Sunday, February 19, 2012

Monday February 20 Housing and Economic stories

KeNosHousingPortal.blogspot.com

TOP STORIES:

Here we go again: FHA insures subprime debt, taxpayers take all the risk - (www.northochousingnews.com) No bailout left behind. While most PMI companies are only insuring loans with the best credit profile, FHA is now going in the opposite direction. Why not, it’s not their money. FHA will probably just get another bailout if they need money. It’s “not the best time to begin guaranteeing houses that the average American couldn’t afford,” said Anthony Yezer, director of the Center for Economic Research at George Washington University. “It may be that the insurance fund even now is insolvent.” Obama told Congress he would send it legislation that would allow all U.S. homeowners to refinance their mortgages to take advantage of record-low interest rates. The proposal, and the Congressional mandate, come a year after officials vowed to shrink the role of government in the mortgage markets.

Florida's housing crisis: Not a politician out there willing to help - (www.guardian.co.uk) At the county court in downtown Miami, a stooped, elderly man smartly dressed in a light suit jacket, stands in front of the judge's bench as he tries to cancel the imminent sale of his house. "I spoke to the bank, they gave me papers" he said. "You'll have to file notice and notice on the day is not enough," the judge replies. "I wish there was some way I could help, I'm sorry." Asked later what will happen, the man shrugs. "I've lost the apartment. Which I gave $85,000 in cash for." A woman, dressed in a tight-fitting skirt suit and heels, her make-up carefully applied, approaches the bench and talks to the judge in Spanish. Within minutes, her request for an extension has been denied. She turns around and walks briskly out of the courtroom, her eyes filling with tears. Miami-Dade courthouse's Foreclosure Master Calendar is where homeowners caught in the middle of Florida's housing crisis go to request emergency motions to cancel the bank's foreclosure sales of their homes. Some have attorneys, some represent themselves. Those with attorneys tend to fare better.

How The Bank Lobby Owns Washington - (www.huffingtonpost.com) When Washington puts policy on the auction block, bankers are consistently the highest bidders. The industry's most striking victory has been the watering down of post-financial crisis reforms, to the point that banks are now bigger than ever and the bonuses keep flowing. But Wall Street's campaign spending and lobbying power is so intimidating that banks have repeatedly stuck the public with the tab for their losses and no one in Washington stops them. Why hasn't the government done something about outrageous ATM fees? Or credit card interest rates up to 30 percent? Bankers' clout is such that common-sense pro-consumer legislation is presumptively dead on arrival at Capitol Hill if it threatens banks' revenue streams. An epic recent battle between consumers and Wall Street was fought over a congressional proposal to give bankruptcy judges the legal authority to modify principal balances on mortgages in a way that is fair to both parties. Known as "cramdown," it would have allowed more than a million ordinary Americans to keep their homes. But because it would have leveled the playing field between banks and debtors -- and would have forced banks to officially recognize losses they don't want to acknowledge -- the financial services industry fought cramdown with everything it had.

Journalists Swept Up in Mass Arrest at Occupy Oakland - (www.motherjones.com) On Saturday, Occupy Oakland re-entered the national spotlight during a day-long effort to take over an empty building and transform it into a social center. Oakland police thwarted the efforts, arresting more than 400 people in the process, primarily during a mass nighttime arrest outside a downtown YMCA. That number included at least six journalists, myself included, in direct violation of OPD media relations policy that states, "Even after a dispersal order has been given, clearly identified media shall be permitted to carry out their professional duties in any area where arrests are being made unless their presence would unduly interfere with the enforcement action."

New Strategy, Old Pentagon Budget - (www.nytimes.com) The $259 billion in budget cuts over the next five years announced by the Pentagon may sound like a lot. But they are mainly a scaling back of previously projected spending — the delights of the Washington budget games. This year, Pentagon spending will total $531 billion. In 2017, it will rise to $567 billion. Factoring in inflation, that amounts to only a minuscule 1.6 percent real cut. (Both numbers exclude war spending — $115 billion this year.) After a decade of unrestrained Pentagon spending increases, President Obama deserves credit for putting on the brakes. The cuts are a credible down payment on his pledge to reduce projected defense spending by $487 billion in the next decade. They are not going to be enough. In the likely absence of a bipartisan budget pact, a further automatic across-the-board 10-year cut of nearly $500 billion is to take effect starting next January.

OTHER STORIES:

Wealth can be a political burden - (www.washingtonpost.com)

How Romney's Tax Rate Stacks Up To Recent Presidential Candidates' - (www.talkingpointsmemo.com)

The one percent war of the billionaires against the millionaires - (www.reuters.com)

MF Global: Aaaaand it's gone. - (www.blogspot.com)

Building Roads to Cure Congestion Is an Exercise in Futility - (www.streetsblog.org)

Freddie Mac Bets Against American Homeowners - (www.propublica.org)

Jive Talkin By Obama - (www.kunstler.com)

Sarkozy Says France Will Impose 0.1% Transaction Tax in August - (www.bloomberg.com)

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