Katherine Heigl’s Own Life In ‘Life As We Know It’
housing bubble..if i pop, you’re screwed!! …..item 3..US homes lost to foreclosure up 25 pct on year (September 2010) …..item 5…The financial fallout was an ‘Inside Job’……
Image by marsmet47
"If the people understood the rank injustice of the money and banking system, there would be a revolution by morning." – Andrew Jackson "
Our goal is gradually to absorb the wealth of the world." – Cecil Rhodes. "
The Federal Reserve is the most corrupt institution the world has ever seen." – US Congressman Luis McFadden. "
Banks loan money they DO NOT HAVE" – John Maynard Keynes. "
A "loan" made by a bank is a clear addition of money into the community." – Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed.
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…..item 1)…web-link……yahoo news…Housing Optimists Are "Not Paying Attention" to the Facts, Says Dean Baker
Posted May 12, 2010 10:02am EDT by Heesun Wee in Investing, Banking, Housing
Related: xhb, ^dji, ^gspc, xlf, tlt, tbt
finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/housing-bulls-are-"not…,^dji,^gspc,xlf,tlt,tbt
Among the crowded ranks of economists and market watchers, Dean Baker stands out. Baker presciently called the housing bubble when he published “The Run-up in Home Prices: Is It Real or Is It Another Bubble?” in 2002.
So does our guest Baker see the so-called housing recovery now? "No. I mean I think people that are saying that just aren’t paying attention to what’s in front of their eyes," says Baker, an American economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
"I think we’re going to see a big fall-off in purchases for the rest of 2010 and even into 2011,” Baker says. “So the idea that somehow the market is stable, that housing prices will rise anytime soon – it’s really hard to make a case for that."
Baker lays out several reasons for his bearish case:
* Programs that lifted the market, including the tax credit for first-time buyers, have expired.
* The Federal Reserve is exiting the mortgage market, which will likely push rates to 5.5% to 6% by the end of the year.
* There’s still an inventory glut and rental rates are falling in many markets, notes Baker, author of "False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy." He says the rental market doesn’t lie.
Naturally the housing bulls disagree. Hedge-fund manager John Paulson, for example, said housing prices in hard-hit California will begin to rise this year, setting the stage for a wider recovery, as the FT reports.
So what are the chances of, say, another tax credit or purchase of mortgage-backed securities? "I think they’d be reluctant to do that because of the signal it would send," Baker says in the accompanying clip. "I mean it would send this unambiguous signal things really are bad, worse than had been advertised."
Click on the player to learn about Baker’s idea to let struggling homeowners stay in their homes, and prevent home inventory from climbing even higher.
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…..item 2)…….housing bubble….flickr member…TheTruthAbout…
farm4.static.flickr.com/3078/2683703739_818b785616.jpg
Excess…
I took this photo while just north of Los Angeles in the city of Santa Maria. It’s been one of the harder-hit areas of California, despite being fairly close to pricey and always fashionable Santa Barbara. Perhaps too much building/supply and simply not enough demand was the problem here. This particular photo was taken right off the 101 freeway, and actually only captured a handful of the many, many real estate signs planted on the patch of growth by the on-ramp. I was immediately drawn to the scene, as I felt it summed up the housing bubble perfectly, which in my opinion, has been all about excess – photo courtesy The Truth About Mortgage
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…..item 3)…..Yahoo! News …bought to you by Yahoo! Finance….US homes lost to foreclosure up 25 pct on year
By ALEX VEIGA, AP Real Estate Writer
Thursday September 16, 2010
news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100916/ap_on_bi_ge/us_foreclosure_r…
LOS ANGELES – Lenders took back more homes in August than in any month since the start of the U.S. mortgage crisis.
The increase in home repossessions came even as the number of properties entering the foreclosure process slowed for the seventh month in a row, foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac Inc. said Thursday.
In all, banks repossessed 95,364 properties last month, up 3 percent from July and an increase of 25 percent from August 2009, RealtyTrac said.
August makes the ninth month in a row that the pace of homes lost to foreclosure has increased on an annual basis. The previous high was in May.
Banks have been stepping up repossessions to clear out their backlog of bad loans with an eye on eventually placing the foreclosed properties on the market, but they can’t afford to simply dump the properties on the market.
Concerns are growing that the housing market recovery could stumble amid stubbornly high unemployment, a sluggish economy and faltering consumer confidence. U.S. home sales have collapsed since federal homebuyer tax credits expired in April.
That’s one reason fewer than one-third of homes repossessed by lenders are on the market, said Rick Sharga, a senior vice president at RealtyTrac.
"These (properties) are going to come to market, but very slowly because nobody wants to overwhelm a soft buyer’s market with too much distressed inventory for fear of what it would do for house prices," he said.
As a result, lenders are putting off initiating the foreclosure process on homeowners who have missed payments, letting borrowers stay in their homes longer.
The number of properties receiving an initial default notice — the first step in the foreclosure process — slipped 1 percent last month from July, but was down 30 percent versus August last year, RealtyTrac said.
Initial defaults have fallen on an annual basis the past seven months. They peaked in April 2009.
Still, the number of homes scheduled to be sold at auction for the first time increased 9 percent from July and rose 2 percent from August last year. If they don’t sell at auction, these homes typically end up going back to the lender.
More than 2.3 million homes have been repossessed by lenders since the recession began in December 2007, according to RealtyTrac. The firm estimates more than 1 million American households are likely to lose their homes to foreclosure this year.
In all, 338,836 properties received a foreclosure-related warning in August, up 4 percent from July, but down 5 percent from the same month last year, RealtyTrac said. That translates to one in 381 U.S. homes.
The firm tracks notices for defaults, scheduled home auctions and home repossessions — warnings that can lead up to a home eventually being lost to foreclosure.
Among states, Nevada posted the highest foreclosure rate last month, with one in every 84 households receiving a foreclosure notice. That’s 4.5 times the national average.
Rounding out the top 10 states with the highest foreclosure rate in August were: Florida, Arizona, California, Idaho, Utah, Georgia, Michigan, Illinois and Hawaii.
Economic woes, such as unemployment or reduced income, are now the main catalysts for foreclosures.
Lenders are offering a variety of programs to help homeowners modify their loans, but their success rates vary. Hundreds of thousands of homeowners can’t qualify or fall back into default.
The Obama administration has rolled out numerous attempts to tackle the foreclosure crisis but has made only a small dent in the problem. Nearly half of the 1.3 million homeowners who enrolled in the Obama administration’s flagship mortgage-relief program have fallen out.
The program, known as Making Home Affordable, has provided permanent help to about 390,000 homeowners since March 2009.
Regardless, many troubled borrowers have seen their efforts to get a loan modification stymied.
Larry Book of Winter Garden, Fla., was one packet away from a permanent loan modification from Chase under the Obama administration’s foreclosure prevention plan after more than a year of back and forth and one failed attempt.
But his modification never went through. Instead, his loan was transferred from Chase to IBM Lender Business Process Servicers in July and he was told he owed ,562.62 and must bring his mortgage current by Sept. 15 or foreclosure proceedings will begin.
"It just becomes too exhausting," Book said about the modification process. "That’s why some people walk away. But I’ve invested too much and given up too much to just let it go."
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AP Real Estate Writer J.W. Elphinstone in New York contributed to this report.
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…..item 4)…..Yahoo! News…..6 Trillion Retirement Deficit…September 2010
CNBC EXCLUSIVE
news.yahoo.com/video/business-15749628/21910261#video=219…
There’s a .6 trillion gap between what Americans will need to retire and what they will actually have, according to a Retirement USA study. CNBC’s Scott Cohn has the details.
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…..item 5)….website….Marketplace……..The financial fallout was an ‘Inside Job’….with youtube video…
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Kai Ryssdal talks to Director Charles Ferguson about his new documentary "Inside Job," which explores the causes of the 2008 financial crisis.
photo of …..Director Charles Ferguson. (Ian Gavan/Getty Images)
images.publicradio.org/content/2010/09/15/20100915_charle…
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marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/09/15/pm-the…
TEXT OF INTERVIEW
KAI RYSSDAL: I know I said yesterday that I’m not a big fan of anniversary stories, but this is kind of a big week. Two years ago today, Lehman Brothers went broke, kicking off a stretch of a crazy couple of months that we’re still trying to recover from.
Documentary filmmaker Charles Ferguson has a new movie out — "Inside Job, it’s called — that tries to explain what happened that fall and to figure out who’s to blame.
So that’s where we started when we talked, with me asking whether it’s possible to blame individuals for the whole financial crisis, or whether the problems on Wall Street were more systemic?
CHARLES FERGUSON:What has happened is that a very substantial fraction of the financial services industry has come to be outside the law, and as it has become increasingly powerful, it has attracted increasingly amoral people. Its behavior has become more and more dangerous to the financial system and to the American economy.
RYSSDAL: There was also a sort of trend of not talking about any of this stuff. There’s a great moment in the film when one of the few regulators you’ve got on camera was Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister. And you started asking her about Lehman Brothers, and when she found out that it was going under.
FERGUSON: When were you first told Lehman in fact was going to go bankrupt?
CHRISTINE LAGARDE:After the fact.
FERGUSON: After the fact? Wow, OK. And what was your reaction when you learned of it?
LAGARDE:Holy cow.
RYSSDAL: Clearly, we’re connected financially, but not so much along the lines of communication, huh?
FERGUSON: I was truly, truly dumbstruck when I learned the extent of the ignorance and disconnect in this, of the American regulatory system during the crisis. Paulson, Bernanke, were astonishingly ignorant of the consequences of their decision. They did not understand foreign bankruptcy laws, they did not understand that all transactions in London would be halted and then that would cause catastrophic financial results cascading throughout the financial system almost immediately.
RYSSDAL: I want to play something from the film. It’s Allan Sloan, he’s a senior editor at Fortune magazine. He’s a well-respected financial writer. He tells a little story.
ALLAN SLOAN: A friend of mine who’s involved in a company that has big financial presence said, "Well, it’s about time you learned about sub-prime mortgages." So he set up a session with his trading desk and me. And the techie who did all this gets very excited, runs to his computer, pulls up in about three seconds this Goldman Sachs issue of securities. It was a complete disaster. Borrowers had borrowed on average 99.3 percent of the price of the house, which means that they had no money in the house.
RYSSDAL: So for all the blame that Allan puts on Goldman Sachs — and certainly they deserve it — what about Americans looking in the mirror and saying, you know what, a little bit of this is our fault too.
FERGUSON: Well, certainly that’s true to some extent. There was a bubble, and it was a big bubble and many people bought houses that they couldn’t afford and were careless with regard to the loan documentation that they signed. But over half of people who received sub-prime mortgages actually would have qualified for a less expensive prime mortgage. They were steered into more expensive sub-prime mortgages by mortgage brokers who were paid extra money the more expensive the loan they made was. So it was something that was cultivated, and in many regards, forced upon the American people by the financial services industry.
RYSSDAL: How come nobody went to jail?
FERGUSON: Well, there’s a simple obvious answer and then there’s a deeper, more complicated answer, which I don’t fully understand. The simple obvious answer is that this has become an out-of-control industry; a very, very powerful industry.
RYSSDAL: What’s the more subtle reason that you haven’t quite figured out?
FERGUSON: For some reason that I truly don’t understand, this situation has not generated the level of popular outrage that similar or comparable things have generated at other times in American history. There have been other times in American history — some recent, some long ago — when our leaders, our business leaders, and/or our political leaders, have done something terribly wrong and more than once, the American people have risen up and said, "We simply will not permit this." And that hasn’t happened here, yet. I think that part of the reason that it hasn’t happened might be that people think that finance is too complicated for them to understand, and that the situation is too complicated for them to understand. And indeed one reason that I made the film is to make it clear that actually they can understand it.
RYSSDAL: Charles Ferguson, his new film is about the financial crisis and the events of fall two years ago and how it got there. It’s called "Inside Job." Mr. Ferguson, thanks so much for your time.
FERGUSON: Thank you.
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…..item 6)……website….DNAinfo….Manhattan Local News…..New York Film Festival Documentary Tackles Wall Street Greed
October 1, 2010 7:23am
Director Charles Ferguson explores the financial meltdown.
dnainfo.com/20101001/manhattan/new-york-film-festival-doc…
MIDTOWN — Academy Award-winning director Charles Ferguson has shifted his sights from the origins of the Iraq War to greed on Wall Street.
The director of "No End in Sight," which examined the Bush Administration’s actions leading up to the war in Iraq, traces the root causes of the financial meltdown in his latest film, "Inside Job," showing Friday and Monday at the New York Film Festival.
"It’s important that the American people understand what happened here," Ferguson said in an interview with DNAinfo. "I hope that people come away with an understanding…that is hasn’t been fixed yet, and that it’s up to us, the American people to fix it."
Ferguson said even he was taken aback by some of what he learned over the course of interviews with top economists, politicians, scholars and even a Wall Street psychotherapist, who detailed the cocaine habits of senior management level bankers.
Glenn Hubbard, dean at Columbia University’s business school, is taken to task in the film for his ties to leading financial services firms. Ferguson argues that big consulting fees corrupt economic scholarship.
While the film’s message is far from cheery, it features an upbeat soundtrack with songs from Peter Gabriel and Russell Ballard as well as narration from actor Matt Damon. In between interviews, the camera lingers on shots of the Manhattan skyline at dusk and dawn, and zooms down on Learjets, yachts and Long Island mansions.
"I wanted the film to look cool, but also I wanted to convey that New York is a big place, and there is a lot of money here," Ferguson said. "Certainly when we took film of the Hamptons, I wanted to convey to people where all that money was going."
The "Inside Job" will be released in theaters on Oct.8.
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…..item 7)….
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Katherine Heigl’s Own Life In ‘Life As We Know It’
Katherine Heigl’s personal and professional lives collided while making her new romantic comedy “Life as We Know It.” “I literally became a mother four days before filming began so the whole process of filming and my personal life it’s all on camera,” the actress, who adopted her daughter Naleigh with husband Josh Kelley in September 2009, told Access Hollywood Thursday night at the film’s New …
Read more on omg!
Tool’s Maynard James Keenan Talks Wine
With A Perfect Circle’s don’t-call-it-a-reunion tour this fall, one would imagine Maynard James Keenan should be rehearsing with his bandmates. He’s not (yet). Instead, he’s harvesting grapes at his Northern Arizona vineyards for his Caduceus Wines brand. It’s a detailed and demanding process — especially in the Sonoran Desert! — that’s documented in Blood Into Wine , a film starring Keenan …
Read more on Spin
Conversation: Chad Troutwine, Producer of ‘Freakonomics’
First a bestselling book, then a popular blog and soon to be a public radio show , the phenomenon that is “Freakonomics” is the brain child of University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner, who have long been examining and explaining “the hidden side to everything.” Now ‘Freakonomics’ is a movie. For this project, six of America’s leading documentary filmmakers …
Read more on The Online NewsHour
‘The Promise’: Who knew Bruce Springsteen owned so many white T-shirts
If you’re any kind of music fan at all, you’ll want to see “The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town.” This new film gives us a fascinating glimpse of Bruce Springsteen in 1977, when he was…
Read more on Los Angeles Times
