patrick.net

To Paralithodes: You and I both, are being proven right right in front of our eyes, by these Leftist idealogues. Now they are admitting that raising taxes for high-income earners is not for fixing the deficit because it won't make a dent, but it's for fairness and lowering their 'wealth', basically just so low-earners will feel better. It won't raise wages for low-earners.

I said it's really about getting votes for Democrats. I continue to believe that's why the Democrat politicians push the class-warfare slogans -- and their voters eat it up and think it will 'do good'.

I also continue to believe, that taxing people in this manner is not Constitutional. It is not a right of the govt to take/confiscate/tax people for these types of insane reasons -- this is not a 'reasonable' seizure.

sbourg says

To Paralithodes: You and I both, are being proven right right in front of our eyes, by these Leftist idealogues. Now they are admitting that raising taxes for high-income earners is not for fixing the deficit because it won’t make a dent, but it’s for fairness and lowering their ‘wealth’, basically just so low-earners will feel better. It won’t raise wages for low-earners.

Sbourg--

See if you can follow along with me. Right now 50% of people don't pay income taxes, right? That's a stat that your type love to bandy about. If you decreased wealth disparity, people at the bottom and middle would have more money. And these people spend a much higher % of their income so demand for most everything would increase. Increased demand would lead to increased production which = more jobs. More jobs = more people making $$ and more taxpayers. More taxpayers = higher tax revenue.

See how that works?? It has nothing to do with fairness or socialism or ideaology. It has everything to do with practicality. I'm for doing things that work.

Chase had two properties (short sale) 4 bedroom condo's by the beach in my area. They wanted 300k a piece for them. Only 2 units in the building. Fairly new but a little distressed. My cousin offered 270k for one, I was going to put in an offer for 240k for another. They refused the offer of 270k and told me not to bother with my offer. The bank would not entertain any offers below 295k. 6 months later, I just discovered that they just sold both units to a local bank for 250k. They sold the units as a two family to the bank for 125k a piece. What on earth is going on. I see these kind of deals all day long. They won't sell to the general public but will sell to contractors and other banks. I would like to know if there is an investigation into these dealings?

I agree Klarek. I also put an offer in on a house that was listing for 279k extremely distressed home. I offered 220k. Listing agent said her seller wasn't considering offers under 269k. We had to strong arm (threaten) her to deliver the offer. She said she delivered it and her sellers refused. Just found out yesterday the house went for 210k. WTF. Like I said I see this all day long. I lost a house that was bank owned to a contractor. My offer was 260k His was 230k He won the bid. It was bank owned and he was working with the listing agent.
He fixed the property up to flip it. It went back on the market for 489k (vacant) He can't sell it. It's been on for a year now. He's had one price reduction of 20k. I hope he chokes on that house. Meanwhile I just want to get a house for my family to live in.

shrekgrinch says

What part of actual history do you have a problem with?

The part you make up to support your thesis.

Pretty much everything you post is anti-obama. If the wife is pms-ing, do you blame obama's policies? The reason we skim your posts and don't take you seriously has much to do with your obvious hatred of all things Obama.

Your Newt buddy is throwing his cute little cap in the ring, shrekgingrich. Are ya excited?

I HAVE HAD SIMILAR EXPERICES, INDICATED CLOSING AND OFFER EXCEPTED, FIRST ONE IN. THEN I GET A CALL FRM. REALTOR --OH--WENT TO AUTION. SOLD FOR 50K LESS THEN MY OFFER. OR, THE REALTOR HAVE THEIR BUYER ALREADY LINED UP, WAIT PAY THE SIGN PERSON WAIT 3 DAYS, THEY CALL THEIR BUYER , SEAL THE DEAL THEN PUT IT ON THE MLS AND SIGN GOES UP. WROTE TO REAL EST. BOARD, RESPONSE NO WRONG DOING????? GIVE ME A BREAK>

The banks are controlling prices just like the oil companies are controlling prices. When you own a lions share of the oil or real estate you can hold back supply to create demand and keep prices artificially suspended. This is what they are doing. Just like the feds were holding the interest rate steady and offering incentives to artificially prop the market up. People are stupid and they just don't get it. Our oil reserves have never been so high historically, but they are holding back supply. So now they don't have to depend on the natural fluctuations of the economy they can create it by holding back shadow inventory and there are tons of it. It's such a scam and the taxpayers are the ones paying for it more than once, 3x over when you look at where the costs are and who those costs are being charged to.

I hear you, we have a company called Tache in Mass, they are wired and deal with most of the bank owned property. I see this all day long with their brokers. Filed a complaint, fell on deaf ears. They don't care. I was told from someone on the inside that they take their orders from the bank on how to conduct business. Since The banks are the ones holding all the cards, they follow suit. The only problem is, it's unethical and their is no watch dog organization to put the screws to them. The Govt is in bed with The Banks and The Banks are running the show. Conspiracy Theorists have said for years that part of the NWO plan was to do away with private property. It's strange but it seems like that's where we are headed. When you have banks buying up property and renting them out. Hmmmmm something to think about. Maybe we will be relying on them for more than our checking accounts.

bubblesitter says

Although I am bear, I doubt there will be a major slump…unless there is sudden worsening of job market - like 14% CA UE rate or interest rate going up suddenly to 7%. Very unlikely, fed is still holding lots of cards.

Can't say how, but I am in a position to tell you that the real UE rate in the SV is 22 percent. California overall is 15 percent.

We are already there.

~Misstrial

I live on the East Coast and the homes here are still very high. We are not seeing the deflated prices of The West Coast or Fla. I know these were the hardest hit but still our home prices are not in line with assessments two years out. For example I looked at a home yesterday. The assessment for 2009 was 309k, that was two years ago. Our market has been steadily decreasing at the rate of about 15% a year. They are asking 330k. I see this and much worse all day long. There are many homes not moving and many homes without a single price reduction in a year or longer. How do you propose another bubble is going to be created if the market does not first correct itself?? That hasn't happened here. There is a lot of shadow inventory, not even on the open market.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/43003679

Obama Tells Companies to 'Step Up' and Hire Workers

So that's his economic plan? What a moron. I've got news for Obama, American companies are hiring, in China, India, Brazil, etc.

tatupu70 says

Have you seen the change in wealth disparity over the last 20 years?

http://www.cbo.gov/publications/collections/tax/2009/pre-tax_income_shares.pdf

1979 -- the lower 3 quintiles were making around 1/3 the income and the top 5% was bringing in 1/5.

2006 -- this had changed to 1/4 and 1/3 respectively.

http://www.cbo.gov/publications/collections/tax/2009/average_before-tax_income.pdf

For the middle quintile, real incomes have increased 1/6th, from $53,000 to $61,000.
For the top 1%, incomes tripled, from $500k to $1.7M.

What's the end-game here?

Have the super-rich actually earned all that extra wealth they'e been collecting -- how much of it is parasitical rent-seeking instead of actual bona-fide capital enterprise.

People who say they do not see the problem here are talking their book.

zzyzzx says

Obama Tells Companies to ‘Step Up’ and Hire Workers

You have to admit his plan is working. McDonalds listened to Dear Leader and came to the pick-up window with 62,000 high quality, economy changing, minimum wage blockbuster jobs (the fact that McDonalds is exempted from ObamaCare has absolutely nothing to do with it, I am absolutely certain of that). Also, when Obama promised creating "4 million new jobs," he never said they would be in "China, India, Brazil, etc." so you can't hold that against him. Please try to be fair. Thank you.

Paralithodes says

. . . government through its good graces is simply allowing you to keep a portion of it.That is essentially what President Obama meant when he referred to “tax expenditures.”

Sorry, wrong. A good example of a "tax expenditure" is the mortgage interest deduction. Government could just cut checks for the tax benefit they're giving to home debtors (like they did recently), but instead this policy was slipped into the tax code as a deduction.

Geddit?

Misstrial says

Can’t say how, but I am in a position to tell you that the real UE rate in the SV is 22 percent. California overall is 15 percent.
We are already there.
~Misstrial

Aha, truth of numbers being reported! Let's just keep it simple. Worsening job market and sudden spike by 1+% rate should do it .

Paralithodes says

I’ve seen plenty of projection in this forum, but this one absolutely wins the prize! Nice job!

sbourg's stuff in this thread perfectly exemplifies all of that. He was throwing out "facts" without actually bothering to cite anything at all other than pure bullshit.

And then he tops his "argument" off with: "Because if you are, I think you need a shrink."

umm yeah.

Yes ... this is becoming very common. I was ready to go in with an over asking offer. The listing agent reply was don't bother unless you are near $50k over asking. We didn't bother. And then find out it sold 10k under asking. These particular agents need to be called on this practice.

I wouldn't mind if listing agents were stonewalling investors with all cash offers though ... give the hard working owner occupier a chance. I like when I see listings where they spell out first X days owner occupiers only after that investors are considered. I think that listings with these date ranges are HUD homes or something. This should be standard on all bank owned or short sales.

I'm not sure that this strategy works for the average homeowner because I've seen HUD just turn all offers that are under asking price down and then once the investor comes in they get it. People feel as though if they don't give the bank the asking price or over they will lose the property to a contractor. I'm telling you this market makes no sense unless they want the flippers and other banks to get the properties or hold them off the open market in order to gain more control of the market and pricing. Have you looked at the numbers (shadow inventory) they are staggering.

And Obama wanted to raise taxes in December ‘10 on millions of higher-paid families.

heh. He of course campaigned on that. Plus the use of "higher-paid" vs. "high-income" is probably the new TruSpeak the righties have to say now. The reality is the Obama tax rise would largely hit the "ultra-rich" but "higher-paid" sure sounds a lot better than that, LOL.

The stimulus was horribly targeted in terms of creating jobs. It's going to be regarded as an utter failure for quite some time. The money went mostly to: a) unneeded tax cuts and b) local and state govts who weren't even capable of balancing their budgets during the boom years, thereby subsidizing their overpaid employees' salaries and generous benefits (yes, this was done to help the unions).

Keynes wasn't a fraud, but people who talk about his theories are usually quite ignorant of what he was advocating. Were he alive today, he'd likely be very against the god-awful stimulus bill. Keynesian proponents like to ignore the major tenet of his theory which is to use the govt's expenditures as a seesaw. Unlike the free market, the govt has a lot of non time-critical projects. Literally years can pass while something that's funded sits on the shelf. When unemployment rises, it can use those paid-for projects to fill the gaps. That's a very unique sort of flexibility that the govt can use to actually improve the economy while providing the same level of services that it would be doing were it to not time the projects with economic cycles.

You might notice some similarities in what I just wrote and what Keynesian "proponents" believe, but there are some glaring differences:

-First off, notice that I'm talking about FUNDED projects. As in, you don't borrow a trillion dollars plus an eventual hundreds of billions in interest. The money ought to be appropriated responsibly, not put on the credit card. Fans of Keynes almost always ignore this key component, and instead stick to the "spending" part of his theory. No, you save and then spend. I don't care if George Bush racked up a massive debt and left no savings on the table to use, it doesn't make this perversion of Keynes' theory legitimate and it's an exercise in intellectual dishonesty to paint it otherwise.

-Second, those projects to be put into place during recession ought to be projects which are NEEDED, ones that we were already planning on doing. Not the bullshit "find ways to piss away a trillion dollars in as little time as possible" approach that congress took two years ago. Make-work programs do not improve our aggregate standard of living, and are an insult to anybody with a shred of economic intelligence. All that's accomplished in doing that is to make those who are given those stimulus jobs feel like they're better off than they really are.

You can either read Keynes to understand what he's talking about, or you can repeat the bullshit that assholes like Krugman sputter about how we just needed "more spending". I know, he's a Nobel-winning economist, so everything he says must be gospel. But he's first and foremost a political ideologue; he uses his economic clout as a means of promoting his ideology rather than deriving his ideology from his economic knowledge. Like Art Laffer, he has an army of economically-retarded drones believing his bullshit because he carries the title of "economist", even though there are tens of thousands of economists who know how full of shit he and Laffer are.

If you want to argue about the merits of Keynes' theories, know what the fuck he was talking about. That applies both to his critics as well as his proponents.

"Second, those projects to be put into place during recession ought to projects which are NEEDED, ones that we were already planning on doing."

Well then you must not have kept track of stimulus prokects very well because many of them were most certainly needed, such as the Second Avenue Subway in NYC. And the 7 line extension. And the East Side Access project, allowing LIRR trains to go to Grand Central.

I believe you can get the data from RealtyTrack.

HousingWatcher says

Well then you must not have kept track of stimulus prokects very well because many of them were most certainly needed, such as the Second Avenue Subway in NYC. And the 7 line extension. And the East Side Access project, allowing LIRR trains to go to Grand Central.

Federal taxpayers subsidizing New Yorkers' public transportation projects. Thank you for furthering my point.

A home in Marin, SFBA, put on the market for $1.6M, and received 23 offers. Sold price is $2.4M to an all cash buyer. It is what it is whether you like it or not. I didn’t make the rules

Yes but those are higher priced homes and aren't they the next to get cut out of the Govt Loop? So maybe we should wait and see how things are for you after that happens.

So I assume you are opposed to federal taxpayers subsidizing DC transportation projects as well?

Its your right to bid whatever you want, I have closed 100% of the short sales I have worked on. You have to negotiate with a low offer to get the bank to give you their bottom line, then you get that lowered. Why would anyone buy anything but a short sale. The order takers/realtors that can't get them done are just lazy or poor business people. Chase is just as easy as any other bank. Wachovia is a push over and bof A is the worst because of equator. I could get that place for 200k I bet. I do agree with Solver, market will tank for a long time.

klarek says

No, you save and then spend.

Odd assertion. Just where does the government keep this savings?

I think this savings is just a very low national debt, mostly held by social pension funds, like what the 1990s cycle was moving towards, until Justice Kennedy put the looters back in charge.

klarek says

those projects to be put into place during recession ought to be projects which are NEEDED, ones that we were already planning on doing

you mean "shovel ready"?

klarek says

Krugman sputter about how we just needed “more spending”

I agree that Krugs doesn't actually have a concrete plant to fix anything.

klarek says

Federal taxpayers subsidizing New Yorkers’ public transportation projects.

Thing is, infrastructure projects are generally local in nature. Gov't could do more R&D etc but having construction people collect EUC when there's stuff to build is not that optimal.

This nation had the debate about Federal investment in local infrastructure a long, long time ago. The Hamiltonians won, and the country would have been a lot better off if the nation had not allowed laissez-faire competition to capture so much of the public wealth of the untamed west via railroad speculation, too.

So how do you explain your contradiction klarek? Should the govt. build a massive subway line that goes through all 50 states so that no state has to pay for a subway that they will not use? Do you honestly think that states have the money to build large scale infastructure projects? HINT: Without the feds, there would be no subways, no highways, no bridges, or anything else. The only way to get anywhere would be through dirt road.

klarek says

Federal taxpayers subsidizing New Yorkers’ public transportation projects. Thank you for furthering my point.

I was going to say that New York only gets 80% of what it pays to DC, but, yeah, there's no reason the financial capital of the galaxy should be needing Fed stimulus funds.

States Receiving Most in Federal Spending Per Dollar of Federal Taxes Paid:

1. D.C. ($6.17)

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2004/09/red_states_feed.html

So tell me klarek, who is subsidizing who again?

Neither Democrats or GOP are followers of Keynes.

A key element of Keynes was the idea of regulation and taxing sufficiently during the boom times to smooth out inevitable busts. During the booms neither GOP nor Democrats raise a finger to force any acorns into storage for the winter.

The "Great Moderation" that Alan Greenspan liked to boast about was nothing of the sort.

The banks are operating quite differently on the East Coast than they are on the West. Not sure if it's because you have much more inventory on the open market, less jobs. Not sure what is going on but Chase is notorious in way that no one can get a short sale out from under them. Most short sales in my area are just a way for them to buy more time/make more money. They usually have no intention of approving any amount. I've seen them turn down offers only to sell them after they've purchased them back at auction (for the amount of the note) to new buyers at lower offers. Makes not sense if you didn't realize the banks are making their money and then some regardless of what they do.

The Realtors who are handling the Banks inventory of homes are not Bank employees, but are contractors. They can do what ever they want to sell the home including cooking up fake cash offers and what ever to get higher commissions. The REA are doing what they have always been doing "cooking up higher prices" with fake multiple offers and all cash buyers.

Same-O Same-O....

Just to complete the record on this house, 1111 Carey had 100% financing on the original loans with ResMAE ($504k first, $126k second).
As a side note, I was tracking two SFH 'coming soon' foreclosures in San Francisco. A quick check at the Recorders site showed that the owners had at least another property heading into (or already in) foreclosure. Folks are starting to throw in the towel...

E-man says

rubyrae says

Have you looked at the numbers (shadow inventory) they are staggering.

I don’t know where and how to obtain this number. Can you show me some real numbers or are you speculating?
Be formless, shapeless, like water - Bruce Lee

You send me a $500 check and I'll email you the numbers. :)

EBGuy says

100% financing on the original loans with ResMAE ($504k first, $126k second).

You forgot to mention, it was the best and highest bidder.

Anyone else wants to be the best and highest bidder ?

You send me a $500 check and I’ll email you the numbers.

You sound like a RE Broker. Checks in the mail.

Realtytrac has a figure of 1,963 foreclosures in my county, only 650 homes for sale. Now I'm assuming a good deal of the homes for sale aren't foreclosed on yet. So where is this inventory? I know where it is because I drive by these homes every day. They are sitting and haven't entered the open market. My county is not that big.

The chart "looks like google" means very little. Charts as you know show what has happened in the past, and the future is not known.
I saw the pictures of riots in China over the iPad2. I was in Mexico at the Walmart and people were buying Apple products on store credit. People were going to work to pay off their Apple products.
I know Chinese people who are extremely proud of their name-engraved iPods that cost them 1/4 month's wages.
I would look at how the Apple sales of all products and services is growing. It's probably increasing.
As far as I know, Android doesn't make a dime from the phones they put it onto.
The competitor's tablets are a joke compared to the iPad2. They have no market share.
But, gambling of course is always fun. If you win, you have bragging rights.