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Could be but making love to a 220 volt power socket might turn out to be safer.unless the government does what they are threatening to do which is to take control of pensions across the board. No matter how you slice it, it has been clear for 5 years that few pensions were gonna be able to deliver on their baby boom liabilities.
Could be but making love to a 220 volt power socket might turn out to be safer.unless the government does what they are threatening to do which is to take control of pensions across the board. No matter how you slice it, it has been clear for 5 years that few pensions were gonna be able to deliver on their baby boom liabilities.
That would be suicidal any time before the new congress is sworn in, it is an engraved invitation to the GOP to defund his entire agenda and be heroes for doing so.
Would you feel more or less confident if the new congress contains 100 to 200 Greens, Libertarians and other third party citizen legislators?
GHook93 said:Percentage Blame Game:
Government (including FM/FM) - 60% (Clinton - 80%; Bush 20%)
Banks - 25%
Wall Street - 10%
Consumers/Mortgagee - 5%
The rate of homeownership in America now stands a record high of 68.4 percent. Yet there is room for improvement. The rate of homeownership amongst minorities is below 50 percent. And that's not right, and this country needs to do something about it. We need to -- (applause.) We need to close the minority homeownership gap in America so more citizens have the satisfaction and mobility that comes from owning your own home, from owning a piece of the future of America.
Last year I set a goal to add 5.5 million new minority homeowners in America by the end of the decade. That is an attainable goal; that is an essential goal. And we're making progress toward that goal. In the past 18 months, more than 1 million minority families have become homeowners. (Applause.) And there's more that we can do to achieve the goal. The law I sign today will help us build on this progress in a very practical way.
Many people are able to afford a monthly mortgage payment, but are unable to make the down payment. So this legislation will authorize $200 million per year in down payment assistance to at least 40,000 low-income families. These funds will help American families achieve their goals, and at the same time, strengthen our communities.
Thanks for the video kissmy. I hope this does not sound smart ass but if I could go to my Yahoo bar and get 80% of the same story about two weeks ago then why didn't the MSM?
GHook93 said:Percentage Blame Game:
Government (including FM/FM) - 60% (Clinton - 80%; Bush 20%)
Banks - 25%
Wall Street - 10%
Consumers/Mortgagee - 5%
Correction: Clinton = 20%; Bush = 80%
Wall Street = 90%
Prior to 2003, the foreclosure rate was about average. After Bush signed the American Dream Act, he opened the floodgate to every storefront mortgage office to lure in minorities. Wall Street investment banks bought those mortgages from small banks and mortgage companies, packaged them into securities, and bought and sold those packages as a single investment. The rest is history.
President Bush Signs American Dream Downpayment Act of 2003
The rate of homeownership in America now stands a record high of 68.4 percent. Yet there is room for improvement. The rate of homeownership amongst minorities is below 50 percent. And that's not right, and this country needs to do something about it. We need to -- (applause.) We need to close the minority homeownership gap in America so more citizens have the satisfaction and mobility that comes from owning your own home, from owning a piece of the future of America.
Last year I set a goal to add 5.5 million new minority homeowners in America by the end of the decade. That is an attainable goal; that is an essential goal. And we're making progress toward that goal. In the past 18 months, more than 1 million minority families have become homeowners. (Applause.) And there's more that we can do to achieve the goal. The law I sign today will help us build on this progress in a very practical way.
Many people are able to afford a monthly mortgage payment, but are unable to make the down payment. So this legislation will authorize $200 million per year in down payment assistance to at least 40,000 low-income families. These funds will help American families achieve their goals, and at the same time, strengthen our communities.
GHook93 said:Percentage Blame Game:
Government (including FM/FM) - 60% (Clinton - 80%; Bush 20%)
Banks - 25%
Wall Street - 10%
Consumers/Mortgagee - 5%
Correction: Clinton = 20%; Bush = 80%
Wall Street = 90%
The big secret of foreclosuregate is that Wall St. is dying. Old Wall St. was and is an information exchange even more than a securities exchange. As information costs decline so will Wall St. Layoffs in the 80-100K following bonus distributions were being predicted prior to this story taking off. Stock and bond underwriting by private placement or Dutch auction are becoming more common. Half the reason for the failure of Lehman Brothers was that too much information was available to everybody.
Property ownership is not a right. If you have property, government can't take it, but government doesn't owe you property if you can't afford it.
Worthless mortgages backed by various GSEs and government agencies caused this mess.
GHook93 said:Percentage Blame Game:
Government (including FM/FM) - 60% (Clinton - 80%; Bush 20%)
Banks - 25%
Wall Street - 10%
Consumers/Mortgagee - 5%
Correction: Clinton = 20%; Bush = 80%
Wall Street = 90%
here ya go....back to square one.
The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities by Howard Husock, City Journal Winter 2000
HUD Scandals | Downsizing the Federal Government
my estimate-
Clinton - 45%
Bush 20%
Banks - 15%
Wall Street - 20%
Consumers/Mortgagee - 5%
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/business/03sec.html?_r=1Many events in Washington, on Wall Street and elsewhere around the country have led to what has been called the most serious financial crisis since the 1930s. But decisions made at a brief meeting on April 28, 2004, explain why the problems could spin out of control. The agency’s failure to follow through on those decisions also explains why Washington regulators did not see what was coming.
On that bright spring afternoon, the five members of the Securities and Exchange Commission met in a basement hearing room to consider an urgent plea by the big investment banks.
They wanted an exemption for their brokerage units from an old regulation that limited the amount of debt they could take on. The exemption would unshackle billions of dollars held in reserve as a cushion against losses on their investments. Those funds could then flow up to the parent company, enabling it to invest in the fast-growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities; credit derivatives, a form of insurance for bond holders; and other exotic instruments.
The five investment banks led the charge, including Goldman Sachs, which was headed by Henry M. Paulson Jr. Two years later, he left to become Treasury secretary.
A lone dissenter — a software consultant and expert on risk management — weighed in from Indiana with a two-page letter to warn the commission that the move was a grave mistake. He never heard back from Washington.
One commissioner, Harvey J. Goldschmid, questioned the staff about the consequences of the proposed exemption. It would only be available for the largest firms, he was reassuringly told — those with assets greater than $5 billion.
“We’ve said these are the big guys,” Mr. Goldschmid said, provoking nervous laughter, “but that means if anything goes wrong, it’s going to be an awfully big mess.”
Mr. Goldschmid, an authority on securities law from Columbia, was a behind-the-scenes adviser in 2002 to Senator Paul S. Sarbanes when he rewrote the nation’s corporate laws after a wave of accounting scandals. “Do we feel secure if there are these drops in capital we really will have investor protection?” Mr. Goldschmid asked. A senior staff member said the commission would hire the best minds, including people with strong quantitative skills to parse the banks’ balance sheets.
Annette L. Nazareth, the head of market regulation, reassured the commission that under the new rules, the companies for the first time could be restricted by the commission from excessively risky activity. She was later appointed a commissioner and served until January 2008.
“I’m very happy to support it,” said Commissioner Roel C. Campos, a former federal prosecutor and owner of a small radio broadcasting company from Houston, who then deadpanned: “And I keep my fingers crossed for the future.”
The proceeding was sparsely attended. None of the major media outlets, including The New York Times, covered it.
After 55 minutes of discussion, which can now be heard on the Web sites of the agency and The Times, the chairman, William H. Donaldson, a veteran Wall Street executive, called for a vote. It was unanimous. The decision, changing what was known as the net capital rule, was completed and published in The Federal Register a few months later.
With that, the five big independent investment firms were unleashed.
In loosening the capital rules, which are supposed to provide a buffer in turbulent times, the agency also decided to rely on the firms’ own computer models for determining the riskiness of investments, essentially outsourcing the job of monitoring risk to the banks themselves.
Over the following months and years, each of the firms would take advantage of the looser rules. At Bear Stearns, the leverage ratio — a measurement of how much the firm was borrowing compared to its total assets — rose sharply, to 33 to 1. In other words, for every dollar in equity, it had $33 of debt. The ratios at the other firms also rose significantly.
The 2004 decision for the first time gave the S.E.C. a window on the banks’ increasingly risky investments in mortgage-related securities.
But the agency never took true advantage of that part of the bargain. The supervisory program under Mr. Cox, who arrived at the agency a year later, was a low priority.
