The Housing Bubble

We’ve waited so long. Who remembers 2006? The homes in my rental area are all being repiped, three floods in my place last year. Oh, when I signed up for rental insurance, my landlord used my name for all three claims, i can’t get any till he removes my name. Anyway, my neighbor’s house backed up with sewer thru the toilets and destroyed her home. I would never buy in fire mt-Oceanside. Back to daydreaming about saving the world and living in a trailer park.

Went to a party last night.

First time I got to talk with the host. Very first words:

Me: This is a very nice neighborhood with very nice houses.

Him: Yes. We bought in 2007. We way overpaid.

Me: (Quickly changing the topic) So, I hear your son is a great soccer player…

“As a result, there would be a sharp decline in the standard of living for all Americans, accompanied by regret for having ignored the warning signs when there still had been time.”

That’s then, this is now.

“Having ignored the warning signs when there had been time” means we should select leaders that can think and act beyond the next election. Those who can think and act in such a way may decide to run for public office but because they think and act in such a way they do not get elected.

And so here we are.

I think these guys sitting in their ivory towers do not feel the financial hardship that the little guy does. So it is all academic to them.

Just my 2Cents

Call Obama’s sequester bluff
By Charles Krauthammer, Published: February 7

For the first time since Election Day, President Obama is on the defensive. That’s because on March 1, automatic spending cuts (“sequestration”) go into effect — $1.2 trillion over 10 years, half from domestic (discretionary) programs, half from defense.

The idea had been proposed and promoted by the White House during the July 2011 debt-ceiling negotiations. The political calculation was that such draconian defense cuts would drive the GOP to offer concessions.

It backfired. The Republicans have offered no concessions. Obama’s bluff is being called and he’s the desperate party. He abhors the domestic cuts. And as commander in chief he must worry about indiscriminate Pentagon cuts that his own defense secretary calls catastrophic.
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Seems like there is a hell of a lot of sequester bluff calling going on inside the beltway these days!

We have an economy that is being held together with smoke and mirrors, there is nothing we can do that will not hurt. The automatic cuts are the best we are going to get the budget under control. Had Simpson Bowles been passed at the beginning of Obama’s presidency we would have been far better off but it wasn’t so now we are broke just like Zimbabwe. Similar policies and similar results.

When you borrow 45 cents of every dollar you spend - eventually something has to give.

The real trick is understand that a little pain now MIGHT avoid us become like Greece in the not to distant future- where ALL government programs like these are eliminated.

You like Head Start? When we default the ENTIRE program will be eliminated.

So stop squealing like a spoiled teenage girl who had her iphone taken away.

Our economy is poised to take off [...]

LOL!! That’s _rich_!

Did they really manage to write that with a straight face??

Sayonara, Timmy Boy.

Time to break up the big banks
By George F. Will, Published: February 8

With his chronically gravelly voice and relentlessly liberal agenda, Sherrod Brown seems to have stepped out of “Les Miserables,” hoarse from singing revolutionary anthems at the barricades. Today, Ohio’s senior senator has a project worthy of Victor Hugo — and of conservatives’ support. He wants to break up the biggest banks.

He would advocate this even if he thought such banks would never have a crisis sufficient to threaten the financial system. He believes they are unhealthy for the financial system even when they are healthy. This is because there is a silent subsidy — an unfair competitive advantage relative to community banks — inherent in being deemed by the government, implicitly but clearly, too big to fail.

The Senate has unanimously passed a bill offered by Brown and Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, directing the Government Accountability Office to study whether banks with more than $500 billion in assets acquire an “economic benefit” because of their dangerous scale. Is their debt priced favorably because, being TBTF, they are considered especially creditworthy? Brown believes the 20 largest banks pay less when borrowing — 50 to 80 basis points less — than community banks must pay.

In a sense, TBTF began under Ronald Reagan with the 1984 rescue of Continental Illinois, then the seventh-largest bank. In 2011, the four biggest U.S. banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) had 40 percent of all federally insured deposits. Today, the 5,500 community banks have 12 percent of the banking industry’s assets. The 12 banks with $250 billion to $2.3 trillion in assets total 69 percent. The 20 largest banks’ assets total 84.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

Such banks have become bigger, relative to the economy, since the financial crisis began, and they are not the only economic entities to do so. Last year, the Economist reported that in the past 15 years the combined assets of the 50 largest U.S. companies had risen from around 70 percent of GDP to around 130 percent. And banks are not the only entities designated TBTF because they are “systemically important.” General Motors supposedly required a bailout because a chain of parts suppliers might have failed with it.

But this just means that the pernicious practice of socializing losses while keeping profits private is not quarantined in the financial sector.

To see why TBTF also can mean TBTM — too big to manage — read “What’s Inside America’s Banks?” in the January/February issue of the Atlantic. Frank Partnoy and Jesse Eisinger argue that banks are not only bigger but also “more opaque than ever.” And regulations partake of the opacity: The landmark Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, separating commercial banking from investment banking, was 37 pages long; the 848 pages of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law may eventually be supplemented by 30 times that many pages of rules. The “Volcker rule” banning banks from speculating with federally insured deposits is 298 pages long.
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The housing crime syndicate operators and proxies are desperately flailing away attempting to salvage what’s left of their big lie.

If you can make the telephony or the airline industry more competitive by busting up 800 lb corporate behemoths, why not try it in the banking sector?

Main Street America deserves better banking services than the Fed-funded parasitic vampire squid offerings of Wall Street’s Megabank, Inc cartel has to offer.

I discussed Fisher’s bull with a colleague at work, who is in line to inherit his dad’s Texas ranch. He opined that it really is possible for a breeding bull to be “too big.”

Too Big to Fail Too Hard to Fix Amid Calls to Curb Banks
By Craig Torres & Cheyenne Hopkins - Feb 4, 2013 12:07 PM PT
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Three of the four largest U.S. banks — JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) — are bigger today than they were in 2007, heightening the risk of economic damage if one gets into trouble. JPMorgan’s 2012 trading loss of more than $6.2 billion from a bet on credit derivatives raised questions anew about whether the largest institutions have grown too complex for oversight.

Restructuring Megabanks

That loss is among events that “have proven ‘too big to fail’ banks are also too big to manage and too big to regulate,” Brown, an Ohio Democrat, said in a Jan. 22 e-mail. “The question is no longer about whether these megabanks should be restructured, but how we should do it.”

Brown and fellow Banking Committee member David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, are considering legislation that would impose capital levels on the largest banks higher than those agreed to by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the Financial Stability Board, which set global standards. Brown also plans to reintroduce a bill he failed to get included in Dodd-Frank or passed in the last Congress that would cap bank size and limit non-deposit liabilities.

The two senators have asked the Government Accountability Office to look into the economic benefits including lower borrowing costs that banks with more than $500 billion in assets receive as a result of federal deposit insurance, access to the Fed’s discount window and investor perceptions that they’ll be rescued in times of trouble.
No Consensus

Momentum for revisiting Dodd-Frank, whose Democratic authors Senator Christopher Dodd and Representative Barney Frank are no longer in Congress, is driven by both parties. Still, lawmakers are nowhere near consensus on what approach to take — whether raising capital standards, limiting the size of institutions or curbing subsidies.

The push by regulators may encourage Congress to take another look at the law, said Camden Fine, chief executive officer of Independent Community Bankers of America, which represents about 5,000 small lenders.

“I think there’s going to be a synergy here between the regulators and Congress,” said Fine. “If regulators call for new authority, Congress will look for that. I would say that between now and probably the end of 2015 or 2016 you’re going to see some significant step by both Congress and regulatory agencies to rein in the big banks.”

Fisher’s Bull

The Dallas Fed’s Fisher, who keeps a breeding bull named “Too Big to Fail” on his Texas ranch, proposed in a Jan. 16 speech that regulators be explicit about what kinds of banking the government will backstop. Deposit insurance and discount- window loans would be available only to a firm’s commercial and consumer-banking operations. Fisher’s proposal would push other risk-taking businesses, such as investment banking, away from government support, raising their cost of funding.

Fisher said reaction to his speech and bipartisan interest in limiting the safety net for banks make him think Congress may act on the issue.

“I believe deep in my heart, in the way that speech has been received” that lawmakers “will move on this front,” he said in an interview with Kathleen Hays on Bloomberg Radio’s “The Hays Advantage.”

While Senators Brown and Vitter want to limit bank size, “I’m a little uncomfortable about that,” Fisher said. “But it may be necessary from a transition standpoint.”
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‘The real culprit, IMO, is “growth”.’

Don’t forget about global warming.

‘ Is it snowmageddon, or just a bad blizzard such as we’ve had in the past?’

It’s snow-a-gettin’ me cabin fever. Very windy out. All powder snow with three foot high drifts in the parking lot. Everything is closed. Post offices, stores, you name it. No reason to go out except I did the same yesterday and need to get to the gym ( which is supposed to be open , haaa!) or else I am going to succumb to eating those cookies in the freezer………

Soon they will pass a law that forbids cars to be parked on the street in a storm!

Hello from suburban Boston. About 2 feet but snow is tapering off. Very windy. It’s a typical Northeaster. But guess places to west and south got more snow. All in all a bit hyped. Got to keep viewers glued to the TV.

when I wuz a pup, we had bad storms and blizzards. And I don’t recall such massive power outages.
Almost exactly 35 years ago northern Ohio had its Winter Hurricane. 50 died, many in cars that were marooned & stuck on public roads. Power in rural areas was out for over a week & people with health problems had to be evacuated by National Guard helicopters. One woman I knew had a baby at the beginning of the storm in a farm house. Baby did fine. Mother developed a uterine infection, surely related to stress of no heat & lights, had to be flown out & had an emergency hysterectomy to save her life. A semi truck driver named James Truly got stuck on a state highway near Mansfield after making a steel delivery to an auto plant. He got disoriented in white out conditions and had to park his truck. He had a CB and called for help, but the corrupt local sheriff’s department ignored him. He was buried alive for 124 hours until a National Guard team instigated by his brother, who drove down from Cleveland, found his truck by probing drifted snow along the road side. They had to dig down about 6 feet to get Truly out. His truck was buried so deep it was completely invisible to detection by air.
For a couple of days Akron & other cities banned all non-emergency private vehicular traffic so that the fire, EMS & bus systems could continue to operate. US 30 in the western part of the state was deliberately blocked by snow removal equipment to keep people from driving into a no-go zone where conditions were impossible.
I would call this “massive” by any definition. How soon we forget. News from the NE indicates similar conditions, although I do think they will improve more rapidly than Ohio did in 1978.
Despite all this, the morning after the storm I walked from my house to the bus stop, caught a bus, and was only 5 minutes late for work at a local hospital. Most all the staff did the same, and the hospital did business as usual. The wise decision of local authorities to outlaw non-emergency, non-public transportation saved the day, otherwise the streets and highways would have been clogged by hundreds of ninnies getting stuck.

I’m thinking that the expiration of the US Payroll Tax holiday is being felt around the world, as Americans are buying fewer toys and goodies, which are mostly imported these days.

My, my, such responsibility that comes from being the world’s consumer of last resort.

Poor India and China, they’re only going to have 5% growth. We should offshore even more jobs to their countries and buy more stuff from them (on credit, of course, since we’re broke) as they definitely deserve 10% annual growth.

India is being priced out by cheaper countries like China and the Philippines.

India is riding a major RE bubble. The problem is that the central banks all over the world have pledged to print and increase the M0 supply to infinity. Probably this is the new normal. But how long can it go on till the RE bubbles burst all across the world. With everyone printing, net effect in currency depreciation is almost zero.

I hope this nonsense end sooner than later and RE comes to sanity all around the world. India should really be in recession as it is just a service based economy and massive Keysianism going on there. RE values have climed more than 500% since 2005.

Simply breathtaking how these pro athletes piss money away.

A few seasons ago the Broncos lost most of their running backs to injury midseason and had to scramble to find replacements pronto. They recalled a guy they cut from the previous season. This was a guy who had played for them for a few seasons and no doubt had earned the equivalent of a lottery jackpot over that period and should have been able to retire in comfort. It turns out he was working in a cell phone kiosk in a mall when he was recalled to the team. In an interview he admitted that he was flat broke.

Not a word on the MIC….

#1 We tend to make too many long lists.

This means that a large number of men who could have once held “good” jobs that could have provided a living for them and a family now are barely able to take care of themselves and they also have poor future prospects

Gee, ya think maybe this is why the “have a childlike dependence on government?” Instead of spending the taxpayer money trying to repeal Obamacare 30 TIMES, why not try to bring some jobs back, and then maybe we’d have fewer people “leaching off the more productive.”

Reason 21: Too much extremist political propaganda, not enough rational discussion of what’s best for America’s future.

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/10-Tracy-St-Concord-MA-01742/57064080_zpid/

This record also shows it being sold for $1 April 12, 2012, a little over 6 months prior to the $599k sale.

Definitely something fishy going on…

It’s in our schools and in our speech. There are no winners or losers anymore. Everyone gets a gold star.

Yeah, right. That’s why my kids graduated from High School with honors, 4.0 GPAs and got scholarships for college, while the overwhelming majority of their peers did not come close. Gold stars for everyone? I don’t think so.

How can you include retired military and social security recipients in with the “government handouts” crowd?

Get off my lawn!

I was with Steve Tobak until the final paragraphs — where he certainly isn’t demonstrating much “critical thinking”.

First he tells us:
“Athletes and entertainers making ungodly amounts of money…all the celebrities, reality TV stars, pop culture icons, and society people like the Kardashians and Lindsay Lohan.”

And in the very next paragraph:

“There are no winners or losers anymore. Everyone gets a gold star. Everyone gets an award. There are no individuals, no standouts….”

In America, there are plenty of “standouts”– just as there are plenty of immigration cheats, but there are also plenty of “quiet” standouts as well quiet cheats, and it is these oiligarchic cronies and corporate boards who have skewed the social system so far in their favor as to threaten America’s cohesion — not the increasingly disgruntled people who work (or used to work) for them.

Incentive has to come from within, but if there isn’t a framework from which to employ it, people will survive any way they can. All too frequently, that leads to violence.

Last night I watched John Ford’s iconic film of Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” again, and for the first time in many such viewings found it resonant rather than quaint. Of particular interest to me was the strong message of communism presented by one of the most notoriously individualistic directors (and producers, D.F. Zanuck) in the business at the time. Taken in the context of the times, there is a sobering lesson to be considered.

Today broken-down vans and campers again line the Edison Highway, and the faces of the furtive camping out in the fields and orchards are just as gaunt, but the real story of desperation and loss has transferred to the suburbs where there is an overflow of people searching for jobs, any jobs, to keep them and their family from massive social upheaval. And they’re not finding them.

It’s one thing to lump whole classes of human beings into “parasites” or “producers”, but Tobak seems to miss the broader point, namely that we all inhabit the same system. And like it or not, the numbers aren’t on his side. America’s “weight” is tipped to one extreme end, and it’s in desperate need of rebalancing if our nation is to survive.

This isn’t an ideological issue, it’s a practical one. The real question is how to manage it without resorting to either totalitarianism or anarchy — either of which is likely to lead to bloodshed.

I never thought I’d see the day when it would pay off to be a government bureaucrat. Something’s very, very wrong here.

That “something very very wrong” is the Bottomless Stockholder Maw and its overbonused CEO’s. Pension and retirement plans, at least at the federal level, for government workers hasn’t really changed; in fact it’s not as good as it used to be. It simply looks better because in comparison private sector has decimated its benefits and retirement for full time employees, turned a lot of full-timers into part-timers to eliminate benefits altogether, or offshored the job altogether.

I get the most people mad and angry with me over this…Diversity of opinion includes ME

Everything has to be inclusive

Big Brother is watching you — from a drone’s eye view.

A Map Of Where Drones Are Allowed In The U.S.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation releases the Federal Aviation Administration’s drone authorization list. See who’s allowed to fly drones in your neighborhood!
By Colin Lecher Posted 02.08.2013 at 2:15 pm

If you want to fly more than a hobbyist’s drone in the United States, you have to get permission from the Federal Aviation Administration. We’ve know for a while about some drones–the ones keeping an eye on the U.S.-Mexico border, for example–but this list of applications through October 2012, obtained and mapped by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is the most up-to-date look at domestic-drone permissions we’ve got.

The list is broken down by “entities,” places like colleges or local sheriff’s offices that have applied to the FAA for a license to use drones. The 81 entities on the list, 20 more than on the first list we saw from the EFF, are mixed: a lot of drones are going to government agencies like police departments, a lot to universities and colleges, others to drone manufacturers, and one to an Indian tribal agency. For some reason, Ohio seems to have been granted a lot of permits in this round.

On this interactive map, you can find out what type of drones many applicants were authorized to use: We know the Nellis Air Force base in Nevada has a license to use an MQ-1 Predator drone, and the University of Colorado, Boulder, has a license to use a NexSTAR miniature UAS drone to do experiments into weather and wireless networks. But we don’t know what everyone’s allowed to use. The U.S. Army, for instance, has, permission to fly drones in the “general location” of the Pentagon. Type of drone? “Unknown.”

What this list also doesn’t tell us is how many drones are flying around or how many drones each entity is flying. Like, does the U.S. Army have some gigantic fleet of drones at the Pentagon? This doesn’t say.
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Unsurprised?

Liberals and progressive are funny.

They NEVER think the new insane powers they bestow on the liberals/progressives in power will ever be used against them.

Or against the policies they hold dear.

I guess they figure republicans will not play by the same rules.

Such fools.

I was the target of a drone (?) intimidation attempt about six or seven years ago when I (repeatedly) called the public affairs officer at Edwards Air Force Base to complain about low-flying test pilots violating my airspace (FCC no-no) and intentionally stampeding my stock.

In subsequent weeks my house was periodically circled at low altitude by sleek red and white aircraft (I’m out in the middle of nowhere and the only structure around) for five-to-ten minutes at a time. Very disconcerting the first time it happened. Then it came back. Twice.

Rather than track it through the telescopic site on my deer rifle (FBI bait for certain) I went out on my balcony with my digi-cam and stood there in plain sight, filming it buzzing me.

Then I posted it to Youtube, and called the public affairs officer to tell him to tell his gameboys to knock it off or I’d go to high def and blow the cover on their proprietary design.

Youtube banned me, but the buzzing stopped. They may have my coordinates, but I’ve got their number– for now….

Here is a question that is bound to be forming in every patriotic traditional Goldwater conservative’s head, as well as eve Reagan conservative, which is far less interventionist than the endless warfare GWB conservative:

At what point will I be considered a traitor, no longer a patriot, if I not only say this government is way beyond the constitution, but I participate in civil disobedience? Will it be when the government infringes on the second amendment? Will it be when government orders Citizen’s to send in their gold?

And those conservatives who work in the DOD are bound to start asking these: am I a traitor if I proclaim that the “Patriot Act” and NDAA are bad laws and intrusive and overstepping g the constitution? Will I be denied a clearance by not reporting what guns I have? By refusing to turn in my AR15? Will I be denied a clearance for opposing the Patriot Act and the presidents ability to order the assassination of any American based on the constitution?

“How does the paranoid home arsenal owners club feel about the revelation that Obama can target your house with a drone strike if he chooses?”

Oh I don`t know, the FEMA camps look nice. I really like the way they are right by train tracks.

Jesse Ventura FEMA Camps 1 - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-RoWFUQ63k - 146k - Cached - Similar pages
Dec 12, 2012 … TruTV never re-aired Jesse Ventura’s FEMA Camp show because of constant government harassment and pressure. It has already been …

Napolitano stands by controversial report

By Eli Lake and Audrey Hudson
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The Washington Times
Thursday, April 16, 2009

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Wednesday that she was briefed before the release of a controversial intelligence assessment and that she stands by the report, which lists returning veterans among terrorist risks to the U.S.

But the top House Democrat with oversight of the Department of Homeland Security said in a letter to Ms. Napolitano that he was “dumbfounded” that such a report would be issued.

“Rightwing extremism,” the report said in a footnote on Page 2, goes beyond religious and racial hate groups and extends to “those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”

“It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration,” said the report, which also listed gun owners and veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as potential risks.”

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/16/napolitano-stands-rightwing-extremism/#ixzz2KRNEaStV
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

In reality, there are centuries of precedents where American presidents exceeded Constitutional limits on their power, going back almost as far as the birth of the Constitution. So I am a bit confused why so many folks have their undies in a bunch over the present instance.

Death By Drone, And The Sliding Scale Of Presidential Power
by Frank James
February 08, 2013 1:18 PM

An unmanned drone armed with Hellfire missiles is shown over southern Afghanistan. A Hellfire missile fired from a drone was used in 2011 to kill an American in Yemen who the Obama administration says was an al-Qaida leader. Another American died in that attack, and a 16-year-old American was killed in a separate drone strike. Enlarge image

An unmanned drone armed with Hellfire missiles is shown over southern Afghanistan. A Hellfire missile fired from a drone was used in 2011 to kill an American in Yemen who the Obama administration says was an al-Qaida leader. Another American died in that attack, and a 16-year-old American was killed in a separate drone strike.

The controversy over President Obama’s targeted-killings-by-drone policy is a reminder that the default position of presidents in times of crisis is generally to side with national security over civil liberties.

Whether it has been Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln sidestepping Congress and suspending habeas corpus to enable the arrests of scores of Confederate sympathizers, or that great liberal Franklin D. Roosevelt placing his imprimatur on the internment in camps of hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, presidents have often used their power as military commander-in-chief in ways profoundly at odds with constitutional protections of the individual.

If truth is the first casualty of war, civil liberties often come second.

A 2008 collection of essays titled Security v. Liberty, published by the Russell Sage Foundation, examines this tension throughout the nation’s history. It found no shortage of times when national security concerns — as defined by a president who was sometimes abetted by Congress and the courts — infringed on civil liberties.

A Legacy Of Power Grabs

And the examples go all the way back to the start of the republic.

Daniel Farber, the University of California, Berkeley law professor who edited the book, said he came away from the project with the sense that it’s more the rule than the exception that civil liberties are early casualties of a president’s response to national emergencies.

In an interview, Farber said:

My feeling, after looking at all that history in the book, is that that just goes with the office. It’s part of what happens when you’re sitting in the Oval Office.

Presidents, regardless of political party, or liberal versus conservative, they just don’t seem to have a lot of qualms about doing what they think is necessary for national security. So it doesn’t surprise me [that Obama has allowed Americans to be targeted in drone strikes overseas]. There have been very few exceptions.

The nation had barely begun when Congress in 1798 passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, during a time when the Federalist-led government worried both about an actual French invasion and the French Revolution introducing destabilizing ideas into the new American Republic.

Among other things, the acts made it a crime for anyone to criticize the government. This was seven years after the states ratified the First Amendment, which protected the rights of U.S. citizens to make such criticisms.
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All the more reason why we need to stop the offshoring juggernaut. Remember that the next time you buy something imported because its cheaper.

Good choice! I was going to buy that fund but got completely out of dividends as my personal rule until axes come down. Probably won’t see taxes comIng down in my lifetime.

I bought $18,000 worth of stock in VMW, AAPL, HES and DLTR a few weeks ago. VMW after its 20% haircut. All are low or no yielding. Good to sit on for five years perhaps. Wanted to diversify out of my company stock without realizing aims this year.

good choice I have that same fund in a IRA

I also own shares in the wellington fund and a corporate bond fund

and a money market in case I want to buy somthing