Lenders Refusing “Solid Offers”
March 31, 2009 by admin
Filed under Mortgage Mess
Doom received the following question in our "Submit Ideas" box yesterday from "Inock". The question was too good not to post:
Why isn’t anyone talking about or investigating the fact that agents have solid executed offers on homes and lenders are refusing to accept the offers. The homes just become "bank owned" and list for a far lower purchase price than what licensed agents have had signed offers for!
I am an agent in southern California and Countrywide bank just turned town a cash offer that is $200K over what the last model match in the neighborhood sold for! That is $200K that could offset other losses and limit taxpayer dollars. Once it goes bank owned, foreclosure costs add up, holding costs add up, and the market continues to decline – $300K? $400K?
I am only 1 agent with 6-10 of the same examples – none of this hits the media! I am outraged! How many other agents have experienced this? Where is the media coverage??
Well Inock, we will do our best by covering it here. How about it agents- are any of you seeing the same thing?
Tom Stiglich, Journal Register Newspapers
March 31, 2009 by admin
Filed under Daily Cartoons
PUBLICATION DATE: Tue, 31 Mar 2009
Supreme Court dismisses Philip Morris appeal (Reuters)
March 31, 2009 by admin
Filed under Health News
Reuters – The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by Altria Group Inc's Philip Morris USA over $79.5 million in punitive damages awarded to the widow of a longtime Oregon smoker.
Mountaintop Mining Procedures Halted In West Virginia By Court
March 31, 2009 by admin
Filed under TOP HEADLINES
U.S. District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin issued an injunction that blocked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from authorizing new valley fills through its “nationwide permit” procedure.
In a long-awaited ruling, Goodwin concludes that the corps had not fully examined the cumulative impacts of approving mountaintop removal mines through this streamlined procedure.
“The loss of thousands of miles of streams in Appalachia over the past twenty years … and the loss of over 200 miles of streams in West Virginia alone vividly illustrates the impacts associated with mountaintop mining,” Goodwin wrote in a 63-page opinion.
Lucky Dube: 3 Convicted Of Murdering Reggae Star
March 31, 2009 by admin
Filed under TOP HEADLINES
JOHANNESBURG — Three men accused of murdering a reggae star have been found guilty.
The South African Press Association reported Tuesday that Lucky Dube’s family applauded as the guilty verdicts were read in the Johannesburg High Court. Those convicted are scheduled to be sentenced later.
Judge Seun Moshidi found Sifiso Mhlanga, Mbuti Mabe and Julius Gxowa guilty of shooting and killing Dube during a botched carjacking in 2007.
Earlier Tuesday, media reported that Mabe and Mhlanga had assaulted a police officer in a foiled bid to escape from the court.
The death of the internationally known reggae star drew worldwide attention to South Africa’s crime rate.
More on Crime
Dean Baker: Geithner’s Plan Will Tax Main Street to Make Wall Street Richer
March 31, 2009 by admin
Filed under Capitol Hill, Money
The new consensus among the experts who missed the housing bubble (EMHB) is that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s plan to subsidize the purchase of junk mortgages and their derivatives will help alleviate the stress on the banking system. That’s good news.
These geniuses have devised a plan that for $1 trillion (approximately equal to 300 million kid-years of SCHIP, the State Child Health Insurance Program) can alleviate the stress on the banking system. Note that no one claims that $1 trillion spent on the Geithner plan will actually clean up the banking system – that would be asking too much. The EMHB only assure us that this $1 trillion (more than enough to have energy conserving retrofits for every building in the country) will make things better. Isn’t that enough?
Oh, by the way, some people will get very rich off the Geithner plan. Some hedge and equity fund managers could make hundreds of millions or even billions off the Geithner plan. And, under current law, they will pay a lower tax rate on this money than a schoolteacher or firefighter. Are you sold yet?
One other outcome of the Geithner plan is that the folks who bankrupted their banks and wrecked the economy will be able to continue to earn multi-million dollar salaries. Of course this is necessary, because who else has the skills to run these banks, other than the people who drove them into bankruptcy?
For some reason, every plan the EMHB have developed so far involves using taxpayer dollars to subsidize the bankrupt banks and keep them breathing a little bit longer, while offering opportunities for other Wall Street actors to get hugely wealthy. Some people say that the EMHB keep coming up with plans that enrich the Wall Street crew because they are so closely tied to the Wall Street financial interests.
It is, of course, possible that the EMHB are too closely tied to the financial industry, but it’s also possible that they just lack the creativity and imagination to think of a plan that doesn’t enrich the Wall Street crew. After all, these people lacked the ability to see an $8 trillion housing bubble, the largest financial bubble in the history of the world. So, let’s see if we can help them out.
The core problem is that many of the largest banks are bankrupt. They are currently concealing this bankruptcy by listing assets on their books at prices that are far above their market value. In principle, they can do this for a long time, unless the government forces them to write-down the value of these assets. As long as the banks are bankrupt, they will not make new loans, limiting the ability of many businesses to get capital.
Instead of Geithner’s plan to allow banks to sell these assets at a subsidized price, we can go the other way. Geithner could have announced a plan to clean up the banks, following a standard FDIC-type takeover.
This approach could harness the power of existing bondholders to help the government clean up the banks quickly. Geithner could, for example, promise to honor the banks’ commitments to bondholders in full, if the banks recognized their losses immediately. Bondholders, however, would be offered a lower payback rate for each month that the banks waited.
So, if a bank waited one month, the bondholders would only get a guarantee for 90 percent of the value of their assets. If the bank waited two months, the payback would fall to 85 percent and so on. (Note the issue here is bank bonds that the government has no legal or moral obligation to pay off. The government will, of course, pay off the banks’ FDIC-insured deposits.)
Under this kind of a plan, bondholders would place enormous pressure on the banks to recognize their losses. Bank executives that refused to own up to the bank’s bad assets might even face personal liability. In other words, executives who lie about their bank’s assets might not just lose the bonuses that came out of TARP money, they also might lose the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars they “earned” during the housing bubble.
If President Obama’s advisers, all of whom are leading members of the EMHB camp, had more imagination, they might have devised a plan like this for dealing with the banking crisis. Instead, they came up with a plan that will enrich Wall Street and further punish Main Street.
Congress can try to bring enough pressure to make President Obama reverse course. At the very least, Congress should insist that when this plan fails, Secretary Geithner and others involved in drafting the plan are sent packing. We cannot continue to have a system that always ignores the mistakes by those on top and only holds those at the bottom accountable. The EMHB already wrecked the economy once; how many more times will they get the opportunity?
Read more: Banks, Wall Street Crisis, Bailout, Business News
Alyson Hannigan’s Birthday Bundle of Joy
March 31, 2009 by admin
Filed under Celebrity Nonsense, Media Fools
"How I Met Your Mother”"star Alyson Hannigan had a very special birthday present — her baby girl!
The actress and her husband Alexis Denisof welcomed daughter Satyana Denisof on March 24, which happened to be Alyson’s 35th birthday, People.com reports.
"They’re very excited, and mom and baby are doing great," a rep for the couple who met on the set of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", tells People.com.
Massive chemo dose targets cancerous liver (AP)
March 31, 2009 by admin
Filed under Health News
AP – Bill Darker grinned as he headed into the operating room for a dramatic experiment: A super-high dose of chemotherapy dripped directly into his cancer-ridden liver, 10 times more than patients normally can tolerate.
US Salmonella Suspicion Prompts Recall Of 1 Million Pounds Of Pistachios
March 31, 2009 by admin
Filed under Health News
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) alerted consumers on Monday that together with the California Department of Public Health (CDPH), they are investigating Salmonella contamination in pistachio products made at a Californian plant and that the producer is voluntarily recalling about 1 million pounds of pistachio products.
The Bald Salesman
March 31, 2009 by Scott Adams
Filed under Humor
Years ago a suit salesman gave me a tip that has always stuck with me. He said that people won't notice you're bald if you keep yourself very fit. He was a good example of this. I literally hadn't noticed he was bald until he made the comment. My first impression of him had been dominated by the fact he was so obviously fit. It was a brilliant case of misdirection. And it made me think about all the ways people mitigate their bad luck.
Generally speaking, a high level of fitness can compensate for whatever imperfect genes your parents gave you. Fitness is enough to achieve good looks if you bother to dress well, take care of your skin, and get a good haircut.
And fitness, along with a good diet, can also suppress the most common killer diseases that your genes might predispose you to. You can't prevent bad luck, but you can keep it at bay.
If you have the bad luck to be born to a poor family, education can compensate for that. Some schools are better than others, but almost all of them, at least in developed countries, will get you where you need to go.
If you're unlucky in love or business, your degree of effort can compensate for that. In both cases it's a numbers game. If you keep trying, you're bound to get lucky eventually. You just have to be willing to move on to the next attempt, and learn from your failures.
If you boil it all down, the only types of pure bad luck are the truly random disasters such as being struck by lightning, or being born without the gene for optimism. Optimism is what gives you the willingness to stay fit, eat healthy, and keep trying. You wouldn't do those things unless you expected them to work.
So suppose science finds the gene that controls optimism. And suppose it can be manipulated. That would be enough to solve the healthcare problem and boost the economy. People would get fit, avoiding medical costs, and they'd work extra hard because they believed it would pay off in the long run, thus fixing the economy.
The optimism gene is probably the most important one in the universe. Someday we'll find it. That will be interesting.
