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POPSIndymac Bank Read more details about IndyMac Bank, a bank that provides a number of home mortgage products that are mostly first lien residential loans and huge full-documentation loans and home equity lines of credit.
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POPSThe Bernanke Bailout Boondoggle Announced this week is the number of re-financing on sub-prime loans and foreclosure should have been on everyone's mind. However, no one cares, as long as the stock market continues to climb higher. Giving those who have lost 50% of their 401k money, hoping for a rebound. Riddle me this? What has lost 55% and gained 45%, and still down 45% from the high? If you know the answer, you are well on your way to understanding the truth! The stock market is a game, if you don't know how to play by their rules, you will lose!
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POPS1 Family Sole Occupants of 32-Story Tower Residents of Florida Highrise Find Every Other Prospective Condo Owner Has Bailed, and Now Want Out. there were security concerns. One night, someone pounded on their door at 11 p.m. The parents and their children sleep with their cell phones by their beds. Betsy McCoy, vice president and associated general counsel with The Related Group, which sold the family their unit, said they have tried to help find a solution - even offering them a unit in the building next door, free of cost, while the situation is resolved. "They haven't wanted to take us up on that," McCoy said Friday. "They frankly rejected every solution and offer and proposal that we've come up with." Victor Vangelakos said they don't want to move to the tower next door because they would still be paying the mortgage and maintenance costs on the condo they own. They paid $430,000 for the unit and took out a $336,000 mortgage. He'd like for The Related Group to buy them out.
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POPSMy Response to Sen. D. Stabenow (D-MI)
For the most part, my insurance coverage is catastrophic only. My portion of the premiums if I were to cover eligible members of my family would cost nearly 1/4 of my bi-weekly take home pay. Obviously, if a mortgage is only supposed to by 1/3 of your monthly salary, then insurance premiums are nearly the price of a good-sized house. Adding to the 'ranks of the uninsured' is the fact of a 14.2% unemployment rate - of which my husband is one. He doesn't qualify for unemployment insurance so he isn't even counted. So, why are my premiums so high? First, because malpractice insurance for my physicians is totally out of control due to frivolous law suits, huge legal fees and the costs associated with trying even a small case. The judge, clerks, bailiffs, secretaries, etc...all have to be paid - by me, the taxpayer. Because of the need to cover themselves, doctors are forced to order complicated, often if not always expensive and sometimes unnecessary tests and procedures. Ev
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POPSYou bastards, you've killed us all! We have phony rich people (with interest-only mortgages and piles of debt), phony beauty (with plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures), phony athletes (with performance-enhancing drugs), phony celebrities (via reality TV and YouTube), phony genius students (with grade inflation), a phony national economy (with $11 trillion of government debt), phony feelings of being special among children (with parenting and education focused on self-esteem), and phony friends (with the social networking explosion). All this fantasy might feel good, but, unfortunately, reality always wins. The mortgage meltdown and the resulting financial crisis are just one demonstration of how inflated desires eventually crash to earth.
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POPSThe Role Fraud Played in the Mortgage Crisis... . . . . stunning interview with an industry insider including credit references from their country of origin and a valid Visa. To circumvent this requirement, the applications were marked that the borrower was a US citizen then, regardless if the credit profile did not support such a claim, an underwriter was not allowed to question. This along with use of stolen SS# or use of their American born child’s SS# and lax credit requirements that allowed alternative credit, helped cover the ruse. All required documentation was fraudulent and with the large use of a/k/a’s, information was hard to track. Q) What did management do when it was discovered that a stolen Social Security number was being used by a borrower? A) It was not uncommon to find a SS# being used by up to 23 other people or a borrower with 27 a/k/a’s. Management would often clear a loan that you tagged as fraudulent so it wouldn’t be shelved.
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POPSWe have, sadly, been corrupted. I have to say, the worst allegation I've heard about Chris Dodd is not that he's in the pocket of banks and insurers--financial companies naturally seek to curry favor with the Senate Banking Committee, but I don't really see the case that he's sold us out for his benefit. No, the more damning case is that the Senate Banking Committee was basically non-functional in the early part of the crisis, because Dodd was running for president. Even if early action could have saved us money and pain later--and that's a big if--I recently heard a plausible case made that such action was made impossible by his presidential campaign. But somehow, no one finds that offensive, or even notable.
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POPS Stocks Surge On US Toxic Asset Plan up to $12 in loans for every dollar of private equity at risk. Banks will submit pools of loans for auction. Banks said the plan’s structure was favourable to them as it gave them the last word on whether to sell their toxic assets. ●$75bn-$100bn from Tarp invested with private equity in a public-private fund worth $500bn ●Investors and public-private funds buy bad loans from banks at auction, with loans guaranteed by FDIC ●Five fund managers approved by Treasury to invest private capital and public-private fund equity in toxic securities ●The Fed’s Talf programme expanded to include toxic securities, including residential mortgage-backed securities
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POPSComrade Obama Clinton administration when it imposed affirmative action standards on lending practices. For this, we have to thank Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, and the woebegone Harry Reid. These are the ones Obama can thank for his inheritance. Frankly, they should all be in jail. Using Bush as a scapegoat is getting boring particularly when federal revenues actually reached all-time highs during his tenure. Anyone for tax cuts?! Anyone? Anyone at all? Clearly Obama is making a bad situation much worse. The Dow is more concerned with what lies in the future under Comrade Obama than with what happened under President Bush. It understands when a politician is far more interested in the redistribution of wealth than in the creation of it. Worse still, he uses beguiling rhetoric to dupe his audience and to camouflage the enormous disparity between what he says and the aspirations ostensibly entertained.
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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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POPSThere's Some Good News Despite The AIG Outrage than this crazy mark-to-market accounting would have us believe. Sharp-eyed banking analyst Dick Bove has argued that most bank losses have been non-cash — i.e., mark-to-market write-downs. Take those fictitious write-downs away and you are left with a much healthier banking picture. This is huge in terms of solving the credit crisis. In a column last week I suggested that not one more dime of government money is necessary for the banks. Instead, the marriage of the cash-flow valuation of bank assets and the upward-sloping Treasury yield curve will do the trick. Net interest margins are rising as banks purchase money for near-zero interest and loan it out at profitable rates. And the new mark-to-market reform will allow banks to hold their toxic assets for several more years and work them out — just as they did back in the 1990s.
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POPSOcto-Mom and Personal Responsibility We have latched on to Suleman, I think, because it is easier and more comforting to criticize her for a feat of careless hubris than it is to deal directly with our own feats of the same.
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POPSNation’s Food System Nearly Broke This is a pretty dire picture being painted here. It seems Americans have been getting off cheap with low food prices, but that’s about to change. None of us want to see family farms go out of business, they simply cannot survive on subsistence earnings any longer. If you have a space to grow your own food, I suggest you start learning how to make it very productive and learn to can the excess. "Any time a country neglects its family farm base and allows it to become financially bankrupt, the entire economy of that country will soon collapse. It may take generations to rebuild the farm economy and that of the country." Concerned citizens can call the White House, 202-456-1111, or your members of Congress, 202-224-3121, to urge them to support policies that enable farmers to earn a fair market price
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POPS Obama's Shock Doctrine And that’s the strategy behind the sweeping agenda that President Obama laid out. The president called his budget “a blueprint for our future,” and as my colleague John Samples notes, “A blueprint is a plan for the society as a whole just as a real blueprint is a plan for a building…. a plan for the remaking of America. The metaphor reveals a habit of mind at odds with a free society.” Obama promised that the federal government would impose comprehensive redesigns on energy, health care, and education. But the success of America has always been rooted in individual enterprise and free markets. Obama blames free markets for our problems, when it was cheap money from the Fed and misguided federal incentives that caused the mortgage debacle.
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POPSSantelli's Manifesto: Why He Called for a 'Tea Party' Chaos plant for resistance, riots, uprisings...note how he is optimistic. Like he isn't fully aware that the dollar is dead. I'm sure CNBC's ratings received a big spike, taboot. Watching CNBC is like watching a 21st century sitcom. "Banks to Nationalize?" Cut to commercial for Bank of America "Bank of Opportunity" - for the bankster crooks of course. CNBC - "Dow at 6 year low" Cut to investment group commercial or "send your gold for cash!"
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POPSThe Truth Behind the Housing Crisis I know this is not new information but because so many have such short memories I thought it was time to remind us all how we got into this mess we find ourselves. AND GUESS who was right in the middle of it all? Just think the thieves are now in charge of the banks. Golly I wonder how this is going to turn out?
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POPSThe President Explained Today "Spending IS Stimulus"
for the housing market from Washington. George Bush's push for an ownership society and the Democrats push to see FNMA and Freddie Mac extend home ownership to groups normally closed out of that part of the American Dream made it unlikely that any regulator would crack down on the mortgage market. This time the twin towers were "Housing always goes up" and "Washington will bail us out if it doesn't". The rest is history. My history, anyway. Wiliam Kristol advises the Republicans on how to counter-punch - separate the real stimulus from the longer-term investments in America. Republicans should stop trying to improve the unimproveable with small-bore amendments to the current legislative package. Instead, they can point out that Obama is supporting under the guise of emergency legislation a bloated catch-all of stimulus, pork and (often bad) policy. UPDATE: It's officially a "SPENDING" BILL, the President announced that "spending IS stimulus" and his minions "got it"
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POPSNow What? President faces a crisis like many households in America. To show this trend even better I added another line to the chart. This is the 50-day moving average. As you can see the XHB is still trading below this important indicator. In the last two months XHB moved above the 50-day moving average, but couldn’t hold onto the gains. Also the moving average is still in a down slope (never a good sign). I like this indicator because it looks at longer term trends. Despite all the fundamental reasons to look at the housing market, the technicals say watch out.
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POPSPicking Winners and Losers Based on Their Ideas of Fairness Emanuel -- on Obama's behalf, by the way -- might as well have stated: "We liberals are not the least bit concerned about the economy, not because it isn't every bit as bad as you've heard, but precisely because we believe it is. You see, we finally have a chance to implement our ideas on a grand scale. We've helped brew the perfect storm by imposing policies that largely led to the mortgage meltdown and scapegoating corporations for them, thereby demonizing and discrediting the free market to the point that full-blown government solutions are now plausible rather than political suicide. We are not sorry for our current predicament, but elated about it. In our view, the ends always justify the means, so what's a little widespread economic hardship en route to our grand vision for an America where we are in power and we get to pick winners and losers?
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POPSChina May Prevent U.S. Economic Recovery, Thwart Obama's Spending Plan Congress should consider this, for Obama is counting on the continuing saleability of National Debt for his trillion dollar deficit to be funded through what China has historically purchased as an investment, i.e. U.S. treasury bills. You cannot spend indefinitely what you do not have even if the Fed prints it for you if no one is willing to buy it. Global bank consolidation will be introduced as the remedy , which is the globalist goal, as this article linked by Drudge hints: Measures will be taken at the G-20 meeting...Sarkozy ... "We should discuss how each of us is managing his currency, his interest rates." Economist also say that this would reverse low interest rates for home loans in the U.S. since China normally buys mortgage backed (in)securities but may not now. This is the risk of debt, that it makes one a slave to the lender and investors.
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POPSDo You Dare To Prepare ? ? ? "A sustainable economy requires a stabilized population and per capita consumption. In fact, since human population is currently overshooting the earth’s carrying capacity by 20 percent or more, our population and economy are going to have to significantly decrease size before long-term stability can be reached." --- Chuck Burr "Humans are meant to take their modest place in a seamless, stable-state web of living organisms, disturbing that web as little as possible. This would mean sacrifice of present consumption, but it would ensure future survival—which becomes an almost religious objective, perhaps akin to earlier doctrines of “salvation.” People are to be happy not to the extent they dominate their fellow creatures on the earth, but to the extent they lived in balance with them." --- Chuck Burr
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