The Housing Bubble

An indication of how far we have fallen…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24347225

The rest of the world is hailing Snowden as a hero and he has made the short list for the Sakharov Prize; a former Soviet dissident. Ironic, that the MSM isn’t the place to find this, and a U.S. citizen is in exile in the former USSR for going public.

Day 5 of Rio frantically backpedalling in fear

To Our Blog Liar “Rio”:

Post up a phone pic of your “ocean” or a simple scene in “brazil”. Make sure you got your middle finger in the picture so we understand clearly that it’s you.

Show us “Rio”. You’ve got no more credibility to lose.

“Arizona Realtor Facing Federal Drug Charges”

http://www.wopular.com/arizona-realtor-facing-federal-drug-charges

“Bellaire Realtor Jon Holverson indicted in alleged Hurricane Ike fraud”

http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/bellaire/news/bellaire-realtor-jon-holverson-indicted-in-alleged-hurricane-ike-fraud/article_816092a3-9390-5583-be82-ff5f9213b389.html

it seems the bankers want a cut of every large purchase these days. For the most part people are stuck paying interest because prices for the things they want have gotten so high. I guess all the money printing over the past 100 years has served its purpose?

ooh, I feel so good this morning. Just oozing out of every pore with all that hope and change bestowed by the voting public. Why with all this open admin promised by Palosi I can see how the world loves us more and with the new health care people should be crashing our borders to get in.Life is good. Only one thing missing, putting more people in housing they can’t afford.

Did Rio and Housing PimpAnalyst settle that picture-in-Rio wager yet?

I missed HA’s pic of scaffolding, but I never doubted he was in construction. I was just curious as to what sort of housing he built at his low cost/sq ft.

Building is ramping up again in DC. This time it’s surburban infill. One section of my town was an 1960’s abandoned grocery store and ugly parking lot. They bulldozed that up for “Townhomes from the mid $500s” (not sure of the exact price). In other areas, small enclaves of 6-8 Depression-era houses are again being bulldozed up for townhomes from the mid-$500’s. Almost nobody is building SFH smaller than 2500 sq ft McMansion size. The days of the Levittown tract home are over. You have to pay a pretty penny to not share walls.

(To be honest, what I would really like to see are senior-living communities stocked with Ross Chapin-type cottages.)

I just wanted to illustrate what my health insurance has done for me recently.

I had a bit of a health scare. Turned out to be not very serious, though I still have some follow up work to do. Anyway, since it involved a doctor’s visit, a simple biopsy in the office during that visit, a lab looking at the biopsy samples, a scan and a simple blood test. Seems like a nice variety of possible non-emergency interactions with docs to use as an example. This could have been anything from “guess what you are getting a bit older” to “you have aggressive cancer,” so the tests were necessary. Turned out to be the former, but here is the financial break down:

total cost if you don’t have any insurance (”submitted charges”): $1623.80

total cost of the same stuff under the contract the insurance company has with the providers (”plan allowance”): $769.50

total I paid in copays (I had already used up my individual deductible earlier in the year): $99.30

So, just having an insurance company doing my price negotiations for me saved over $850. Believe me, I was in no emotional state to be doing that when I walked into the doc’s office. Oh, and the medication that I was prescribed was vastly less expensive because of the prescription benefit.

And the best deal for the insurance was definitely for the blood test. The plan allowance for the lab test was less than 12% of the cost the lab tried to charge. The only people on site are techs and an admin person (good luck negotiating a better price with them). If you don’t sign a contract to promise to pay the full amount if your insurance rejects the claim, they won’t take the sample at all. I don’t have high blood pressure or high cholesterol or any of that stuff, but gs-fixer has told us that the labs are what kills him when he needs to get his scripts filled.

29 Incredible Facts Which Prove That Poverty In America Is Absolutely Exploding

Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse
October 28, 2013

These poverty numbers keep getting worse year after year no matter what our politicians do.

So is there anyone out there that would still like to argue that we are in an “economic recovery”?

And as I mentioned above, the “have nots” are becoming increasingly angry at the “haves”. For example, just check out the following excerpt from a recent New York Post article…

The maniac who butchered a Brooklyn mom and her four young kids confessed that he did it because he was jealous of their way of life, a police source told The Post on Sunday.

“The family had too much. Their income (and) lifestyle was better than his,” the source said.

The bloody suspect was caught holding the kitchen knife he used during the Saturday night rampage inside the Sunset Park apartment where he had been staying with the victims, the source added.

Sadly, this was not an isolated incident. All over the western world, a “Robin Hood mentality” is growing. This is something that I am so concerned about that I made it a big part of my new book. At this point, even wealthy Hollywood-types such as actor Russell Brand are calling for a socialist-style “revolution” and a “massive redistribution of wealth“.

Perhaps Brand does not understand that what he is calling for would mean redistributing most of his own wealth away from him.

When the next major wave of the economic collapse strikes, I fear that all of this anger and frustration that are growing among the poor will boil over in some very frightening ways. I believe that we will see a huge spike in crime and that we will eventually see communities all over America looted and burning.

But I am not the only one that is thinking along these lines. A new National Geographic Channel movie entitled “American Blackout” attempts to portray the social chaos that could erupt in the event of an extended national power failure…

American Blackout, National Geographic Channel’s two-hour, edge-of-your-seat movie event imagines the story of a national power failure in the United States caused by a cyberattack — told in real time, over 10 days, by those who kept filming on cameras and phones. You’ll learn what it means to be absolutely powerless.

You can view a clip of the film that was made available by NatGeo for the SHTFplan.com community right here.

11 comments

PhoenixLiberty
• an hour ago• 5 △0 ▽− +

Conservatives are waking up to how the GOP (and DEM) has been infiltrated by statists, bankers, lobbyists that take us in one direction. Increasing the size of the government in expense, power, and control, signing away our rights, and stealing from future generations to do it. Picking winners and losers while inflating the power of corporations by depressing our wages with illegal immigration they have no intention of fixing, or brokering trade deals that destroy our industries.

We see how entirely bankrupt the media is, and how the politicians that get the spotlight are often the most corrupt. People that are awake see one party, and two flavors of lies told to sell it to two groups of people with a narrative controlled by the infiltrators. False divisions, illusions of representation and choice, finally propagated with financially fixed elections where 153 individuals control 60% of superPAC money.

What liberals don’t get is that money is ours, and by allowing the government to touch it the waste of transactional overhead robs us! We are way too big to live under centralized government, like dinosaurs were too big to only have one brain. It’s the big government that creates the wealth imbalance. How? By giving a pass to corporations on regulations and taxes, and by creating laws that fix the game and destroy competition by picking winners with such great advantages we get monopolies or what are essentially government sanctioned cartels.

In this situation there is no difference between state and private assets, as the government controls the law and policies these cartels/monopolies operate under. The huge power of the government is abused, infiltrated, and controlled by small groups. Opportunity is lost because it costs them so much to figure out how to even spend the money and keep the power. The value of time and choice cannot be underestimated it is the root of prosperity.

Privileged classes emerge in all systems including socialism and communism you see them in China, the government administrators have their own hospitals, private planes, chauffeurs, villas, and otherwise while some literally eat worms. They create their own aristocracies and it all transforms into feudalism the less power, knowledge, and information people have; which are fundamental to the imbalances. There are so many flavors of corruption.

For the nation to be healthy, when a working person looks at their lot in life, they have to believe that by working harder and making things cheaper they become more wealthy. Wealth created through the more efficient use of resources. But if people don’t benefit from their work, they don’t bother. This is how communism kills societies, and crony capitalism is no different than socialism.

The American people have not benefited from all the sacrifices, hard work, productivity, that has been invested by them into the economy. Instead the bankers loot us, the politicians bank on insider trading, and no matter what happens the American people get the bill one way or another through cost shifting and a myriad of other scams.

Wealth is hard to measure, but we can start with basics human needs. Clean water, food, shelter, clothing, and then our emotional needs of safety, love, etc. Humans live a dignified existence when all these needs are met. What we’ve seen is our emotional needs stripped from us through the abuse of labor, families broken up by the pressures of greed and short sightedness.

Even good things can become weapons, women’s rights can quickly become the demonization of men, depriving children of fathers, creating a culture of divorce and consumerism. Can you put a dollar value on a healthy parent? Families are in both the classical (Aristotle) and modern sense the most basic economic unit. When basic needs are not met people become animalized.

Animals are easy to control, in the past they were called “beasts”, and it was moral to enslave the “beasts”, beasts are people who take no responsibility, but to fill their immediate desires be it food, sex, or otherwise. Families take responsibility/initiative for the future, they build, invest, sacrifice, and preserve. America is being animalized culturally. Divide and conquered by depriving groups of needs and then assigning the provisions of those needs through the government.

You can see this clearly in the use of foreign aid as well, you give foreign aid so that when the government of the country you want to control steps out of your interests you can deprive that aid and create a civil war. Then you can make a new deal with the faction that takes over by arming them or otherwise. They say a nation is 7 days from civil war, because that’s when the hunger drives desperation. That’s the gun that the governments keep at people’s heads, to gain leverage and loot them.

http://www.infowars.com/category/featured-stories/ - 72k -

Wall Street Journal online piece today “U.S. Cities Grapple With Finances” is some nice red meat to bait 2ban into a goon rant. The infographic linked to the article ranks cities by:
Population decline
Days of cash on hand
Low reserves
Taxable real estate per capita
Net direct debt per capita
Pension costs
State aid

Dedicated to all the loanowner debt junkies

Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground perform “Waiting For The Man”, an uplifting tune about strung out junkies taking the subway up to Harlem to score some dope:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hDHkYy2i7sg&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DhDHkYy2i7sg

Judging from their burgeoning share prices, you would almost begin to suspect the plan to unwind the GSEs had been canceled.

Markets
J.P. Morgan’s Mortgage Troubles Ran Deep
Deals With Subprime Lenders at Heart of $5.1 Billion Settlement
By Al Yoon
Oct. 27, 2013 6:24 p.m. ET

A 1,625-square-foot bungalow at 51 Perthshire Lane in Palm Coast, Fla., is among the thousands of homes at the heart of J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM +0.13%) & Co.’s $5.1 billion settlement with a federal housing regulator on Friday.

J.P. Morgan bundled 4,209 loans from New Century Financial into a mortgage-backed security it sold to investors Reuters

In 2006, J.P. Morgan bought one of two mortgage loans on the home made by subprime lender New Century Financial Corp. J.P. Morgan then bundled the loan with 4,208 others from New Century into a mortgage-backed security it sold to investors including housing-finance giant Freddie Mac. (FMCC +11.89%)

By the end of 2007, the borrower had stopped paying back the loan, setting off yearslong delinquency and foreclosure proceedings that halted income to the investors, according to BlackBox Logic LLC, a mortgage-data company.

The Palm Coast loan wasn’t the only troubled one in the New Century deal: Within a year, 15% of the borrowers were delinquent—more than 60 days late on a payment, in some stage of foreclosure or in bankruptcy—according to BlackBox. By 2010, that number exceeded 50%.

“That’s much worse than anyone’s expectations when the deal was put together,” said Cory Lambert, an analyst at BlackBox and former mortgage-bond trader. “It’s all pretty bad.”

J.P. Morgan sidestepped many of the subprime-mortgage problems that bedeviled rivals during the financial crisis, and avoided much of the postcrisis scrutiny that dragged down others on Wall Street. But now its own behavior during the housing boom is coming under close examination as investigators work through a backlog of cases.

The bank dealt with some of the biggest subprime lenders of the time, including Countrywide Financial Corp., Fremont Investment & Loan and WMC Mortgage Corp., a former unit of General Electric, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency complaint.

J.P. Morgan’s relationship with New Century, a subprime lender that went bankrupt in 2007 and later faced a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation and shareholder suits, shows that the New York bank was part of the frenzied push to package mortgages for investors at the end of the housing boom.

The New Century deal, J.P. Morgan Mortgage Acquisition Trust 2006-NC1, was one of 103 cited in the lawsuit against J.P. Morgan brought by the FHFA, which oversees Freddie Mac and home-loan giant Fannie Mae. (FNMA +13.40%)

The $5.1 billion settlement is part of a larger tentative deal with the Justice Department and other agencies that would have J.P. Morgan pay a total of $13 billion. That deal is expected to be completed this week.

“While these settlements seem huge, given the nature of the offenses, they are trivially small,” said William Frey, chief executive of Greenwich Financial Services LLC, a broker-dealer that has participated in investor lawsuits against banks that packaged mortgages. J.P. Morgan declined to comment on the settlement or any loans in the bonds it bought.
…

Review & Outlook
Little Orphan Fannie Mae
Washington rewrites financial-crisis history to punish J.P Morgan.
Updated Oct. 27, 2013 7:00 p.m. ET

The government assault on J.P Morgan Chase is an injustice for many reasons, but the case has now reached tragicomic heights with the bank’s agreement on Friday to pay $5.1 billion for supposedly conning Fannie Mae FNMA +13.40% and Freddie Mac. FMCC +11.89% So the government-favored mortgage giants that did as much as anyone to foment the housing bubble and bust are now presented as victims.

The premise of the allegations settled on Friday is that while it may appear that Fan and Fred were recklessly gambling on the housing market for years before the crisis, they were duped by Morgan and other banks into buying risky mortgage-backed securities that they did not understand. This is the Little Orphan Fannie defense.

Even the partisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, created by the 2009 Pelosi Congress and chaired by a former state Democratic Party chairman, didn’t try to sell that line. As much as the Democratic majority on the panel wanted to absolve Washington of its role in creating the crisis, it had to give the two government-created mortgage monsters their due. The committee’s report dubbed Fannie and Freddie the “kings of leverage” and described all of the ways they avoided oversight while relaxing underwriting standards and raising their bets on subprime mortgages.

The two companies, which profited from an implicit government guarantee, owned or guaranteed $5 trillion of mortgage assets. Sometimes they bought home loans and bundled them into securities for sale to other investors, and sometimes they bought securities that others had assembled. They were the biggest buyers of subprime bundles during the housing boom, and their lust for those bundles fed the subprime machines at Countrywide (later bought by Bank of America) and Washington Mutual (bought at federal request by J.P. Morgan JPM +0.28% ).

After it all fell apart, the only debate was whether the twin disasters at Fan and Fred were primarily the result of federal “affordable housing goals” or executives’ desire for bigger profits and bonuses. Being Democrats, the commission majority settled on greed as the principal problem at Fan and Fred, but nobody concluded that they were victims.

The commission learned from John Kerr, an examiner with the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), that Fannie was “the worst-run financial institution” he had seen in 30 years as a bank regulator. Austin Kelly, an official at FHFA’s predecessor agency, said regulators couldn’t trust Fannie’s numbers because their “processes were a bowl of spaghetti.”

And you should hear what people were saying inside these firms. Former Fannie Mae Chief Risk Officer Enrico Dallavecchia wrote in a 2007 email to the company’s COO that Fannie “was not even close to having proper controls processes for credit, market and operational risk.” He added that “people don’t care about the [risk] function or they don’t get it.”

Over at Freddie, former CEO Richard Syron acknowledged in an interview with the commission that one of the reasons he fired longtime chief risk officer David Andrukonis in 2005 was that Mr. Andrukonis opposed relaxing Freddie’s loan underwriting standards. According to civil charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, around the end of 2004 Mr. Syron rejected the advice of Freddie credit risk officers who had urged him to stop Freddie from guaranteeing so-called NINA loans, which required no verification of borrower income or assets.

Adding to the absurdity of the FHFA suit, even Fannie and Freddie don’t claim they were innocent. The two companies have agreed to a deferred prosecution agreement in which they don’t deny misleading investors about the size of their investments in subprime mortgages and liar loans.

The SEC is still suing former senior executives at both companies for securities fraud. The cases may not come to trial until 2015, which is convenient for the government as it pursues the Fan-and-Fred-as-victims case with Morgan and other banks. You never know what a trial might tell us about how the companies decided to buy mortgage-backed securities sold by banks.
…

Because 100+ P/E ratios signal the investment opportunity of a lifetime

Wall Street Journal - Silicon Valley: Feel the Froth

“Twitter Inc. plans to go public at a value of $11 billion, without turning a profit. Venture capitalists just valued Pinterest Inc., which generates no revenue, at nearly $4 billion, and an even younger, revenue-deprived company, Snapchat Inc., is angling for a similar price tag … shares of internet companies are soaring again, and signs of pre-2000 exuberance can be seen in Silicon Valley and the nearby area. Home prices in San Francisco and surrounding counties rose more than 15% in the past year. Office rents in San Francisco are 23% above their 2008 peak.”

Given overwhelming market strength, how can anyone be pessimistic now?

Oct. 28, 2013, 9:41 a.m. EDT
The S&P 500 moves into the danger zone
Avi Gilburt
Stocks, ETFs, Currency
Avi’s latest posts
Why is everyone so sure of S&P 1800?
Are we setting up for a Lehman-type event?
It will not be different this time
By Avi Gilburt

For several months now, we have had the 1760-1780 region in the cash index as our higher target region. Although we did expect to hit it from a deeper pullback before this leg of the two-year uptrend continued, this week we hit a high of 1759.82. Now that everyone feels that the road ahead of us is clear, as we have moved past the recent debt debacle, what can go wrong for this continued uptrend?

Well, this past week, we saw the AAII Investor Sentiment registering only 17.6% bearishness, whereas the long-term average is 30.5%. Furthermore, we may be seeing evidence that the Russell 2000 and the financials, represented here by the Select Sector (SPDR-Financial XLF -0.41%), the former market leaders, may have begun to lag in this next move higher.

Furthermore, the divergences I am seeing in our daily and weekly S&P 500 charts are becoming more pronounced. Lastly, I am unable to get past the striking support that the weekly slow stochastics have given to this rally from 2011 being a large diagonal. That makes this top a very dangerous one, indeed, which will see a very strong reversal which will likely catch most market participants by surprise.
…

‘It’s quickly turning into crisis time in Washington for President Barack Obama’s health care reform law with the federal website crashing again and a series of hearings set for this week along with a major address from the president.’

‘Middle income consumers are starting to get hit with sticker shock as previously low-priced plans get canceled and replaced with higher-dollar coverage. Stories of consumers getting plans canceled directly contradict Obama’s promise that people who like their plans could keep them under the new law. Defenders of the law say that the new plans will be better. But they will also cost more at a time when wages are stagnant.’

‘And many of these middle class consumers hit by higher rates do not qualify for the federal subsidies intended help millions of lower income consumers get covered, many for the first time. Anger from consumers is likely to add to already rising political pressure to delay or alter the law.’

‘This is especially true for Democratic senators such as Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Kay Hagan of North Carolina facing tough re-election battles next year in states Obama lost. A group of these vulnerable Democratic senators recently signed a letter to embattled Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius asking that the March 31st open enrollment deadline for Obamacare get pushed back.’

‘Calls for an individual mandate delay, fiercely opposed by the administration, will likely becoming overwhelming if the federal website is not functioning seamlessly by Dec. 1. Even if the mandate is delayed, the millions of young, healthy and currently uninsured people the law depends on to make the economics work could ultimately decide paying the penalty is better than buying insurance. That could spark a “death spiral” for the law, an outcome that would be devastating for the Obama presidency and Democrats hopes in 2014 and beyond.’

My, it looks like it’s harder to actually build something than just spying on people or blowing sh#t up with drones and bombs.

Oh I wish I were a nonessential worker
That is what I truly wish to be
cause if i were a nonessential worker
everyone would be in love with me

Extensive piece discusses demographic changes and the political evolution of Colorado:

http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-27/colorado-secessionists-push-for-independence-after-flood.html

Monsters of the Housing Market: Vampire REOs and Zombie …
http://www.realtytrac.com/content/news-and-opinion/monsters-of-the-housing-market-vampire-reos-and-zombie-foreclosures-7892 - 78k - Cached - Similar pages

Oct 2, 2013 … Report on how vacant “zombie” foreclosures and owner-occupied “vampire” bank -owned homes are both a challenge to the housing market

Buckle up in Hong Kong?

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-28/a-downturn-for-the-worlds-most-expensive-property-market

Hong Kong is experiencing something unusual: a slumping property market. The city is the world’s most expensive place to rent office space or apartments and has enjoyed a lengthy run of rising prices, with occasional hiccups like the SARS epidemic in 2003 and the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008. Once investors got over the initial shock of that crisis, the market has been on a tear, with prices more than doubling since the end of 2008.

Demand is already soft, with prices falling about 2.7 percent since March, but Hong Kong-based Barclays analysts Paul Louie and Zita Qin say this is just the beginning. “We believe the property market is about to enter its first real downturn since 1998 and we expect home prices to drop by at least 30 percent by the end of 2015,” they wrote in a report published today. With home prices up 111 percent since the end of 2008, “we believe there is significant scope for owners to take profit on their property holdings,” Louie and Qin wrote.

Pending Sales of Existing Homes Slump by Most in Three Years
Lorraine Woellert
Published 7:35 am, Monday, October 28, 2013
(Updates with production data in fifth paragraph and stocks in seventh.)

Oct. 28 (Bloomberg) — Fewer Americans than forecast signed contracts to buy previously owned homes in September, the fourth straight month of declines, as rising mortgage rates slowed momentum in the housing market.

The index of pending home sales slumped 5.6 percent, exceeding all estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists and the biggest drop in more than three years, after a 1.6 percent decrease in August, the National Association of Realtors reported today in Washington. The index fell to the lowest level this year.

Mortgage rates last month reached two-year highs and some homeowners are reluctant to put properties up for sale as they wait for prices to climb, leading to tight inventories. Combined, those forces are pushing some would-be buyers to the sidelines and slowing the pace of recovery in real estate.

“You did get a bit of a shock when mortgage rates went up,” Gennadiy Goldberg, U.S. strategist at TD Securities USA LLC in New York, said before the report. “It’s an erratic pace of expansion.”
…

Toetag houses are the new black!

For U left Coasters.

Fukushima is Here - San Francisco Human Mural - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBqdutmVqBo - 95k - Cached - Similar pages
5 days ago …

Electronic Goldmine

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Micro Geiger Counter Kit
$99.95

Radiation Illuminator Display
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Miniature Russian Geiger Counter
$59.95

More to choose from

Electronic Kits-Electronic Goldmine
http://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/departments.asp?dept=1059 - 47k

I know you guys think that Ivies are the only places full of shitlibs running programs in Genderqueer Studies. But it’s time to realize that every big university has become a dumping ground for this type of group think. Just look at the link to the Wisconsin prof below and try not to gag.

“Faculty Affiliate in American Indian Studies”

http://history.wisc.edu/people/faculty/kantrowitz.htm

Yes kidz, commuting makes you fat and stupid and depressed:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/28/commutings-hidden-cost/

KEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASH!!!!

What was that?!

It’s the sound of collapsing housing demand across the nation.

Got 25 MILLION excess empty houses?

Re-posting from yesterday:

‘About 1 in 10 houses sold in Pierce County in the past year wasn’t bought by real people. A News Tribune analysis of sales and property data between October 2012 and 2013 shows that three major private investment funds have spent about $172 million on almost 1,000 properties, all destined to become rentals.’

‘Brokers with direct knowledge of Blackstone’s moves in Washington told The News Tribune that the company generally has a five-year plan: Buy low, fix cheaply, maximize rent, then sell high. Or, higher.’

‘The brokers would not speak on the record for fear of damaging their livelihoods. Last year, a newspaper in Tampa Bay, Fla., quoted a local broker by name who was working with Blackstone to buy houses in the area. The day after the report published, the broker said he ended his relationship with the company because he wanted to avoid being sued. According to the newspaper, the broker said company officials told him that he “should have kept my mouth shut.”

‘That attitude is how they come across to competitors, too, one broker told The News Tribune. “They are kind of bullies,” the broker said. “They are willing to pay more.”

‘They are overpaying for properties,” Kevin Knoben, a broker who regularly attends the auctions, said this summer. “Their people are given an amount they can go up to and it doesn’t matter where it’s located. They’re buying houses that would be assessed at $150,000 in South Tacoma and they’re paying $200,000 and up. “They don’t care as long as they can put a renter in it,” he said.’

‘Paying higher prices changed the behavior of banks that were auctioning homes, said broker Lorrie Garl, who buys properties on behalf of regional investors. “Banks are setting opening bids higher because they know they can get it,” she said. “It’s made it a lot more difficult because (the big companies are) willing to pay market value and sometimes above, which is crazy to us, but they do.”

“This is no different from institutional investors being bullish in other commodities,” said Jody McNamer, a Gig Harbor-based real estate investor who has focused on the South Puget Sound region for 20 years. “They run those commodities up and dump their holdings after they make their profits. And little guys are all, um, what happened?”

Many open House signs in Moorpark Ca have not seen that in over a year

Open house signs go up when homes don’t sell and frantic owners tell Realtors “to do something”

Oh well

“This tells us to expect lower home sales for the fourth quarter, with a flat trend going into 2014,” NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in a statement. “Even so, ongoing inventory shortages will continue to lift home prices, though at a slower single-digit growth rate next year.

Milk Prices May Soar to $8 a Gallon
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2013/10/milk-prices-may-soar-to-8-a-gallon/

Farm subsidy bill’s scare tactic.
Cow’s milk isn’t fit for humans anyway. There are better sources of calcium w/o hormones. Broccoli for one. Including the food stamp program, $80B. Holy Cow!

From the guys who brought you the internet and weaponized drones:
Pentagon’s DARPA works on reading brains in real time:
http://rt.com/usa/darpa-pentagon-reading-brain-860/

The SUBNETS program intends to change the current landscape significantly. Not only does DARPA want to map out exactly how diseases establish themselves in an individuals brain, the agency also wants its implant to be able to record the signs of illness in real time, deliver treatments, and monitor the treatment’s effectiveness.
Already, roughly 100,000 people worldwide live with a Deep Brain Stimulation implant, a device that helps patients cope with Parkinsons disease…
The new project is part of President Obama’s BRAIN initiative, which sets aside $100 million in its first year to develop new innovations in neuroscience. DARPA is collaborating with the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation on SUBNETS, and it is currently soliciting proposals from various research teams.

There are a lot of anti-social people who need this technology. I hope they use this breakthrough technology to cure the epidemic of Tea Party disease that has infected our conservative brothers and sisters.
I’m sure it’s covered in your Obamacare insurance policy.

Olygal

Boy that James Taylor really pulled a Sebelius the other night at the World Series.

FACT CHECK: Sebelius misstates law on signup start

CALVIN WOODWARD, AP

5 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Misstating the health care law she is responsible for administering, Kathleen Sebelius has asserted that the law required health insurance sign-ups to start Oct. 1, whether the system was ready or not. In fact, the decision when to launch the sign-up website was hers.

The troubled debut of the government’s health insurance enrollment website has raised questions about whether its start date should have been delayed to allow testing and repairs before it went live. Asked last week whether that might have been the wiser course, Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, said that wasn’t possible because the law required an Oct. 1 launch.

In a visit to a community health center in Austin, Texas, on Friday, Sebelius acknowledged more testing would have been preferable. “In an ideal world there would have been a lot more testing, but we did not have the luxury of that and the law said the go-time was Oct. 1,” she said.

But the law imposed no legal requirement to open the website Oct 1. The law says only that the enrollment period shall be “as determined by the secretary.” The launch date was set not in the law, but in regulations her department had issued. Agencies routinely allow themselves flexibility on self-imposed deadlines.

Officials could have postponed open enrollment by a month, or they could have phased in access to the website. Oregon, one of the 14 states that built its own website under the federal law, did just that, allowing initial website access only for counselors instead of the general public.

Larry Levitt, health insurance expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said that in setting the sign-up start date the administration had to balance three competing interests: keeping the enrollment period short enough to prevent people from waiting to see whether they developed a health condition that needed insurance; keeping the period long enough to allow consumers to learn about their options; and allowing enough time to have the sign-up system ready for an onslaught of applications.

“Looking in the rear-view window, the systems obviously weren’t ready by Oct. 1 and a delay would have allowed for a smoother launch,” he said.

In the Texas appearance, Sebelius also pointed to a more likely reason behind the urgency to launch: politics, and in particular a government shutdown over the issue.

“A political atmosphere where the majority party, at least in the House, was determined to stop this anyway they possibly could … was not an ideal atmosphere,” she said.

Associated Press writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington and Chris Tomlinson in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.

EDITOR’S NOTE — An occasional look at claims by public figures that take shortcuts with the facts or don’t tell the full story

Associated Press

Q from a couple of days back about interest-rate locks:

Comment by Whac-A-Bubble™
2013-10-26 13:09:48

I also told her to try to figure out if these “interest rate locks” generally come with unannounced charges to reduce rates even before the loan has closed. I can’t imagine it would take more than 15 minutes for the lender to compute and write in the payments for a lower rate. Why should this cost $300+?

This actually makes perfect business sense, if you stop and analyze it—and has nothing to do with being scammed.

Assume you were in the business of originating loans, and selling them down-stream. You would be exposed to interest-rate risk on the loans you have in the pipeline, from the moment you “lock” the rate with the customer, until the later time when you sold them to Fannie/Freddie/private securitizers.

How would you handle this risk, or at least convert it from a complete unknown to a known cost? You would hedge your risk on the futures markets.

Those hedges are not free. In the aggregate, over a reasonable period of time, I’m guessing that it is somewhat less than $300.

Years ago, they ran an ad on TV about how you should save for retirement. It had a lady sitting in a chair, by herself, in an empty house presumably maybe being foreclosed upon. She said in the ad in the voice over how she had the best vacations and best restaurants, etc. in her time with their (her and her husband’s) money. But had none now. Presumably because they did not save their money and spent it all on comfort impulses.

I want to see an ad ran that shows renters sitting in a house lamenting how they should not have invested in stocks and bonds and REITs because now they do not have a house to fall back on for cash equity extraction or to sell. I want to see that. I want to see how people who rent are destined to be poor no matter whether they save money into stocks and bonds and REITs. I want the NAR to come out and say that getting a mortgage is guaranteed wealth creation.