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POPSThe US House of Presumptive Meddlers Advocates of government control want you to believe that the serious shortcomings of our medical and insurance system are failures of the free market. But that's impossible because our market is not free. Each state operates a cozy medical and insurance cartel that restricts competition through licensing and keeps prices higher than they would be in a genuine free market. But the planners won't talk about that. After all, if government is the problem in the first place, how can they justify a government takeover?
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POPSAccidental Landlords - Fannie's "Deed for Lease" program What this does is guarantee a steady negative cash flow for the banks, further weakening their financial outlook and giving Obama yet another reason to tighten his grip on them. Fannie Mae caused this mess, and their fix will only make things worse.
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POPSBanks Do Not Make Good Neighbors Ross Wallace, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, turned in his check for $500 and waited on the auction floor in full dress uniform for a chance to buy a Detroit house on the cheap. Wallace, 27, said he did not want to leave his fiancee and two children with a mortgage before shipping out to Iraq later this year. “I still have student loans and I’m trying to be responsible. I don’t want to leave debt,” he said. Wallace waited for the auction to roll around to Detroit’s Boston-Edison district, a once stately area that was home to boxing legend Joe Louis and Motown founder Berry Gordy. But he was quickly outbid. An unidentified investor at the front of the room who had scooped up several dozen properties took the home Wallace wanted for about $15,000. “Why am I competing against a bank?” he said later. “It would be common sense to have a separate process for people who want to move back to the city or it’s going to stay empty.”
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POPSACORN foresaw the foreclosure crisis in 2001
More: Moreover, Oakland's law would have gone much farther than requiring that borrowers could afford loans. In 2001, ACORN officials already recognized that the driving force behind the subprime lending was the ability of brokers to chop up risky mortgages, repackage them with good loans as "securities," and sell them to other banks on a largely unregulated market. When homeowners who couldn't afford their loans later defaulted on them, these securities became widely known as "toxic assets" and were the primary cause of the world financial crisis… But if Oakland's law had been widely adopted, the bailout likely would have been unnecessary and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression probably averted. Why? Because the city's ordinance not only would have held mortgage brokers liable for making bad loans, but also every other bank that later bought pieces of those bad loans after they were securitized. In short, the market for subprime loans would have dried up.
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POPSToxic Drywall Leaving Homeowners in Limbo "This is like the small wave that's out on the horizon that's going to continue to grow and grow until it becomes a tsunami," said Florida attorney David Durkee, who represents hundreds of homeowners who are suing builders, suppliers and manufacturers over the drywall. "This is going to become critical mass very shortly." During the height of the U.S. housing boom, with building materials in short supply, American construction companies imported millions of pounds of Chinese-made drywall because it was abundant and cheap. An Associated Press analysis of shipping records found that more than 500 million pounds of Chinese gypsum board was imported between 2004 and 2008 " enough to have built tens of thousands of homes. They are heavily concentrated in the Southeast, especially Florida.
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POPSTaxpayers Get Soaked Private insurance companies were reluctant to sell insurance to those of us who build on the edges of oceans, and were they to offer it, they'd charge an arm and a leg to cover the risk. But this wasn't a problem for me, because you offered to insure my house. I know you didn't do it personally, but you, as a taxpayer, are the guarantee behind federal flood insurance. Should a big storm wipe out half the coast, you'll cover our losses — up to a quarter-million dollars. Thanks — we appreciate it — but what a dumb policy. The subsidized insurance goes to affluent homeowners on both coasts — from Malibu Beach, where movie stars live, to Kennebunkport where the Bush family has a vacation home, to Hyannisport, where the Kennedy family has a summer home, to the Hamptons, where I bought my house. There is no limit on how many times the government will pay if a house keeps washing away.
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POPSAmerican Casino: A Documentary About the Home-Mortgage Crisis more @ clip source the Cockburns meet one guy in "American Casino" who understands the whole mess better than most, a California real estate investor named Jeff Greene who smelled the end of the housing bubble around 2006 and bet $1 billion against the mid-decade exuberance of Wall Street. Sitting in his walled and gated beach compound in Malibu, Greene calmly tells the camera that the opportunity for his successful hedge bet (which has yielded $500 million so far) involved massive pain for millions of homeowners.
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POPSForeclosure Rescue Fraud - Mortgage and Real Estate Fraud ... Denver mortgage broker indicted (now wanted) in foreclosure rescue fraud allegations CA Attorney General announces further crackdown on foreclosure consultants Ohio AG files lawsuits against three foreclosure rescue companies FTC Stops Foreclosure Prevention Marketers According to the FTC’s complaint, the defendants sold “loss mitigation” services to homeowners at risk of foreclosure, falsely claiming they could prevent foreclosure in 97 percent of cases and misrepresenting that they would make a full refund if they failed. Before performing any loss mitigation services, the defendants required homeowners to pay the equivalent of one month’s mortgage payment. Their contracts instructed homeowners not to contact lenders or their contract and its money-back guarantee would be voided. In some cases the defendants’ consultants told homeowners to stop making their mortgage payments while the defendants were working on their cases.
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POPSAbout half of U.S. mortgages seen underwater by 2011 Housing has been crazy here too. Prices all over the shop but rising despite all that is happening. Banks still milking home loans to the max. We did it on one income and 2 kids. Now they can't with 2 incomes and both kids in childcare. Don't think we had as much to spend though. And the house wasn't real flash, a home though.
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POPSArizona Sues Minuteman Group Leader, Alleging Property-Tax Scam Last Friday, Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard filed a lawsuit against Mercer and the President and CEO of Property Tax Review Board Inc., a Granada Hills, Calif., company that in recent weeks mailed thousands of deceptively official-looking letters to Arizona homeowners soliciting $189 in exchange for a “property-tax-assessment analysis.” According to Goddard, the letters were designed and written in a way intended to deceive recipients into thinking the letters were official government communications from their county assessor’s office. Goddard said his office had received hundreds of calls about the letters, including complaints from Arizona’s 15 county assessors, whose offices were likewise inundated with calls.
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POPSHalf Of US Homeowners Will Be Underwater By 2011 NOW: 14 Million Underwater NEXT YEAR: 25 Million The three bars on the left show three estimates for the number of underwater households at the end of Q1. The two bars on the right show two estimates for next year. DB takes a much more dour view than President Obama's favorite economist, Mark Zandi at Economy.com. Source: Deutsche Bank
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POPSPolling reveals California's fragmented electorate More: # California's white non-Latino population has dipped 26.1 percent over the past 31 years, but the proportion of white voters has dropped by just 18 percent, meaning the ethnic gap between voters and nonvoters has actually increased. # The share of the electorate held by the two major parties, more than 90 percent in 1978, has dropped to under 76 percent as the ranks of independents have swelled from less than 8 percent to 20 percent, with most of that shift coming at the expense of Democrats. # Voters are markedly older than they were in 1978, reflecting the rapid aging of the dominant white population, and more likely to be homeowners (74 percent) and college graduates (46 percent) than they were then. # Democrats are increasingly clustered in coastal cities, while the inland areas of California have become Republican strongholds.
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