KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Saturday May 15 Housing and Economic stories

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TOP STORIES:

Las Vegas property values at 2000 levels - (www.lvrj.com) Las Vegas property values have declined to levels of 10 years ago, but will recover to 60 percent of their peak in the next two to three years, the leader of a local academic institution said Wednesday. Real estate has reached a point of stability and established a new base line for values, said Robert Lang, director of Brookings Institution at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "There is a point where real estate drops so low, it's past the intrinsic value of replacing that real estate," Lang said at a quarterly market presentation by Colliers International brokerage. "I think the actual bottom is irrelevant once you pass that zone. Anything on the upside of intrinsic value, you don't even need a full recovery." That's why people are coming to Las Vegas and writing checks for homes, he said. Investors know they can't replicate the product for the price, even if there's no expectation for appreciation. Lang, who was recently appointed to the Brookings' job at UNLV, remembers coming to Las Vegas in 2005 for a think-tank discussion on affordable work force housing.

Japan Tries to Face Up to Growing Poverty Problem - (www.nytimes.com) Satomi Sato, a 51-year-old widow, knew she had it tough, raising a teenage daughter on the less than $17,000 a year she earned from two jobs. Still, she was surprised last autumn when the government announced for the first time an official poverty line — and she was below it. “I don’t want to use the word poverty, but I’m definitely poor,” said Ms. Sato, who works mornings making boxed lunches and afternoons delivering newspapers. “Poverty is still a very unfamiliar word in Japan.” After years of economic stagnation and widening income disparities, this once proudly egalitarian nation is belatedly waking up to the fact that it has a large and growing number of poor people. The Labor Ministry’s disclosure in October that almost one in six Japanese, or 20 million people, lived in poverty in 2007 stunned the nation and ignited a debate over possible remedies that has raged ever since. Many Japanese, who cling to the popular myth that their nation is uniformly middle class, were further shocked to see that Japan’s poverty rate, at 15.7 percent, was close to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s figure of 17.1 percent in the United States, whose glaring social inequalities have long been viewed with scorn and pity here.

The great property scam is back to rip us off again - (www.independent.ie) They're back! The creeps, the snake-oil salesmen and spoofers who condemned a generation to negative equity are cheerleading again. The advertisers are salivating too because the "property porn" industry sees a chance to sell its fantasy again. The papers are once more displaying "dream homes" replete with doctored photographs and Mediterranean blue skies -- all at "knock down" prices. It's time to buy again, or so I'm reliably told by those who were so reliable last time that they gave us NAMA! I am not saying that property won't recover ever, of course it will; but not from here. Irish property is still extortionately expensive. It is expensive not just on a comparative basis but, more crucially, it is expensive on the basis of what is happening in the economy. Any government that is urging people to buy houses right now clearly has no intention of learning anything from the mistakes of the past few years and therefore is condemned to repeat them -- with catastrophic results. If you were a Martian economist and were asked to put together a blueprint for how Ireland can learn from this boom/bust travesty, the first point on the list would be that Ireland should try to 'lock in' the competitive gain that cheap property gives a country. We should let property fall to a level that we can all afford and then start again. As well as a labour force that is willing and educated, low taxes and cheap land should be part of our competitive offering. In that way, we can afford to pay our workers more, because we are paying our landlords less.

The American people can't afford God's work anymore - (theautomaticearth.blogspot.com) Finance Overhaul Draws a Lobbying Swarm: Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, left no doubt about the consequences if Congress cracked down on his bank’s immense business in derivatives. "It will be negative," he said. "Depending on the real detail, it could be $700 million or a couple billion dollars." With so much money at stake, it is not surprising that more than 1,500 lobbyists, executives, bankers and others have made their way to the Senate committee that on Wednesday will take up legislation to rein in derivatives [..] The forum for all this attention is not the usual banking and financial services committees, but rather the Senate Agriculture Committee, a group more accustomed to dealing with farm subsidies and national forest boundaries than with the more obscure corners of Wall Street. A main weapon being wielded to fight the battle, of course, is money. Agriculture Committee members have received $22.8 million in this election cycle from people and organizations affiliated with financial, insurance and real estate companies — two and a half times what they received from agricultural donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Much of that lobbying has centered on Senator Blanche Lincoln, the Arkansas Democrat who is the committee’s chairwoman and who last week introduced the bill that would prevent banks from trading derivatives directly. The daughter of a sixth-generation rice farmer, she has found herself navigating a dangerous channel between Wall Street firms, which raised $60,000 at two fund-raisers for her re-election campaign so far this year, and her constituents, many of whom want a crackdown on the speculation that led to the financial crisis.

Save "Are" Teachers – (Mish at globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com) Good video and pic showing some well-educated students J

Here is an image from a teacher inspired protest in Des Moines Iowa. Terry Hoffman, a language teacher, organized the kids. It might behoove Hoffman to spend more time teaching grammar. Fortunately she is retiring. In a KCCI video teacher, Terry Hoffman has the kids chanting "Show Us The Money". In Massachusetts, teachers were telling kids that they would lose their homes if they did not get more money. Teachers have no business organizing kids to promote their personal agendas (pay raises for themselves). I believe such actions should be grounds for dismissal.