Category Archives: Bubbles

April 15, 2013

Obama orders same policy that sparked mortgage meltdown

Government: Lend to less qualified or face discrimination lawsuits.

Undaunted by the housing market collapse that crashed mortgage banks, cut the rug from underneath homeowner equity and slammed taxpayers for billions in bad loans, the Obama administration now has launched a major push for banks to hand out mortgages to those with “weaker credit,” including some on public assistance.

Edward Pinto, a former top executive at Fannie Mae, now with the American Enterprise Institute, confirmed to WND the government’s adoption of a strategy that requires banks to lend to less qualified borrowers or face discrimination complaints.

Just like before.

He is outraged, as are other housing industry experts and economists.

“This push by FHA will continue to set up for failure the very families and neighborhoods its mission is to help,” he told WND.

Economist Stan Liebowitz told WND the move is an “unnecessary risk being imposed on the economy for no gain except some political chits being generated by politicians for their own venal purposes.”

Liebowitz, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said the federal government is once again pushing banks to lower lending standards, which is “exactly what the government did starting in the mid 1990s.”

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April 12, 2013

Government Plays Favorites by John Stossel

When the housing bubble burst, politicians got panicked calls from their friends on Wall Street — in many cases former colleagues. Instead of letting their old friends take big losses and trusting smaller banks to expand and take their customers, the political class propped up risk-takers who made bad bets.

People say government must “help the little guy, promote equality, level the playing field.”

People often go into government to do that. But even when people mean well, it’s natural for them to help out their cronies.

David Stockman, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, was criticized for saying the government’s budget numbers didn’t add up. But he was right.

Now, in his book “The Great Deformation,” he says both major political parties failed ordinary Americans when the housing bubble burst, and they rushed to bail out cronies at big banks. Government continues to threaten our future by printing gobs of money and guaranteeing trillions in loans to banks, homeowners, students and other politically connected groups.

The political class claims the economy would have been destroyed in 2008 without a bailout of the big banks. Stockman says that’s a myth: “The Main Street banks were not going to go into a huge retail bank run … and (Fed chairman Ben) Bernanke is totally wrong when he says we were on the verge of Depression 2.0. We weren’t close. We would have worked our way through it. We’ve done it many times in history.”

Worked our way through it? Without the bailouts, there might have been a bigger stock market drop, and more businesses would have closed! But Stockman says, so what? It would have been worth it. And I agree with him.

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April 5, 2013

Bust: Major California City Enters Into Bankruptcy (Video)

Stockton, California boomed during the real estate bubble but went bust when it popped. Now Stockton is the first major United States city to enter into bankruptcy. Who will win and lose as creditors fight over the remains of this failed city? Find out as the Col. Allen West, Terry Jones and John Phillips tell you what is at stake for California pensions and this bankrupt municipality.

Video linked here at original source.


March 14, 2013

Big Sugar Is Set for a Sweet Bailout

The loan program was designed to operate at no cost to taxpayers. A June 2000 study by the Government Accountability Office, then called the General Accounting Office, estimated the program’s cost to the U.S. economy at $700 million in 1996 and $900 million in 1998.


In this Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2013 photo, displayed are Peeps at the Just Born factory in Bethlehem, Pa. With the storied candy brand celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, a quirky new TV ad campaign talks about all the things people do with their Peeps.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is considering buying 400,000 tons of sugar—enough for 142 billion Hershey’s Kisses—to stave off a wave of defaults by sugar processors that borrowed $862 million under a government price-support program.

The action aims to prop up tumbling U.S. sugar prices, which have fallen 18% since the USDA made the nine-month operations-financing loans beginning in October. The purchases could leave the price-support program with an $80 million loss, its biggest in 13 years, said Barbara Fecso, an economist at the USDA, in an interview.

The move would benefit companies that turn sugar beets and sugar cane into granulated sweetener, a business plied by American Crystal Sugar Co., Amalgamated Sugar Co. and U.S. Sugar Corp. The USDA wouldn’t say how many companies have received loans, or identify them. U.S. Sugar said it doesn’t have any USDA loans outstanding. American Crystal and Amalgamated didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Higher prices would hit food companies including candy giants Mars Inc., Hershey Co. and Nestlé SA, and could ultimately boost retail food prices, at a time when many consumers are financially stretched.

“Clearly, the USDA has made up its mind that Big Sugar is going to trump the American consumer,” said Pierson Bob Clair, president and chief executive at Brown & Haley, a confectioner in Tacoma, Wash., that makes Roca butter-crunch candy.

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February 8, 2013

Florida Is Swamped with Foreclosures – And Deals on Distressed Homes

Small-time investors also face tough competition from huge corporate buyers who have been scooping up foreclosures on a grand scale (think: tens of thousands of homes bought in a few months’ time) so that they can be rented and, later, resold when prices rise even higher.

Ah, Florida. It’s celebrated as the land of sunshine, snow birds, theme parks, and beaches. This year, it’s also considered the hottest state for snatching up foreclosed homes on the cheap.

For deals on distressed homes, look south. According to a new study from the foreclosure-tracking firm RealtyTrac, Florida was home to 8 of the country’s top 20 metropolitan areas for highest foreclosure rates last year. By no small coincidence, 5 of the top 10 “Best Places to Buy Foreclosures in 2013? also just so happen to be in Florida.

To come up with its “Best Places”—one of the few “Best Places” lists cities would prefer to not be associated with—RealtyTrac uses data points including the number of months of inventory of foreclosure homes, the percentage of total sales that are foreclosures, and the average foreclosure discount percentage. Tally up the numbers and the hottest market for scooping up distressed properties at major discounts is the Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville area of Florida. RealtyTrac summed up the market’s top-ranking data this way:

Topping the list of best places to buy foreclosures in 2013 was the Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville metro area in Florida with a total score of 394: 34 months’ supply of inventory, foreclosure sales representing 24 percent of all sales, average foreclosure discount of 28 percent, and a 308 percent increase in foreclosure activity in 2012 compared to 2011.

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February 2, 2013

North Dakota Went Boom

In the fall of 2011 in Crosby, N.D., Continental Resources, the oil company with the most acreage leased in the basin, erected a self-congratulatory granite monument celebrating its work in the so-called Bakken Formation, the Williston Basin rocks that, as Continental put it, ushered in “a new era in the American oil industry.”


Kevin Tschetter, 34, hauls water to and from active wells for KNS Enterprises. Originally from South Dakota, he was meeting with other KNS employees at the Scenic 23 Club in New Town.

Long before the full frenzy of the boom, you could see its harbingers at the Mountrail County courthouse in Stanley, N.D. Geologists had pored over core samples and log signatures and had made their educated guesses, and now it was the hour of the “landmen,” the men and women whose job was to dig through courthouse books for the often-tangled history of mineral title and surface rights.

Apart from a few fanatics who sometimes turned up at midnight, the landmen would begin arriving at the courthouse around 6 a.m. In the dead of winter, it would still be dark and often 20 or 30 below zero, and because the courthouse didn’t open until 7:30, the landmen would leave their briefcases outside the entrance, on the steps, in the order they arrived. And then they would go back to their cars and trucks to wait with the engines running, their faces wreathed in coffee steam. Sometimes there were more than 20 briefcases filed on the courthouse steps. The former landman who told me this — Brent Brannan, now director of the North Dakota Oil and Gas Research Program — said he sometimes thought he could see the whole boom in that one image, briefcases waiting for the day to start, and it killed him a little that he never took a picture.

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December 31, 2012

The End of the University as We Know It

Prior to the Wall Street meltdown, it seemed absurd to think that storied financial institutions like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers could disappear seemingly overnight. Until it happened, almost no one believed such a thing was possible. Well, get ready to see the same thing happen to a university near you, and not for entirely dissimilar reasons.

In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.

We’ve all heard plenty about the “college bubble” in recent years. Student loan debt is at an all-time high—an average of more than $23,000 per graduate by some counts—and tuition costs continue to rise at a rate far outpacing inflation, as they have for decades. Credential inflation is devaluing the college degree, making graduate degrees, and the greater debt required to pay for them, increasingly necessary for many people to maintain the standard of living they experienced growing up in their parents’ homes. Students are defaulting on their loans at an unprecedented rate, too, partly a function of an economy short on entry-level professional positions. Yet, as with all bubbles, there’s a persistent public belief in the value of something, and that faith in the college degree has kept demand high.

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December 30, 2012

‘We Have Passed That Point of No Return’: Ron Paul Explains What’s Missing in The ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Talks

“They are so they so far removed from admitting the seriousness of this crisis and if they don’t admit it, they can’t solve the problem. They’re like a bunch of drug addicts that just want another fix. That’s what they are looking for,” he concluded.

Even if Congress manages to come up with a solution to avert the “fiscal cliff,” a combination of year-end tax increases and spending cuts, it won’t be worth anything because it’ll probably only deal with tax rates and ignore the problem of runaway government spending, or so say Texas Congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul.

“I think we have passed that point of no return where we can actually get our house in order,” Rep. Paul said Friday on CNBC. “I believe there is too much bipartisanship on the spending. Nobody is talking about cutting any spending.”

“Republicans and Democrats,” he continued, “they pretend they’re fighting up there, but they really aren’t. They’re arguing over power, spin, and who looks good, and who looks bad, but they’re all trying to preserve this system where they can spend what they want, take care of their friends, and let the Fed print money when they need it.”

However, that’s not to say Rep. Paul doesn’t believe U.S. lawmakers will come up with temporary solutions to things like the “cliff.”

“[It’ll be] sort of like — how many times have they had a ‘solution’ for the Greece crisis? About ten or 15 times?” the congressman asked, referring to the eurozone’s most unstable and financially broken member.

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December 14, 2012

Britain’s new homeless: Banker sleeps rough in park (Video)

Britain is in the grip of a housing crisis of a sort not seen before, where even the most unexpected people are losing their homes.

Video linked here.

Kevin Browne is an investment banker. He moved to America and ran his own firm until the crash in 2008. His company went bust and his marriage fell apart.

He eventually lost his home and returned to England on a flight paid for by a charity. BBC Panorama met him last summer while he was sleeping rough in a park in Croydon.

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Queen talks of ‘lax’ bankers and ‘toothless’ regulators behind financial crisis

The Queen has spoken about “lax” City workers and a banking regulator which “didn’t have the teeth” to intervene as she discussed the causes of the financial crisis during a visit to the Bank of England.

With her face on every banknote and coin in circulation, it is only natural that the Queen takes a sharp interest in the nation’s finances, as she showed on a visit to the Bank of England today.

Her Majesty suggested the financial crisis of 2008 had happened because the Financial Services Authority “didn’t have the teeth” to rein in the biggest risk-takers.

The Duke of Edinburgh, meanwhile, had a typically blunt piece of advice for the Bank’s executives: “Don’t do it again!”

The Queen and the Duke grilled Bank of England staff during a visit which included a tour of a vault stacked with £27 billion worth of bullion.

Suit Kapadia, one of the Bank’s financial policy experts, said he wanted to answer a question the Queen asked academics at the London School of Economics in 2008 about why no one saw the financial crisis coming.

“Oh!” said the Queen, looking slightly taken aback.

Mr Kapadia said the City had got “complacent” because it thought risk was being managed better than it was, and the financial system had become too interconnected.

The Queen agreed: “People got a bit lax … perhaps it was difficult to foresee.”

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