Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Friday, March 26, 2010
Obama Unveils $14 Billion Plan To Help Troubled Homeowners - CNBC
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Show Entire ArticleObama Unveils $14 Billion Plan To Help Troubled HomeownersReuters | March 26, 2010 | 10:43 AM EDT
The Obama administration on Friday announced a $14 billion effort to try to stem a rising tide of home foreclosures by giving lenders incentives to erase some mortgage debt and slash mortgage payments for the unemployed.
The new aid programs, funded from the $50 billion allocated to housing rescue under the Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program, will also allow borrowers to erase mortgage debt down to a maximum of 115 percent of their home's value by refinancing through the Federal Housing Administration.
The plan comes as President Barack Obama is under increasing political pressure to change his strategy for helping struggling homeowners and stem the tide of rising foreclosures and is the second major housing initiative announced in as many months.
Delinquencies on U.S. mortgages rose to nearly 14 percent in late 2009, led by a sharp increase in seriously overdue home loans held by the most credit-worthy borrowers, U.S. banking regulators said earlier on Thursday.
The new measures are a shift from the efforts announced last year, which focused on reducing interest rates for struggling borrowers who got risky loans.
The latest efforts are targeting unemployed workers and homeowners in places where home values have plunged across the board and it is increasingly making more financial sense for homeowners to walk away from their mortgage.
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via cnbc.com
This is Good News!
Gary's Blog: OPEN HOUSES in the Crieve Hall area this Weekend
OPEN HOUSES in the Crieve Hall area this weekend include four homes that show a wide range of what Crieve Hall has to offer, including affordability, level of finish of the home, location, and nearby amenities that add to the experience of living in this part of Nashville, Tn.
The Crieve Hall area lies just south of Nashville along the corridor of I-65 between the Harding Road exit, and the Old Hickory Blvd exit at Brentwood. It is bound on the north by Caldwell and Abbay Hall, similar neighborhoods just north of Harding Road, and on the east by Edmondson Pike. The zip codes for this area are 37211, and 37220.
These Open Houses range from $219,900 to $299900 in price and square footages from 1425 to 2168. Danby, Barrywood, Hogan, and Oakley are all very popular streets in this neighborhood and showcase all that Creive Hall has to offer with mature trees, creeks and even Ellington Agricultural Center which houses the Tennessee Agricultural Museum.
The agricultural museum, located on the spacious grounds of the Ellington Agricultural Center, has an extensive collection of home and farm artifacts from the 19th and early 20th centuries along with rural Tennessee prints. Textiles, a woodworking collection, buggies, wagons and large items like the McCormick reaper and Jumbo steam engine are exhibited in a renovated plantation barn. Log cabins, a small farm house, kitchen/herb garden, perennial garden and nature trail are also part of the museum tour.
The ranch style homes in the Crieve Hall area were generally built in the 1960's and 70's and are hallmarked by traditional and simple layouts, including extensive sand and finish hardwoods and sizable lots, now only seen in higher price bracket homes.
Another great feature of this area is the central location it occupies. One is virtually 15 minutes from everything in Nashville. When these were built, they were on the outskirts on downtown Nashville, and in fact , the first Nashville area mall, One Hundred Oaks Mall was quite near to this beautiful tree-lined area.
The Nashville Zoo is also right next door on the northern boundary, and has great walking trails for a day visit. Another great place to visit close by is Radnor Lake Natural Area and Wildlife Refuge just across I-65, but that will be the subject for the next blog.
Come out and drive through Crieve Hall. You might just find your dream home and we still have time to take advantage of the 2010 Home Buyers Tax Credit.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist - An Absence of Class in the G.O.P.
Some of the images from the run-up to Sunday’s landmark health care vote in the House of Representatives should be seared into the nation’s consciousness. We are so far, in so many ways, from being a class act.
Readers' Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.A group of lowlifes at a Tea Party rally in Columbus, Ohio, last week taunted and humiliated a man who was sitting on the ground with a sign that said he had Parkinson’s disease. The disgusting behavior was captured on a widely circulated videotape. One of the Tea Party protesters leaned over the man and sneered: “If you’re looking for a handout, you’re in the wrong end of town.”
Another threw money at the man, first one bill and then another, and said contemptuously, “I’ll pay for this guy. Here you go. Start a pot.”
In Washington on Saturday, opponents of the health care legislation spit on a black congressman and shouted racial slurs at two others, including John Lewis, one of the great heroes of the civil rights movement. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was taunted because he is gay.
At some point, we have to decide as a country that we just can’t have this: We can’t allow ourselves to remain silent as foaming-at-the-mouth protesters scream the vilest of epithets at members of Congress — epithets that The Times will not allow me to repeat here.
It is 2010, which means it is way past time for decent Americans to rise up against this kind of garbage, to fight it aggressively wherever it appears. And it is time for every American of good will to hold the Republican Party accountable for its role in tolerating, shielding and encouraging foul, mean-spirited and bigoted behavior in its ranks and among its strongest supporters.
For decades the G.O.P. has been the party of fear, ignorance and divisiveness. All you have to do is look around to see what it has done to the country. The greatest economic inequality since the Gilded Age was followed by a near-total collapse of the overall economy. As a country, we have a monumental mess on our hands and still the Republicans have nothing to offer in the way of a remedy except more tax cuts for the rich.
This is the party of trickle down and weapons of mass destruction, the party of birthers and death-panel lunatics. This is the party that genuflects at the altar of right-wing talk radio, with its insane, nauseating, nonstop commitment to hatred and bigotry.
Glenn Beck of Fox News has called President Obama a “racist” and asserted that he “has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
Mike Huckabee, a former Republican presidential candidate, has said of Mr. Obama’s economic policies: “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”
The G.O.P. poisons the political atmosphere and then has the gall to complain about an absence of bipartisanship.
The toxic clouds that are the inevitable result of the fear and the bitter conflicts so relentlessly stoked by the Republican Party — think blacks against whites, gays versus straights, and a whole range of folks against immigrants — tend to obscure the tremendous damage that the party’s policies have inflicted on the country. If people are arguing over immigrants or abortion or whether gays should be allowed to marry, they’re not calling the G.O.P. to account for (to take just one example) the horribly destructive policy of cutting taxes while the nation was fighting two wars.
If you’re all fired up about Republican-inspired tales of Democrats planning to send grandma to some death chamber, you’ll never get to the G.O.P.’s war against the right of ordinary workers to organize and negotiate in their own best interests — a war that has diminished living standards for working people for decades.
With a freer hand, the Republicans would have done more damage. George W. Bush tried to undermine Social Security. John McCain was willing to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the Oval Office and thought Phil Gramm would have made a crackerjack Treasury secretary. (For those who may not remember, Mr. Gramm was a deregulation zealot who told us during the presidential campaign that we were suffering from a “mental recession.”)
A party that promotes ignorance (“Just say no to global warming”) and provides a safe house for bigotry cannot serve the best interests of our country. Back in the 1960s, John Lewis risked his life and endured savage beatings to secure fundamental rights for black Americans while right-wing Republicans like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were lining up with segregationist Democrats to oppose landmark civil rights legislation.
Since then, the right-wingers have taken over the G.O.P. and Mr. Lewis, now a congressman, must still endure the garbage they have wrought.
Sign in to Recommend More Articles in Opinion » A version of this article appeared in print on March 23, 2010, on page A29 of the New York edition.
via nytimes.com
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Bashing Goldman Sachs Is Simply a Game for Fools: Michael Lewis
Bashing Goldman Sachs Is Simply a Game for Fools: Michael Lewis
Commentary by Michael Lewis
July 28 (Bloomberg) -- From the moment I left Yale and started working for Goldman Sachs, I’ve felt uneasy interacting with those who don’t.
It’s not that I think less of Goldman outsiders than I did while I remained among you. It’s just that I feel your envy, and know that nothing I can do or say will ever persuade you that I am no more than human.
Thus, like many of my colleagues, I have adopted a strategy of never leaving Goldman Sachs, apart from a few brief, spasmodic attempts to make what you outsiders call “love” or “the beast with two backs.” Goldman recognizes how important it is for its people to replicate themselves. We bill no performance fees for the service.
Today, the sheer volume of irresponsible media commentary has forced us to reconsider our public-relations strategy. With every uptick in our share price it’s grown clearer that we who are inside Goldman Sachs must open a dialogue with you who are not. Not for our benefit, but for yours.
America stands at a crossroads, and Goldman Sachs now owns both of them. In choosing which road to take, ordinary Americans must not be distracted by unproductive resentment toward the toll-takers. To that end we at Goldman Sachs would like to dispel several false and insidious rumors.
Rumor No. 1: “Goldman Sachs controls the U.S. government.”
Every time we hear the phrase “the United States of Goldman Sachs” we shake our heads in wonder. Every ninth-grader knows that the U.S. government consists of three branches. Goldman owns just one of these outright; the second we simply rent, and the third we have no interest in at all. (Note there isn’t a single former Goldman employee on the Supreme Court.)
What small interest we maintain in the U.S. government is, we feel, in the public interest. Our current financial crisis has its roots in a single easily identifiable source: the envy others felt toward Goldman Sachs.
The bozos at Merrill Lynch, the dimwits at Citigroup, the nimrods at Lehman Brothers, the louts at Bear Stearns, even that momentarily useful lunatic Joe Cassano at AIG -- all of these people took risks that no non-Goldman person should ever take, in a pathetic attempt to replicate Goldman’s financial returns.
For too long we have allowed others to emulate us. Now we are working productively with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the Congress to ensure that we alone are allowed to take the sort of risks that might destroy the financial system.
Rumor No. 2: “When the U.S. government bailed out AIG, and paid off its gambling debts, it saved not AIG but Goldman Sachs.”
The charge isn’t merely insulting but ignorant. Less responsible journalists continue to bring up the $12.9 billion we received from AIG, as if that was some kind of big deal to us. But as our CFO David Viniar explained back in March, we were hedged. Our profits from AIG “rounded to zero.”
People who don’t work at Goldman Sachs, of course, find this implausible: How could $12.9 billion round to zero? Easy, but you just need to understand the mathematics.
Let’s assume AIG transferred $12,880,560,250.34 of taxpayer money to Goldman Sachs. A Goldman outsider, asked to round this number, might call it $12,880,560,250.00. That’s not how we look at it; at Goldman we always round to the nearest $50 billion, so anything less than $25 billion rounds to zero.
Think of it that way and you can see that $12,880,560,250.34 isn’t even close to not rounding to zero.
Rumor No. 3: “As the U.S. government will eat the losses if Goldman Sachs goes bust, Goldman Sachs shouldn’t be allowed to keep making these massive financial bets. At the very least the $11.4 billion Goldman Sachs already has set aside for employees in 2009 -- $386,429 a head, just for the first six months -- is unfair, as the U.S. taxpayer has borne so much of the risk of the wagers that generated the profits.”
Really, we don’t know where to begin with this one. It is wrong-headed in so many different ways!
Let’s begin with the idea that the taxpayer is running a bigger risk than we are. The billions he stands to lose are trivial; after all, they round to zero.
The real risk, when you think about it even for a minute, is the risk we take ourselves: that Goldman will cease to exist and we will cease to be Goldman employees. To flirt with such tragedy we obviously need to be paid.
Rumor No. 4: “Goldman employees all look alike.”
Several recent newspaper photos have revealed that a surprising number of Goldman Sachs workers are white, male and bald. That non-Goldman people glance at such photos and think “Holy crap, they even look alike!” just shows how deeply anti- Goldman bigotry runs in American life.
We at Goldman represent unique clusters of DNA; if we bear some faint surface resemblance to one another, and to creatures from the 24th century, it is only because our superior powers of reasoning lead us to hold in our minds exactly the same thoughts, at exactly the same time.
A shared disinterest in growing hair, for instance, isn’t a coincidence of nature but an expression of healthy like- mindedness.
“The world is a pool table,” our naked-headed CEO likes to tell us. “And all the people in it are either stripes or solids. You alone are the cue balls.”
Rumor No. 5: Goldman Sachs is “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
Those words are of course taken from a recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine and they are transparently false.
For starters, the vampire squid doesn’t feed on human flesh. Ergo, no vampire squid would ever wrap itself around the face of humanity, except by accident. And nothing that happens at Goldman Sachs -- nothing that Goldman Sachs thinks, nothing that Goldman Sachs feels, nothing that Goldman Sachs does --ever happens by accident.
(Michael Lewis is a columnist for Bloomberg News and the author of “Liar’s Poker,” “Moneyball” and “The Blind Side,” soon to be a major motion picture. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Michael Lewis at mlewis1@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: July 27, 2009 21:00 EDT
via bloomberg.com
Just another observation... when do we get involved?
Monday, March 15, 2010
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