGH ACRES, Fla.—Joseph Reilly lost his vacation home here last year when he was out of work and stopped paying his mortgage. The bank took the house and sold it. Mr. Reilly thought that was the end of it.

In June, he learned otherwise. A phone call informed him of a court judgment against him for $192,576.71.

It turned out that at a foreclosure sale, his former house fetched less than a quarter of what Mr. Reilly owed on it. His bank sued him for the rest.

The result was a foreclosure hangover that homeowners rarely anticipate but increasingly face: a “deficiency judgment.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904060604576572532029526792.html - 211k -

Bloomberg
U.K. House Prices Fall as Hometrack Forecasts Faster Declines
October 02, 2011, 8:30 PM EDT
By Jennifer Ryan

Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) — U.K. house prices fell for a fifth month in September and the pace of the decline may accelerate in the coming months, property researcher Hometrack Ltd. said.

The average cost of a home slipped 0.1 percent from August and was down 3.5 percent from a year earlier, the London-based company said today in an e-mailed report on its monthly survey of real-estate agents. Prices based on Hometrack’s measure have fallen in every month but one since July 2010.

Nationwide Building Society said last week that downside risks to Britain’s property market have increased as Europe’s debt crisis undermines confidence and global growth prospects weaken. Almost a third of economists in a Bloomberg News survey say the Bank of England will restart its asset-purchase program this week to support a faltering recovery.

“Events in the euro zone, together with pressures on the domestic economy and household incomes are clearly taking their toll on consumer confidence,” Richard Donnell, Hometrack’s director of research, said in a statement. “We expect demand to continue to slip back” and see “a likely acceleration in the level of monthly price falls over the final quarter.”

New property listings rose 22 percent in the nine months through September, double the pace of demand growth, Hometrack said. On the month, new buyers registering with real-estate agents fell 2.6 percent from August.
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Falling demand marks change for house prices

A shift in the balance between supply and demand is beginning to emerge in the housing market with September seeing the number of buyers fall for the second month in a row.

Sold sign to go with story on outlook for house prices

3 October, 2011

This is in contrast to the first half of the year when demand had been steadily rising, according to the latest house price survey from Hometrack.

On the supply side, the number of new properties coming to the market in the 9 months up until

September, grew by 22%, compared to an 11% increase in demand.
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Occupy Wall Street shows no signs of stopping
Verena Dobnik, Associated Press
Monday, October 3, 2011

John Minchillo / AP

Occupy Wall Street protesters carry on in Zuccotti Park, the New York plaza where hundreds have gathered since last month. Similar protests have taken place across the nation.

New York –

Protesters who have been camping out in Manhattan’s Financial District say their movement has grown and become more organized, and they have no intention of stopping following another weekend of mass arrests.

The Occupy Wall Street demonstration started out small last month, with less than a dozen college students spending days and nights in Zuccotti Park, a private plaza off Broadway. It has grown sizably, however, both in New York City and elsewhere as people in other communities across the country display their solidarity in similar protests.

The event has drawn demonstrators of diverse ages and occupations who are speaking out against corporate greed, social inequality, global climate change and other concerns.

Kira Moyer-Sims, 19, of Portland, Ore., said protesters have become more disciplined since the rally began. “We have a protocol for most things,” she said, including what to do when people are arrested in terms of getting legal help.

On Sunday, a group of New York public school teachers sat in the plaza, including Denise Martinez, 47, a Brooklyn school teacher.

“The bottom line is the feeling that the financial industries here on Wall Street have caused the economic problems, and they’re not contributing their fair share to solving them,” she said of her reasons for camping out Sunday.

Another voice Sunday belonged to Jackie Fellner, 32, a marketing manager from Westchester County.

“We’re not here to take down Wall Street. It’s not poor against rich. It’s about big money dictating which politicians get elected and what programs get funded,” she said.
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OCTOBER 3, 2011, 3:57 A.M. ET

GLOBAL MARKETS: European Stocks Slump; Banks Take A Beating

–European stocks open sharply lower

–Greece in focus after government says it will miss deficit targets

–Banks take a hammering

–Euro lower against dollar, yen

By Michele Maatouk

Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

LONDON (Dow Jones)–European stocks fell sharply Monday, and the euro came under pressure, amid rising concern about the possibility of a Greek default, after the country’s government said Sunday that it will miss its deficit targets this year.

At 0740 GMT, the benchmark Stoxx Europe 600 index was down 2% at 221.76. Frankfurt’s DAX was 3.2% lower at 5327.73, Paris’ CAC-40 index was off 2.4% at 2910.94, and London’s FTSE 100 fell 2% to 5024.43. Bank issues were among the hardest hit, with the Stoxx Europe 600 index for the sector down 2.9% to 129.79.

The Greek cabinet Sunday approved its 2012 draft budget, with cuts of around EUR6.6 billion and gave the green light to plans to cut thousands of public-sector jobs. This came ahead of Monday’s meeting of European finance ministers in Luxembourg to discuss Greece’s progress on reforms.

“We still expect the sixth tranche of the IMF-EU loan to be disbursed in mid October, but the news is bad enough to stir markets in the short run,” said Lloyds Bank Corporate Markets.

The news about Greece heightened fears about the fallout from the euro-zone debt crisis, while doubts over global growth also continued to plague investors, traders said.

There are good reasons to fear the spillovers from the euro-area financial stress, said JPMorgan. “Europe’s sovereign debt crisis threatens regional banking sector stability and building stress on banks is fueling a generalized reduction in global risk appetite,” it said.

“Although the recent loss in global growth momentum has been broad-based, it is the recent sharp weakening in the euro area that stands out. Italy and possibly Spain have joined Portugal and Greece in recession this quarter,” said JPMorgan. It added that a sharp drop in euro-zone area business confidence and in the September PMI composite suggests a region-wide recession is taking hold.
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Asian markets down

A man looks at quotation board at the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) in front of a Japanese securities company. Tokyo shares dropped 2.26 per cent on Monday after Greece said it cannot meet deficit targets this year.

Last Updated: 21 hours 41 minutes ago

Asian markets have fallen amidst concerns Greece will lose out on a multi-billion euro bailout as the country says it will miss its deficit target for the year.

Major Asian bourses dropped significantly by Monday afternoon, with Tokyo and Hong Kong stocks slipping 2.26 and 4.95 per cent as Greece refused to meet its deficit target set for it by the IMF and EU.

“It is far from a given that policymakers will succeed in turning the tide in markets in the final quarter of the year,” ANZ Bank senior economist Sharon Zollner told Dow Jones Newswires.

These quarterly losses are the worst the Asian market has seen since the 2008 financial crisis when a trend of investing safer assets over equities developed from fears of global recession.
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Stock Slump Deepens in Europe and Asia
By DAVID JOLLY AND BETTINA WASSENER
Published: October 3, 2011

PARIS — Stocks started off the final quarter of 2011 on Monday the same way they ended the last one, sinking amid pessimism over Europe’s efforts to contain its sovereign debt problems and fears that a wider economic slowdown could bring a renewed financial crisis.

European markets were down more than 2 percent by mid-morning after Asian stocks closed sharply lower. Standard & Poor’s 500 index futures fell modestly, indicating Wall Street would start Monday on a sour note, as well.

The dollar gained against most other major currencies, as investors moved out of relatively risky assets.

Greece’s acknowledgment over the weekend that it would miss its deficit-reduction targets for this year and next, despite additional cuts in the public payroll, weighed on market sentiment, analysts at the French investment bank Crédit Agricole CIB wrote in a note.

Finance ministers from the 17-nation euro group were to meet Monday night in Luxembourg, but it was unlikely that a decision would be made on whether to release the next tranche of Greece’s bailout package. “Whatever the outcome will be, the confusion and uncertainty will certainly not help calm the market’s volatility,” analysts at Milan-based Mediobanca Securities wrote in another note.

Global equities, tracked by the MSCI world index, are down 14 percent this year, with many major indexes recording their worst quarterly drops over the June-September period since the world’s banks were teetering on the brink in 2008.
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News Analysis
Toil and Trouble Over the Caldron That Is Greece
Angelos Tzortzinis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A street vendor cooked corn as taxi drivers protested Greek austerity measures outside Parliament during their two-day strike last week in Athens.
By STEVEN ERLANGER and STEPHEN CASTLE
Published: October 2, 2011

PARIS — Europe’s long, halting struggle with deficits and debt can seem like the agonies of Macbeth: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time.”

The 17 European Union nations that share the euro don’t have that much time, of course, to convince investors that they have a plan to hold the currency together and prevent a run on the Continent’s banks. Some analysts say they have less than five weeks, until the Group of 20 summit meeting in November; others say a bit longer.

But rapid action comes hard to a union that works in increments, with political agreement required at every step.

In the short term, Greece remains the central problem. Two bailouts have not been enough. Greek public debt continues to mount, and so does the pressure on the government to find more revenue and make more cuts. Europe’s strategy, to the extent it can be discerned, is to put off restructuring Greece’s debt as long as possible and build up enough backing for a bailout fund so that banks with large exposure to the sovereign debt of Greece and other troubled euro-zone countries, like Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain, can survive an all-but-inevitable Greek default.

But the austerity-driven recession in Greece has made its budget deficit even worse than experts predicted, and the country has not kept all its promises to the “troika” — the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank — that is keeping Athens afloat. Experts from the troika left Greece a month ago in unofficial disgust; they returned last week only after getting fresh promises of action.

Athens is again at the brink. Without the next tranche of aid from the troika — 8 billion euros — Greece could immediately default. So the troika is playing hardball, trying to force Athens to make crucial structural changes that lenders think will never happen otherwise.

Still, the consequences of a disorderly default are considered so dire that Athens has cards to play, too. A strike by workers at the national statistics bureau has made it difficult to get up-to-date fiscal data. The government has said it faces default by mid-October without the aid, but “we think they were exaggerating deliberately to put pressure on us,” a senior European official said.
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Breakingviews: No quick fix for banks’ U.S. mortgage liability
9/9/2011 COMMENTS

NEW YORK, Sept 9 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Subprime is the crisis that keeps on giving. Mortgages made to mostly American borrowers with questionable credit histories helped sink well-established financial firms like Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Countrywide some three years ago. They’re now threatening the viability of the survivors, like Merrill and Countrywide’s new owner Bank of America, with their second wind in the courts.

Unpacking the lawsuits can be as confusing as the subprime securities themselves. The legal entanglements not only involve countless plaintiffs, defendants, jurisdictions and prosecutors, but they envelope each link of the modern mortgage-lending chain. The Federal Housing Finance Agency suit filed last week against 17 banks is just the latest in a long line of high-profile cases that have hammered bank stocks.

Herewith, Breakingviews offers a cheat sheet of sorts on four of the biggest cases that investors in the financial industry will need to watch:

1) Foreclosuregate - Attorneys general from the 50 states want mortgage servicers like Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo to pay upward of $20 billion among them for incompetence, or worse, in the banks’ back offices. The case is rooted in accusations that banks may have wrongly foreclosed on homeowners without adequately completing and reviewing pertinent paper work.
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2) The FHFA hunt - The nearly $200 billion of suspect mortgage-backed securities certainly caught investors’ eyes when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s regulator filed its lawsuit against 17 financial institutions. But how much the FHFA actually suffered in losses — and will request in damages — is still unclear. The FHFA says the banks, which include BofA, JPMorgan and RBS, allegedly misrepresented facts about the mortgage bonds they sold to Fannie and Freddie.
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3) An insurer’s wrath - AIG has its sights on BofA. The insurer, whose own collapse in 2008 led to a $180 billion-plus government bailout, claims that it was defrauded in connection with the mortgage bonds it bought.
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AIG is also considering litigation against other financial institutions that may have misrepresented the risk of the mortgage bonds they sold.

4) The not-so-done deal - BofA looked like it had one big suit sewn up. In June, it reached a tentative $8.5 billion settlement with institutional investors, including PIMCO, BlackRock and the Federal Reserve, on home loans that violated representations and warranties about a borrowers’ creditworthiness.
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But some investors are contesting the settlement, and New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is investigating whether the deal shortchanges investors.

The good news is that settlements in these cases would at least give shareholders something to work with when trying to figure out just how much an individual bank stands to lose. But more lawsuits could be in the works. With roughly $1.1 trillion of risky mortgage bonds still outstanding, there are sure to be plenty of disgruntled investors contemplating whether they should take their complaints to the courts. Shareholders will have to decide whether the legal limbo is worth the risk.
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Another reason not to buy: Homeownership leads to major depression.

Op-Ed Contributors
Foreclosures Are Killing Us
By CRAIG E. POLLACK and JULIA F. LYNCH
Published: October 2, 2011

AFTER slowing down in the first half of the year, the rate of homes entering foreclosure is rising again. First-time default notices were served on 78,000 homes in August, a 33 percent increase from July. A $1 billion federal program to help jobless and underemployed homeowners ended Friday. Foreclosure notices were filed against a record 2.9 million properties last year, and an additional 1.2 million in the first half of this year.

Foreclosure is not just a metaphorical epidemic, but a bona fide public health crisis. When breadwinners become ill, they miss work, lose their jobs, face daunting medical bills — and have trouble making mortgage payments as a result.

But that is only part of the story. A growing body of research shows that foreclosure itself harms the health of families and communities. In our 2008 survey of 250 people undergoing foreclosure in the Philadelphia area, 32 percent reported missing doctor’s appointments and 48 percent said they let prescriptions go unfilled, significantly higher rates than others in their community. A paper released last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that people living in high-foreclosure areas in New Jersey, Arizona, California and Florida were significantly more likely than those in less hard-hit neighborhoods to be hospitalized for conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure and heart failure.

More than one-third of homeowners in our study had symptoms of major depression. The N.B.E.R. study found significantly more suicide attempts in high-foreclosure neighborhoods. For every 100 foreclosures, it found a 12 percent increase in anxiety-related emergency-room visits and hospitalizations by adults under 50. Losing a home disrupts social ties to neighbors, schools, jobs and health care providers — ties that under better circumstances promote good health. Neighborhoods suffer, not just homeowners.
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September 30, 2011 12:38 am
New US mortgage delinquencies surge
By Shahien Nasiripour in New York

New US mortgage delinquencies soared in the last quarter as foreclosures increased and banks offered fewer loan modifications to help distressed borrowers, according to a new government report.

The number of homeowners a month behind on their obligations surged nearly 17 per cent, quarter-on-quarter, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said on Thursday.

The increase was in part due to seasonal factors as delinquency rates typically rise from the start of the year through June, OCC officials said. A similar jump occurred last year, on a small scale.

High unemployment also seemed to play a role. In addition to an increase in delinquencies among homeowners with sub par credit histories, those with sterling credit also fell behind.

“That suggests some economic factor,” said Joseph Evers, deputy comptroller for large banks. “That’s probably the striking thing in this report”.
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Compounding fears was a 2.5 per cent quarterly increase in borrowers at least 60 days late or in bankruptcy, the first time the number of seriously delinquent homeowners rose since 2009.

Loan modifications fell 18 per cent quarter over quarter, according to the report, which tracked loans serviced by nine companies which handle about 63 per cent of all first-lien mortgages. Officials said many homeowners who were significantly behind on their payments have probably already been evaluated for loan restructuring.

Home seizures and forfeitures slightly climbed in the second quarter, evidence that mortgage servicers will probably begin repossessing homes at higher rates. Banks say they have fixed the deficient processes that produced scandals such as so-called “robosigning”, where employees signed off on foreclosure documents en masse without reviewing the requisite paperwork.
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Palm Beach County’s surplus of empty homes creates unexpected market

By Kimberly Miller Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Posted: 10:25 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 1, 2011

WELLINGTON — The lakefront home on Crown Point in Wellington once was leased to the polo set as a seasonal rental for the well-heeled followers of the sport of kings.

With fewer pony-loving transients arriving during the economic slump, the nearly 3,000-square-foot home is now being marketed to tenants whose heels are more humble - those with Section 8 housing vouchers from the government.

The housing bust has been a boon for low-income families who receive the federal rental subsidy as a glut of homes - sometimes with pools, sometimes in gated communities - weighs heavily on the market.

Home buyers caught in real estate’s free fall and landlords buying up nearly new properties at foreclosure auctions are eager for tenants whose government rent is electronically delivered each month.

“Guaranteed rent is guaranteed rent,” said Reggie Williams, who manages several rental homes, including the one on Crown Point. “I’ve had very good experiences with Section 8.”

Government-subsidized housing began during the Great Depression with Section 8 of the U.S. Housing Act of 1937 outlining the rules. For years, market forces steered tenants to apartments and homes in less desirable neighborhoods.

But the Great Recession has turned the tables. Now, Section 8 options include homes with five bedrooms, new appliances and two-car garages.

About 6,600 families in West Palm Beach, Delray Beach and their surrounding unincorporated areas receive Section 8 vouchers. The monthly rent subsidy for local homes is as high as $2,109 for a five-bedroom, three-­bathroom home in a suburban Lake Worth gated community. But stipends for less than $100 are also doled out. The average voucher amount from the West Palm Beach Housing Authority is about $900. Delray Beach Housing Authority stipends average about $860.

The amount awarded is based on a family’s size and the median family income for the area. In Palm Beach County, a family of four cannot exceed an annual income of $36,700 to receive a voucher. For a family of six, the income limit is $42,600.

A family receiving a voucher is expected to pay 30 percent of its monthly adjusted income for rent and utilities.

With more variety to choose from, landlords say, Section 8 tenants can be more selective.

“They’re looking for new kitchens, granite countertops, stainless steel,” said Andy Pollack, who manages rental properties including several that he rents to families with Section 8 vouchers.

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/money/real-estate/palm-beach-countys-surplus-of-empty-homes-creates-1890346.html - 89k

Will the Fed’s Other New Policy Encourage Risky Mortgages?
By Daniel Indiviglio
Oct 2 2011, 10:01 AM ET 6

The central bank will create more mortgage demand as interest rates fall, and credit standards may suffer

By now, you’ve probably already heard about the Federal Reserve’s “Operation Twist.” That’s the program through which the central bank hopes to push down longer-term interest rates. But in their September meeting they announced another policy changes that is arguably just as important. The Fed will begin reinvesting the maturing principal from their mortgage securities in new government-backed mortgage-backed securities. This could have a very significant effect on the housing market — but not all good.
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This recurring idea of top-down intervention in private contracts never grows old, does it? Who would get summarily screwed in order to pay for this proposed panacea?

SPECIAL REPORT - A “great haircut” to kick-start U.S. growth
By Jennifer Ablan and Matthew Goldstein
NEW YORK | Mon Oct 3, 2011 8:46am IST

(Reuters) - More than three years after the financial crisis struck, the U.S. economy remains stuck in a consumer debt trap.

It’s a situation that could take years to correct itself. That’s why some economists are calling for a radical step: massive debt relief. Federal policy makers, they suggest, should broker what amounts to an out-of-court settlement between institutional bond investors, banks and consumer advocates - essentially, a “great haircut” to jumpstart the economy.

What some are envisioning is a negotiated process in which cash-strapped homeowners get real mortgage relief, even if it means forcing banks to incur severe write-downs and bond investors to absorb haircuts, or losses, in some of the securities sold by those institutions.

“We’ve put this off for too long,” said L. Randall Wray, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “We need debt relief and jobs and until we get these two things, I think recovery is impossible.”

The bailout of the nation’s banks, a nearly trillion dollar stimulus package and an array of programs by the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates near zero may have stopped the economy from falling into the abyss. But none of those measures have fixed the underlying problem of too much U.S. consumer debt.
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http://market-ticker.org/

What is risked when prosecution is absent (or why giving the banksters a free pass for their massive swindles undermines democracy).

Mortgage help that never should have been there in the first place runs out:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Mortgage-help-for-unemployed-cnnm-1947200164.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=1&asset=&ccode=

Realtors are a product of a failed society.

Come on, Greece, default already. You know you want to…

S&P 500 Valuations Below Recessions Since ‘57
By Lu Wang, Inyoung Hwang and Rita Nazareth - Oct 3, 2011 1:57 AM PT

A pedestrian passes in front of Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC in New York, U.S. S&P 500 profits fell an average of 12 percent on a yearly basis in the nine recessions since the 1950s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg

The rout that erased $2.9 trillion from U.S. equities has pushed valuations in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index 25 percent below the average level from the last nine recessions, even as profit estimates fall.

Companies in the benchmark gauge for American equities trade at 10.2 times 2012 forecast earnings, compared with the average in economic contractions since 1957 of 13.7, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. At the same time, analysts have cut projections for profits next year by 2.6 percent to $110.78 a share, the biggest eight-week drop since 2009, the data show.

Bears say analysts have just started paring earnings estimates and that shares will prove expensive when gross domestic product shrinks. Bulls say stock prices have fallen so much that even should earnings fail to increase in 2012, equities are inexpensive.

“What you’re seeing is a growth scare,” Wayne Lin, a money manager at Baltimore-based Legg Mason Inc., said in a telephone interview on Sept. 29. His firm oversaw $643 billion as of Aug. 31. “The question is, how much of that is priced in. I’d say that if we don’t have a double-dip recession, if earnings just stay flat, these valuations are reasonable. The market already expects those downgrades.”
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Perry bet big on tax grants to subprime lenders
By JACK GILLUM, Associated Press
Monday, October 3, 2011
(10-03) 01:28 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) –

As Texas governor, Rick Perry spent tens of millions in taxpayer money to lure some of the nation’s leading mortgage companies to expand their business in his state, calling it a national model for creating jobs. But the plan backfired.

Just as the largest banks began receiving public cash, they aggressively ramped up risky lending. Within four years, the banks were out of business and homeowners across Texas faced foreclosure. In the end, the state paid $35 million to subsidize it.

An Associated Press review of federal mortgage data, court filings and public statements found that Perry downplayed early warnings of an impending mortgage crisis as alarmist. That’s even as Perry’s own attorney general would later investigate whether Countywide Financial Corp. encouraged homeowners to borrow more than they could afford.

As Perry offered $20 million in grants to Countrywide and $15 million to Washington Mutual Inc. — each blamed for having a major role in one of the country’s most serious recessions — he took in tens of thousands of their dollars for his gubernatorial campaign.

Perry, a Republican candidate for the White House, did what any governor would want to do: bring in jobs for his state. He also supported a cap on how much consumers could borrow against their homes, which experts credit for softening the blow of the mortgage crisis in Texas: by the end of 2008, more than 22 states had a greater percentage of foreclosures.

Yet Perry didn’t appear to recognize that the industry his administration had subsidized was damaging the national economy.
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They don’t pronounce it “Misery River” fur nothin’…

U.S. NEWS
OCTOBER 3, 2011

Flood Leaves a Trail of Ruin
Residents Face Cleanup After Missouri River Inundates Homes, Farms and Roads
BY JACK NICAS

FORT PIERRE, S.D.—A summer of record flooding along the Missouri River is leaving a band of destruction—broken roads, drowned farmland and condemned houses—through the nation’s midsection.

The country’s longest river is still flooded near Kansas City, but upstream it has receded into its banks as the Army Corps of Engineers slows its releases of water from six giant reservoirs. Those lakes had filled to capacity in May and then discharged their water at more than twice the record rate from mid-June into September.

In recent weeks, thousands of people in the Dakotas, Nebraska and Iowa have re-entered their waterlogged homes …

They call that a “loan”??? I call it a $50,000 giveway…

End all bailouts (to include wall street). Pay for your own damn house.

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Mortgage help for unemployed disappears
CNN Money | 10/03/11 | Tami Luhby

The federal government can’t even give money away to help the unemployed pay their mortgage.

A $1 billion program to assist the jobless will likely end up spending only half the funds, at most, because so few people met the strict criteria.

The Housing Department, which had to approve the applications for the Emergency Homeowners’ Loan Program by Friday, expects that only 10,000 to 15,000 people will qualify. That’s only a small sliver of the roughly 100,000 who applied.

“No one could have anticipated how difficult the statutory requirements make it to reach homeowners,” said Lemar Wooley, a HUD spokesman.

Those who make the cut are expected to receive between $35,000 and $45,000 in aid, he said.

Many had high hopes for the loan program because it was targeting a segment of delinquent homeowners not being helped by other federal initiatives, such as mortgage modifications.

Realtors Are Liars®

”The Cliffs” ..You have all gotton those slick ads why you should invest a wad of your cash in one of their high -end housing projects. Jim anthony’s name keeps popping up in lawsuits in upstate SC , that they aren’t paying bills . It is only a matter of time till it will collapse , and the lands involved reverts back to the bears .

Pictorial-Occupy Wall Street
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/09/occupy-wall-street/100159/
(It would have been more effective if it wasn’t the fringe doing it in NYC, imo.)

This economic collapse is a ‘crisis of bigness’

Kohr’s claim was that society’s problems were not caused by particular forms of social or economic organisation, but by their size. Socialism, anarchism, capitalism, democracy, monarchy – all could work well on what he called “the human scale”: a scale at which people could play a part in the systems that governed their lives. But once scaled up to the level of modern states, all systems became oppressors. Changing the system, or the ideology that it claimed inspiration from, would not prevent that oppression – as any number of revolutions have shown – because “the problem is not the thing that is big, but bigness itself”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/25/crisis-bigness-leopold-kohr

To boost flagging economy, U.S. wants to import more shoppers
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/to-boost-flagging-economy-us-wants-to-import-more-shoppers/2011/09/30/gIQA8P2OGL_story.html

The corporations are upset that the workers they are paying aren’t spending more, now that they can’t just mortgage a future that has already been sold.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-02/falling-wages-threaten-u-s-rebound-as-consumers-may-retrench-on-spending.html

“Take-home pay, adjusted for prices, fell 0.3 percent in August, the third decrease in five months, and personal income dropped for the first time in two years, the Commerce Department reported last week. The declines followed news from the Census Bureau that median household income in 2010 fell to $49,445, the lowest in more than a decade, and the poverty rate jumped to 15.1 percent, a 17-year high.”

“Inflation-adjusted weekly earnings have fallen for six consecutive months, dropping 1.8 percent in August from a year earlier, a pace not seen since the 18-month economic slump ended in June 2009.”

That’s the good news for the wealthy and retired. The bad news?

“It’s hard to see where consumers are going to get a lot of wherewithal to sustain strong spending…It’s certainly a concern that, rather than sluggish consumption growth, we see flat or declining consumption.”

What Would Keynes Do?
Thomas Geoghegan
September 27, 2011 |
This article appeared in the October 17, 2011 edition of The Nation.

After the Obama stimulus seemed to fail, a Washington Post headline gibed: John Maynard Keynes, the GOP’s Latest Whipping Boy. On the left, of course, he’s still our guy, even if, like some “Keynesians,” we have never read a word of Keynes. Some pundits say that in the 2012 presidential election, the real candidates will be Keynes and Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who raged against all forms of state planning (though Hayek liked national health insurance). If that’s the real presidential election, wouldn’t it behoove some of us true believers to ask, in this moment of double-dip despair, “My God, what would Keynes do?”

Why the party needs to have a plan, keep it simple—and do something for the base.

Let the Republicans actually filibuster something, hour after excrutiating hour, in real time. The public won’t like it.

If we consult his writing, the scripture left by Keynes himself, we might be surprised to find that it would be a lot more than “prime the pump”—i.e., just run up the federal debt. For Keynes, the problem would be not just getting people into stores, or even getting employers to hire but getting our plutocracy to invest. It’s not just our jobless rate but our huge trade deficit that would appall him. He’d be aghast to see the United States bogged down in so much debt to the rest of the world.

I know: that’s not what people think. “Wait, wasn’t Keynes the one trying to get us into debt?” Yes, but not that kind of debt—in fact, as his biographer writes, Keynes personally hated debt. Especially in a recession, he hated to see a country with a trade debt, or trade deficit, which arises when a country’s imports exceed exports. Indeed, when the trade deficit is as jaw-dropping as the US trade deficit is now, it is harder to use Keynesian deficit spending to push employment back up. Keynes, unlike some of his disciples today, was quick to see this problem.
…

Wow Gross get’s it, this is the first time I’ve ever heard a WS titan say anything like this.

Sovereign balance sheets resemble an overweight diabetic on the verge of a heart attack,” Gross wrote in a monthly investment outlook posted on Newport Beach, California-based Pacific Investment Management Co.’s website today. “If global policy makers could focus on structural as opposed to cyclical financial solutions, new normal growth as opposed to recession might be possible. Long-term profits cannot ultimately grow unless they are partnered with near equal benefits for labor.”

I still don’t understand how he could get the treasury issue so wrong given his understanding of this.

finance.yahoo.com/news/Gross-Recession-Risk-bloomberg-2146162934.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=4&asset=&ccode=

If you live in DC, your opinion on housing does not count:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/now-might-be-the-best-time-ever-to-buy-a-home-2011-10-03?link=MW_home_latest_news

Occupy Wall Street protesters irked by rising student debt in U.S.
Marketplace Morning Report, Monday, October 3, 2011

Occupy Wall Street protestors have a list of complaints, including student loan debt. Why?

Occupy Wall Street protest on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Demonstrators with the Occupy Wall Street movement attempt to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on the motorway on Oct. 1, 2011 in New York City. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Steve Chiotakis: Protests over the inequity between Wall Street and the rest of us continue. Some of the cardboard signs held up during weekend protests in New York read: “Honk if you have student debt.”

The protests have also fueled an online petition that proposes to forgive all student loan debt to boost the economy.

Marketplace’s Gregory Warner is with us live to talk about what the protesters are so upset about. Good morning, Gregory.

Gregory Warner: Good morning.

Chiotakis: Why has student loan debt become this cry of protestors — is it just because they’re mostly young people here?

Warner: That’s part of it, sure, but student loan debt in this country is now $830 billion. That’s higher than credit card debt, and of course there are more credit card holders than students — so that’s a huge debt burden. And students are taking on more of the riskiest kind of debt — these unregulated private student loans — where you have the least protection and pay the highest interest rates, up to 19 percent.

So the argument you hear is, “You’ve bailed out Wall Street, what about us?” Forgive student loans, you boost the economy because you put hundreds of dollars a month back in the pocket of middle-class families, and of young people just as they’re entering the workforce.

Chiotakis: What does this have to do with Wall Street?

Warner: Just as Wall Street helped spur the housing bubble with mortgage-backed securities, they’ve also spurred the student loan bubble with, as they’re called, student loan asset-backed securities.
…

In ‘Boomerang,’ Cheap Credit Exposes Nations’ Flaws
by NPR Staff / Morning Edition
Boomerang — Travels in the New Third World
by Michael Lewis
Hardcover, 213 pages
October 3, 2011

No two countries are experiencing the global financial crisis in the same way. And according to author Michael Lewis, you can tell a lot about each country by looking at its problems — and how they’re being dealt with.

To research for his new book, Boomerang, Lewis went on what he has called a “financial disaster tour.” He surveyed some of the most financially challenged countries in the world, from Iceland and Ireland to Greece and the United States.

As he tells NPR’s Lynn Neary, Lewis found a fatal flaw deeply ingrained in each country’s culture — which he says helps to explain how they lost their economic way when they were offered cheap credit.

“You can think about the credit bubble as one giant temptation that was laid before the developed world,” Lewis says. “Anybody who wanted to borrow basically could, in virtually unlimited sums. And given that temptation, different countries wanted to do different things with the money.”

On Iceland

“Fishing has been a source of wealth there. And they’ve used the wealth to buy lots of education — it’s a highly educated population. And then you’ve got a problem. You’ve got a bunch of highly educated people who are left to fish.”

“When all of a sudden their banks were offered unlimited credit by the rest of the world, every young Icelander was offered the opportunity to essentially become an investment banker.”

“The losses were just breathtaking — you know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in banking losses, for every man, woman and child in Iceland.”

“Essentially what had happened is, the men in the society — the fishermen — had told the women they knew what they were doing. And for a brief period, they looked like they were successful. When I walked in, the women were busy taking back the country from the men.”

“They basically walked away from most of their debts. So, they’ve kind of gone on their way.”
…

Mortgage help for unemployed disappears
A federal mortgage program to help the unemployed is ending.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The federal government can’t even give money away to help the unemployed pay their mortgage.

A $1 billion program to assist the jobless will likely end up spending only half the funds, at most, because so few people met the strict criteria.

The Housing Department, which had to approve the applications for the Emergency Homeowners’ Loan Program by Friday, expects that only 10,000 to 15,000 people will qualify. That’s only a small sliver of the roughly 100,000 who applied.

“No one could have anticipated how difficult the statutory requirements make it to reach homeowners,” said Lemar Wooley, a HUD spokesman.

Those who make the cut are expected to receive between $35,000 and $45,000 in aid, he said.

Many had high hopes for the loan program because it was targeting a segment of delinquent homeowners not being helped by other federal initiatives, such as mortgage modifications.

Passed last year as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill, it was modeled after a very successful program in Pennsylvania that has helped tens of thousands of residents since 1983.

The federal effort offered interest-free, forgivable loans to homeowners who lost at least 15% of their income because of the economy or their own medical condition. Applicants had to be at least 90 days delinquent, facing foreclosure and show that they could resume payments if they found a new job.

If they qualified, they could receive up to $50,000 or 24 months of assistance, whichever came first.

The initiative quickly became a quagmire of delays and requirements, however. The rollout was postponed for months, finally launching in late June. HUD originally gave people less than six weeks to apply, but then pushed back the deadline to mid-September.

But it was the income and delinquency guidelines that prevented many seemingly eligible people from getting assistance, housing counselors say. HUD used a complicated formula that took into account monthly payments, income and arrears.

Only 34 of the 174 homeowners who came to Tierra del Sol Housing Corp. in Las Cruces, N.M., met the criteria, said Rose Garcia, the agency’s executive director. Some people were turned away because they were already too far behind in their payments or because their income fell because of a family member’s illness.

“This program could have made a difference to save people from being homeless,” she said. “But it doesn’t meet people’s needs.”

Imagine if you could write a number on a piece of paper, sell the paper, and a get percentage of the number in commission.

The debt bubble was/is like that.

Gas here hit $3.38/gallon around Labor Day. Today I topped off the tank and paid $3.01 per gallon.

Enjoy it while it lasts. Of course if most of the world’s economies are heading downward this may last a while.

Oil drops to lowest price since 2010
AP News

Since peaking near $114 per barrel in May, benchmark oil has dropped about 30 percent. Gasoline prices, however, have stayed relatively high, falling only about 14 percent in that time.

heheeeheeeheehaahaaahaaheeehaahaaa… (Hwy50™)

GoldenmanSucks Inc. (SCOTU$ person) = “TrueFinancialCult™” / “TrueSerialLiquiditist™” / “TrueSerialManipulator’$™” live for yet another day!

Yep,
File under: Wall $t. doing “God’s work”… quietly:

Homes = Wall $t. manipulation/extraction $cheme (Large $ denomination$)

Oil/Energy = Wall $t. manipulation/extraction $cheme (small $ denomination$)

Another day, another HORizen:

Food = Wall $t. manipulation/extraction $cheme (even smaller $ denomination$)

2012 will be Mr. Cole’s 1st time at the Pasadena, CA. Doo Dah Parade.

(Perhaps, there might be some NYC visitors: “Wanker-Banker’s-R-U$” [BofA $ponsor] / “Linda-the-Lobbyi$t-Live$-Lavi$hly!” [Faux New$ Inc. $ponsor] / Ra$h Limpbaugh$ & Limpy the Lion performing “Radio Roar!” [Viagra $ponsor])

Group spokesman Patrick Bruner urged protesters to dress up as zombies and eat Monopoly money to let financial workers “see us reflecting the metaphor of their action$.”

Wall Street protesters dress as zombies in NYC
WSJ

John Hildebrand, 24, an unemployed teacher from Norman, Okla., sat up in his sleeping bag around 10 a.m. He said he arrived Saturday after getting a cheap plane ticket to New York.

“My issue is corporate influence in politics,” he said. “I would like to eliminate corporate financing from politics.”

(Hey John, when yer all pushed out of Manhattan, head on down to the US Supreme Court building in DC and help out The Justice’$ who voted CorpInc.’$ = people,…(their names escape me, but you can easily recognize them by their ear-to-ear $miles and cackling laughter.))

heheeeheeeheehaahaaahaaheeehaahaaa… (Hwy50™)

To fix the economy, first fix the housing market
October 3, 2011

There’s no way the U.S. can get back on track without a cure for what’s killing real estate.
By John Cassidy, contributor

FORTUNE — Is this a great country or what? At the start of last year, a friend of mine, the proprietor of a small business that has suffered badly in the recession, entered a trial mortgage-modification program. A few months later the bank told him that his application for a government-assisted refinancing rate had been turned down — his house was too far underwater. He had bought it during the boom for $220,000, putting down $30,000, and then spent another $45,000 doing it up. Now it’s worth about $100,000. Once his monthly payments were set to go back up (his mortgage rate is 6.5%), my friend stopped paying them and waited for the foreclosure and eviction notices to arrive. A year and a half later he is still inhabiting his own home and watching the mail.

Whenever I hear somebody saying that growth is about to pick up, I think about my friend and the roughly 11 million homeowners whose mortgages are worth more than their homes. Some of them are still making their monthly payments. Some, like my pal, are living for nothing. The drip-drip foreclosure crisis shows how, six years after the bursting of the real estate bubble, the U.S. residential real estate market is still a mess. And without a genuine revival in housing, it is hard to think we will ever get a self- sustaining recovery.

Sure, the news that President Obama and the Republicans are talking about enlarging this year’s payroll tax cut and extending unemployment benefits through 2012 is good news. The last thing the economy needs is a $250 billion hit to spending, which is what doing nothing would amount to. But where are the serious proposals to revive the housing market? It’s as if both parties have agreed to drop the issue.

Housing isn’t just another industry: It’s a driving force for the entire economy. Residential investment accounts for up to a quarter of overall capital investment. House prices have a big influence on consumer spending — for every $1,000 the value of his house falls, a homeowner tends to cut his outlays by about $50 or $60. And falling property tax revenues are decimating many towns and cities. How bad is it out there? New-home construction is running at less than a third of its pre-recession level; in August it fell again. Existing-home sales picked up a bit, but that was largely because of bottom-fishing investors who are betting prices can’t go any lower. Let’s hope they are right. Nationwide, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index, prices are down 6% over the past year and down 32% since the first quarter of 2006.

I’m not saying that fixing the housing market is easy. If it were, somebody would have done it. But to begin with, we could make the much-maligned Home Affordable Refinancing Program (HAMP) work better. Generally, anybody who is current on payments and whose home is worth at least 80% of the outstanding loan is eligible to participate. But many homeowners have been put off by the red tape and by additional charges that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which ultimately own or insure many of the mortgages, have imposed on applicants.

Then there are folks whose mortgages are way underwater. One option: Force the banks to foreclose on them and get the whole nightmare over with. But that would dump yet more properties on the market. A better solution, which has never seriously been tried, would be to expand the mortgage-modification program, offering interest rate reductions and principal write-offs in return for options on the upside value of the property. For example, the government and the bank could reduce my friend’s mortgage to $150,000 — 150% of the property’s current value — but demand half of any profit he makes when he eventually sells the property.

The details would need working on — there’s a tradeoff between maximizing uptake and minimizing rewards to irresponsible borrowers — but surely it is worth trying. Three years of fiddling with the housing problem haven’t gotten us very far.

–John Cassidy is a Fortune contributor and a New Yorker staff writer.

Cemex Posts Worst Quarterly Decline Ever
Bloomberg

Cemex SAB, the largest cement maker in the Americas, plunged a record 56 percent in the third quarter on concern a global economic slowdown will crimp demand for the company’s products.

Cemex slumped 6.3 percent today to 4.44 pesos in Mexico City, a 12-year low, as of 4:15 p.m. New York time. The quarterly decline was the stock’s worst performance since Bloomberg records dating back to 1992.

Global stocks fell today, dragging the MSCI All-Country World Index to its biggest quarterly loss since 2008, as declines in Chinese manufacturing and German retail sales signaled less demand for the construction materials the company makes. Investors are also concerned the company won’t be able to meet its debt obligations, Carlos Hermosillo, head of equity research at Grupo Financiero Banorte SAB, said today.

“The quarterly fall has been dramatic,” Hermosillo said today in a telephone interview from Mexico City. “The company hasn’t convinced investors that its outlook isn’t as bad as it appears.”

Chief Executive Officer Lorenzo Zambrano said yesterday the Monterrey, Mexico-based company plans to sell about $1 billion of assets by the end of 2012 to reduce debt. Cemex, which had $17.8 billion in debt at the end of the second quarter, will meet bank covenants for 2011 and 2012 without renegotiating or selling equity, Zambrano said.

Cemex had obtained a $15 billion bank loan in August 2009 to avoid default after U.S. cement demand plummeted following the company’s $14.2 billion acquisition of Rinker Group Ltd., which had more than 80 percent of sales in the U.S.

Starbucks to Accept Donations to Spur U.S. Job Growth - Bloomberg

Starbucks Corp. (SBUX), the world’s largest coffee-shop operator, will start collecting donations online and at some of its cafes to spur job creation among community businesses in the U.S.

Starbucks will accept money beginning Nov. 1 to help fund loans to small businesses, according to a statement today. Seattle-based Starbucks is working with Opportunity Finance Network, which represents institutions that provide credit to community businesses, to form “Create Jobs for USA.”

“We’re going to raise millions of dollars,” Starbucks Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz said today in a telephone interview, declining to give a specific number. “This is about Americans helping Americans,” he said. “We’re not going to wait for Washington.”

In August, Schultz, 58, asked fellow CEOs and business leaders to boycott donating to U.S. political campaigns to encourage leaders to solve the nation’s growing budget deficit. Last month, he sent a letter to President Barack Obama and Congress urging them to put partisanship aside to find a solution to unemployment.

Starbucks will open at least 200 new stores and remodel 1,700 locations in the U.S. this fiscal year, which will create “well over 2,000 jobs,” Schultz said. “Business leaders can step up and we can create a renewed level of confidence by investing in the economy and creating job opportunities.”

The coffee company opened 27 net new stores in the U.S. in the quarter ended July 3.

Concentration of wealth and power

Subsidiaries of the global business empire headed by the Koch Brothers, the controversial conservative energy moguls, made illegal payments to win foreign contracts, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in a detailed investigation in its November issue. In addition, foreign subsidiaries belonging to the parent company founded by the brothers–who have helped bankroll an array of conservative, anti-regulatory causes and tea-party initiatives–sold millions in petrochemical equipment to an Iranian methanol plant, Bloomberg also reports.

In September 2008, a team of researchers sent by Koch Industries to its subsidiary in Arles, France, “found evidence of improper payments to secure contracts in six countries dating back to 2002, authorized by the business director of the company’s Koch-Glitsch affiliate in France,” Bloomberg’s Asjylyn Loder and David Evans write.

Koch Industries, based in Wichita, Kan., was reportedly none to pleased when the allegations came to light internally. Instead of recognizing the work of Ludmila Egorova-Farine–the ethics compliance officer who first brought the alleged bribes from the French subsidiary to the company’s attention–the company took Egorova-Farines off the case. Koch management then fired her a year later, Loder and Evans report.

The Bloomberg Markets investigation also found that “Koch Industries–in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East–has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism,” Loder and Evans write.

Considering Making an Offer on a House: Warnings

Making an offer on a house may cause serious mental/mood changes, even after rescinding the offer. Drinking alcohol while considering an offer may increase the risk for mental/mood changes. Making the offer itself may also cause mental/mood changes. Stop considering making an offer and tell your doctor or pharmacist immediately if you have symptoms such as depression/suicidal thoughts, agitation, aggressiveness, or other unusual thoughts or behavior.

The house next to us, which is abandoned (but the bank hasn’t taken back) back, is failing into disrepair. Nothing major, but Florida lots overgrow quickly.

Today, with the wind at the right speed/angle, a massive frond (probably 30-40 lbs.) broke off and collapsed into my front lawn. I know, I know, I am a mere renter, but the thought crossed my mind that if one of my chilluns had been under it, they would have been severely injured or even killed. I would maintain the trees myself, but they are easily 30ft. tall and require lifts and/or those crazy chainsaw-on-a-stick rigs to prune.

So… I will obviously keep an eye out (the fronds brown before they detach) and keep my kids away on windy days. I am not confident that letter writing would be helpful, although I should in case something does happen.

Anyway, maintain it, or sell it. WTF.

Cea$ar: “Let the game$ begin!”

$COTUS Inc. “per$on” = 1
“RoarRadio!”: -1

Williams explained during the Fox News telecast that he made the comparison because the president was “the enemy.”

Hank Williams Jr. pulled from ESPN after comparing Obama to Hitler
by James Hibberd
In partnership with CNN /2011 Entertainment Weekly

The country singer criticized the president’s recent “golf summit” with Republican House Speaker John Boehner. The singer told Fox & Friends that the meeting “would be like Hitler playing golf with [Israeli leader] Benjamin Netanyahu.”

E$PN released this statement:

“While Hank Williams, Jr. is not an ESPN employee, we recognize that he is closely linked to our company through the open to Monday Night Football. We are extremely disappointed with his comments, and as a result we have decided to pull the open from tonight’s telecast.”

Death of a salesman. Seems like a fictional story. Hmmmmm. Was it worth it?

http://www.donlapre.com/

What’s more dangerous: A Tea Party with or one without brains?

Oct. 4, 2011, 12:00 a.m. EDT
Occupy Wall Street is a tea party with brains
Commentary: Protesters seek a political process that doesn’t exclude them
By David Weidner, MarketWatch

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The revolution just might be televised after all.

More than two weeks after a band of young people began camping out under the shadow of the New York Stock Exchange, the movement to remake America’s inequitable financial system is growing
…