Thursday June 18 Housing and Economic stories

KeNosHousingPortal.blogspot.com

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From PRAVDA (pravda.ru) American capitalism gone with a whimper, Translated from Russian - (www.safehaven.com) It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people. True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists. Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters. First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather than the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish. Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more than Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more than happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America. The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more than another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe. These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more than ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them? These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more than a whimper to their masters. Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions. So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less than two months ago, warned Obama and UK's Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride. Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper...but a "freeman" whimper. So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses? Senator Barney Franks, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive. The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left. The proud American will go down into his slavery without a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

Why Rookie Lawyers Get $60,000 Paid Vacations - (www.time.com) Volunteering at church. Working part-time at a bookstore. Selling real estate. All are worthwhile pursuits, but not exactly what Peter Marshall thought he'd be doing after he graduated from Vanderbilt Law School this spring. Particularly since he received a coveted offer last September to join a white-shoe Chicago firm, Kirkland & Ellis. Then the economic crisis set in, and as legal work across the country has dried up, many large and mid-sized firms have turned to a surprising cost-cutting strategy: paying incoming first-year associates — whose starting annual salaries at Manhattan firms is $160,000 — not to show up. So far this year, Marshall and hundreds of other third-year law students at prestigious schools have seen their job start dates pushed back anywhere from just a few months to a full year, leaving those affected scrambling to find other options to fill the time off. "To get my stipend from Kirkland, I can't take on any other paid legal work," says Marshall, whose job is now set to begin Nov. 30. "So I'm just going to take advantage of a little extra freedom this fall." At first blush, receiving a generous stipend — sometimes as much as $75,000 — to do whatever your heart desires might not sound so bad. But for young lawyers facing upwards of $200,000 in law school debt, the outlook is less rosy. For starters, there's the very real possibility that that the deferred job may never materialize — nearly 5,000 veteran attorneys have been laid-off since last September, according to industry website Lawshucks.com. "I'd love to take the money and go backpack around Thailand," says David Kirchblum, who graduates from Boston College's law school next week and had the start date for his job at New York firm Milbank Tweed pushed back to January 2010. "But if I suddenly have to find a new position, that gap is going to be difficult to explain." Some firms are forcing deferrals on incoming associates while others are taking a choose-your-own-adventure approach. Stroock & Stroock & Lavan in New York has offered incoming associates three options: start in January 2010 and get a $10,000 stipend, start in January 2011 and get $50,000 or agree not to come at all and get $75,000. Which sounds great until you remember that finding another firm job or any post-graduate work at all at this point will be next to impossible in this economy. For associates who start their jobs a year late, the delay could have consequences in terms of earning potential and making partner, which is generally an eight-year war of attrition among the group of lawyers who start working the same year. "This will definitely be a setback for the classes of 2009 and 2010, who are now on a collision course," says James Leipold, executive director of the Washington-based National Association for Law Placement. "They'll find themselves competing for jobs and money the rest of their careers."

Former escrow officer guilty of extensive fraud - (www.sfgate.com) An Alameda County jury has convicted a former escrow officer of two counts each of felony grand theft and felony identity theft in an "equity stripping" case that highlights a widespread type of fraud that artificially inflated prices during the housing boom. Wonda Kidd, 58, was convicted Tuesday of aiding and abetting an extensive real estate fraud that took place from April 2005 through August 2006. The scam involved real estate agents who either personally purchased or used "straw buyers" to buy properties in Oakland. Kidd, acting as the escrow officer, falsified documents to deceive lenders into thinking the purchase price was $100,000 above the actual sales price, said David Lim, an Alameda County deputy district attorney. When the transactions closed, Kidd would disburse the extra $100,000 to her cohorts and various shell companies. The buyers would default on the mortgages, often not making a single payment, leaving the lenders to foreclose on properties worth much less than the loans they had made. "This was the hallmark of the real estate fraud that was going on during the subprime boom," Lim said. The district attorney's office spent three years investigating and prosecuting the case. Its first break came when it was approached by lender New Century Mortgage, which had begun to suspect irregularities on some of the loans. "We started looking through the loan applications for Alameda County," Lim said. That's when he noticed problems with loans originated by Hiddenbrooke Mortgage, a Vallejo company. "There were five different houses and five different buyers, but each buyer had the exact same bank account," Lim said. Wilson Berry, who runs a handyman company in the East Bay, was a victim of the fraud; his identity was stolen for some of the deals. "I haven't wanted to look at real estate the same way since then," he said. "I have been severely depressed off and on over this whole thing. I was at the top of my game, then all of a sudden I was laying on my back. I felt like that lady in the ad, she's fallen and she can't get up." Berry said the verdict, following on the heels of sentences for other participants in the scam, "gives me a little closure, some sense of justice, some sense that people do have moral values these days." The scheme's mastermind, Karim Akil, 42, pleaded guilty to charges of grand theft in 2008 and is serving a three-year sentence in state prison. His assistant, Michelle McGuire, also pleaded guilty in 2008 to grand theft and is serving a year in Alameda County jail.

What the Golden State's bleak future means for America - (www.reason.com) California is famously considered abellwether state for social and political trends, from the positive (hot rod andsurf culture, the human potential movement, tax revolts, digital culture) to the regrettable (murderous cults, carbon reduction mandates). With that in mind, a simple—yet terribly difficult for our political class—contemplation of the state's current cash crisis is both instructive and scary for the future of our nation as a whole. California now confronts a roughly $24 billion deficit. Recent attempts to get voters to approve various fiscal shenanigans and cost-shifts got smacked down at the polls. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is now making a big show of proposing heavy spending cuts that will, we are told by the state’s journalistic and political mavens, destroy the state, beggar its sick and young, and leave just enough cash to forcibly keep people out of various state parks, though not to “operate” them.
Of course, nowhere among the “serious options” under consideration is legalizing pot and other controlled substances, which would likely give the state an extra billion dollars a year in tax revenue. That simple act of political sanity would also save the state the $43,000 a year per inmate now spent incarcerating drug criminals, of whom a fresh nearly 19,000 were added in 2008 alone. Finding places to cut costs without reducing the state to post-apocalyptic squalor shouldn’t be such a big deal, of course. As explained in California’s political newspaper Capital Weekly last week: [N]ew revenue estimates released by the Department of Finance this week place the state’s general fund revenues at $85.9 billion—nearly $4 billion higher than they were just five years ago. Even with the depleted funds caused by plunging home prices and a global economic slowdown, Gov. Schwarzenegger’s budget is still larger than his first budget in the 2004-05 budget year. But in that first budget year, state spending was at $79.8 billion. Over the next two years, state spending jumped by more than 21 percent, to more than $101.4 billion in the 2006-07 budget year.

Government jobs shield workers from the recession - (news.yahoo.com/s/ap) An AP analysis of economic data from around the country shows that economic pain in a county decreases as the percentage of government workers in its work force rises. Facts and figures about some of the counties around the country enjoying relative prosperity because of heavy concentrations of government jobs: Leon County, Fla. — Home to the state capital, Tallahassee. Population 264,000. Percentage of government workers 20. 6.2 percent March unemployment and an AP Stress Index Score of 7.26 (4th lowest in Florida). Champaign County, Illinois — Location of the University of Illinois. Population 193,600. Percentage of government workers 18.5. 7.1 percent unemployment in March and an AP Stress Index Score of 7.87 (ninth lowest in Illinois). Johnson County, Iowa — Location of the University of Iowa. Population 128,000. Percentage of government workers 25.6. 3.6 percent March unemployment and an AP Stress Index Score of 3.89 (lowest in Iowa). Riley County, Kansas — Home to U.S. Army's Fort Riley and Kansas State University. Population: 71,000. Percentage of government workers 17.4. 3.4 percent March unemployment and an AP Stress Index Score of 3.71 (12th lowest in Kansas). Washtenaw County, Mich. — Home to the University of Michigan. Population 347,000. Percentage of government workers 19.1. 7.4 percent March unemployment and an AP Stress Index Score of 9.25 (second lowest in Michigan). Los Alamos County, N.M. — Los Alamos National Laboratory location. Population 18,000. Percentage of government workers 30.7. 2.9 percent March unemployment and an AP Stress Index Score of 3.28 (second lowest in New Mexico). Albany County, N.Y. — Has both the state capital in Albany and a State University of New York campus. Population 298,000. Percentage of government workers 22.6. 7 percent March unemployment and an AP Stress Index Score of 8.4 (seventh lowest in New York). Orange County, N.C. — University of North Carolina located here. Population 126,000. Percentage of government workers 26.2. 6.5 percent March unemployment and an AP Stress Index Score of 7.13 (lowest inNorth Carolina).






OTHER STORIES:

SEC charging ex-Countrywide CEO Mozilo with fraud - (finance.yahoo.com)
Insider Trading - Mozilo, Angelo - (www.note graph at top) - (www.secform4.com)
Buffett Is Less Bullish on US Than You Think - (www.bloomberg.com)
Mortgage Rates Touch New 2009 High - (optionarmageddon.ml-implode.com)
The Fed Loses the Mortgage-Rate Battle? - (www.minyanville.com)
Bernanke's Monkey See Monkey Don't Policy - (Mish at globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com)
13 cities post unemployment higher than 15% - (money.cnn.com)
Medical bills cause more bankruptcies than mortgages do - (www.reuters.com)
FEMA May Use Foreclosed Houses As Shelters - (www.wkrg.com)
California's Day of Reckoning: What to Cut - (www.time.com)
Geithner's Poor Judgement In Real Estate - (www.patrick.net)
Pictures of Geithner House - (www.zillow.com)
Global house prices: Bottom fishing - (www.economist.com)Present Depression To Be Deeper than Great Crash of 1929 - (Charles Hugh Smith at www.oftwominds.com) The Next Big Thing: Neomedievalism - (www.foreignpolicy.com)

U.S. Stock Futures Decline; Freeport-McMoRan, Exxon Mobil Fall - (www.bloomberg.com)
Treasuries Fall as Traders Bet on Higher Fed Rate; Stocks Drop - (www.bloomberg.com)
Dollar maintains upside momentum - (www.marketwatch.com)
Gold Falls in London as Stronger Dollar Curbs Investment Demand - (www.bloomberg.com)
Doubts mount over US toxic asset plan - (www.ft.com)
U.S. to Propose Wider Oversight of Compensation - (www.nytimes.com)
Oil to ‘Spike’ Without New Investments, Shell Says - (www.bloomberg.com)
Ireland Debt Rating Downgraded Again by Standard & Poor’s - (www.bloomberg.com)
Crisis-hit Latvia contemplates deeper cuts - (finance.yahoo.com)
BRICs Add $60 Billion Reserves as Zhou Derides Dollar - (www.bloomberg.com)
Socialists across continent left licking wounds - (www.ft.com)
Bollard Says N.Z. Won’t Need Quantitative Easing, Scoop Says - (www.bloomberg.com)
Argentina’s Faster Inflation Puts Pressure on Peso: Week Ahead - (www.bloomberg.com)
European elections: results map - (www.ft.com)
Bernanke Conundrum Threatens Housing on Rising Mortgage Rates - (www.bloomberg.com)
Obama’s Economic Circle Keeps Tensions Simmering - (www.nytimes.com)
U.S. Will Let Some Banks Repay Aid - (www.washingtonpost.com)
World airlines seen losing $9 billion this year - (www.google.com/hostednews/ap)