Archive for the ‘Housing Market’ Category
Monday, March 25th, 2024
Democrats certainly do have a knack for destroying everything they touch ! Nancy
California is not all right
March 23, 2024
Despite stubbornly high inflation and record-high credit card debt, the economy added 2.7 million jobs last year while unemployment hovered just below 4%. But not all states did as well. California, the gem of Democratic uniparty governance, added just 154,000 jobs, and joblessness stagnated above 5%.
While states such as Florida and Texas grew their workforce by 3.4% and 3.3%, respectively, California’s grew by just 0.87%. All this was while the state budget deficit ballooned to a record $73 billion as revenues from personal income tax collection dropped by 25%.
Why is California’s economy sputtering while the rest of the nation moves ahead?
The simplest answer is that California’s population is shrinking. After more than 100 years of steady growth, California is exporting more people than it is importing. The state continues to have golden sunshine, natural beauty, and warm winters, but bad policy decisions by Democratic politicians who run the state mean people simply don’t want to live there anymore.
The biggest reason people are leaving is the cost of housing. On the coast where the best jobs are, California has some of the most expensive housing in the nation. To afford a median-priced home in San Francisco, a household needs to make $400,000 a year. Actual households in San Francisco make just one-third of that: $136,000.
California’s housing crisis is due to excessive environmental regulation, which makes it impossible to build new homes. While California built just fewer than 120,000 new homes in 2020, Texas built more than 260,000.
(more…)
Posted in Administrative State, Bankruptcy, Big Government, California, Corruption/Crime, Culture Rot, Deep State, Democrats, Demographics, Economy, Election 2024, Energy, Environmental Issues, Environmental Protection Agency-, Government Regulation, Government Waste and Fraud, Housing Market, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Liberalism, Marxism, Open Borders, Political Corruption, Politics, Progressive Movement, Radical Left, Social Issues, Socialism, Totalitarian, Transparency, Wokeness | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 29th, 2023
Please click on the link and please share. Nancy
PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS LIST:
GOVERNMENT ECONOMY NATIONAL SECURITY
Posted in Administrative State, Afghanistan, Agenda 2030, Agenda 21, Agriculture, Asia, Banking, Big Business, Big Government, Border Security, Budget for 2022, China, Congress, Conservatism, Constitution, Corruption/Crime, Deep State, Defense Budget, Demographics, Department of Education, Dept of Defense, Donald Trump, Durham Report, Economy, Education, Election 2020, Election 2024, Europe, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Fracking, Free Trade, Germany, GOP, Government Regulation, Government Waste and Fraud, Healthcare, Housing Market, ICE, Illegal Immigration, Industry, Infrastructure, Intelligence, Interest Rates, International Affairs, Iran, Iran Nuclear Deal, IRS, ISIS Terror Group, Islamic Refugee Migration, Israel, Israeli Prime Minister, Judges, Justice Department, Legal Issues, MAGA, Medical/Drugs, Melania Trump, Mental Health, Mexico, Middle East, Migration - Islamic, Missle Defense, Mueller, National Defense, NATO, Netanyahu, North Korea, Nuclear Energy/Weapons, Open Borders, Palestine, Patriotic, Police/law enforcement, Regulations, Religion, Religious Freedom, Republican Convention, Resistance, Sidney Powell, Small Business, Social Media, Space Exploration, Spending, State Department, Supreme Court, Taliban, Taxes, Technology, Terrorism, Trade Agreements, Trump Cabinet Members, U.N., U.S. Presidents, USMCA, Voter Fraud, Wall Street, Women's Issues | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 11th, 2016
BILL WHITTLE VIDEOS – DEBATING HILLARY
Published on Oct 3, 2016 Part 1
In Part 1 of this 6 part series, Firewall host Bill Whittle responds to the ECONOMIC issues left untouched in the first presidential debate.
Published on Oct 3, 2016 Part 2
In Part 2 of this 6 part series, Bill Whittle flips Hillary’s claim that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by tax cuts for the wealthy, and explains who the REAL villains are
Published on Oct 4, 2016 Part 3
During the debate, Mrs. Clinton returned to the same line we’ve been fed for eight years: there’s an economic boom waiting in the Green Economy. No, there isn’t. In Part 3 of this 6 part series, Bill takes apart Hillary’s energy plans and examines the consequences to the planet.
Published on Oct 5, 2016 – Part 4
Surely there was no greater missed opportunity in the first debate than listening to HILLARY CLINTON talk about how “concerned” she is about the security of classified government information.Bill Whittle rushes in where CNN fears to tread.
Published on Oct 6, 2016 Part 5
Hillary Clinton says she has a “plan” to “really squeeze ISIS in Syria.” It seems like Syria might be squeezed enough already. In Part 5 of this 6 part series, Bill Whittle lays out the historical facts that show that Clinton and Obama CREATED ISIS.
Posted in American History, Benghazi Terrorist Attack, Big Government, Bill Whittle, Clinton, Cyber Warfare, Democrats, Economy, Election 2016, Energy, Environmental Issues, Fannie and Freddie, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Government Waste and Fraud, Hillary Clinton, History, Housing Market, Iraq - Surge, ISIS Terror Group, Liberalism, Libya, Middle East, National Defense, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Progressive Movement, Radical Islam, Taxation, Taxes, Transparency, Videos, Women Candidates | No Comments »
Thursday, June 16th, 2016
Are the Clintons the Real Housing-Crash Villains?
Let’s revisit this piece of financial history, before Hillary rewrites it.
By Larry Kudlow & Stephen Moore– Larry Kudlow is a contributing editor of National Review. Stephen Moore is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation.— May 28, 2016
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: The seeds of the mortgage meltdown were planted during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Under his HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo, Community Reinvestment Act regulators gave banks higher ratings for home loans made in “credit-deprived” areas. Banks were effectively rewarded for throwing out sound underwriting standards and writing loans to those who were at high risk of defaulting. If banks didn’t comply with these rules, regulators reined in their ability to expand lending and deposits.
We are going to reveal the grand secret to getting rich by investing. It’s a simple formula that has worked for Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, and all the great investment gurus over the years. Ready?
Buy low, sell high.
It turns out that Donald Trump has been very, very good at buying low and selling high, which helps account for his amazing business success.
But now Hillary Clinton seems to think it’s a crime. Campaigning in California last week she wailed that Trump “actually said he was hoping for the crash that caused hard-working families in California and across America to lose their homes, all because he thought he could take advantage of it to make some money for himself.”
So she’s assailing Trump for being a good businessman — something she would know almost nothing about because she’s never actually run a business (though she did miraculously turn $1,000 into $1 million in the cattle-futures market).
Hillary’s new TV ads say Trump predicted the real-estate crash in 2006 (good call) and then bought real estate at low prices when the housing crash that few others foresaw arrived in 2008. Many builders went out of business during the crash, but Trump read the market perfectly.
What is so hypocritical about this Clinton attack is that it wasn’t Trump, but Hillary, her husband, and many of her biggest supporters who were the real culprits. Before Hillary is able to rewrite this history, let’s look at the many ways the Clintons and their cronies contributed to the housing implosion and Great Recession.
(more…)
Posted in American History, Banking, Bankruptcy, Bill, Clinton, Corporate Cronyism, Democrats, Economy, Election 2016, Fannie and Freddie, Financial Meltdown, Government Regulation, Hillary Clinton, History, Housing Market, Interest Rates, Liberalism, Political Corruption, Social Justice | No Comments »
Thursday, December 31st, 2015
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
FANNIE AND FREDDIE FOREVER
Dec. 31, 2015
Washington is a place where bad ideas go to live forever. How else to explain the latest innovation from federal regulators to keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dominating the market for mortgage finance?
Prior to the financial crisis of 2008, these two government-created behemoths owned or guaranteed more than $5 trillion in mortgage debt. When the housing boom went bust, taxpayers were forced to provide a $188 billion bailout to the toxic twins—and endure an historic financial crisis. So the taxpayer interest is in shrinking and eventually shutting down Fan and Fred.
But these days the Federal Housing Finance Agency that supervises the twins under federal “conservatorship” seems to view itself as the official preserver of Fan and Fred’s market share. So instead of simply telling the mortgage giants to stop buying and guaranteeing so many mortgages, the regulator has been encouraging the use of ever more complex financial instruments to keep Fan and Fred at the center of this multi-trillion-dollar market.
Fan and Fred are selling the CDOs to private investors, who are getting compensated with juicy yields in return for theoretically accepting much of the default risk in Fan and Fred’s bundles of mortgages. The program is ramping up and now covers at least some of the risks on more than $800 billion in mortgages of the more than $4 trillion that Fan and Fred still own or guarantee.
Posted in Banking, Bankruptcy, Big Government, Fannie and Freddie, Financial Meltdown, Government Regulation, Housing Market, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Wall Street | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 4th, 2015
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Fed, the White House and Congress are setting up the next financial bubble
By Stephen Moore – – Sunday, October 11, 2015
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: The point is that government and politicians have no learning curve. All of the conditions of financial wreckage are reappearing. This is why congressional Republicans absolutely should put up a fight on the debt ceiling by requiring more budget discipline as a condition of higher debt levels. They should require at least 8-10 percent downpayments on all government insured mortgages. They should repeal all or part of the Dodd-Frank bill that is destroying community banks, while promising voters they will never again bail out a bank or financial institution. Finally, they should be urging the Fed to restore sound money by gradually raising short term interest rates. And the presidential candidates should start warning voters that Washington is rebuilding another financial house of cards.
My 13-year-old son told me at the dinner table the other day that Franklin Roosevelt was one of America’s “greatest presidents” because “he ended the Great Depression.” He’s usually a good student, so I checked where he got this tripe and sure enough the fairy tale was right there in his American history book.
Sure enough his text book tells kids that the New Deal ended the Great Depression and even saved capitalism. Of course the New Deal exacerbated the pain and financial devastation of a stock market crash, and unemployment lingered in double digits for a decade after Roosevelt was elected until the start of World War II.
We get this kind of rampant revisionism because the left writes the history books — which they are doing right now.
Here’s the latest story line: bailouts, trillions of dollars of government spending and debt, easy money, and re-regulation of Wall Street ended the 2008 Great Recession. The myth took on new life last week when Ben Bernanke took a bow in The Wall Street Journal for in his mind saving the economy with his $3 trillion of quantitative easing and zero interest rate policy. No, actually this is what created the crisis. Don’t be surprised if Mr. Bernanke receives a Nobel Peace Prize.
As Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute and other scholars have thoroughly documented, the crash of 2008 was caused by the Federal Reserve’s easy money policies for nearly a decade, government housing policies that led to preposterous mortgage loans being issued, and massive overleverage of government, companies, and households.
Posted in Banking, Big Government, Debt Ceiling, Dodd/Frank Financial Regulations, Economy, Election 2016, Financial Meltdown, Housing Market | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 21st, 2015
nypost.com/2015/07/18/obama-has-been-collecting-personal-data-for-a-secret-race-database/
NEW YORK POST
by Paul Sperry
Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “The Great American Bank Robbery,” which exposes the racial politics behind the mortgage bust.
A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”
Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.
This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.
Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.
So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.
OBAMA IS PRESIDING OVER THE LARGEST CONSOLIDATION OF PERSONAL DATA IN US HISTORY.
Housing database (more…)
Posted in Big Government, Democrats, Demographics, Housing Market, Liberalism, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Politics, Racism, Radical Left, Transparency | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2015
BOOK REVIEW – HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: What Really Caused the World’s Worst Financial Crisis and Why It Could Happen Again
by Peter J. Wallison
Mortgage Madness
Blame for the 2008 financial collapse is, and should be, widespread.
Jay Cost
June 1, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 36
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Wallison ends on a distressing note. He asserts that because experts have embraced a false narrative about the crisis, the remedy of Dodd-Frank will not protect us from the next calamity. Actually, it’s worse than this. The answer to the financial crisis may have been hidden in plain sight, but the failure to see it was willful. A powerful coalition of interest groups dominated housing policy for a generation, and they still do—despite the damage that policy caused in the Great Recession.
In The Semisovereign People, political scientist E. E. Schatt-schneider argues that “political conflict is not like an intercollegiate debate in which the opponents agree in advance on a definition of the issues. As a matter of fact, the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power. . . . He who determines what politics is about runs the country.” Schattschneider calls the organized effort to ensure that some alternatives remain illegitimate “the mobilization of bias.”
Peter J. Wallison must be quite familiar with this idea. A longtime critic of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises (GSE) tasked with injecting liquidity into the secondary mortgage market, he has offered warnings about these agencies that have fallen on deaf ears for over a decade. When he and Edward Pinto, his colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, correctly pointed out that Fannie and Freddie were loaded up with the subprime mortgages that contributed to the financial collapse of 2008, and that maybe—just maybe—this had something to do with the mess, they were greeted with accusations of Hitlerism. “The Big Lie” is what Joe Nocera of the New York Times accused Wallison and Pinto of propagating.
There are some ideas that simply cannot gain mainstream acceptance because they challenge essential priorities of the ruling elite. Accordingly, any connection drawn from Fannie and Freddie to the financial collapse must be squashed, because distributing federally subsidized credit to low- and middle-income (LMI) borrowers has been a backbone of the nation’s housing policy for nearly 20 years. All of this makes Wallison’s work intriguing to anybody inclined to question the status quo—even more so because he has written this excellent book in defense of his thesis. (more…)
Posted in American History, Banking, Congress, Conservatism, Economy, Fannie and Freddie, Financial Meltdown, Housing Market, Lobbyists, Obama Administraiton and Policy | No Comments »
Monday, December 9th, 2013
Peter J. Wallison
American Enterprise Institute
The Case for Repealing
Dodd-Frank
PETER J. WALLISON holds the Arthur F. Burns Chair in Financial Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously he practiced banking, corporate, and financial law at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, D.C., and in New York. He also served as White House Counsel in the Reagan Administration. A graduate of Harvard College, Mr. Wallison received his law degree from Harvard Law School and is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. He is the editor, co-editor, author, or co-author of numerous books, including Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency and Bad History, Worse Policy: How a False Narrative about the Financial Crisis Led to the Dodd-Frank Act.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on November 5, 2013, during a conference entitled “Dodd-Frank: A Law Like No Other,” co-sponsored by the Center for Constructive Alternatives and the Ludwig Von Mises Lecture Series.
The 2008 financial crisis was a major event, equivalent in its initial scope—if not its duration—to the Great Depression of the 1930s. At the time, many commentators said that we were witnessing a crisis of capitalism, proof that the free market system was inherently unstable. Government officials who participated in efforts to mitigate its effects claim that their actions prevented a complete meltdown of the world’s financial system, an idea that has found acceptance among academic and other observers, particularly the media. These views culminated in the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act that is founded on the notion that the financial system is inherently unstable and must be controlled by government regulation.
We will never know, of course, what would have happened if these emergency actions had not been taken, but it is possible to gain an understanding of why they were considered necessary—that is, the causes of the crisis.
Why is it important at this point to examine the causes of the crisis? After all, it was five years ago, and Congress and financial regulators have acted, or are acting, to prevent a recurrence. Even if we can’t pinpoint the exact cause of the crisis, some will argue that the new regulations now being put in place under Dodd-Frank will make a repetition unlikely. Perhaps. But these new regulations have almost certainly slowed economic growth and the recovery from the post-crisis recession, and they will continue to do so in the future. If regulations this pervasive were really necessary to prevent a recurrence of the financial crisis, then we might be facing a legitimate trade-off in which we are obliged to sacrifice economic freedom and growth for the sake of financial stability. But if the crisis did not stem from a lack of regulation, we have needlessly restricted what most Americans want for themselves and their children.
It is not at all clear that what happened in 2008 was the result of insufficient regulation or an economic system that is inherently unstable. On the contrary, there is compelling evidence that the financial crisis was the result of the government’s own housing policies. These in turn, as we will see, were based on an idea—still popular on the political left—that underwriting standards in housing finance are discriminatory and unnecessary. In today’s vernacular, it’s called “opening the credit box.” These policies, as I will describe them, were what caused the insolvency of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and ultimately the financial crisis. They are driven ideologically by the left, but the political muscle in Washington is supplied by what we should call the Government Mortgage Complex—the realtors, the homebuilders, and the banks—for whom freely available government-backed mortgage money is a source of great profit.
The Federal Housing Administration, or FHA, established in 1934, was authorized to insure mortgages up to 100 percent, but it required a 20 percent down payment and operated with very few delinquencies for 25 years. However, in the serious recession of 1957, Congress loosened these standards to stimulate the growth of housing, moving down payments to three percent between 1957 and 1961. Predictably, this resulted in a boom in FHA insured mortgages and a bust in the late ’60s. The pattern keeps recurring, and no one seems to remember the earlier mistakes. We loosen mortgage standards, there’s a bubble, and then there’s a crash. Other than the taxpayers, who have to cover the government’s losses, most of the people who are hurt are those who bought in the bubble years, and found—when the bubble deflated—that they couldn’t afford their homes. (more…)
Posted in American Enterprise Institute - AEI, American History, Banking, Congress, Democrats, Economy, Fannie and Freddie, Financial Meltdown, Housing Market, Interest Rates, Liberalism | No Comments »
Sunday, October 27th, 2013
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Book Review: ‘The Map and the Territory,’ by Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan argues that Wall Street didn’t predict the 2008 crisis because it paid scant attention to the insights of behavioral economics.
Oct. 22, 2013
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Bubbles and crashes will always be characteristics of free-market systems, but they need not lead to economic crises. In 1987 the stock market fell over 20% in a single day, but the effect on economic activity was minimal because holders of common stock weren’t highly leveraged. The bursting of the Internet bubble in early 2000 left only a mild imprint on the financial system and the real economy for the same reason. The crash of the housing bubble was devastating because the toxic mortgage-backed assets were held by highly leveraged institutions, and this debt was short-term rather than “permanent” and thus especially susceptible to “runs” where lenders were unwilling to “roll over” their short-term loans. “It was the capital impairment on the balance sheets of financial institutions that provoked the crisis,” Mr. Greenspan writes. In his view, the answer is not more regulation but more capital.
“The Map and the Territory” ranges beyond the market crisis and predictive models. Mr. Greenspan offers a conservative but balanced discussion, for instance, of the need to restrain the growth of entitlement spending. In his section on income inequality he emphasizes the role of globalization and the rise in stock-based compensation, as well as the failure of our education system to produce skills for the workforce that match the needs of the economy. He says that immigration reform, by loosening the requirements for H-1B visas, would allow us to draw on a large pool of skilled workers abroad and thus stabilize income inequality. At the moment, immigration restrictions protect, and thus subsidize, high-income earners from global wage competition.
The financial crisis of 2008 and the deep recession that followed forced each of us—perhaps most notably, Alan Greenspan —to question the fundamental assumptions about risk management and economic forecasting. Mr. Greenspan, the nation’s chief forecaster as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, steered the nation through almost two decades of prosperity and relative stability, retiring from the Fed in 2006 with an unparalleled reputation for prescience. And then came the economic crisis, and no one’s reputation for prescience survived.
In prepared remarks before a congressional hearing a month after Lehman’s September 2008 bankruptcy, Mr. Greenspan declared: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief.” He was hardly alone in failing to predict the economic tsunami. Equally clueless were government officials, Wall Street practitioners and professional economists. In “The Map and the Territory,” Mr. Greenspan tries to explain what went wrong and offers suggestions for how we can do a better job. (more…)
Posted in Banking, Bankruptcy, Big Government, Economy, Entitlements, Fannie and Freddie, Federal Reserve, Financial Meltdown, Government Regulation, Housing Market, Obama Administraiton and Policy | No Comments »