Category Archives: Real Estate & Lending
Hypocrisy….thy name is Obama:
We know what happened when we strayed from those values over the past decade – especially when it comes to our housing market.
Lenders sold loans to families who couldn’t afford them. Banks packaged those mortgages up and traded them for phony profits. It drove up prices and created an unsustainable bubble that burst – and left millions of families who did everything right in a world of hurt.
60 Minutes, as usual, had a very nearly excellent program last week on the economic collapse, and they were all upset because no one has been arrested; no particular person appears to be under investigation. They have a good reason to be upset, but they seemed, at least in this report (and in several previous programs), to be clueless as to why. Continue reading
This is a testimony to the unending and blind stupidity of the left:
Wall Street’s resurgent prosperity frustrates its claims, and Obama’s
President Obama has called people who work on Wall Street “fat-cat bankers,” and his reelection campaign has sought to harness public frustration with Wall Street. Financial executives retort that the president’s pursuit of financial regulations is punitive and that new rules may be “holding us back.”
But both sides face an inconvenient fact: During Obama’s tenure, Wall Street has roared back, even as the broader economy has struggled.
Karl Marx has indigestion; Cuba has just announced the imposition of private property rights and a citizen’s right to sell and buy real estate.
Fidel and Raul Castro have maintained the most classical example of Marxism in the world for over 50 years: consequently, the Cuban people live in abject poverty under totalitarian rule, while their leaders enjoy their wealth, opulence, and outrageous personal economic portfolios so typical of iron fisted thugs ruling over a Socialist dystopia.
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I have a friend that has a Masters in Psychology. We usually confine our discussions to beer, softball, women, and beer. The man is a master of manipulation. I have seen him deflect arguments with such skill that the other person walks away in a cloud of befuddlement. Sometimes we discuss politics. I brought up the growing divide in our country and told him I have little hope that we will ever bridge it. He explained to me the nature of this divide and why we may never come together again as a nation. These are the five logical fallacies that prevent us from agreeing. Continue reading
Barack Obama has unveiled a crisp, fresh and new campaign theme.
President Obama has devised a new strategy for dealing with troubling economic developments: Showcase optimism about turning around the economy while reassuring voters that although he understands their fears he isn’t directly responsible for their pain.
It’s four months shy of three years since I penned the post, “A Perfect Storm of Housing and Lending Events… the crash of the US housing market and economy. Since then, it’s been stimulus after stimulus spending… albeit all with different names to disguise the same. In the weeks following the Obama inaugural, economist Chris Low was saying the housing market hit bottom, and that 2009 was a year of stabilization and recovery.
It was not to be Continue reading
Life not fair. Nor for that matter is it unfair. It simply is. It’s not fair or unfair that the lion feasts on the slowest zebra or that the penguin who leaps into the ocean at just the wrong moment becomes dinner for an Orca. Life is life… fair doesn’t come into play.
Fair is a fundamentally human concept that is defined by a lack of preference or favoritism and or injustice.
Despite its subjective nature, fairness is a word that the left loves to bring to what should be an objective realm, politics. Continue reading
In Sept, 2008, I penned the post, the US Economy: A Perfect Storm of Housing and Lending Events. This overview of how we managed to bring ourselves to the precarious cliff of a failed economy revealed it was not a single issue, but a combination of many events – including political pressure on lenders for homeownership, relaxing of GSE lending criteria, regulation/deregulation, and profit motivation by financial institutions – leading to an out of whack supply vs demand, driving up housing values to unsustainable and dangerous levels.
It never crossed my mind that financial terrorism could be another element to be factored in. So when the WA Times wrote of an unclassified Pentagon report by Kevin D. Freeman, my head perked up. Continue reading
Just caught this from this evening’s Washington Times. I’ve done no research yet, nor found a link to the actual report. But here’s the basics…. a Pentagon contractor, Kevin D. Freeman, wrote an analysis in 2009 titled “Economic Warfare: Risks … Continue reading