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POPSBank can't prove it owns the mortgage, Judge writes off $460k debt This is why Rep. Kaptur was telling people facing eviction to squat in their own homes , refuse to be evicted, and make the bank demonstrate in court that the debt is legitimate . Possession is 9/10 of the law. I predict that this is the first tremble of a massive shock-wave about to move through our economy.
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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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POPSSafety nets for the rich More: Enough! Goldman Sachs is thriving while the combined rates of unemployment and underemployment are creeping toward a mind-boggling 20 percent. Two-thirds of all the income gains from the years 2002 to 2007 — two-thirds! — went to the top 1 percent of Americans. We cannot continue transferring the nation’s wealth to those at the apex of the economic pyramid — which is what we have been doing for the past three decades or so — while hoping that someday, maybe, the benefits of that transfer will trickle down in the form of steady employment and improved living standards for the many millions of families struggling to make it from day to day. That money is never going to trickle down. It’s a fairy tale. We’re crazy to continue believing it.
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POPSWall Street Derivatives: So complex as to be "Computationall intractable" MORE: In principle, an alert buyer can detect tampering even if he doesn't know which asset classes are the lemons: he simply examines all 1000 CDOs and looks for a suspicious overrepresentation of some of the asset classes in some of the CDOs. What Arora et al. show is that is an NP-complete problem ("densest subgraph"). This problem is believed to be computationally intractable; thus, even the most alert buyer can't have enough computational power to do the analysis. Arora et al. show it's even worse than that: even after the buyer has lost a lot of money (because enough mortgages defaulted to devalue his "senior tranche"), he can't prove that that tampering occurred: he can't prove that the distribution of lemons wasn't random. This makes it hard to get recourse in court; it also makes it hard to regulate CDOs. Everyone on Wall Street... UP AGAINST THE WALL, THE LOT OF YOU BASTARDS!
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POPSIt shakes a village: What thousands of individual economic crises mean for an entire community More: Through the Marin Housing Authority, Fatooh discovered three affordable housing complexes accepting applications -- then discovered a waiting list of three years. She phoned agency after agency, with no luck. Finally someone told her she'd have a better chance getting placed if she and the family spent three months living at a campsite. Meanwhile her repossessed house in Cazadero sits empty, she says. …The TV news reminds us every night: We're in a recession. But often the camera zooms in too tight: the single family facing eviction, the single worker laid off at the plant, the single patient unable to pay for cancer treatments. The panorama of such cases remains hazy: What does joblessness, foreclosure or lack of healthcare mean for entire communities? What happens to town after town of people like Kassy Fatooh? How does a multiplicity of stories like hers tear at the patchwork of agencies and services meant to hold our communities intact?
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POPSTrying to muster sympathy for the billionaires' shrinking assets More: Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, sensibly points out that one could generate incentives to excel for less: “I don’t think the added incentive of earning $100 million over $50 million is very different than the incentive of making $10 million over $5 million,” he told me once.
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POPSHow Weed Won The West - Trailer #1 In Oaktown, we voted to increase our own taxes on Marijuana . Because, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization."
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POPSTime to put "Wealth On Trial" again? The Pecora hearings resulted in 12,000 pages of transcripts that are still a primary source for historians of the Great Crash, and important New Deal legislation that for the first time regulated the high-handed, free-wheeling banking industry and protected the public from its excesses -- including the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (which established the Securities and Exchange Commission -- Pecora was one of its first commissioners) and the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933, which erected a firewall between commercial and investment banking -- a wall torn down during the Clinton administration, leading to much of our trouble today.
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POPSThe end of beer coasters? As a bartender I can assure you, the beer coaster fulfills a vital function in addition to putting your beer on it: Put it over the top of your glass when you step away from the bar to go have a smoke to signal "I'm coming back, don't take my seat or my drink please".
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POPSGOP Losing Support Among Nearly All Demographic Groups I remember saying to myself back in 2000 that if there was anything positive that could come out of Dubya being president was that they would finally push things too far and the country would turn against them. Remember young Americans: when you think "Republicans", think Iraq, Katrina, massive corporate greed, the Patriot Act, the TSA, and Econopocalypse.
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POPSGlobal Warming is NOT TRUE???!!!! SO Why Floods Are Expected Soon? Wall Street, a few meters above sea level, will also be swallowed, along with much of New York City, as ocean circulation winds down in the Atlantic, subjecting the Northeast to hyperviolent storms and surges. (Of course, given its role in our current "econopocalypse," few might not consider that such a bad thing.) Another world away, southern Africa has been swamped by floods worse than anything the region has experienced in decades, which has killed over 100 and made 100,000 homeless.
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POPSUp In Smoke: The Deposit Vanishes To everyone who ever described us renters as "People people who throw away their money when they could be owning..." The whole economy is a ponzi-scheme, and it's all coming undone. The people who worked hard, who played by the rules and believed they'd get ahead doing so? They're the ones profiled in this article. And us grasshoppers who've been dancing are watching all the diligently built ant-hills gets washed away by the storm. The ants have moved in to the rental unit next door. I feel sorriest for the ants. They played by the rules and get screwed the hardest. At least us grasshoppers got a few dances in.
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POPSIt's the pot economy, stupid It’s time to end the unjust charade of marijuana prohibition, tax this flourishing multi-billion dollar market, and redirect criminal justice resources to matters of real public safety.Assemblyman Ammiano has done an enormous service by breaking the silence on this common-sense solution.
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