KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Tuesday February 21 Housing and Economic stories

Monday, February 20, 2012

Tuesday February 21 Housing and Economic stories

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TOP STORIES:

Almost Half Of US Households Live One Crisis From The Bread Line - (www.huffingtonpost.com) What does it mean to be poor? If it means living at or below the poverty line, then 15 percent of Americans -- some 46 million people -- qualify. But if it means living with a decent income and hardly any savings -- so that one piece of bad luck, one major financial blow, could land you in serious, lasting trouble -- then it's a much larger number. In fact, it's almost half the country. "The resources that people have -- they are using up those resources," said Jennifer Brooks, director of state and local policy at the Corporation for Enterprise Development, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group. "They're living off their savings. They're at the end of their rope." The group issued a report today examining so-called liquid asset poverty households -- the people who aren't living below the poverty line, but don't have enough money saved to weather a significant emergency.

Schneiderman promises aggressive fraud probe, in election year only - (www.latimes.com) New York Atty. Gen. Eric Schneiderman, who was tapped byPresident Obama to co-chair a new state and federal mortgage crisis unit, promised Wednesday to move aggressively to coordinate investigations into the causes of the subprime mortgage market meltdown. "We’re undertaking a more coordinated effort to pull together all of the various strands of investigations relating to the conduct that created the mortgage-backed securities bubble and led to the market crash," Schneiderman told reporters in Washington after an event at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
"There have been investigations going on in various states and branches of the federal government," he said. "We’re now making a concerted effort to pull everything together and move forward aggressively to address these issues."

A List of Goldman Sachs People in the Obama Government - (www.firedoglake.com) At a time when Congressional hearings are set to call testimony from some Goldman Sachs employees, it is vital to understand how widespread that institution’s ties are to the Obama administration. This diary shows the pervasive influence of Goldman Sachs and Goldman created institutions (like the Hamilton Project embedded in the Brookings Institution), employees and influence peddlers in the Obama administration. While many of the people listed below formerly worked for Goldman Sachs or its offshoots (like the Hamilton Project, including all three of that project’s first Directors) influence can be exerted not only through people but through money, awards, sponsored scholarship, and creation of an agenda favorable to Goldman Sachs (which is where Brookings and the Hamilton Project come in and have proved especially useful to Goldman Sachs). It is further of note that although Goldman Sachs has been the center of attention especially since Matt Taibbi’s insightful investigative journalism, that I have not been able to find a comprehensive list of the influence of Goldman Sachs in this administration..

House prices drop, and consumers turn gloomy - (www.reuters.com) Home prices fell more steeply than expected in November, and consumers turned less optimistic in January, highlighting the hurdles still facing the bumpy economic recovery. After accelerating at its fastest pace in 1-1/2 years at the end of 2011, the U.S. economy is expected slow in early 2012. The S&P/Case-Shiller composite index of single-family home prices in 20 metropolitan areas, released on Tuesday, declined 0.7 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis, a bigger drop than the 0.5 percent economists expected.

The Catholic Church Has Launched A Fight Against Obama That's Unprecedented In American History - (www.businessinsider.com) We've been talking about this emerging conflict between the Catholic Church and the Obama Administration for two weeks, and last night and this morning it exploded all over the mainstream media. The basics are this: the department of Health and Human services issued a regulation that all non-Church religious institutions, like hospitals and schools, had to provide employee health insurance that includes contraception, sterlization, and drugs that the Church maintains are abortifacients. You might be thinking: Doesn't the Catholic Church oppose all sorts of things? Why are we even talking about this? Well, it's true that the Catholic Church opposes legal abortion, it opposed liberalized divorce laws. The current pope and the last one opposed the Iraq War, etc.