KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Monday February 27 Housing and Economic stories

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Monday February 27 Housing and Economic stories

KeNosHousingPortal.blogspot.com

TOP STORIES:

We May Be Looking At A Mad Dash For Banknotes In Switzerland - (www.businessinsider.com) There have been press reports in Switzerland that commercial banks are no longer able to meet client demand for safe deposit boxes. All of the boxes are apparently taken. As a result, people are renting safe deposit boxes in hotels. (Link) "...If you want a bank box in Zurich today, they will require that you have a minimum of half a million swiss francs on deposit in the bank, before they will even consider you. That is how short of space they are." From Le Temps 2/6/2012: "A distinguished lady had hidden 65,000 euros in the heels of her shoes and her bra...A Labrador is trained to sniff out banknotes in Chiasso...A motorist was caught in early February with more than 200,000 euros hidden at the bottom of his suitcase...In a survey of "the great capital flight", the daily La Repubblica suggests a rise of 50% of receivers of property along the border with Switzerland in late 2011 over the summer.

Ditching your bank - (www.sacbee.com) Exactly three months ago, many bank customers were fuming. They didn't like bigbank bailouts, and they didn't like the $5 debit card fees that Bank of America and other institutions were rolling out. Across the country, consumer activists and Occupy Wall Street groups alike urged customers to dump their old bank and switch to a new one, presumably with fewer fees. Through blogs, billboards and bullhorns, last Nov. 5 was officially designated as "Bank Transfer Day." So what was the result? According to a study released last week, about 610,000 U.S. consumers jilted their existing bank and hooked up with a new one between October and December, specifically citing "Bank Transfer Day" as their reason.

Cost for Doing God's Work Declines from $13.2 Million to $9 Million - (globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com) Inquiring minds note a stunning drop in the price for doing God's Work. Last year Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein received a salary of a $600,000 as well as a stock bonus worth $12.6 million. This year the base salary for doing God's work rose to $2 million, however, bonuses fell to a shockingly-low $7 million. The net effect is a decline from $13.2 million to $9 million. That is a 30% reduction in the overall cost of doing God's work. Said Blankfein "Now I know how those in Greece feel". For additional details, please see Goldman’s Blankfein Awarded $7 Million in Stock for ’11. Here is one key fact from the article. The filings don’t include how much any of the executives have been awarded in cash bonuses. Blankfein received a $5.4 million cash bonus for 2010, his first since getting about $27 million in cash bonuses for each of 2007 and 2006. Mercy! How can the man survive a cut like that?

New York sues banks over foreclosures - (www.cnn.com) The New York attorney general sued some of the nation's biggest banks on Friday, accusing them of unlawful and deceptive practices for relying on a private electronic registry that tracks mortgages. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on Friday sued Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, as well as the Mortgage Electronic Registration System Inc. (MERS) in New York state court. Schneiderman says that the banks created the electronic registry as an "end-run" around the public property recording system to help them more quickly buy and sell parts of mortgages. He said the system helped banks create "deceptive and fraudulent court submissions" and improperly foreclose on homeowners. "Our action demonstrates that there is one set of rules for all -- no matter how big or powerful the institution may be -- and that those rules will be enforced vigorously," said Attorney General Schneiderman in a statement.

History says real estate is a bad investment - (www.cbsnews.com) While the housing bust showed many people the dangers of investing in residential real estate, investors could have realized this long before, simply by paying attention to history. Prior to the bust, recent history made many investors feel comfortable that buying up houses would prove profitable. The recent Journal of Wealth Management paper "Measuring Residential Real Estate Risk and Return" noted that while there were a few individual quarters when the S&P Case-Shiller home price index fell, the overall trend for the 19-year period 1987-2005 was upward. The run-up in home prices was so great that for the 10-year period 1997-2006, the nominal and real returns were 9.7 percent and 7.1 percent, respectively. And from 2000 through 2006, the figures were 11 percent 8.2 percent, respectively.