Bits Bucket for September 7, 2013
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.
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Name:Ben Jones
Location:Northern Arizona, United States
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“One odd thing in the report is the number of homes with equity that are in foreclosure, meaning they could have probably sold without having to go through the foreclosure process.”
But then they would have to pay rent somewhere and they couldn’t enjoy the 6-7 year extra $1,500-$2,500 discretionary income a month robo signed victim I deserve a free house lifestyle. So really, there is nothing odd about it at all.
Hope for PB County’s underwater homeowners
by Kim Miller
About 12 percent of Palm Beach County homeowners with a mortgage are on track to have enough equity to sell their homes sometime in the next 15 months without resorting to a short sale.
According to a report released today by the Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac, rising home values across the board are pushing people who have between 90 percent and 110 percent equity into a selling zone. That means a homeowner owes either 10 percent more on their mortgage than the home’s value or owes 10 percent less on the mortgage than the home’s value.
Statewide, about 13 percent of homeowners with mortgages are in the same situation, meaning more homes could be coming up for sale as buyers continue to scour a market low on supply.
But that’s the good news. A full 40 percent of Florida mortgages remain deeply underwater, meaning 25 percent or more is owed on the mortgage than the home’s value. That ranks Florida in second place, and tied with Illinois, for the highest percent of deeply underwater homes.
Nevada ranked in the top spot at 46 percent.
About 36 percent of Palm Beach County homeowners with a mortgage are deeply underwater.
“Steadily rising home prices are lifting all boats in this housing market and should spill over into more inventory of homes for sale in the coming months,” said Daren Blomquist, vice president at RealtyTrac. “Homeowners who already have ample equity are quickly building on that equity, while the 8.3 million homeowners on the fence with little or no equity are on track to regain enough equity to sell before 2015.”
That’s if prices continue to increase at the rate of 1.33 percent per month, Blomquist noted.
One odd thing in the report is the number of homes with equity that are in foreclosure, meaning they could have probably sold without having to go through the foreclosure process.
In Florida, 15 percent of the homes in foreclosure have equity.
“Nearly one in four homeowners in foreclosure nationwide has at least some equity, giving them a better chance to avoid foreclosure without resorting to a short sale — assuming they realize they have equity and don’t miss the opportunity to leverage that equity,” Blomquist said.
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 5th, 2013 at 7:48 am and is filed under Florida economy, Foreclosures, Housing affordability, Housing boom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Can’t wait for Mace the Nation’s propoganda tomorow morning with Bob Schieffer on CBS News.
Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer on CBS News
Bob’s Blog: Keeping our word on Syria
Words matter. When the President of the United States says he’ll will do something, our friends and enemies around the world take him at his word. So put aside all the arguments about whether he should have drawn a red line about Syria using chemical weapons, the fact is he said it. So if it turns out that Congress does not give him the authorization to do it and if the United States does nothing, the country will be left in a precarious and dangerous position.
Will the President’s words be recalled in Iran and North Korea when we warn them the next time not to proceed with developing nuclear weapons programs and in places like Japan, one of our strongest allies? After all we have a treaty with Japan that says if they are attacked with nuclear weapons we will respond. Will inaction against Syria cause them to question our resolve in carrying out our treaty obligations to them? How all this is viewed may be the best reason and at this point, the only real reason for Congress to give the President this authority.
Having said that, my sense is that if this vote came today, Congress would not give the President the authority to carry out a strike.
So how does the White House change that? That’s where we’ll start Sunday with our lead guest, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, who will give us the latest on how the Obama administration is breaking this all down. We’ll also hear from Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., who chairs the House Intelligence Committee and backs the president’s plan.
Plus we’ve put together one of our best panels of analysts ever: Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard, David Sanger of The New York Times, David Ignatius of the Washington Post and Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute.
http://www.cbsnews.com/face-the-nation/ - 143k
Maybe they’ll send Susan Rice out on the circuit again!
FWIW, as far as lack of liberal protesting, there are some new signs in Berkeley, on the pedestrian overcrossing on I-80. There are three big new ones, fat black letters stenciled on white, but I only remember what one of them said: “Obama, War Criminal”. This is Berkeley, mind you, but at least it’s something. Virtually guaranteed that whoever made that sign voted for Obama, probably twice.
“Virtually guaranteed that whoever made that sign voted for Obama, probably twice.”
One vote for Obama, now 2,
now 2, will you give me 2?
Two votes for Obama, now 3,
Now 3, will you give me 3?
Three votes for Obama from the man in Berkeley, now 4,
Now 4, will you give me 4?
IIRC, in the last 20 years or so, Berkeley students have established Republican clubs.
“IIRC, in the last 20 years or so, Berkeley students have established Republican clubs.”
No doubt, but I just can’t picture them throwing up these signs. They have leftist written all over them imo, but I’d love to be wrong here.
yes you can get out of that 9-5 rut, it all starts with buying a house.
Flip, baby, flip! Working is for “loosers”!
So, that means switching to a 5-9 rut instead?
Love the rut you’re in (and be careful of what you wish for).
Buy several houses (why stop at one?) and you’ll quickly learn to appreciate the rut you feel you are now stuck in.
One person’s rut is another person’s dream.
(Oh, and buy a Bed & Breakfast while you are at it.)
What is really neat about experience is one does not have to be the one to endure an experience in order to benifit from it. (i.e you do not have to be the one to touch a hot stove in order to learn that it is hot.)
“(Oh, and buy a Bed & Breakfast while you are at it.)”
If you want to reach the top of the property ladder, you’ll need to aim for a boutique winery.
yes you can get out of that 9-5 rut, it all starts with buying a house.
Meaning I’ll need to take a second job?
Rut roh!
What we don’t know about the $1.2 trillion student loan problem
Filed Tue Sep 3, 2013 2:26pm EDT
By Ryan McCarthy
President Obama recently unveiled a higher education plan that had one central element: improving data on college costs and affordability. We know that student loan debt skyrocketed in the last few decades, and a study by the New York Fed recently showed how academic debt reduces other forms of borrowing, like mortgages and car loans.
For a form of debt that’s an acknowledged drag on the economy, it’s surprisingly difficult to find good information on the number of students who can’t pay their loans back. Even basic questions about student loan defaults can be tricky to answer.
Matt Taibbi puts it this way:
“…Data about student-loan-default rates has been carefully concealed from the public and from Congress. For years, when it reported statistics about student defaults, the DOE relied upon a preposterous arbitrary calculation called the “cohort default rate,” which essentially measured the rate of default only within the first two years of graduation. In 2008, Congress passed a law forcing the DOE to switch to a theoretically more accurate three-year measurement, which it sent to Congress for the first time last year. Overnight, the picture looked a good bit grimmer. The 2009 number, based on the old two-year 2009 “cohort” rate, was 8.8 percent. When the new three-year number came out, the rate had jumped to 13.4 percent.
The basics:
•$1.2 trillion — the estimated amount in outstanding student debt.
•$260 billion — what that amount was in 2004.
•37 million — Americans with student loan debt outstanding, according to estimates from The New York Fed.
•$28,000 — The typical 2012 college graduate’s debt load upon Graduation Day, according to Hamilton Place Strategies.
•$9,000 — That debt load in 1993.
•$810 billion and $670 billion — The total outstanding auto and credit card debt held by Americans, respectively, putting student debt into a clear lead.
The default rates:
•13.4% — the national default rate for borrowers whose loans entered repayment from fall 2009 - fall 2010. (This is the first year for which the government has released three-year default data.)
•22.7% — defaults in the first three years for graduates from for-profit colleges. “For-profit institutions had the highest average three-year default rates at 22.7 percent, with public institutions following at 11 percent and private non-profit institutions at 7.5 percent,” according to the Department of Education.
•Nearly 47% of all defaults were from for-profit colleges, the Institute for College Access & Success said, even though those institutions have just a 13% share of college enrollment.
Another measure is Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s recent calculations,
•7 million — Number of student loan borrowers in default, out of an estimated 37 million total. That includes public and private loans, according to the CFPB.
•4.4 million — Number of FFEL program borrowers who are in default.
•19% of borrowers from the government’s legacy FFEL program are in default.
What’s the Obama plan trying to do about this?
The plan promises a “Datapalooza” to “catalyze new private-sector tools, services, and apps to help students evaluate and select colleges.”
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/09/midweek-pm-reads-3/ - 64k -
An employer’s dream: Thousands of very hungry college graduates desperate for employment.
Get ‘em hungry an keep ‘em hungry and you will own their lives.
Churn & burn a few and the others will toe the line. If done correctly then the message will not only be sent to the newbies but it will also be sent to the multitudes of oldsters that have been around for a while.
(Enter plug for unions here: __________)
The unions don’t care about the young, new hires. They routinely slice up the pie in favor of the older more lazy workers with the seniority.
I GOT MINES!
They routinely slice up the pie in favor of the older more lazy workers with the seniority.
Ignoring the “more lazy” attack, I concur that unions who engage in preserving their existing benefits for older workers by throwing newer/younger workers under the bus are showing their true colors, and have lost their way.
That’s fair, my more lazy comment was just from my own personal experience.
I will add my two cents here. In working with union “goons”
and their supervisors I have come to the conclusion that there are good union workers and bad workers. But more importantly there are a lot of bad supervisors that got promoted mostly due to the Peter Principle effect. Invariably when you have bad supervisors the good union workers get a bad rap.
What ever government touches - it destroys.
See:
Healthcare
Housing
Higher education
GM
Detroit
etc.
What ever government touches - it destroys ??
Or enriches…See;
Military complex
Big Banks
Big Corp
black people
Why is Uncle Sam so intent on getting black people to use subprime loans to buy houses?
Same reason the CIA wants to sell them crack.
Border Industrial complex
Law Enforcement Industrial complex
“•$28,000 — The typical 2012 college graduate’s debt load upon Graduation Day, according to Hamilton Place Strategies.
•$9,000 — That debt load in 1993.”
I had $22,000 at 8% of student loan debt in 1998, and I paid it off in 5-yrs while also supporting a stay at home wife and two children. However, we had to move to flyover country where the cost of living was lower, and we didn’t buy new cars, electronics, etc., but I did have a stem job.
Many of today’s graduates have discipline and maturity problems, IMHO.
“Many of today’s graduates have discipline and maturity problems, IMHO.”
My opinion also. I think it is because college is considered by many as to be just an extension of high school. You don’t grow up in college you just extend your childhood for a bit longer - four years or so longer. Then, after graduation, you go out into the “real world”, and if the real world isn’t all that comfortable for you then you find a way to go back into the world that IS comfortable for you which is the academic world that you just left, which means you furthur delay the solving of your discipline and maturity problems and you rack up a lot more debt in the process.
If you are a student then you are on the journey of “becoming something” and as long as you are on this journey of becoming something you are not expected to arrive - you are only expected to arrive after you have completed your journey.
So the game the professional student plays is one whereby he is always on the journey to a destination but never arrives at this destination, and if it looks as if he will (gasp) arrive at this destination then he just may change his major and thus change the destination and hence will keep him on his journey - which is really the place in which he wants to be because this is the place where he is most comfortable.
then you have the ones perpetually starting out, but can’t complete one semester without a meltdown. meanwhile more loan money down the rathole.
I agree with the “discipline and maturity” issues.
Add to this mix that the knowledge they really have after they graduate is minimal due to various issues: grade inflation, graduating large masses just because they paid the tuition etc.
At any rate more power to the disciplined students - just look their competition - they are able to get jobs easily.
Another thing the newly minted graduates are short on “patience” in a professional STEM career. The engineering field these days is populated with sales type MBAs instead of engineers!
One of the self-preserving tactics used by senior engineers is not to leave a trace of their knowledge. The result is that no one has a clue about solving engineering problems. The company then would hire many people to do the job that a single person handled. Oh the irony!
The result is that no one has a clue about solving engineering problems. The company then would hire many people to do the job that a single person handled. Oh the irony!
And real engineering turns slowly from almost-a-science back to a craft in response to management tactics.
I agree with the “discipline and maturity” issues.
I’ve observed that the latest generation of college graduates are lacking in people skills, so collaborative problem solving is suffering. I’m not sure when the disengagement first develops, but it’s a real issue.
It appears they all like to lean back and put their feet on the desk and play with the smart phones given the opportunity, and if you are talking with one of them and their phone alerts with a new text message our conversation STOPS while they check the message. WTF, can’t wait 5-minutes? Really?!
I’m not at all surprised by the desire to off-shore.
One thing that gets me with the new graduates is that once they work on a “specialty” project that required serious engineering work that was done with the help of knowledgeable folks, these guys think they are experts and want to move on.
That’s what employers reward. Nobody cares about the “knowledgeable folks” who are going nowhere in their careers.
“•$28,000 — The typical 2012 college graduate’s debt load upon Graduation Day, according to Hamilton Place Strategies.
•$9,000 — That debt load in 1993.”
CPI-U — Annual Averages
1993 144.5
2012 229.594
Typical 2012 college graduate’s debt load deflated to 1993 dollars:
$28,000*(144.5/229.594) = $17,622.
– STILL NEARLY TWICE THE 1993 GRADUATE’S DEBT LOAD AFTER ADJUSTING FOR INFLATION!
Most people under 25 have those problems. The forebrain hasn’t finished growing until then.
I had something like $20k (Masters was final degree), and my wife something like $55k (law degree as final).
We lived in crappy apartments and drove crappy cars for a few years…within 5 years, we were done paying off the loans.
You need to be willing to have delayed gratification…after my wife was done, she commented on how some of the partners at her firm were still paying off their loans (driving MUCH nicer cars, obviously).
We were debt free until we purchased our house…not sure I’ll rush to pay off the 3.75% fixed loan…
How long did it take the size of the problem to go from “nearly $1 trillion” to $1.2 trillion” (20% increase!)?
Big Data is sh!t data when the data has been gamed massaged and manipulated. This is basically where we are at with most government data. Once somebody looks at the figures and says, ooh that doesn’t look good, the massaging begins until the metric becomes worthless.
Getting at the “true numbers” is harder and harder.
FWIW, data no matter the quantity is just data, which usually has little value. Only when data has been gathered and organized into information does it attain fundamental value.
“…data no matter the quantity is just data…”
…data no matter the quantity are just data…
“These weren’t foreign-born America-hating terrorists. These were native-born America-hating terrorists.”
And as we’ve all been told, they are the very, very worst kind of terrorists.
‘Sovereign citizens’ assault Port Everglades
By Robert Nolin, Sun Sentinel
8:07 p.m. EDT, September 5, 2013
Amid the explosions, smoke, roaring vehicles and chattering gunfire of a terrorist attack Thursday afternoon at Port Everglades, one fact became chillingly clear:
These weren’t foreign-born America-hating terrorists. These were native-born America-hating terrorists. And they were making things difficult for the good guys.
“They’re moving, they’re taking positions, they have superior firepower,” said Sheriff’s Deputy Richard Saito. “They’re clearly very well-trained, very well-motivated.”
Of course it wasn’t a real terrorist attack, but rather a large-scale SWAT training exercise mounted by the Broward Sheriff’s Office involving boats, bus, bombs and booby-trapped hostages.
“This is really a worst case scenario,” said Saito, the SWAT team member who concocted the training storyline.
In Saito’s plot, seven “sovereign citizens,” or militia-styled revolutionaries who advocate the government’s overthrow, assault the port by boat. Their goal: steal a shipment of arms and ammunition transiting through the facility.
Initially thwarted by deputies, the terrorists seize hostages, (I think they got Colorado and Alpha) wound a deputy, and leave a backpack full of explosives by Terminal 22. Then things get serious.
The terrorists strap bombs to the hostages, (Run Alpha run!) take over a bus, (Get off the bus Colorado! These are armed Teabillies!) and engage in a full-blown gunfight with SWAT team members. The bad guys use paintball guns. The helmeted, body-armor-clad SWAT team responds with simulated ammo.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/broward/fort-lauderdale/fl-port-everglades-sovereign-citizens-20130905,0,7970718.story - -
You can be a libertarian, or (in politically safer terms) an advocate of Thomas Jefferson’s ideas, and not call out for a violent overthrow of government and continue to have a security clearance. 100% of the libertarians who understand the N.A.P. do not call for violent overthrow of the government. 100% are for self defense though. I believe in civil disobedience, combined with self defense. If a SWAT team targets me and shoots at me for being a voluntaryist and for practicing peace, I will regard that as a threat on my life and shoot back.
Buy now or risk being debt free forever!
‘The chief author of the Patriot Act announced Friday that he’s joined a lawsuit seeking to stop the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of records, saying that the Obama administration is going far beyond what he intended when he wrote the law in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.’
‘Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Wisconsin Republican and chief sponsor of the Patriot Act, filed a amicus curiae brief on Wednesday saying he was misled about the scope of snooping the government intended to use the Patriot Act for, and said he would not have backed reauthorizing key parts of the law if he had known about it.’
“This misinterpretation of the law threatens our First, Second and Fourth Amendment rights,” Mr. Sensenbrenner said in a statement after he filed his legal brief. “Congress never intended this. I will rein in the abuse of both the Patriot Act and the U.S. Constitution with the support of the American public.”
‘His brief raises serious separation of powers questions over how far the president can stretch a law beyond what Congress specifically intended. Mr. Sensenbrenner said Section 215 of the act, which granted the government the ability to collect records from companies, was meant to apply only when the government thought the records were important to a specific investigation.’
‘The National Security Agency has interpreted the section to mean it can demand and store years’ worth of data about phone calls, and later go back and look at the relevant data as part of investigations. In its own court filing last month, the government said its approach is reasonable.’
“Even if collecting telephony metadata involved a Fourth Amendment ‘search’ (it does not), the Fourth Amendment bars only ‘unreasonable’ searches and seizures, whereas the collection of metadata at issue here is reasonable under the standard the Supreme Court applies to assess suspicionless searches that serve special government needs,” the Justice Department said.’
Mr. Sensenbrenner, though, said that amounts to a “dragnet” of Americans’ records that has “frightening implications.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/6/patriot-act-author-sues-frightening-obama-abuses/#ixzz2eDRijePM
It’s kinda funny to watch the war mongers with this Syria thing. John McCain’s eyes bugging out while the citizens tell him to get bent. Obama acting like Bush with the WMD deal; ‘Oh, I didn’t say red line’ ‘let’s call it all off’. Freaking losers.
Sensenbrenner? Whaaaaaaa?
Every time this guy opens his mouth he sounds like a Stasi officer. Patriot act, real ID…. this guy is deep in the state/internal security apparatus.
Just out of curiosity, Ben, have you ever received a government request for info on any posters? Or can’t you say?
I think they can find out without asking Ben.
I’m sure they can, but they can probably do so with Facebook, Goog and MS too, so why even bother with requests, then? Oh, right, it’s the law.
If the government wanted information on any of us posters it would just take it.
Why would they ask, why would they want to leave a trail?
Because supposedly they DO ask, according to stories about how many requests FB, Goog, Verizon etc have had, so I was just curious.
Of course, I think it’s more of a demand than a request.
Or a red herring. Snowden showed us that the government can (and does) track everything we do. If lots of noise can be made about the legality of this and that then attention can be directed and diverted to squabbling over rules
What is nifty and neat for the guys at the top who run the NSA is they get to read everybody’s mail - they get to learn the nitty-gritty on everybody, they get to learn where the bodies are buried, who is in the closet, etc. And if anybody in Congress decides to get outraged and decides to make noises about reigning in the NSA then they had better be squeaky-clean else they will be “outed”. And this fact gives to the NSA guys a very secure lock on the positions that they hold and for the funding they get to enjoy.
And because everything is held secret for “National Security” reasons nobody will ever really know the truth (except for maybe a hundred years from now).
‘have you ever received a government request for info on any posters’
No. Years ago i was getting emails from people in the military saying they couldn’t access this blog from their military connections. I asked the web guy helping me at the time and he figured out what they had done and fixed it. Really strange.
Here’s what I don’t understand about Syria. Everybody is acting like the US is an impartial actor. How the media pretends to not know the US has actively been aiding Al Qaeda there for years? So this dictator is winning this proxy war, and he’s going to use chemical weapons just as UN chemical weapon inspectors show up a few miles away? But the government steps over this and everybody buys it. After all, Al Qaeda may post youtubes of beheadings and eat the lungs of Syrian soldiers, but to suggest Al Qaeda would use a false flag attack is a crazy conspiracy theory!
If they cared, couldn’t the enessay use their newfangled hacking tools to uncover the identities of all posters?
The military folks on the line are very active on the net, or at least they were. It’s their connection to family, friends, home, etc. In the early days of the Iraq conflict, I used to get the occasional customer from the military pretty much any time I had anything unique for sale on line that was military related, I remember selling to one guy who was stationed in Mosul when I had an old painting depicting Roman centurions engaging with Barbarians. He told me his connection was sort of erractic. But that hasn’t happened in quite a while.
As to Syria, there’s something majorly different about the public mood toward this conflict. Maybe the media pretends the US is an impartial actor, but my take is not so many people are buying it, which is progress since 9/11. The joke about Al-Qaeda is that it is “Al-CIA-Duh”. More people know that now.
I am hopeful the administration can be reined in on this. Kerry seems to really have come unhinged on the subject of Syria, though.
but to suggest Al Qaeda would use a false flag attack is a crazy conspiracy theory! ??
Yeah, I am suspect also….Its an attempt to drag us in…Preferably unilaterally that way we bought the whole thing…
Like explosives, chemical weapons are usually produced in unique batches with chemical signatures that can be used to trace effectiveness and/or origin. UN inspectors could match collected samples with stockpiles given the opportunity. Certainly more to this story than what has appeared in the major media outlets.
So what will they show when the stockpiles are compared? Where did they originate? Oh I guess we won’t know once they are destroyed by missiles.
The weirdest “block” I have ever seen on my work computer was the homepage of the Smithsonian Museum of American History. I wanted to check if they had extended summer hours one year and the home page was blocked. That went away a while ago. Currently (well, as of a few weeks ago) I can’t access the list of fall lectures at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Mr. Sensenbrenner, though, said that amounts to a “dragnet” of Americans’ records that has “frightening implications.”
Gotta love it.. looks like people know the root of the problem (patriot act) and neocons like him are sweating a little….
The one thing I did like about Sensenbrenner was his vehement opposition to illegal immigration, he drove the advocates crazy.
Mr. Sensenbrenner, though, said that amounts to a “dragnet” of Americans’ records that has “frightening implications.”
There are no “frightening implications” here. As long as you are not “lilly white”, you don’t associate with anyone who has any connections to the name Ron Paul, the words Tea Party or Patriot and you donate heavily to the Democratic party.
“John McCain’s eyes bugging out while the citizens tell him to get bent”
That town hall was priceless. I work 5 minutes from Barr library and if I hadn’t been busy I would have gone. Not sure how the meetings in Prescott and Tucson went, but that crowd was certainly in no mood for his BS.
McCain is a perfect example of these imperial senator positions. Once in, it’s very hard to get them out no matter what they do. Remember when Arizona grew a little backbone and passed some immigration measures? Now McCain is leading the charge on a full amnesty. How many of you heard about this:
‘The Arizona Department of Public Safety seized $1 million worth of methamphetamine during a traffic stop Monday night. Two undocumented immigrants were arrested on drug charges after officers discovered more than 34 pounds of methamphetamine in their vehicle.’
‘Robson said both suspects told DPS officers during an interview that they were in the United States illegally. However, their cases have not been turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security has not issued an immigration detainer.’
http://azdailysun.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/dps-makes-million-meth-bust-in-flagstaff-traffic-stop/article_425f8b12-1526-11e3-8097-0019bb2963f4.html
‘Guy Calls for John McCain to be Arrested and Tried for Treason’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB2lh6N0m4w
“imperial senator positions”
A beautiful accurate arrangement of words. Thank you.
We limit the president to two eight-year terms, to prevent an imperial presidency.
Congressional terms are completely unlimited. Thus we have an imperial Congress. That’s the real scandal.
Gingrich ran on the Contract With America back in the mid-90s. Term limits for congress was one of the bullet points in the contract. As soon as the Republicans took over, they had one vote on the issue, it was defeated, and that was the last we ever heard of it.
It was a milestone in my education of how politics work.
+1 Ben
I can’t wait until we have armed men in squad-size displays of paramilitary force wearing body armor and jackets emblazoned with POLICE in big, bold letters, to read our water meters around here. God knows they already have the SWAT teams and the funding to do it.
Gold miners near Chicken cry foul over ‘heavy-handed’ EPA raids
Sean Doogan|
September 3, 2013
When agents with the Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force surged out of the wilderness around the remote community of Chicken wearing body armor and jackets emblazoned with POLICE in big, bold letters, local placer miners didn’t quite know what to think.
Did it really take eight armed men and a squad-size display of paramilitary force to check for dirty water? Some of the miners, who run small businesses, say they felt intimidated.
Others wonder if the actions of the agents put everyone at risk. When your family business involves collecting gold far from nowhere, unusual behavior can be taken as a sign someone might be trying to stage a robbery. How is a remote placer miner to know the people in the jackets saying POLICE really are police?
Miners suggest it might have been better all around if officials had just shown up at the door — as they used to do — and said they wanted to check the water.
“This seems to have been a heavy-handed, and heavy-armor approach,” said Murkowski. “Why was it so confrontational? The EPA really didn’t have any good answers for this.”
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/20130903/gold-miners-near-chicken-cry-foul-over-heavy-handed-epa-raids - 135k -
Ever since the FBI assassination of one of the Weavers (Randy Weaver’s wife?) in Idaho a couple of decades ago our government thugs grew fangs and were paramilitary. It’s very frightening. They are supposed to be servants of the taxpayers, not paramilitary menaces against innocent civilians. When will Americans have enough of the tyranny, usurpations, and bullying? Retread the first couple paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence before it is banned.
Hi. I’ve noticed a big spike in listings in here in suburban Boston. Strange. Like the spring rush but in the fall. People trying to get out before more rises in the mortgage rates? A couple of times this summer I was really tempted to buy a place. There were several that suited my needs perfectly. But my (relatively) old bones and gut tell me to wait some more.
Cue HA in 3, 2, 1 and…
Indeed.
The signs are growing like weeds. And we haven’t gotten to the discussion of the weeds growing around houses without the signs.
It’s always interesting to see what a routine Google search on the words “housing bubble” will produce:
News for housing bubble
Shiller Warns of Housing Bubble After 225% Surge: Brazil Credit
Bloomberg - 1 day ago
Robert Shiller, who predicted the collapse of the U.S. housing market, is warning that a bubble is emerging in Brazil at a time when a sluggish …
Scotiabank CEO says rate hikes best tool to avert housing bubble
Reuters - 1 day ago
If Norway’s housing market isn’t a bubble, what is?
Quartz - 18 hours ago
How did Liberace’s harpsichord gig go last nite? Did he even show up?
I dunno, but didn’t Liberace’s house sell for some dismally low figure? Thought I saw that in the news.
The conservative also promised a crack down on asylum seekers.
Conservatives sweep to Australia election victory
Associated Press | Sep 7, 2013 | Rod McGuirk
Australia’s conservative opposition swept to power Saturday, ending six years of Labor Party rule and winning over a disenchanted public by promising to end a hated tax on carbon emissions, boost a flagging economy and bring about political stability after years of Labor infighting.
“I know that Labor hearts are heavy across the nation tonight, and as your prime minister and as your parliamentary leader of the great Australian Labor Party, I accept responsibility,” Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said in a speech to supporters, after calling opposition leader Tony Abbott to concede defeat. “I gave it my all, but it was not enough for us to win.”
Australia’s new government has promised to slash foreign aid spending as it concentrates on returning the budget to surplus. Labor spent billions of dollars on stimulus projects to avoid recession. But declining corporate tax revenues from the mining slowdown forced Labor to break a promise to return the budget to surplus in the last fiscal year.
While in America…
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Illegal Aliens Disrupt Town Hall Meeting, Demand Citizenship, Chant ‘We’ll Be Back’
Stand With Arizona | 09-06-2013 | John Hill
Arrogant illegal alien protesters continue to disrupt the town hall meetings of Republicans, demanding citizenship.
In Sugarland, TX, outside Houston, illegals interrupted the questions of citizens and tried to take over Rep. Pete Olson’s (R-TX-22) immigration and ObamaCare town hall. The organizer even referred to themselves as “undocumented citizens”.
Their arrogance is at an all-time high, thanks to Obama’s decimation of ICE, and blanket refusal to detain ANY illegal aliens in the United States.
The supporters themselves recorded and posted the video below, presumably to make themselves look good. We think it has the opposite effect.
Austerity is REALLY kicking in…
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Number of Gov’t Workers Up 324,000 in One Month – Private Sector Down 278,000
CNS News | 9/6/2013
The number of workers employed by the government went up 324,000 between July and August while the number of workers in the private sector declined 278,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In the employment numbers released today, the BLS shows there were 20,041,000 government workers in July 2013. In August, that number had climbed to 20,365,000 – an increase of 324,000 people on the government payroll.
At the same time, July to August 2013, the workforce in the private sector fell from 113,164,000 to 112,886,000 – a decline of 278,000.
Where do you get your figures? Mine are from the Washington Post.
Yours appear vague at best and fabricated at worst.
Government jobs are (still) the problem
By Neil Irwin, Published: September 6 at 12:33 pm
One of the reasons for quiet optimism about the economy over the last few months has been the possibility that state and local governments have finished their long retrenchment and that government hiring might soon contribute to job creation.
Never mind.
From July 2008 to January 2013, the sector shed more than 737,000 jobs. Had the jobs merely been maintained, the unemployment rate would be as much has half a percentage point lower. Indeed, the state and local pullback is one significant reason that this recovery has been weaker than those in the past. Here is a chart, prepared by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, that compares the progression of employment by this sector with past economic recoveries.
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A big part of the reason why the August jobs report was disappointing is that the Labor Department revised down June and July job growth estimates by 74,000 jobs. And more than half of that, 38,000, was due to government job losses.
Add it all up, and the picture for government employment is murkier. The total number of state and local government jobs is now below 3,000 below its April level. The federal government looks even worse; with the sequester spending cuts and an ongoing contraction by the U.S. Postal Service, federal government employment fell by 36,000 jobs since April.
In other words, the onus for job creation is almost entirely on the private sector, which is being whipsawed by forces of its own. Neither Uncle Sam nor the state and local governments around the country are doing much to help the sluggish job market.
Yours appear vague at best and fabricated at worst.
Did you note the CNS news source? Their stuff is generally vague at best and fabricated at worst.
I think that somebody mentioned here in the last couple of days that school districts often “fire” teachers and other employees in June and then re-hire them in August. The BLS usually issues seasonally adjusted numbers that filter out those fluctuations. Of course, a news article could always be written using the unadjusted employment numbers.
Co op question:
Is it standard procedure for co ops to to require members to purchase their units in cash?
My friends mom purchased a unit (for cash) in a building in Detroit around 2002 for 100K. Tried to sell and could not get an offer above 40K.
Mom has been moved to an assisted living situation; son has power of attorney…
What should he do?
Co op rules only allow you to rent out your unit for 3 years, then it must:
a) be sold
b) you must live in it and pay condo fees ($1400.00 a month)
c) let it sit empty and you pay condo fees ($1400.00 a month)
Its a nice unit in a secure 15 story building on the Detroit river.
I had friends who tried to get a mortgage on a co-op in Chicago years ago. The co-op board had no rules about cash purchases, but no lender would touch it. In a foreclosure situation any buyer would have to be approved by the co-op board, and a lender wouldn’t want to deal with that.
The requirements should be written out in the rules. Many coops require a substantial down payment 20% - 50%. Others even do require all cash / no financing. Many coops can also kill the deal to maintain sale prices/ comps. That is they could kill the $40K deal even if it was all cash.
Actually if I every buy again (maybe for retirement in NY) I would pick a coop over condo. Prices are lower because typically financial requirements more stringent. A well run coop (and there are lots) can provide a good place to live. You can make sure you don’t get an absentee landlord renting to 15 college kids have parties 24/7, etc… Some of the more well run coops like where my cousin lives never have apartments go on the market. There is enough demand that the places are sold by word of mouth.
Quite the difference from the 1970s when NY was in its death throes and you could n’t give away real estate there.
I remember when some swank co-op in NYC wouldn’t let Keith Richards buy a unit in it.
Co op rules only allow you to rent out your unit for 3 years, then
What are the units renting for?
Personally, I’d take what I could get while I could get it. Even $40K is way better than nothing, and the mother clearly doesn’t need the place anymore.
$1400/mo in fees??? WTF? That’s more than it would cost to service the mortgage on such a place, assuming that you could obtain one.
Yeah, I thought $1400 a month was kinda high, but I think it includes everything like electricity, heat, water, security…
The son is smart, but “magical thinking” may cloud his logic when it comes to real estate. Since its Detroit, I doubt the unit will ever sell for $100K in his life time.
Also, co ops can have some “suspicious” politics. Check this out: The mom was having some issues with dementia. I won’t go into details, but after a few incidents, the management was able to get her declared a “ward of the state” and force her out of the unit and into a “care facility” which she could not leave.
When the son called the management of the building to find out why his mom was not answering the phone, management REFUSED to tell him where his mom was.
He got a call from a nursing home telling him they had his mom.
So how did the nursing home get the sons number?
See what I mean?
By this time she had been made a ward of the state and the son had to get a lawyer and spend 6 months working to get custody of his mom fighting “the system”.
I smell EVIL.
He suspects it was all designed to help them “snatch” her unit?
Don’t most multi housing buildings require an emergency contact number/next of kin info be on file with the management?
What kind of people would allow a woman with dementia to be removed from her paid for unit, made a ward of the state, and detained at a “care facility” without alerting her children?
“He suspects it was all designed to help them “snatch” her unit?”
+1 This likely wasn’t their first victim either.
Coop fees typically include taxes.
Hmmm…sounds like we’ve found one class of at-least-somewhat desirable housing that is immune to government price fixing.
Occasionally there is a post about housing prices cratering 42%. Here is an example about house value cratering 100%, because the house is literally cratering.
“Sinking home leads to sunken dreams
Couple urging bylaw changes after slope failure on their land leaves them financially ruined
APRIL CUNNINGHAM
TELEGRAPH-JOURNAL
SAINT JOHN NB- The same day Terry and Lori Finnigan moved into their Manawagonish Road home - a sprawling, 6,000-squarefoot house with vistas of the Bay of Fundy - they noticed a serious crack in their neighbour’s foundation.
Four years later, the Finnigans are left with a worthless property, drained savings, bad credit and crippling health issues they believe are tied to stress.
The home, which cost $310,000, is now slowly sinking over the side of a cliff.
In yellow spray paint, Lori has scrawled the words: “Warning: Slope Failure” on the front window of what was supposed to be a home to grow old in…”
and it goes on. The contractor put 800 loads of fill in trying to stabilize the house next door but nothing worked. Lawsuits are being fought. The couple blames the city. The home inspection never mentioned the possibility of slope failure.
This hillside is a couple of miles longer. If you drive along below it, you see lots of evidence of fill being put here and there, attempts to shore up the hillside with rock etc. There have been other newspaper stories over the years about slope problems.
They are learning a nasty lesson.
Terry and Lori Finnigan shouldlook on the bright side, their house is only “slowly sinking over the side of a cliff”, this dude’s house swallowed him in the middle of the night without warning.
A loud crash, then nothing: Sinkhole swallows Florida man
By Michael Pearson and John Zarrella CNN
Tue March 5, 2013
Seffner, Florida (CNN) — The ground just swallowed him up.
A Florida man fell into a sinkhole that opened suddenly Thursday night beneath the bedroom of his suburban Tampa home, calling out to his brother for help as he fell, the brother said Friday.
“I ran toward my brother’s bedroom because I heard my brother scream,” Jeremy Bush told CNN’s “AC360.”
“Everything was gone. My brother’s bed, my brother’s dresser, my brother’s TV. My brother was gone.”
Bush frantically tried to rescue his brother, Jeff Bush, by standing in the hole and digging at the rubble with a shovel until police arrived and pulled him out, saying the floor was still collapsing.
“I couldn’t get him out. I tried so hard. I tried everything I could,” he said through tears. “I could swear I heard him calling out.”
Jeremy Bush and four other people, including a 2-year-old child, escaped from the blue, one-story 1970s-era home in Seffner, a Tampa suburb.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/01/us/florida-sinkhole -
Building on the side or foot of a steep hill is bad feng shui.
Forget Friday’s bond rally off of the weaker-than-expected jobs report. Because while the 10-year yield dropped below 2.9 percent on Friday, Brent Schutte, market strategist at BMO Private Bank, says we’ve hardly seen the start of the rate rise. That would mean that bond prices, which move inversely to rates, have much further to fall.
“For all the talk of a cult of equities, I think there’s a cult of bonds,” Schutte said on Thursday’s ” Futures Now .” “We had this great 30-year bond bull market that made people think there was no reason not to buy bonds, and that things were going to be OK.”
But in Schutte’s view, “4 percent (on 10-year Treasurys) somewhere around the end of the year to early next year would be a good intermediate-term level. And if you look over the longer term, I don’t think that 6 or 7 percent is out of the question.”
(Read more: US yields dip below 3 percent watershed after tame jobs data )
Schutte presented three reasons why a 7 percent yield wouldn’t surprise him.
Reason one: The economy is improving
While in recent years, low rates have been associated with a strong stock market, rates and stocks have historically tended to rise together. After all, as the economy improves, it is natural for people to demand a greater return on their investment.
And Schutte points out that the economic picture is significantly brighter than people acknowledge. “I think people are missing the idea that Europe and Japan and places like that”-in other words, areas that have caused economic anxiety-”are actually becoming less of a headwind. And so you’ve had this growth” in the U.S. economy.
That’s why Schutte ties his rate thesis to gross domestic product, which is often considered the strongest indicator of economic strength. “If you get 5 to 6 percent nominal GDP growth, I think 6 to 7 percent on a 10-year Treasury is perfectly reasonable,” he said.
(Read more: Here’s why Marc Faber likes bonds more than gold )
Reason two: The Fed will taper in September
Schutte is a strong believer in a September tapering of quantitative easing. Not only is the economy improving, but “you’ve run out of the benefits of QE. It’s done what it’s supposed to do.”
In addition, Schutte points out that in fiscal 2014, there will simply be fewer bonds for the Federal Reserve to buy.
“When the government’s running 1 trillion-plus deficits, the Fed was probably thinking that they might want to buy up some debt to keep people from being crowded out by government debt,” Schutte said. “Now, the Congressional Budget Office’s budget deficit is expected to be $560 billion for fiscal year 2014. If the Fed keeps on buying at their current pace of $45 billion per month in the Treasury market, they will essentially buy the whole debt of the U.S. I don’t think that’s a place they want to be in.”
And tapering could certainly be expected to raise rates. “The Fed has pretty much been the buyer of Treasurys, and a non-price-sensitive buyer,” Schutte noted. Once the Fed moves out of the market, “it turns over to people who have the desire to earn a real rate of return.”
Reason three: Inflation is coming
Inflation is a normal part of a growing economy. And as Schutte noted, “Just because there’s not inflation now, that doesn’t mean there won’t be.”
After all, much of the money that the Fed has injected into the market has been stuck on bank balance sheets. “There are $2 trillion worth of reserves that are threatening to come out on to the economy, and I think they will eventually lead to inflation,” he said.
Inflation tends to increase bond yields, because a higher rate of inflation means that investors need to a greater rate of return just to receive the same effective sum on maturation.
And according to Schutte, Fed priorities almost make inflation a guarantee.
“I think the Fed has telegraphed that they have an asymmetric risk for deflation as opposed to inflation, and they’re going to stick around too long, by definition, because of that,” Schutte said.
All in all, Schutte thinks that we could see a 7 percent yield “in the next couple of years.”
Posted on January 28, 2013
Obama OK’s Subprime Borrowers for Prime Loans
Paul Sperry, Investor’s Business Daily, January 14, 2013
New mortgage rules issued last week by the administration will have the effect of forcing lenders to approve prime loans to borrowers who would normally only qualify for subprime loans carrying higher interest rates and fees to cover the added risk of default.
Banks are already under renewed pressure from federal prosecutors and regulators to make home loans to low-income borrowers with blemished credit as part of the administration’s stepped-up enforcement of anti-redlining laws.
Before the mortgage crisis, lenders were able to hedge losses by placing such homebuyers in higher-cost subprime mortgages—something the government at one point actually encouraged as part of a strategy to expand credit opportunities for lower-income minorities and close the racial “mortgage gap.”
But under the new mortgage rules, loans with subprime features do not fall under the official government definition of “qualified mortgages,” and therefore do not provide a “safe harbor” against lawsuits and other action.
As a result, analysts warn lenders may end up having to “subsidize” riskier borrowers at the expense of other customers.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Dodd-Frank Act-created agency that wrote the 800-page mortgage regulation, has decreed that the way to distinguish a prime loan from a subprime loan is by the interest rate charged, even though the main distinguishing feature of a subprime loan is a sub-660 credit score.
“Under its tortured definition of ‘prime,’ a borrower can have no down payment, a credit score of 580, and a debt (-to-income) ratio over 50%,” as long as the borrower is charged a prime rate, said former Fannie Mae chief credit officer Edward Pinto.
Mortgages carrying a prime rate, or one within 1.5 percentage points of the national average, will have the strongest level of legal protection, according to the regulator. Analysts say this rule effectively limits lenders’ ability to price for risk. Lenders who charge rates above the 1.5-point threshold open themselves up to legal liability.
Starting in January 2014, when the new rules take effect, borrowers who default on nonqualifying home loans will have the power to “raise a foreclosure defense” against banks, according to Joseph Barloon, a lawyer for New York-based Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.
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It seems that federally-guaranteed subprime lending below the conforming loan limit is creating havoc.
Investment Banking | Financial Services
September 6, 2013, 1:32 pm
A Mortgage Market Out of Balance
By PETER EAVIS
Interest rates on mortgages for expensive homes have fallen below those for smaller mortgages that the government promises to repay if the borrower defaults.
Nick Ut/Associated Press
The vast system that provides home loans to millions of Americans has long been a strange place. A surprising development has made it even stranger.
Recently, interest rates on mortgages for expensive homes have fallen below those for smaller mortgages that the government promises to repay if the borrower defaults.
On Thursday, for instance, Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, was offering to make the larger so-called jumbo loans at a fixed rate of 4.625 percent for 30 years. That compared with the 4.875 percent that the bank was charging on fixed 30-year loans that qualify for government backing.
On the surface, these moves in rates make little sense. The jumbo mortgages do not have a taxpayer guarantee of repayment. Anyone holding such loans relies solely on the creditworthiness of the borrowers to be repaid. Most of the jumbo borrowers are wealthy and have good credit scores, so they are not that high a risk right now. Still, their credit probably isn’t as strong as that of the federal government, which guarantees the smaller loans. As a result, those loans, often called conforming mortgages, should have lower rates than those on jumbo mortgages. Indeed, as far back as industry participants can remember, that has been the case.
The fact that jumbos are now cheaper points to dysfunctions in the mortgage market, which is going through a jarring adjustment that appears to be influencing guaranteed mortgages more than jumbo loans.
Since the financial crisis of 2008, the mortgage market has had two substantial sources of government support. First, government entities have been backing a far higher proportion of mortgages than in recent decades. Banks make these loans but don’t hold them. They package them into bonds and sell nearly all of them to investors, like pension and mutual funds. The second support has come from Federal Reserve. As part of its efforts to invigorate the economy, the Fed has been buying large amounts of those taxpayer-backed mortgage bonds. That helped bring about a big decline in mortgage rates in the grim years after the crisis.
But the Fed, believing the economy is gaining strength, has signaled that it may soon buy fewer of these bonds. Their price has fallen. This pushes up the yields on the bonds, which in turn drives up mortgage rates for people taking out new conforming home loans.
The rates on jumbo loans have also risen over the last few months. But because fewer jumbo mortgages trade in markets, they are less vulnerable to big swings in investor sentiment. That is not the case for guaranteed loans, which investors have sold heavily in recent weeks.
Of course, once uncertainty about future interest rates dissipates, and markets settle down, the rate on guaranteed mortgages could fall back below that of jumbo loans.
But policy makers have reason to be unnerved. If jumbo rates remain lower for a long time, it could mean that banks have begun to believe that there will be lower losses from defaults on jumbo loans than on conforming mortgages. That might seem a preposterous stance, given the government guarantee on conforming loans.
Still, there are circumstances under which the conforming loans might be riskier for the banks that make them — and recent efforts to overhaul the mortgage market may heighten that risk.
The government guarantees the conforming loans, but with one big caveat. If there are problems with those loans that lead to default — if the bank didn’t properly check a borrower’s income, for example — the government can effectively send them back to the bank that made them. Returning loans can saddle the lender with hefty losses, which has already happened after the government rejected many shoddy precrisis loans. As a result, mortgage experts say, banks have since the crisis charged borrowers extra interest to cover the risk of losses from taking loans back.
Amid all this, it’s possible to see why banks might come to believe that jumbo loans will result in fewer losses than conforming loans. From the outset, jumbo loans may simply experience fewer defaults than conforming mortgages, partly because their borrowers have higher credit scores. And when the conforming mortgages do default, the banks may not be able to predict what their losses will be because of the government’s ability to send back faulty loans.
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