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Blog Archive

Saturday, September 27

Police Gear to Handle any Problem

There may be a need for some Galco Holsters at your police department. With the current national real estate, mortgages and financial crisis, the future is uncertain. Galco holsters are leather gear that are worn on the belt or possibly the shoulder, to secure weapons. Tactical policewear items are those that help police to do their work in stopping enemy operatives. This can be anything from clothing, to flashlights, knives, bullet proof or other vests and specialty items. It is hard to describe all the gear available, so check out my friends at 511tacticaloutdoors.com, and free shipping. Let's hope the politicians settle things so things don't get too out of hand for the police.

Warren Buffet Demands Congress Pass Bailout

Not only does Warren Buffett Tells CNBC he wholeheartedly supports bailout plan but he had some additional off-camera remarks to CNBC's Becky Quick.

On camera, he told CNBC's Becky Quick over the weekend, "It's what I would do if I were there." Becky also notes that the SEC's "no-short" rules may have helped Berkshire Hathaway's stock price "get it up" late on Friday.

Warren noted that the peasants must give him and other billionaires what they want.
To paraphrase he declared:

You are my doggies. Without me, you would be nothing. Anyone who makes less than about $1 million a year, is a stupid piece of crap anyway. Or as my dear friend Marie Antoinette said, before she lost her head, "Let them eat cake." (spoof of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France). The government has bought the mortgages, bought the real estate, and now the peasants must be milked.

Tuesday, September 23

Derivatives according to Ben Stein,And Critique

special guest column from ben stein, and translation:


The headlines scream doom. There are endless references to the economic situation being "the worst since The Great Depression." Translation: We are about to go into a collapse like the 14th century Bubonic Plague, which is what Lyndon Larouche said.

First of all, all you have to do is look around you to see that in terms of daily life, we are not anywhere near The Great Depression. Unemployment is barely about six percent. It was 25 percent at the nadir of The Great Depression.

Translation: I am an empiricist idiot. Until I actually starve to death, I don't believe it will ever happen.

On the other hand, the losses in financial products have been devastating. The Dow is off 23 percent from its high in 2007. Financial stocks even after the recent rally are off staggeringly. The biggest insurer in America has become a basket case.
Most of all, there is REAL FEAR in the air. Decent, hard working people are terribly afraid as they see their life savings melt away. Retirement has become just a forlorn dream for tens of millions of Americans.

Translation: You must bail the banks out, and the hedge funds and all the crap. Nazi looting hedge funds have feelings too.

How did it happen?

Here s one big part of the answer. First, the alert reader will notice that Ben Stein said many times that the amount of money at risk in the subprime meltdown was just not enough to sink an economy of this size.

Translation: The mortgage collapse has always been a big red herring. That was the last desperate gasp to refinance everything.

Now let's get to the meat of the matter:

The crisis occurred (to greatly oversimplify) because the financial system allowed entities to place bets on whether or not those mortgages would ever be paid. You didn't have to own a mortgage to make the bets. These bets, called Credit Default Swaps, are complex. But in a nutshell, they allow someone to profit immensely - staggeringly - if large numbers of subprime mortgages are not paid off and go into default.

The profit can be wildly out of proportion to the real amount of defaults, because speculators can push down the price of instruments tied to the subprime mortgages far beyond what the real rates of loss have been. As I said, the profits here can be beyond imagining. (In fact, they can be so large that one might well wonder if the whole subprime fiasco was not set up just to allow speculators to profit wildly on its collapse...)

These Credit Default Swaps have been written (as insurance is written) as private contracts. There is nil government regulation of them. Who writes these policies? Banks. Investment banks. Insurance companies. They now owe the buyers of these Credit Default Swaps on junk mortgage debt trillions of dollars. It is this liability that is the bottomless pit of liability for the financial institutions of America.

Because these giant financial companies never dreamed that the subprime mortgage securities could fall as far as they did, they did not enter a potential liability for these CDS policies anywhere near their true liability - which again, is virtually bottomless. They do not have a countervailing asset to pay off the liability.


Now, we are about to have a similar phenomenon happen with commercial mortgage debt, debt from mergers and acquisitions, credit card debt, and car loan debt. Many trillions of dollars in Credit Default Swaps have been sold on all of this, and the prices of all of them have fallen and can be made to fall more.

As I said, the pit of loss is bottomless. Warren Buffett, the smartest man of all time in the world of finance, has called financial derivatives - of which Credit Default Swaps are a prime example - "weapons of financial mass destruction." And so they are. As with the hydrogen bomb, no one thought they would ever be used to end the world. But unless someone figures a way out - and maybe the new RTC is and maybe it isn't - we are in real peril. This should never have happened. Now that it did happen, should the taxpayer pay to make the billionaire speculators whole on their bets? What the heck is to be done?

Translation: We need a bankruptcy reorganization, but Ben is too much of a greedy pussy to admit it.

Monday, September 22

The Market Demands Surrender and Bailout



As Wall street stocks fell in early trading on Monday morning, investors demanded to know that they will be bailed out.

"you must bail us out"
"Say you're our doggie"
"You must bail us out"

Was a song sung, to the tune of "You Belong to Me" by pop singer Carly Simon.
Investors are relieved that federal authorities are taking action but still our insecure, since they know most of their investments are worth nothing, and our worthless toxic derivative junk. That is my they insist on being bailed out, particularly in MBS Mortgage Backed Securities in the Housing market, which continues to sink.

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley demanded to be changed to bank holding companies. This is to flaunt the destruction of the Glass-Steagall act, and the investment banks ability to rape and murder the deposit banks, merging and canoodling with them. And interest rates on U.S. Treasury bonds were at unbelievably low, for a three-month bill, of 0.93 percent Monday, down slightly from 0.94 percent late Friday. The Treasury's 2-year note's yield was at 2.19 percent, up from 2.14 percent Friday. The yield on the 10-year benchmark Treasury was higher, at 3.88 percent compared with 3.82 percent Friday. You must bail us poor little investment banks out!

Thursday, September 18

Federal Reserve Meltdown- Credit DefaultSwaps Game

The Wall Street Journal says that the latest problem is the derivatives, and the credit default swaps (CDS). This is directly related to the bailout by the US Treasury of AIG insurance company.

Wall St. Journal says:

The latest trouble spot is an area called credit-default swaps, which are private contracts that let firms trade bets on whether a borrower is going to default. When a default occurs, one party pays off the other. The value of the swaps rise and fall as the market reassesses the risk that a company won't be able to honor its obligations. Firms use these instruments both as insurance -- to hedge their exposures to risk -- and to wager on the health of other companies. There are now credit-default swaps on more than $62 trillion in debt, up from about $144 billion a decade ago. One of the big new players in the swaps game was AIG, the world's largest insurer and a major seller of credit-default swaps to financial institutions and companies. When the credit markets were booming, many firms bought these instruments from AIG, believing the insurance giant's strong credit ratings and large balance sheet could provide a shield against bond and loan defaults. AIG believed the risk of default was low on many securities it insured.
As of June 30, an AIG unit had written credit-default swaps on more than $446 billion in credit assets, including mortgage securities, corporate loans and complex structured products.

What this means is that Obama and McCain are both failures as presidential candidates. Can McCain shoot caribou from the air or not? Neither of these candidates have addressed any of the issues affecting the survival of the United States.

Saturday, September 13

Bronx Real Estate Blues

In the Bronx private equity groups such as SG2, and Pinnacle have been speculating on rent stabilized buildings. The concern on this issue has been the potential for owners to cut back on services to buildings in order to handle their huge debt service (mortgage) payments and rising operating costs (e.g., fuel, water, insurance). The worst case scenario involves a building going into foreclosure -- a losing situation all around not just for the owner, investor and lender, but more importantly for the building, the tenants and the neighborhood. As we saw in the late 1980s with the rash of multifamily foreclosures in Bronx buildings overfinanced by Freddie Mac, these properties often fell into serious disrepair and communities. The owners of the Riverton, a large middle income and mostly rent stabilized housing complex in Harlem, are warning their lenders that "they are in imminent danger of defaulting on their mortgage." While a number of small Bronx apartment buildings (6 - 15 units) have already gone into foreclosure in recent years, the Riverton may signal a wave of larger defaults. The recent disclosure that the owners of Riverton Houses, a 1,228-unit apartment complex in Harlem, might default on their loan has shocked the real estate industry. And it has raised fears about other apartment building deals from the not-so-distant past, when the frenzy in the market was reaching its peak. The strategy in these types of investments has been to achieve high levels of turnover in apartments (i.e., force/encourage as many tenants to move out as possible, especially the ones with lower rents) in order to take advantage of rent stabilization laws that allow for a 20% increase in an apartment's rent upon vacancy. That's how you terrorize and kill people, get them out, and make money, but now the mortgages are going south too.

Thursday, September 11

After the Fannie Mae Gobble Up

Run, Run, Run,
Let's Have a lot of fun.

Kansas Bankers Surety Corp., of W Buffet's Berk. Hath. has terminated its "excess deposit insurance" plan by which it insured bank deposits above $100,000. It seems Buffett fears 1,500 U.S. banks failing in the near future. And there are fourteen U.S. regional banks, that have at least 5% of whose core capital was now-worthless stock of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; and Lehman is near the end after it reported a $3.9 billion second-quarter loss and started setting up a separate unit to try to auction off $30 billion in commercial mortgage-backed securities. The amount reminds a lot of Bear Stearns, and the sell off of Merrill Lynch of MBS at 20 cents on the dollar--after having to loan the buyer the money, so it's said.

Rumors say the likely "receiving bank" for the remnants of Lemon Brothers
is Morgan Stanley, and the next step is Davey Jones' Locker. Washington Mutual, the country's biggest S&L with over $250 billion in deposits and a totally toxic book of mortgage "assets," was placed on probation by the Office of Thrift Supervision. With American voters waking up to the fact that trillions of their tax money has just been pledged by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, bank runs are on the way.

Friday, September 5

The Cracking Point on the Real Estate Bubble

Current estimates are that the national average price of heating oil will be $4.35 a gallon this Fall and Winter, with a typical house easily using 1200- 1500 gallons through the cold months in the Northeast and Midwest. In the past people could get credit for one year based on their equity. However, now in the northern states, the number of people qualified to get a loan to heat their homes in the winter is collapsing. This is on top of the home mortgage and real estate bubble collapse, and 3 million households ready to lose their homes.

Lyndon LaRouche pointed to the fact that the cracking point politically will be when people, especially in the northern states, have to sign contracts for heating oil.
LaRouche stressed that you have to look beyond "this week" into coming weeks. "The guy in streets doesn't think ahead. But in the coming weeks there will be a qualitative change in the perceived situation. This is going to hit hard in October."
The soft parade has now begun for the collapse of people's economics and the USA economy, unless we get the Homeowner and bank Protection Act.

Monday, September 1

Cheney's Real Estate Grab in Georgia Repub.

This Report from Der Spiegel, a magazine in Germany that exposed Saakashvili is very important.

There are some reports coming from European monitors of the peace in South Ossetia. It is possible that their reports, which now leaked out of the OSCE center in Vienna, also included information about wiretapped phone calls of the Georgian leadership. One that is familiar with these reports personally, summed up the assessment in the following way: "Saakashvili lied 100 percent to all of us, the Europeans and Americans alike." The Georgians are provocateurs and liars. They are the ones who attacked South Ossetia, not the Russians.

"At the same time [that governments were preparing the EU special summit], several departments of the German government in Berlin began voicing doubts about the credibility of this presently most problematic friend of the West." The Russian tanks were on the north side of the Roki Tunnel, when Georgia attacked. That has been told by military observers of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), who were in Georgia.

In a preview of Dick Cheney's visit to Georgia this week, "it is mooted in Washington, DC, that he, who claims wanting to solve the conflict, is one of those that orchestrated it. One of his most experienced advisors, Joseph R. Wood, was in Tbilisi shortly before the Georgian Army attacked. That was confirmed for the first time last week by Cheney's office." So the question is, why do the neo-cons and their British buddy want to crack the Russians and humiliate them.