Real Estate Still Overpriced in California in many Markets and Paying your Mortgage with Unemployment Benefits – Examining Housing Values through Employment and Local Market Trends. Los Angeles has a 4.4 Income to Home Price Ratio even after a 42 Percent Price Decline.
As housing prices have collapsed from their halcyon bubble peak, many are peering out into the foreclosure landscape that is the current U.S. real estate market and are wondering if prices now fall in line with economic fundamentals. The problem in many areas across the U.S. isn’t so much with housing prices but actual employment [...]
How the Middle Class Slowly Evaporated in the Last 40 Years – Loss of Manufacturing, Bank Deregulation, Hyper Consumption, and Short-term Profit Seeking from Wall Street.
Some like to think that the middle class has always been a fixture of American society. In fact, the rise of a steady and strong middle class didn’t happen until after World War II. Clearly people can’t look at the economically painful Great Depression, which rampaged the nation from 1929 to 1939 as a good [...]
3 Underground Real Estate Practices Moving the Market – Short Sale Fraud, Squatter Stimulus, and Buying Before Foreclosing.
In the early days of the housing bubble here in California and other bubble states a handful of people were raising alarm bells that mortgage fraud was occurring at unprecedented levels. The housing industry initially came out skeptically stating this was only a handful of wayward people. As it turns out, it was the vast [...]
The Anti-Savings Model – Offer 0.1% APY on Savings Accounts and Charge 15% on Credit Cards. A System Designed to Punish Savers and Encourage Extravagant Spending via Usury.
U.S. Banks have a solid incentive, dipped in gold, to keep people in a perpetual state of paying rent on debt while not saving a shiny penny. In fact, their ideal state of financial equilibrium for Americans would be one in which people spent every single penny from their earnings reaching the end of the [...]
The Weakest Bang for our Wilting Dollar – How we Overpaid for the Bailouts and were left with a Wilting Economy Propped up by Government Spending. Paying $446,000 Per Loan Modification and $43,000 for Homes that were already going to be Purchased.
So much horrible policy has occurred since the economy entered recession that the majority of Americans are shell shocked with each day of news. It used to be that a billion dollars in toxic assets was enough to garner some movement out of the market. Now, we talk about trillion dollar deficits as if they [...]
Middle Class Americans Losing Financial Ground on Retirement – As Stock Market Rebounds more Middle Class Americans Have Less Money and Fewer Jobs. How is Health Care Spending Boosting GDP a Good Thing?
As more and more data is released on this Great Recession it is becoming abundantly clear that we have two tracks people are following. On one track where most travel, we have middle class Americans dealing with the highest unemployment in a generation while seeing their net worth dissolve. On the other side of the [...]
631 Million Credit Cards for 113 Million Households – Credit Card Excess Contracting for First Time in 40 Years. How Plastic Hid Middle Class Financial Decay.
It is estimated that in 2010 we will have 181 million Americans carrying credit cards. Now this is interesting given that Census data from 2008 only shows 113 million households. The credit card is ubiquitous flowing through our economy like a river of easy money. Yet credit cards have become a major pitfall for many [...]
Breaking the American Bank – Banking Propaganda and Using the American Middle Class as a Credit Card for Wall Street Excess. How About we let the Average American Borrow from the Federal Reserve at 0 Percent and cut out the Loan Shark?
Banks are showing their true colors and what little regard they have for the average American. As they advertise with cute and friendly faces assuring consumers they are looking out for their best interest, behind their backs they send in a locust of lobbyist onto Washington to do everything in their power to gut any [...]
Squeezing the Last Drop of Productivity from the American Working Class – 18 Percent National Underemployment and why Wall Street and the Government are Cheering Your Financial Failure.
The American financial press cheered on Friday when “only” 36,000 jobs were lost in February. This if you haven’t noticed now passes for good economic news. The unemployment rate remained unchanged because the actual workforce continued to show a decline yet Wall Street somehow viewed this as positive developments. And why not? The middle class [...]
The Middle Class Financial Compact Being Washed Away – Income Dilution and the Saving Disparity. 57 Million Households Live on $52,000 Per Year or Less.
The middle class is finding itself struggling to keep what was once seen as staples of a burgeoning working class in our country. Part of this battle has come from a system that has rewarded easy finance on the backs of the working class. Take for example residential real estate. For decades, this was probably [...]
