KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Saturday October 8 Housing and Economic stories

Friday, October 7, 2011

Saturday October 8 Housing and Economic stories

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Man slain in Hayward was a gold dealer - (www.sfgate.com) A Hayward man who was shot and killed outside his home was a gold dealer who worked local swap meets and had been targeted by robbers in the past, police and neighbors said. Amador Carrera, 65, was killed and his 59-year-old wife was wounded when they were accosted in their minivan outside their home on St. Andrews Street, in a neighborhood between BART tracks and Mission Boulevard, at about 8 a.m. Sunday, authorities said. Police said they were investigating whether robbery was the motive for killing Carrera, who bought and sold gold at swap meets. No one has been arrested. Susan Grace, a neighbor, said she heard three shots the morning Carrera was killed. "It was pow-pow, and then like a three-second delay, and then a pow," she said. She then heard the couple's daughter screaming for help. "It's just a shame that someone would kill a man over gold," Grace said.

Ex-labor chief's 1-day rehire nets $158,000 city pension - ( www.msnbc.msn.com) A retired Chicago labor leader secured a $158,000 public pension — roughly five times greater than what a typical retired public-service worker in the Windy City receives — after being rehired for just one day of active duty on the city payroll, local news reports said. According to The Chicago Tribune, Dennis Gannon stands to collect approximately $5 million in city pension funds during his lifetime. He now draws the pension while working for a hedge fund, the Tribune reported. The Republican leader of the state House, Tom Cross, said he will introduce a bill to repeal the 1991 law that allows the windfall. Senate President Dennis Cullerton, a Democrat, agreed the law seems flawed. Gannon, former president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, was able to take a long leave from a city job to work for a union and then receive a city pension based on a high union salary. That arrangement is allowed under a state law signed by Gov. Jim Thompson on his last day in office in 1991, according to an investigation by the Tribune and WGN-TV.

Greece on Edge 24 Centuries After First Default - (www.bloomberg.com) History’s first sovereign default came in the 4th century BC, committed by 10 Greek municipalities. There was one creditor: the temple of Delos, Apollo’s mythical birthplace.

Twenty-four centuries later, Greece is at the edge of the biggest sovereign default and policy makers are worried about global shock waves of an insolvency by a government with 353 billion euros ($483 billion) of debt -- five times the size of Argentina’s $95 billion default in 2001. “There is a monstrously large amount of uncertainty and a massive range of possibilities,” said David Mackie, chief European economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in London. “A macroeconomic disaster could be averted but only by aggressive policy action” by central banks and governments, he said.

Spain’s Banking Mess - (www.nytimes.com) Just when markets were focused on the risks of a Greek default and the possibility of contagion to other countries, Spain’s central bank reported this week that things were getting worse for that country’s banks — but not because they held a lot of Greek debt or bonds issued by other troubled European economies. The problem, instead, is the same old one. With Spain’s economy weak and home prices falling, bad loans are growing. And the central bank thinks things are getting worse. In a surprisingly frank presentation to investors in London on Tuesday, José María Roldán, the Bank of Spain’s director general of banking regulation, said that Spanish land prices had fallen about 30 percent from the 2007 peak, adjusted for inflation, and that home prices were off about 22 percent. “In both cases, we expect further corrections in the years to come,” he said. For land prices, he said, the bank’s “baseline scenario” was that prices would fall to little more than half of the peak level. The “adverse scenario” indicated that the decline could be significantly worse.

Insight: Faith in policymakers plunges, taking markets with it - (www.reuters.com) Europe's debt crisis looks more intractable than ever. The Federal Reserve appears to be shooting blanks when it comes to firing up the U.S. economy. Add in signs that Chinese growth is slowing by the day, and it explains why financial markets took a hammering on Thursday, with global stock markets, oil, metals and even gold sliding. And investors now fear there isn't much that authorities can do to stop the slide: central banks are running out of ammunition and political will among U.S. and European leaders is in short supply. Even as central bankers and finance ministers from the world's largest economies met in Washington, few were holding out hope for a miracle solution. "People are losing confidence in policymakers altogether," said Kathy Lien, director of research at GFT Forex, an online retail currency platform. "If they keep failing to boost growth and confidence, we may see the kind of deep global crisis we saw three years ago."