Saturday, July 26, 2008

Closures, and Drug Busts, and Suicides, OH MY.

A lot of people wonder why, after the business of Bend RE has finally begun its Great Implosion, why would I or anyone want to remain anonymous? Why not come out of the proverbial closet, and say who I am. Even BendBB? Who is he?

Well, we found out this week. People in Bend take their real estate seriously. Real serious. Dead serious. People around here will KILL when RE deals go South on them.

I don't know who this Jay Audia guy is, but he swooped in on what is now the Mirada parcel, bought it at a pretty good discount, and was going to make low-end laborer shacks. We've talked about this in the past actually. I've actually put pictures of Mirada right here in this blog.

Apparently Mirada, at steep land price discounts, still did not work out. And this Audia guy took it to heart. Too bad. But it illustrates a point. From the comments:

I have to conclude you don't know what your talking about when you're talking about SF. I think it has more to do with your propensity toward creating artificial stereotypes and projecting your bottomless hatred at them. Sorry, but it ain't reality. Personally, I hate SF. But it is quite sound economically. It is an endless fountain of endless 100K + jobs. If you don't make that in SF, you don't even exist or must have no motivation whatsoever. There is so much money there I don't think you can fathom it.

And another:

You're right the Cali-banger isn't a real person. It's a meaningless stereotype used to make you feel better about not taking responsibility for the conditions in your own community.

Hmmm. People have a passion about it. An irrational passion. They'll kill over it. Themselves when necessary.

They'll accuse me of hate crimes of a sort. "Bottomless hatred". Can't even see the forest for the trees anymore. Mention "Cali-Banger", and they go into attack mode, can't even think straight. Buster said what I couldn't:

The cali is a very real person. They can be seen speeding through Bend round-abouts daily. They can be seen by their car, they can be seen by their dress.
...
A cali is a fucking disease, and is a real person. HOMER trys to call the whole USA cali-ism, but cali is really about california, and what it does to people, and the kind of people who leave the east-coast and come to cali, and then migrate north.

Florida has its own breed, and in general the east-coast are all mother fuckers, classic americans, in the sense of complete fucking dog-eat-dog americanism.
I concur with homee that mid-west is the salt of the earth, but that don't mean they'll inherit the earth, history shows the meanest junk-yard always wins.

The bible is full of fucking shit, about the meek inheriting anything.
The law of the jungle is the jungle-law. The USA will continue to rape and pillage the world,, and the citizens of the USA will continue to rape and pillage one another. Cali-ism, or its particular type of consumerism, is of course non-sustainable.

Our current post 1998 cycle, where they could sell the $1M, and come to Bend and buy 1/2M, and live off the other 1/2M is OVER. No more perpetual money machine in Bend. The cali lifestyle and visible wealth will go the way of the do-do, just like visible wealth post-depression.


They are real, they walk the streets here thicker than the indigenous Original Bendites. They are easy to spot. They just have the most severe case of some sort of disease that is creeping across this country.

And it's so subtle, it's hard to catch it anymore. It's ubiquitous. My least favorite commercial is by American Express. It's supposedly narrated by a series of telephone operators who tell these Amex Success Stories. A man buys a diamond ring, but is approached STERNLY and is told, "There's a problem". A couple wants tickets to a show and some Amex phone operator weasels tickets for them. Another is what appears to be a ridiculously expensive restaurant.

It GLORIFIES excess consumption. It's so over the top, it makes me want to gag. But I watched that commercial probably 100X with complete accepting indifference before I realized how horrendous the message was. And how absurdly over the top it was. And how COMMON that sort of thing is. Now I run to change the channel or mute the TV whenever that crap comes on, cuz it is sickening.

Cali-bangers are real. The Real Problem is wanton excess. In cars, in clothes, in homes, in everything. It's not knowing what to think about your life in terms other than consuming goods & services. And it's a very easy trap to fall into.

I feel like I have to maintain constant vigilance not to fall into this trap. I feel I have one real weakness, and that's books. They are work related, which helps me rationalize things. I've probably spent $150 on books this year alone. That's a LOT for me. I just don't buy stuff.

I can afford a lot of "stuff". But I have no interest in buying crap like that. I have 2 cars, food to eat, a few computers & books. Don't need much else. Although I do want a house someday. I'm pretty sure that when the time is right, I'll be able to buy a house for cash. Maybe. From the comments:

I knew a guy who had the saying "He Who Dies With the Most Toys Wins" on his license plate. He was a native Oregonian. The attitude you describe is an AMERICAN one, not just a California one.

This ludicrous excess consumption is the #1 Social Problem in this country. IT'S DEADLY because there's No Institutionalized Cure. In fact almost every large scale economic force is DEDICATED to making it worse.

This is why the current BAILOUT is doomed. We are band-aiding the problem, AGAIN.

Dropped rates the for the NASDAQ bust, don't wanna feel the pain. No way. Keep spending, keep the party going.

Second tinderbox, the housing bust, well they're going to bailout the banks. Notice they're BUYING foreclosed homes; fuck the inhabitants, pay off the banks.

Reminds me of Old School forest management. Fight the fire. PUT IT OUT. Think about the destruction. Prevent it at all costs. We can HARVEST that wood, if we put out the fire. Squelch the flames before we suffer!

We found out the ignorance of our ways.

Fires periodically burn the fuels on the floor, and if they burn frequently enough, and nature takes its course, then the fires don't burn as hot. Big trees remain, the ecosystem rejuvenates itself, and growth begins anew.

But humans intervened to STOP THESE NATURAL PROCESSES. Selfish, stupid & short-sighted.

The old NEEDS to be PURGED. It NEEDS to burn. If we don't let it burn now, the next time it goes up it will INCINERATE EVERYTHING. It will go out of control.

Fannie & Freddie should be allowed to go down. Otherwise we end up with companies famously contained in Mr Burns stock portfolio:

Amalgamated Spats. Confederated Slaves Holdings. Baltimore Opera Hat Company.

We're in our Second Huge Firefight. We saved NASDAQ in 2000-2004. We are now saving Fannie & Freddie, and it's burning HOTTER. This time it is WAY BIGGER than last time.

We should let them BURN. We should allow nature to take its course. Let homes be foreclosed on. Let banks lose trillions. We'll survive & move on in a few years.

But the government is GOING TO FIGHT THIS FIRE, because The Religion of Excess Consumption would be sacrificed if they did not. They can't even allow that to ever even be considered. Excess Consumption is What We Do.

Mark my words: Fire #3 won't be containable. They are going to LIQUIFY THE US ECONOMY. Maybe Fire #3 is Hyper Inflation, maybe a huge fucking war. I don't know.

I only know that the US economy is being manipulated to an unnatural demise. We've got to allow FAILURE. We NEED TO BURN. We need to cleanse this desire to consume well beyond our needs.

Moving on...

Dunc had a pretty good post, Greenwood status report.

I travel Greenwood quite often, and it has become riddled with "For Sale" and "For Lease" signs, or the true harbinger of doom, "For Sale or Lease".

If you want to watch the gutting of Bends bread & butter businesses in high relief, then go to Greenwood, mainly between 3rd & downtown. EVERYTHING is empty. It's happening everywhere, but this is a main artery & heavily traveled.

Good training ground for future generations on how to destroy property values. Raised lease rates beyond reasonable, and now vacancy rates are exploding. Once you hit that tipping point of excessive EMPTY, you can't lease anything at any price.

There are in fact many Cent OR standby businesses that are shuttering their doors.

Kayos is closing both locations. Blue Teal. Ernestos. Jokers is now called something else (I forget), after its owners had to kite checks. Tum-A-Lum lumber.

This is Tip-Of-The-Iceberg reporting. For every 10 that is reported as closing, 90 are simply shut down.

Bend media. Just like the US Government. Amex too. Wants to keep you spending. Blow sunshine up your skirt. LIE about the magnitude of the problem. Act like its not even there.

TETHEROW OPENED TODAY!
SPEND! SPEND! BE HAPPY! SPEND!


No one is killing themselves over bad real estate deals. No businesses are closing. Just spend.

No. Bends true character is coming out nonetheless:

Tumalo barn yields record $2.8 million pot haul
A raid on a large barn in Tumalo turned up almost 650 marijuana plants worth more than $2.8 million on the street, the largest indoor pot grow ever dismantled in Central Oregon - and it was still gearing up for full operation, officials said Thursday.

Madras meth raid busts 'major supplier'
A raid on a southwest Madras home Tuesday morning led to the arrest of two residents, one described by drug agents as a major methamphetamine supplier in the area.

Bend police capture second fugitive after chase

Driver charged with hindering prosecution; handgun found By Barney Lerten, KTVZ.COM The second of two Bend men wanted in a recent assault and robbery was located by police Friday night and tried to run away but was soon spotted again and taken into custody, officers said.

Bend fugitive on the run captured in Idaho

Knocked on Nampa woman's door, asked for water - and place to hide By Barney Lerten, KTVZ.COM A Bend fugitive wanted in an armed robbery and assault who fled pursuing police late last week, triggering an intensive manhunt, has been captured in Idaho, authorities confirmed late Thursday.
Bend manhunt: Knife-wielding suspect eludes police
Residents get warning; search scaled back at midday By Nina Mehlhaf and Barney Lerten, KTVZ.COM Wanted since Monday for armed robbery and assault, a Bend man forced south Bend residents to keep their doors locked while a manhunt went on for hours Thursday.

Yup. When the rubber meets the road, Bend reverts to its True Self, a crime & drug haven.

No. It ain't "just you". These stories ARE happening with increasing & alarming frequency. Hell, I didn't even mention the huge increase in vandalism.

Look at what's happening. We are all of us consuming lemmings. They want us to keep buying NO MATTER WHAT. Even if it kills us. Even if CONSUMING means ME KILLING YOU. Even if it means ME STEALING YOUR SHIT. Even if it means ME SELLING YOU DRUGS.

Jay Audia, I'm sure was a nice guy. But he bought into The Bend Dream, like thousands of others. But it's a DREAM folks. This place doesn't really have a sustainable economy. That's how 19 year old punks rent HUGE mansions: DRUGS.

Bend is becoming & will become a town of crimes, drugs, vandalism, murder & suicide.

And it's because the media WON'T let us BURN. Audia in the papers as a WARNING? No. Put out that fire. What's after Audia then? Someone going postal?

The Shire shut down. Are they going to kill Peter Jackson? Hey, I'm NOT kidding. Read the comments. People are MAD AS HELL because I'm advocating WE LET IT BURN THIS TIME. "Bottomless hatred" they call it.

City of Bend. American Express. US Government. Bend media.

All want to let it ride. Put out the fire & LETS GET BACK TO NORMAL. Worked out with that NASDAQ snafu, right? It'll work this time again, right? Not going to happen.

IF, and it's a big IF, we manage to avert disaster this time, we simply have built a tinderbox that will rage out of control next time.

The current crisis is so large it will require liquefaction. Fire up the printing presses. Economy turns to mud beneath our feet. Hyper inflation. That'll be it. End of Story.

See, Jay Audia is the collateral damage of this firestorm. There will ALWAYS be losses. Anyone whose been in Cent OR for the Summer season KNOWS there's always going to be a spark.

But no one wants anyone to know that. They think that ARTIFICIAL CONTAINMENT is a sustainable practice, it is not. Jay Audia killed Jay Audia. But in some measure John Costa killed Audia. KTVZ killed Audia. Hell, even Alan Greenspan had a hand in it.

The last containment creates more victims The Next Time. And believe me, There Is Always A Next Time. If you notice, this country has begun to be run as if there isn't.

Not On My Watch. I don't care what happens, just not on my watch. That's how it's being run. Give it to Obama.

The first cycle, I had friends who lost lots of money. But nobody DIED. Now in Round 2, we're starting to see what happens when nature is NOT allowed to take its course. People we KNOW have started to DIE.

Jay Audia would be alive today were the NASDAQ recession allowed to run its course. But no, Greenspan had to resurrect the Cali-Banger ASAP. Who cares about Round 2, that's Not My Watch.

Folks, we need to let this thing go, run its course & burn like hell. I DO NOT have "bottomless hate" for you or your excessive ways, Cali-Bangers. I have quite a few friends who probably scored over 50 on my little Cali-Test. I had a few points too.

But the Cali-Banger lifestyle is going to INCINERATE this country. Negative Savings? We've started acting like it's OK! What? We've gotten used to it.

For each one of us, our government owes FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS hundreds & thousands of dollars. We are transferring our wealth, built over the course of centuries, to foreign governments & corporations at a rate unheralded in history. We only have to buy 400 billion barrels of oil, and we'll be broke. $700 billion a year OUT THE DOOR. Your 3 humungoid SUV's & 2 White Liberal Guilt Prius' are why that's happening, Cali-Banger.

Who cares about what we owe each other. Credit cards, budget deficit. Blah, who cares. That's just us owing us. But when we owe others, we are well & truly going broke. The budget deficit won't kill us, the Trade Deficit WILL. And the Trade Deficit is the DIRECT RESULT of the Cali-Banger lifestyle, a lifestyle that has the decision makers of the World scrambling to preserve it AT ALL COSTS.

Simply realize it CANNOT be saved. Negative savings? My God, talk to anyone about a topic like that prior to the last 30-40 years, and they'd have thought you crazy.

At some point 'we the people of bend' have to take action, and collectively edoocate the BULL&SORE that having +50% of homeless beggars roaming in BEND will NOT fix the fucking bubble.

If we stay on this bailout track, the US will be the beggar out on the course, picking up balls. We will be the Worlds beggars, if we aren't already. Centuries of work, wiped out to preserve an artificial lifestyle.

You need only educate yourself on the aftermath of artificial forest management to see where the US is headed. We did it for a hundred years. Just meant forests overrun with fuel, tinderboxes, burned out of control "next time". We couldn't "save" them, the Big Trees were not big enough to survive & they burned.

What are these "Big Trees"?

Note, also before one jumps to some huge fucking conclusion, the oil will be gone as know its use in 20-40 years, and the USA has the biggest COAL deposits in the world. Our coal will ten-fold, the rest of the world will be buying coal derivatives in the form of liquid petro from the USA in the next century.

Your cali-ism of excess, is just a 1920's blip. The world moves on, I think the logical assumption would be that if the USA continues to impoverish itself, that you can expect China or some 'super-power' in the future to invade the USA to secure our coal deposits.

We are. The US itself, is. We need to let this fire burn. We didn't last time, and now this time it is burning so hot it threatens our very financial system. It threatens to take down a system that has put MILLIONS of people in homes for the past 40 years.

If they liquify our economy to preserve the Cali-Banger this time, there won't be a place left worth going here. Des Moines, Wichita? No, the whole mess will be taken down, no matter its participation in Round 2.

Shit get an old boat, or an old RV, and head down to mexico and live on $500/mo or less, or shit go to thailand, and live on $500/mo or less and get a 20 yr-old wife even if your 80..

We've talked back in the day about some pretty weird stuff. Gardening for your food. Caching gold, for the love of Christ. Real survivalist stuff.

(How about this: Historians might look back on George Bush as one of our greatest, most prescient Presidents! After all, he created the Great Country of Amer-Iraq-ica, 3rd largest oil reserves in the World...)

And this stuff is actually starting to make A Lot Of Sense.

Did you think people, people you know, would start DYING over this thing?

People are dying, collateral damage of artificial maintenance of a natural process. If they're DYING this round, what happens Next Time.

China takes us over? Buster & his clapboard; Looks less & less crazy everyday. It ain't Wichita or Charlotte we'll flee to, to escape Round 3, it'll be Thailand or Australia or China.

We need to let this fire burn. Let it burn, or there won't be a country worth having next time.

Drugs. Business Closures. Murder. Suicide. Speed traps. Bank failures. Homocide. Fannie. Freddie. Foreclosures. The Plaza. Meth dens. Robbery. Embezzlement. Fraud. Jay Audia.

All for want of the Cali-Banger lifestyle.

They are all of the same origin. Round 1 wasn't allowed to run its course. These are the offshoots of that decision. They are the fuels of Round 2. And they are AGAIN not going to let the fuel BURN. And so begins Round 3. Hello Bangkok, goodbye Wichita & Charlotte.

We should LEARN from our own mistakes & the mistakes of others and Let It Burn. If we do not, this time will be remembered as the most backward & uneducated period in our financial history. The Great Depression... The Japanese Bust of the past 20 years... both the DIRECT RESULT of Well-Meaning, but ultimately DESTRUCTIVE intervention by governments who wanted to preserve the status quo At All Costs. And the costs ended up being high indeed.

When you want to know The Real Costs, the Total Costs, of this bailout, look around. It's everything. It's all around us. We'll lose this country. Let It Burn means making do with your car for another 2-3 years. It means NOT buying $200 in clothes this weekend. It means waking up & not being lulled into a coma by some fucking Amex commercial. You DO NOT NEED 90% of the shit you think you need. You don't need that fucking iPhone, PS3, big screen TV, or all that other crap. You don't.

Consuming in excess of what you're making, and pre-consuming all your future earnings is the road to complete disaster. We can't survive as a country & think that's even remotely possible. We're transferring $700 billion overseas every year JUST FOR THE OIL needed to perpetuate this myth. And it is a myth, a 100% fantasy, and it cannot go on.

But our government & corporations are doing everything possible to keep this dream alive. Despite the fact it will ruin us. 100% ruination.

We Need To Let It Burn.

399 comments:

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tim said...

Dammit, ICBINB, you stomped on my final reply to last week's post. Now no one will read it.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Cali-Bangers don't know what the fuck to do with themselves....


The struggle to keep big cars moving
Dealers face losses on gas guzzlers – and demand for gas savers

By Jeff McDonald / The Bulletin
Published: July 27. 2008 4:00AM PST

While national automakers are shifting much of their production from sport utility vehicles and large trucks to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles, local dealers and consumers are trying to figure out how much their used rigs are worth.

In the current market — the volatility of which is reflected by the wildly fluctuating price of oil and speculation of demand — the traditional Kelley Blue Book pricing standards don’t apply, said Jack Holt, owner of Murray & Holt Motors Inc. in Bend.

“The market is in complete turmoil,” Holt said. “There’s no standard today for cars, trucks, SUVs, vans — there’s no real standard like there has been in the past.”

The Kelley Blue Book publishes every 60 days, but prices are changing almost daily in today’s market, Holt said.

Prices for used large SUVs and trucks have dropped $3,000 to $5,000 in the last five to six months over the normal expected depreciation, said Jeff Robberson, owner of Robberson Ford-Lincoln-Mercury-Mazda in Bend and Prineville. At the same time, values for smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles have appreciated about $500 above the typical Blue Book value, Robberson said.

Dealers are forced into a choice: Either take the loss on the value of the SUV or truck, or try to sell it for its previous, higher value, he said.

Robberson has decided to take the losses and move on, he said.

Ford announced last week a companywide shift to significantly accelerate its production of several new fuel-efficient small vehicles in North America and transform existing plants to more easily produce those vehicles.

General Motors Corp. also has made the push toward more fuel-efficient vehicles, including the GMC Yukon, a gas- and electric-mode hybrid SUV, in response to shifting demand from consumers.

Nationally, auto dealers are in the “classic merchant’s position” of trying to buy the vehicle as low as they can with the expectation that they can sell it for something more, said George Van Horn, senior analyst with IBISWorld, a Los Angeles-based industry research firm.

The price of crude oil, which settled at $123.26 per barrel on Friday but had topped $147 earlier in July, is the wild card in the new- and used-car market, Van Horn said.

“We’re in a state where people can’t make a lot of great forward-looking decisions,” Van Horn said. “It’s very difficult for a car company to come up with a production plan, but the car industry has worked its way out of these situations before.”

Consumers trying to sell or trade in their SUVs and trucks — especially those who don’t rely on the vehicle for primary transportation — may decide to wait until prices stabilize before selling, Van Horn said.

Higher gas prices may be a trade-off that people are willing to pay in different parts of the country, especially places that have an outdoor lifestyle like Central Oregon, he said.

“Short term, they may decide that the marketplace conditions are so out of whack that they might have to keep this vehicle longer and reduce other costs,” Van Horn said. “Ultimately, it comes down to what they can afford.”

If they leased a less fuel-efficiency vehicle, customers are in a good position to trade in their gas guzzlers for a more fuel-efficient one, Van Horn said.

Leasing has become a popular option for consumers during uncertain market times, said Robert Durfee, general manager at Toyota of Bend.

“We’re seeing more people leasing because it helps them get out of negative equity on their trucks and large SUVs and it helps them avoid the gas crunch,” Durfee said, referring to the leasing of smaller vehicles at Toyota.

The Toyota dealership’s biggest challenge is getting enough smaller, fuel-efficient vehicles to meet demand, such as the Toyota Prius, for which there is an eight-month wait, Durfee said. Another challenge is selling cars to people with existing debt on their large SUVs and trucks, debt that may be higher than what the vehicles are now worth, he said.

“We try to clear our trucks out as fast as possible — we don’t try to make a large profit off them,” Durfee said. “The fuel-efficient vehicles are closer to Kelley Blue Book value. The big diesel trucks and large SUVs are significantly (lower than) the Kelley Blue Book.”

When it comes to pricing the vehicles, however, values change almost weekly, Holt said.

“If you talk to new-car franchise dealers or major used-car operations, one guy will say he’s not going to take any more large vehicles in a trade. Another will be out looking to buy trucks and SUVs because he thinks the market went down further than can be justified,” Holt said.

Central Oregon’s SUV and large-truck culture may help boost those vehicles’ sales in the end, Holt said.

For some functions and needs, such as family and outdoor recreation or construction work, there is no substitute, he said.

Bend resident Jeremy Dickman said selling his 2006 Toyota Tacoma pickup has been harder than he expected.

Dickman has listed the vehicle for $22,500, about its Blue Book value, but he hasn’t gotten many calls, he said.

Due to a lack of response over the past eight weeks, Dickman might keep the vehicle, he said.

The pickup, which gets between 17 and 20 mpg, has been the right vehicle for his outdoorsy lifestyle, Dickman said.

“I thought about getting something with better gas mileage,” he said. “But it’s tough to find a vehicle with good gas mileage that is all-wheel drive.”


There's a great pic of Holt next to a brand spanking new 2008 GMC Yukon HYBRID, my favorite illustration of just how fucked up this country really is.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

tim said...

RIP Bend Bubble...

38 degrees.

Nice little restaurant in NW Crossing dead zone. Note on the door.

Too bad. I had a couple business meetings there. People were great and I loved their soup.

NW Crossing seems like a dangerous place to hang your hat.

Note that there are three businesses that have already moved into the crazy "work downstairs live upstairs" retail townhouses. Those are actually IN the neighborhood.

Paint me extremely skeptical on those being able to turn a profit.

As for the Bulletin, we got the obit on Audia, but no homage to him from the paper. Cheesy. Especially for a guy they quoted 6 months ago.

We always hear the optimistic first half of the story with the Bulletin and never get the depressing second half. No follow through.

I didn't go through every page yet, but I saw nothing on Tetherow opening. Nothing. I was expecting something on the front page, but Buster was right yet again. Curse you Buster!

So, two surprises in the Bulletin today for me.

Best photos are of a pathetically empty (at least from the photos) music festival.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

38 degrees is gone?

Well Holy Shit. I was actually going to see if it was OK, despite its location. Heard the sangria was top notch.

But I think Sangria is just sugary wine. Cheap wine & Lime Jarritos or something. Serve low end crap in an upscale location... same old, same old...

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Fuck-N A folks, it's happening fast & furious now.

How many restaurants is that? Remember the iceberg rule: for every one you see, there are 9 others...

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

you all must be ugly little toads that hide under rocks. Are you on prozac pauldoh. you hate blacks you hate calis i am a 5th generation native. just who do you like? or do you just hate everyone?You remind me of my dad. He hated everyone and he hated his dad

**shrug**

tim said...

::snort:: "I hate my dad because he hated his dad."

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

38 Degrees is a victim of The Standard Bend Business Plan:

Me Too.

38 Degrees got built cuz Merenda succeeded. Merenda spawned a whole host of restaurants in Bend; The Super Upscale Cracker Shack serving 100% crappy food at ridiculous prices. That's literally all that's left of downtown. And they fanned out from there, now they're everywhere.

Course, nobody did a single fucking bit of research to see just how HYPER-SATURATED that market is/was.

Nope. It was:

Jody Built Merenda. Me Too.

Happened 100X. We have the capacity to support about 5-6 restaurants of this sort. But since in Bend, We're Different, people were suckered into a Suicide Pact With Their Bank.

"Hi, I'm Joe Your Loan Officer. We have super-streamlined our loan application for your borrowing convenience! It's only ONE LINE":

"Will you KILL YOURSELF if you cannot make your payments?"

tim said...

I think what'll happen in NW Crossing is that almost all retail will gradually morph into medical and offices. That's what works there.

You have doctors, brand merchandisers, Ruffwear, licorice moguls, software guys. The other stuff is going to struggle.

Problem: Office space exploded in the last two years. Expect low rents for your pretty red brick buildings.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

i am a 5th generation native

My ancestors came across on the Mayflower.

Please attempt to limit your logical flaws to 1 per post. So many red herrings, ad hominem attacks, and other inane statements really make it hard to respond.

You need to throttle back Cali-spunkage. Re-read. Try to NOT take it personally. Again, realize you are flawed, and you need to change.

I am flawed & I try to correct my flaws. And I don't do it by asking you if you take Prozac, which you probably should.

Chill bone, Lady.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

AWESOME!

Ron Paul on the Mother of All Bailouts

Freaking AWESOME!!!!

I love this guy!!!!

Anonymous said...

“But it’s tough to find a vehicle with good gas mileage that is all-wheel drive.”

My Jaguar has all-wheel drive and gets 28 mpg highway, 18 mpg city. My wife's Subaru wagon, also AWD, gets similar mileage. Not equal to a Prius, but not too bad. What this guy means is it's tough to find some big-ass TRUCK with all-wheel drive that gets decent mileage.

Why would anybody who doesn't NEED a truck want to own one? That has always mystified me.

Anonymous said...

For some functions and needs, such as family and outdoor recreation or construction work, there is no substitute [for a truck or big SUV], he said.

For construction work, okay. For recreation, bullshit. Americans have been brainwashed into believing they can't go camping or fishing or boating without some gas-guzzling monstrosity.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Wow. I have found a kindred spirit in Ron Paul.

That guy is awesome.

Anonymous said...

NW Crossing seems like a dangerous place to hang your hat.

Too out-of-the-way for most people, and the population in the immediate neighborhood isn't big enough to support much in the way of restaurants or retail.

tim said...

The Brady Bunch didn't have an SUV and they did fine.

I'm mystified by the "need" for one, and I have 3 kids.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Dollar bills will soon come with the slogan:

Back by the Full Faith & Credit Of Your Next Door Neighbor

What I find FORBIDDING, is that no one seems to realize that we are going to be in almost the same position as Japan after their RE bubble.

The Jap Gov't eased down to the sleeping point, and could not stimulate. Why? It was/is an entire country of people servicing 50 year $1MM mortgages on apts worth $175K.

They could not borrow anymore. They were full up. Mortgaged to the hilt for life. They couldn't borrow more if you paid them.

Which is exactly what we are doing. Throwing money at institutions to keep them alive, so that the patient doesn't die. But it doesn't matter.

We're a nation of over-extended borrowers. All this gov't intervention is pushing on a string. There is ZERO SLACK in the system. No one can borrow & even think about paying it back.

And banks know this. And so they are not making loans anymore. The banking business plan is obsolete for now. But still we will expend trillions to keep it alive.

Anonymous said...

Nationalize Fannie and Freddie. Let them be run by civil servants getting six-figure salaries instead of CEOs getting eight-figure salaries. The policy of socializing the risks while privatizing the profits SUCKS.

Anonymous said...

The Brady Bunch didn't have an SUV and they did fine.

LOL! Exactly. And my family does fine too; the Subaru gets us anyplace we need to go. 'Course we don't go off-roading or mud-bogging in it.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Housing Predictions

As I watch even the most optimistic economists finally get around to having to admit that the U.S. is in recession, I listen closely to their excuses for being “so wrong for so long.”

After all, being wrong about something as serious as our floundering economy can’t simply be explained away by saying, “Hey, I’m an idiot.” Oh no, it’s the oil price that threw them. How could anyone have ever predicted that oil would go sky high? Well sure, they could have read a book on the subject sometime during the past 50 years. Or they could have reasoned the using 87,000,000 barrels of a finite resource daily could come with some problems,…no they couldn’t.

Remember when Alan “Cash” Greenspan and “Bronco” Ben Bernanke both said that housing would make a soft landing? That reminds me of the elderly lady who was exiting the plane after a terribly hard landing. When she passed the Captain who was sheepishly saying goodbye to everyone, she said, “Did we land or were we shot down?”

Housing was shot down. And, for the distant future, it will stay down. Here’s the problem. The price of housing went up like a rocket. Why? America needed an economy and housing was it. A person who had worked at McDonalds for two weeks could get a house on the buy now and pay later plan.

What goes up must come down, and housing made a spectacular decent. Ya see, residential housing is an impossible basis for a sustainable industry. Housing represents shelter and nothing more. I wrote an entire chapter in my book on this subject and predicted the fall of housing more than a year before it occurred.

There is a huge difference between a house, a home, and an investment. If a person thinks that a house represents a true investment, they should stay home and watch the money roll in. Some of those ditzy economists who insisted that due to rising home equities, Americans weren’t really experiencing negative savings over the past few years, have foreclosure signs in their yards also. In this case, it wasn’t oil at fault, it was the bank. Sure it was.

Some types of housing will never recover as reality creeps into even an economist’s life. Large, energy sucking, tax draining, maintenance monster homes will die a slow death along with their foolish owners or their foolish lenders in states that have non-recourse laws. Non recourse means that the lender can only go after the home and not any other assets that the borrower may have. If you wonder why the banks are writing off Billions, it is often due to non-recourse loans where the borrower had nothing down and nothing to lose.

Housing will have a second downfall. Once the inventory glut of current non-sold homes is liquidated (about 24 months average), the inflation factor will in the mean time have driven building costs through the roof. So here is the scenario. Lenders will remain leery of loose lending practices and actually have the audacity of requiring a down payment. How ridiculous, the next thing will be requiring proof that the borrower can actually pay them back.

In the mean time our built-in inflation will drive everyday living costs well beyond what we are experiencing today, making saving nearly impossible for the average person. Wages will not rise accordingly. Real purchasing power will continue to decline as an excess labor pool vies for fewer good paying jobs.

Government (seeking re-election to avoid gainful employment) rather than embracing the real issues, will continue to attempt to turn the tides by using bales of tax money to build weak levies against the inevitable rising costs that are built into our economic system of exponential growth. Residential housing in the mean time will become more and more unaffordable to the point that the average American will not have the means to purchase a home.

Anonymous said...

The banking business plan is obsolete for now. But still we will expend trillions to keep it alive.

If the banking business dies, what do you propose to replace it with? Lending and borrowing money is what keeps the wheels of capitalism turning. Or do you suggest we create some kind of pay-as-you-go economy? Yeah, THAT's gonna work.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

The Brady Bunch didn't have an SUV and they did fine.

I bought a minivan several years back & found transportation Nirvana. Hauls more than my previous SUV's (work required!), got better mileage, hauled more people, and has a hell of a lot of pep. And besides, after almost 7 years, it still runs like a champ.

I will not sell/trade it in, until it literally disintegrates.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Or do you suggest we create some kind of pay-as-you-go economy? Yeah, THAT's gonna work.

Well, I didn't suggest it, you did.

Look at the Ron Paul video I just posted.

Let it burn.

Duncan McGeary said...

Except that even Jody says his sales are down 25%.

I think he's been preparing us for the bad news for months, now.

Mark my words....

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Or do you suggest we create some kind of pay-as-you-go economy? Yeah, THAT's gonna work.

Your comment is indicative of the NOT ON MY WATCH mentality that is now running this place. Do something NOW so that consequences are put off onto the next guy.

Like there HAS TO BE a solution. No. Maybe you just let it sort itself out. Maybe we just let it burn, so that old excesses are purged. Maybe the answer is No Answer.

Duncan McGeary said...

Nothing on Tetherow.

That's extremely weird, unless they're saving it for tomorrow.

And yeah, "I hate my father because he hated his father..." lot of anger, there.

"Those sheep are loud...." Hah! More sheep than concert goers?

Anonymous said...

It is still slowing down...time to bail.
Homes sales not looking up this month. Might be the first July that didn't out sell June in my memory(22 years.
July 08 month to date solds = 68 @ $275k
July 07 1-27 solds = 98 @ $345k
June 08 1-27 solds = 101 @ $315k
There are usually more sales the couple days of the month, but we need a hugh infusion to beat June.

Buckle up, the roller coaster is headed down the steepest slope.

Lot'o veggie's looking good in the garden, ammo hoarding, new guns, water storage, cash hoarding, new tires for the bikes, no new toys that we don't need. Fresh perch and crappie in the freezer. Lot's of extra canned and paper goods stored, outdoor toilet built. Check!!
If anyone out there is going to cleanout the freezer of fowl or beef email me..have a friend that can't afford to feed her wolf dogs. No readon to throw freezer burned food away.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Lot'o veggie's looking good in the garden, ammo hoarding, new guns, water storage, cash hoarding, new tires for the bikes, no new toys that we don't need. Fresh perch and crappie in the freezer. Lot's of extra canned and paper goods stored, outdoor toilet built. Check!!

I think I'm in love....

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

After all the gloom & doom...

I've gone to 100% invested. None taxable yet, just IRA's.

I actually think stocks will be the place to be. Not treasuries, that's death. Cash, ditto.

It's only my opinion, but stocks are The Place To Be during inflation. Not due to their innate goodness, but because all else is worse.

I did well these past few weeks... up between 10-40% on what I bought during some pretty unnerving drops... I'm prepared for some decent giveback on those gains, perhaps 100% or more.

Oh well, never sell.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Oy, and I'll probably regret not pulling the trigger on LCC (US Airways). It's thrown a triple from the bottom on Jul 12.

The harem was pretty full at that point...

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

While I wasn't looking, Prineville Bancorp (PNVL) collapsed to $5.

Should have seen that a mile away.

tim said...

Prineville bancorp?

I didn't even know it existed. What was it, a bank in the back of a McDonalds?

tim said...

>>It's only my opinion, but stocks are The Place To Be during inflation.

Sometimes that works. It didn't in the 70s. In the 70s, you wanted to be in coins, stamps, art, & collectibles.

I checked out a few of my stamps in a guide at the bookstore. They quadrupled during the 70s and haven't moved since.

Anonymous said...

Homer what was most interesting in the Ron-Paul talk was his mention about the IRS now getting access to all credit-card data for EVERYONE 24/7, all part of the emergency-housing-bill!!!!

The ramifications of this alone are fascinating.

All the non-filers I know have been working construction for +30 years, off the grid, but use fucking plastic.

THE IRS GOON SQUAD IS GOING TO INCREASE 10X MARK MY WORDS

They're going to zoom in on people who have a high velocity of money, with no reportable income. There goes another 40% of BEND to prison.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

And yeah, "I hate my father because he hated his father..." lot of anger, there.

Yeah. I KNOW that if someone will kill themselves over busted dreams (usually dreams of life-long Cali-Banger excess), they have got no problem killing me. That's why Anon.

Don't go overboard in your criticisms. Murder is just suicide with bad aim. And these people are easily confused.

Can't even read past the words "Cali-Banger" without going into a Hate Spiral. Cali-Banger would rather kill someone than have their lifestyle questioned. That's the Kool-Aid... worse than meth.

Anonymous said...

EURO's boyz, anything but dollars.

Given that RE has no buyers, I doubt it will be much of an inflation hedge.

I hate to be redundant, but my best 'cash' investment in the past 30 years has been offshore banking.

I see NO reason for the dollar NOT to continue to slide.

I think gold is already over-priced.

I would be very worried about ALL USA stock.

I really think we're looking at 1932, and not the 1970's, I think all we can do is wait for VOLKER 20% rates, but we all know that would kill our economy, and of course sky-rocket RE-REPO's, something that nobody wants.

Homer is most likely very correct in his assertion of watching JAPAN, but note Japans problem was they were #1, and believed their own HYPE, just like FUCKING BEND. Thus I concur BEND will end up like Japan.

The USA in recent, with its borrowing and war-mongering is really MOST like post WWI GERMANY, and that be HYPER-FUCKING INFLATION.

Which goes back to FULL force of having VALUABLE paper like EURO's.

WWI GERMANY borrowed from the world to finance WWI, they had the same feel-good hippy shit in the 1910's, and into the 1920's. Hesse was all time popular, Goldilocks, Narcissism.

USA in the 1995-2005 was WWI GERMANY, most likely will go down like Russia, not so much a wimper, more of a slow loss of our colonys, like So-Korea, bases all over the world, today we control 2/3 of the world, perhaps in five years 1/3, ...

I would be leery of buying YUAN, but I believe in the BET, at 8 to 1, and used to be 10 to 1, last time I lived in CHINA. I can see the YUAN becoming more valuable that the USA dollar in the next few years.

There are lots of safe places to hold your cash.

HYPER-INFLATION.

Bend is JAPAN, everyone that could buy did buy, and now his themselves in perpetual debt for their lifetime, these new interest only loans, insure that they'll never be paid off.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

THE IRS GOON SQUAD IS GOING TO INCREASE 10X MARK MY WORDS

Fuck man, this gov't uses every little incursion to reduce our freedoms. First 9/11, now this.

Mandatory DNA samples of every man, woman, child is when I go to Alaskan backcountry. If they get me with satellites, time to head East...

Anonymous said...

. I KNOW that if someone will kill themselves over busted dreams (usually dreams of life-long Cali-Banger excess), they have got no problem killing me. That's why Anon.

*

This is a critical point, I'm glad that HOMER has now mentioned it twice, no BRUCE it doesn't apply to you, cuz you never say anything to offend anyone. I think dunc does the same.

I mean hell why the fuck do you think jody left merenda for the 'the deep'? He wanted a smaller place, with less employees, and less sq-ft. Still bacon wrapped tempura in post 2006 BEND?? If I was him or any other restaurant folk in BEND, I would be doing a HANS, the best place in 25 years, and closed the fucking door? Why? Cuz they know what's going to happen now, they know what it looked like 25 years ago, there are TOO many places chasing too few dollars on this fucking little desert island.

Yes, calis go postal all the time, and liberal calis are the worse, as they have no fire-control.

Keep a low profile folks. I was thinking about the BULL, I know that years ago in PDX the BIG-ZERO ( oregonian ) put up barriers to entry, does the BULL let people just walk in? I never go there. If I were the BULL I would be very, very concerned, and would keep the doors locked. Note, they're not just full of shit, cuz they inflated the bubble, now they're afraid cuz no matter what they say or don't say, they're in trouble.

I have predicted for a long time here the BULL would go down, shuttering the place for safety, or hell its a conglomerate of a bunch IDAHO/wally-world shut, I can see them moving the entire office to walla-walla, somewhere safe, away from the killing fields of BEND-OR.

Anonymous said...

"They just have the most severe case of some sort of disease that is creeping across this country."

*****

This disease was diagnosed over a decade ago by a PBS show co-produced by OPB. The disease is called "affluenza." Here are the diagnostic guidelines:

http://www.pbs.org/kcts/affluenza/diag/have.html

You can watch the show in multiple parts on YouTube.

Anonymous said...

THE IRS GOON SQUAD IS GOING TO INCREASE 10X MARK MY WORDS

Fuck man, this gov't uses every little incursion to reduce our freedoms. First 9/11, now this.

*

This is why the patrick.net Ron-Paul speech is SO FUCKING important, as RP says, this country is going down, and they're desperate for money, in anyway they can get it, that's why the put the VISA-SPY bill into the housing bill, hoping to find a few non-filers, or anybody they can shake down.

A country that's not broke doesn't have to do this shit, but a country that has MORE people in prison per capita than any other in the world, a country that imprisons the world illegally, and thinks nothing of spying on its own people, ... As RP says this is ONLY happening cuz we're broke, and its going to get worse.

On the satellite, its just like the MEXICAN fence, or the FBI computers, the shit never really works, its always a contract of graft. Not even the lowest bidder, just peter-principal.

Harder, and harder to stay under the radar.

Homee, I bet the next housing bill will give the police access to all google anonymous users on demand 24/7, I see that coming.

..........

(copyright 2008) We report, you decide when to blow your brains out.

tim said...

Latest place to worry about a housing bust? China. Apparently their banks have been as idiotic as ours in loans.

I'm not that thrilled with the Euro right now. In the long term, yeah, diversify. The Japan currency tempts me.

tim said...

My uncle is cash economy guy. Never got a SS#, as far as I know. No credit cards. No accounts. He says it's harder and harder to do stuff with cash, and he should no.

You can't do it anymore. I think they give you a SS# in the hospital when you are born.

tim said...

I think the Dow is actually OK because all their growth is going to come from overseas.

Anonymous said...

BP this is one for you, since you like to be the guy on the street.

Watch the BULL & SORE, and see if they beef up security.

I suspect that the press in this town, is going to get very paranoid.

I would expect security, like you see in Federal Building(s) to ban entry ( Oregonian has this for years ), I predict armed guards at the doors.

The Deschutes County courthouse comes to mind.

tim said...

Just heard about another suicide. Guy in Sunriver who got pinched as the economy went down. Owned a gas station and something else (maybe a restaurant?).

Anonymous said...

Never got a SS#, as far as I know. No credit cards. No accounts. He says it's harder and harder to do stuff with cash, and he should no.

*

Most places still take cash, hell you can pay your utility's with cash.

But my experience is that most non-filers are STUPID, and have gotten away with it forever, but now that the IRS will have credit-card data, they'll be able to map income, and file a tax lien, ..

Especially 'calis', they love credit cards. Off the grid, food stamps, under the table income, but spend $5k/mo with their credit card, gold card I should say.

The IRS is going to have a gold-rush, all under the auspices of a 'housing bill'.

What's cute is where is OLD GW-BUSH on this? I mean I thought you were innocent until proven guilty? Not anymore the republicans just need money, and all road-blocks have been pulled.

Anonymous said...

No. Maybe you just let it sort itself out. Maybe we just let it burn, so that old excesses are purged.

So the global economy collapses, the world goes back to a hunter-gatherer economy and something like three-fourths of the human population dies?

Look, we all know you hate the world, but some of us are trying to live here. And a few of us actually like it.

What we need to do is nationalize Fannie and Freddie and reinstate the banking regulations that were removed by the right-wing zealots on the spurious basis that they were relics of the 1930s and we didn't need 'em anymore. Capitalism is a glorious thing, but unregulated capitalism is simply an invitation to piracy.

Anonymous said...

Latest place to worry about a housing bust? China. Apparently their banks have been as idiotic as ours in loans.
*

BIG fucking diff, I don't like talking about stuff other than BEND, but given the comment, and the fact that I speak mandarin, and have lived there on&off since 1985 I'll say something.

Up until say ten years ago, there was no notion of private property. You got a billion people, and most don't own, it had been collective government owned housing in the city's and communism in the country.

Yes, you got a few major city's that have converted soviet/england style tenements to condo's, and people have bought them, ... But actually the stock if MORE insane. Yes, shanghai, and Beijing have built lots of new buildings.

Given parity with the US dollar, and then some, as 90% of CHINA is still without ELECTRICITY I can honestly say they can grow 10x-100X in the next twenty years.

The USA is over, no where to go but down, we don't make shit, and all our people are on welfare.

Yes, the chinese stock market is HIGH, but its got less than 5% players, yes the RE is high, but its got less than 5% ownership.

Do you CUNTS see where I'm going with this??

In USA, and our BEND,its over cuz all who could get in debt, did get in debt, in CHINA it hasn't even started.

IN terms of tech, they're still in the 1910's in 90% of the country.

Millions of cars, and fridges will be SOLD, its the HOLY fucking grail. Does anybody have a fucking clue?

I have travelled all over, and most villages have no POWER, and NO TV's, ... Water usually comes from a common hole you have to go down into, just like Africa.

CHINA is going to fucking modernize, they're going to emulate the USA, ... but instead of 200M, imagine ONE-BILLION CALIS, ... all wanting SHIT!

Anonymous said...

I've gone to 100% invested. None taxable yet, just IRA's. I actually think stocks will be the place to be.

I don't get it. Bubble Boy wants the economy to crash and burn, and at the same time he's putting money into stocks. Financial death wish?

Anonymous said...

So the global economy collapses, the world goes back to a hunter-gatherer economy and something like three-fourths of the human population dies?

*

NO, CUNTS YOU MUST READ this week "ATLANTIC MONTHLY", its about the demise of the suburban city in the USA. IT's about how the HUD section-8 voucher has moved murder from the city to the suburb. Its about how all the homeboys who were sent up for ten, came home with a degree in METH.

THE USA is going to BURN, riots, and NOT enough COPS to put out the fire.

READ the fucking article.

All gets back to why I said it was so critical that O-BOMB-A get all the niggers into IRAN ASAP, otherwise the USA will go cannibal.

CHINA will march ahead. Let me say something about how it works in CHINA. YOU RAPE - YOU GET SHOT in the HEAD ON SITE. NO MATTER WHO the fuck you are. I remember, one day down the street years ago a cop raped a girl, and they shot him in the head, just down the street.

NOT every fucking place is going to be like BEND or the USA.

CHINA knows how to control the MONKEY. They have known for 4,000 years, its called Confucianism, and the way it works is time to time to control 100 monkeys, you slit the throat of one if front of all, it doesn't matter which one.

Not to sound RIGHTorLEFT, but the USA with its liberal kowtowing, and morality of coddling the criminal, has made them fearless.

I can honestly see PERU style death squads in the USA, if they don't send all the niggers to IRAN, and when I say nigger, I'm not talking about blacks.

Anyway not all will go back to hunter-gather, that is TOO FUCKING bambism, especially when some of us have an arsenal, and other are un-armed bambists.

It's jungle rules CUNTS, and its NOT pretty.

Yes, HOMEE said it on the MAIN POST, but New-Zealand, Australia, CHINA will look very fucking good.

Sure the gated community like pronghorn, might work, but not for long "READ" the fucking Atlantic-Monthly article and see what they're doing with the gates, the barbarians will get in, and they're now in the desert NO WHERE is safe.

Anonymous said...

I don't get it. Bubble Boy wants the economy to crash and burn, and at the same time he's putting money into stocks. Financial death wish?

*

IMHO bubble-boy ( my homee ) is probably talking about $50 dollar-cost averaging with the nickels his wife lets him keep.

Don't assume that homee is a stock-market guru, he likes to dabble, and bullshit.

Like most in BEND, my guess is the ONLY reason homee hasn't left dodge, is cuz he's got not enough cash to move, and he's already a renter, where in the fuck are you going to get cheaper rent than BEND?

If all of HOMEE's stock's goes south and he loses all $5k, I doubt it will cause him to blow his brains out.

I concur that the stock market will go down, there are exceptions like solar-panel companys that can deliver product, but that shit is already over-priced.

The stock market is NOT a safe place during hyper-inflation.

HOMEE doesn't think in terms of CAPITAL-PRESERVATION, cuz it clear he ain't got any.

Anonymous said...

. Capitalism is a glorious thing, but unregulated capitalism is simply an invitation to piracy.

*

Not a fucking thing to do with the BEND-BUBBLE. EVERYONE left&right drank the fucking kool-aide, and thought they were going to get rich in BEND, and retire in their 30's.

It's take an entire village of idiots to destroy the village, BUSH had little to do with BEND's self destruction other than providing the blank-checkbook.

Bewert said...

You Know The Banking System Is Unsound When....

1. Paulson appears on Face The Nation and says "Our banking system is a safe and a sound one." If the banking system was safe and sound, everyone would know it (or at least think it). There would be no need to say it.

2. Paulson says the list of troubled banks "is a very manageable situation". The reality is there are 90 banks on the list of problem banks. Indymac was not one of them until a month before it collapsed. How many other banks will magically appear on the list a month before they collapse?

3. In a Northern Rock moment, depositors at Indymac pull out their cash. Police had to be called in to ensure order.

4. Washington Mutual (WM), another troubled bank, refused to honor Indymac cashier's checks. The irony is it makes no sense for customers to pull insured deposits out of Indymac after it went into receivership. The second irony is the last place one would want to put those funds would be Washington Mutual. Eventually Washington Mutual decided it would take those checks but with an 8 week hold. Will Washington Mutual even be around 8 weeks from now?

5. Paulson asked for "Congressional authority to buy unlimited stakes in and lend to Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE)" just days after he said "Financial Institutions Must Be Allowed To Fail". Obviously Paulson is reporting from the 5th dimension. In some alternate universe, his statements just might make sense.

6. Former Fed Governor William Poole says "Fannie Mae, Freddie Losses Makes Them Insolvent".

7. Paulson says Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are "essential" because they represent the only "functioning" part of the home loan market. The firms own or guarantee about half of the $12 trillion in U.S. mortgages. Is it possible to have a sound banking system when the only "functioning" part of the mortgage market is insolvent?

8. Bernanke testified before Congress on monetary policy but did not comment on either money supply or interest rates. The word "money" did not appear at all in his testimony. The only time "interest rate" appeared in his testimony was in relation to consumer credit card rates. How can you have any reasonable economic policy when the Fed chairman is scared half to death to discuss interest rates and money supply?

9. The SEC issued a protective order to protect those most responsible for naked short selling. As long as the investment banks and brokers were making money engaging in naked shorting of stocks, there was no problem. However, when the bears began using the tactic against the big financials, it became time to selectively enforce the existing regulation.

10. The Fed takes emergency actions twice during options expirations week in regards to the discount window and rate cuts.

11. The SEC takes emergency action during options expirations week regarding short sales.

12. The Fed has implemented an alphabet soup of pawn shop lending facilities whereby the Fed accepts garbage as collateral in exchange for treasuries. Those new Fed lending facilities are called the Term Auction Facility (TAF), the Term Security Lending Facility (TSLF), and the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF).

13. Citigroup (C), Lehman (LEH), Morgan Stanley(MS), Goldman Sachs (GS) and Merrill Lynch (MER) all have a huge percentage of level 3 assets. Level 3 assets are commonly known as "marked to fantasy" assets. In other words, the value of those assets is significantly if not ridiculously overvalued in comparison to what those assets would fetch on the open market. It is debatable if any of the above firms survive in their present form. Some may not survive in any form.

14. Bernanke openly solicits private equity firms to invest in banks. Is this even close to a remotely normal action for Fed chairman to take?

15. Bear Stearns was taken over by JPMorgan (JPM) days after insuring investors it had plenty of capital. Fears are high that Lehman will suffer the same fate. Worse yet, the Fed had to guarantee the shotgun marriage between Bear Stearns and JP Morgan by providing as much as $30 billion in capital. JPMorgan is responsible for only the first 1/2 billion. Taxpayers are on the hook for all the rest. Was this a legal action for the Fed to take? Does the Fed care?

16. Citigroup needed a cash injection from Abu Dhabi and a second one elsewhere. Then after announcing it would not need more capital is raising still more. The latest news is Citigroup will sell $500 billion in assets. To who? At what price?

17. Merrill Lynch raised $6.6 billion in capital from Kuwait Mizuho, announced it did not need to raise more capital, then raised more capital a few week later.

18. Morgan Stanley sold a 9.9% equity stake to China International Corp. CEO John Mack compensated by not taking his bonus. How generous. Morgan Stanley fell from $72 to $37. Did CEO John Mack deserve a paycheck at all?

19. Bank of America (BAC) agreed to take over Countywide Financial (CFC) and twice announced Countrywide will add profits to B of A. Inquiring minds were asking "How the hell can Countrywide add to Bank of America earnings?" Here's how. Bank of America just announced it will not guarantee $38.1 billion in Countrywide debt. Questions over "Fraudulent Conveyance" are now surfacing.

20. Washington Mutual agreed to a death spiral cash infusion of $7 billion accepting an offer at $8.75 when the stock was over $13 at the time. Washington Mutual has since fallen in waterfall fashion from $40 and is now trading near $5.00 after a huge rally.

21. Shares of Ambac (ABK) fell from $90 to $2.50. Shares of MBIA (MBI) fell from $70 to $5. Sadly, the top three rating agencies kept their rating on the pair at AAA nearly all the way down. No one can believe anything the government sponsored rating agencies say.

22. In a panic set of moves, the Fed slashed interest rates from 5.25% to 2%. This was the fastest, steepest drop on record. Ironically, the Fed chairman spoke of inflation concerns the entire drop down. Bernanke clearly cannot tell the truth. He does not have to. Actions speak louder than words.

23. FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said the FDIC is looking for ways to shore up its depleted deposit fund, including charging higher premiums on riskier brokered deposits.

24. There is roughly $6.84 Trillion in bank deposits. $2.60 Trillion of that is uninsured. There is only $53 billion in FDIC insurance to cover $6.84 Trillion in bank deposits. Indymac will eat up roughly $8 billion of that.

25. Of the $6.84 Trillion in bank deposits, the total cash on hand at banks is a mere $273.7 Billion. Where is the rest of the loot? The answer is in off balance sheet SIVs, imploding commercial real estate deals, Alt-A liar loans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds, toggle bonds where debt is amazingly paid back with more debt, and all sorts of other silly (and arguably fraudulent) financial wizardry schemes that have bank and brokerage firms leveraged at 30-1 or more. Those loans cannot be paid back.

What cannot be paid back will be defaulted on. If you did not know it before, you do now. The entire US banking system is insolvent.


Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Bewert said...

Don't want to hold dollars? Here's an option:

"Merk Investments Launches Merk Hard Currency Fund; Mutual Fund Seeks to Protect against a Declining US Dollar Relative to Other Currencies
Business Wire, May 17, 2005"


The Fund, a pure play on hard currencies, provides investors with a new fundamental investment option to gain exposure to hard currencies such as the euro, Swiss franc, Australian dollar and gold.

See www.merkfund.com for details. They also have an Asian currency basket fund.

Anonymous said...

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but the ER doc found in the river a couple weeks ago was heavily involved in the Shire. A NOD was filed with his and his wife's name on it on the 22nd. His Drake Park home, MLS 2804862, is currently listed at $1.4 million, down from $1.79 million. His death looks very suspicious.

LavaBear said...

>>time to time to control 100 monkeys, you slit the throat of one if front of all, it doesn't matter which one.

The real saying is "Kill a chicken to scare the monkey". The Chinese need the monkey to get shit done but they are gonna eat the chicken anyway. They aren't so stupid to waste a monkey. That's what a Cali-Banger would do.

It's been said that Iraq is the chicken in the game Cheney is playing.

Anonymous said...

Lava,

That is how you capture monkeys, is by slitting a chicken throat.

Controlling monkeys is different, besides you wouldn't waste monkey, you just slit his throat, and then rush back into the restaurant to serve his brains while he's still alive. Dead animals have no value, people over only eat fresh ( live ) kills, they simply don't trust each other, they generally don't have refrigeration, and want stuff ( live ) fresh.

They used put a boat with banana's near a shore and let it fill up with monkey, and then detach the boat from the shore, as monkeys don't swim. Then you come out with a chicken and skit its throat and they'll all faint. Monkeys don't like the site of blood.

The 1,000 monkey principal, is that if you off one, the rest will behave, its well understood principal, and in CHINA everybody traditionally kept his/her mouth shut, as NOT to be that monkey.

love you lava, like homer loves marge

Anonymous said...

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but the ER doc found in the river a couple weeks ago was heavily involved in the Shire.

*

Now you people are working. BP should get to work on that and start posting the NOD address for all stuff, especially if the guy/gal is under 60, the street of dreams, has gone to the street of death, and not a peep from the BULLorSORE, then I understand their silence,

Dunc has a good post about how the BULL promoted all these folks on the BEGIN side, and gives them persona-non-grata on the end side.

Typical cali, all american, everyone loves a winner, or a potential winner, and nobody wants to give the loser the time of day.

These are the days when you get to see WHO your real friends are in BEND OREGON.

Anonymous said...

It's been said that Iraq is the chicken in the game Cheney is playing.

*

Perhaps, but killing arabs just begets retribution in that country, and memory can last 1,000 years.

In China they'll go ballistic en-mass, and sometimes a lone wolf will blow up a pubic building.

I really don't think that random killing of Arabs or Bedouins is a way to achieve respect in that part of the world. They have honor, tribes, family, and deep sense of history.

Given that ALL of CHINA has recently bee re-educated, there really is no history, MAO made sure of that.

It might be said that Cheney has tried to do the 1,000 monkey game in IRAQ, but we all know it sure and the hell didn't work.

They fucked up, he said they were going to embrace, after all we put the NAZI ( IRAQ was a national-socialist government ) into power, and then we took him out.

Shit if killing people was the solution in the middle-east ISRAEL would be done, they're #1. Nah, in that part of the world, you kill someone's son, and then his family tree is obligated to kill your family for a 1,000 years.

They tried to wipe out the middle east with aids like they did Africa, it didn't work, they'll do it by spent-uranium-fuel as bullets, aka depleted uranium.

CHINA will continue to be well managed, and will prosper, right now they just have to get the graft under control so that villagers get their share.

CHENEY did his job, he got the killing machine going, we want the OIL, and we want all the people their exterminated, thats be a goal since the last OPEC war in the 1970's. IMF&WB are terrified of giving billions to arabs for oil, that will just turn around and use that money to buy bombs to be used against Israel.

LavaBear said...

I love you too man.

Kill the chicken is my management style. When you have one employee that you know isn't gonna make it, you watch until they do something fairly slight that the rest of your monkeys are doing that needs correction. You catch the chicken and fire his ass in front of all of your monkeys. It only works with fresh monkeys. As they become seasoned you'll need to sacrifice a monkey now and again.

ps. See Iran in terms of Cheney's chicken move. But I do believe China is the real monkey in Cheney's game.

Anonymous said...

They also have an Asian currency basket fund. - bp

*

Baskets SUCK, its best to have in account in an offshore. With NO management fee's.

Like the fucking GOLD funds, a few months ago, a lot of the funds were sitting on cash, or funny paper,

You want to OWN something, and you don't want US government to able to get it, cuz they will, and soon.

EVERYONE is going to get economically cleansed.

The ONLY real way to open an account offshore, is to go there on vacation, and open an account.

It's NOT illegal for US citizens to have offshore accounts.

Anonymous said...

ps. See Iran in terms of Cheney's chicken move. But I do believe China is the real monkey in Cheney's game.

*

In a couple of months we'll never hear about Cheney ever again.

We should be discussing how O-BOMB-A is going to send nigger to die in IRAN.

Lava, or anybody else, YOU must read the current Atlantic-Monthly article about US city suburbs becoming anarchy.

Sounds like 'lava' is a fellow business owner, no wonder some of us think alike. Well I laid my last employee off post 911, and I have never been happier.

Employees are just children that never grow up, Peter-Pan is in every employee. Shit those who really are hard workers, and know their own shit figure out when their young to start their own racket, I know I quit working for other in my early twentys.

The left loves to hate Cheney, now with O-BOMB-A he'll have a Cheney by a different name, but the actions will be the same.

Remember what I was saying about JFK quotes, I saw in the NY-TIMES this AM, and the OREGONIAN, they were comparing O-OBOMB-A quotes with JFK from the 1960's and the SHIT was almost verbatim.

O-BOMB-A isn't running for prez, he's running for world-citizen.

All war opposition will cease under o-bomb-a like there ever was any.

AIPAC controls most US press, and O-BOMB-A has promised ISRAEL they'll get whatever they need. #1 neuter IRAN.

Anonymous said...

It's NOT illegal for US citizens to have offshore accounts.

*

I think that is why the new housing bill is letting the IRS snoop a lot of people use their credit-cards to move money abroad, and right now the luv-guv wants to know who is moving money out.

If you want to move money, do what Al-Queda does, diamonds, they're small and can't be detected by any security.

You get where you want to go, buy wholesale, sell wholesale.

Again, this is what the #1 cat&mouse people do, and they do it cuz it works,

I'm sure art can be the same, have an expensive painting here, roll it up, sell it EU, and deposit the money in EURO's in a Swiss bank you just opened while you were there.

Whatever it takes.

I talked about VOLKER know your history know that in 1970's interest rate was 20%, that's the ONLY thing that will fix the USD. If they don't do that then hyper-inflation, which means SMART people will be moving their CASH out, and the US will want to know.

Bewert said...

Of course they are going to let inflation run for a while--it's the easiest way to reduce our debt. They don't care about regular citizens, so plan to be fucked and do something about it before it happens. Buster's right.

LavaBear said...

Contrarian Chronicles
7/28/2008 12:01 AM ET
The repugnant bailout nation

There seems to be little outrage as the US, a country where free enterprise is supposed to reign, moves to nationalize losses without even contemplating reform.

By Bill Fleckenstein

We are at another moment when those of a bullish persuasion, whose financial muscle memory was developed under former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, are determined to put lipstick on the pig at every opportunity.

As soon as any facet of each financial minicrisis ends -- whether that be in certain subprime lenders, certain Alt-A lenders, certain monoline insurers or certain banks -- folks act as though all is well, even as financial institutions continue to implode.

At nearly every one, there's a lot more than meets the eye, because much of the surface strength centers on the perception that these institutions have correctly marked their mortgage-related assets. Recently, the portfolio of Cheyne Finance, one of the more infamous structured-investment vehicles, or SIVs, was sold at 44 cents on the dollar. I suspect that similar assets are not marked anywhere near that valuation on financial institutions' balance sheets. So, the game of "everything's contained" continues, albeit in a different form.

Of course, the fantasy has friends in high places -- namely the Fed, the Treasury and Congress, which last week engineered a huge bailout for Fannie Mae (FNM, news, msgs) and Freddie Mac (FRE, news, msgs), though Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has tried to insist it won't be needed. Never mind what this portends for our economy -- Wall Street applauded legislation many of us find repugnant.

The government's efforts will not create a bottom for financial stocks because of the fundamental problem in this country: People carry too much debt against homes that are sinking in value, homes they really couldn't afford in the first place and homes that have become all the more burdensome due to the inflation that's ravaging their paychecks. That the implosion of the housing debt bubble is dragging the economy down with it will just put additional pressure on jobs and the ability to service housing debt.
Goldilocks in hock to her gold card
Exhibit A: American Express (AXP, news, msgs). In last week's earnings release, the company noted that it has now been hurt by the weak economy. AmEx described the weakness as much worse this quarter than it had been in January and said it expects that trend to intensify.

On June 4, the company had raised yearly profit expectations to a range of $3.51 to $3.61 per share, up from $3.32. On July 18, it changed that forecast drastically. Obviously, a lot went wrong over those six weeks. AmEx noted that even some of its "superprime" card members are feeling the effects of the weak economy. Of course, if AmEx's customers are having problems, you can be sure that virtually every credit card company is seeing its consumers struggling to pay their bills -- despite help from government rebate checks.

The Fed's money-printing apparatus has been checkmated by roaring inflation. None of Paulson's cockamamie schemes, from super SIVs to bailing out Fannie and Freddie (after Bennie and the boys at the Fed bailed out Bear Stearns), will help the economy. Yet we must continually endure the cheering by stock market operators every time this country, the supposed bastion of free enterprise, "successfully" takes another step in its move to nationalize all losses that are inconvenient to those in power. As Jim Grant questioned in a brilliant Wall Street Journal article July 19, "Why no outrage?"
A birth that saw Fannie come out first
That brings me to an absolutely brilliant -- though nauseating, for what it revealed about our government -- article written by Paul Gigot in July 23's Wall Street Journal: "The Fannie Mae gang." This ought to be mandatory reading for everyone in America. It detailed the hardball thuggery, arm-twisting and insidious interlocking relationships among, for example, former Fannie Mae Chairman Franklin Raines, former Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank that have helped create the monsters called Fannie and Freddie:

"I recount all this now because it illustrates the perverse nature of Fannie and Freddie that has made them such a relentless and untouchable political force. Their unique clout derives from a combination of liberal ideology and private profit. . . . The abiding lesson here is what happens when you combine private property with government power. You create political monsters that are protected both by journalists on the left and pseudo capitalists on Wall Street, by liberal Democrats and country club Republicans. Even now, after all the dishonesty and failure, Fannie and Freddie could emerge from this taxpayer rescue more powerful than ever."

That is a truly disturbing prospect because the same incompetence and greed that brought us this mess will lead to further troubles if the cabal that surrounds Fannie and Freddie gets more powerful, which appears to be the case from the legislation just foisted on U.S. taxpayers.

To Paulson, one of the cabal's powerful members, who last week described the legislation as sending "a very strong message to the markets," here is my interpretation of that message:

Yeah, we're willing to do anything to keep the status quo, as rotten as it is, because reform is too painful to contemplate.

At the time of publication, Bill Fleckenstein did not own or control shares of any company mentioned in this column.

Anonymous said...

"AIPAC controls most US press"

***

conspiracy theorists are shockingly delusional

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

A new theory of the leisure class

by Virginia Postrel
Inconspicuous Consumption

MISSED SIGNALS: The less money your peer group has, the more bling you buy—and vice-versa. (Photo credit: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

About seven years ago, University of Chicago economists Kerwin Kofi Charles and Erik Hurst were researching the “wealth gap” between black and white Americans when they noticed something striking. African Americans not only had less wealth than whites with similar incomes, they also had significantly more of their assets tied up in cars. The statistic fit a stereotype reinforced by countless bling-filled hip-hop videos: that African Americans spend a lot on cars, clothes, and jewelry—highly visible goods that tell the world the owner has money.

But do they really? And, if so, why?

The two economists, along with Nikolai Roussanov of the University of Pennsylvania, have now attacked those questions. What they found not only provides insight into the economic differences between racial groups, it challenges common assumptions about luxury. Conspicuous consumption, this research suggests, is not an unambiguous signal of personal affluence. It’s a sign of belonging to a relatively poor group. Visible luxury thus serves less to establish the owner’s positive status as affluent than to fend off the negative perception that the owner is poor. The richer a society or peer group, the less important visible spending becomes.

On race, the folk wisdom turns out to be true. An African American family with the same income, family size, and other demographics as a white family will spend about 25 percent more of its income on jewelry, cars, personal care, and apparel. For the average black family, making about $40,000 a year, that amounts to $1,900 more a year than for a comparable white family. To make up the difference, African Americans spend much less on education, health care, entertainment, and home furnishings. (The same is true of Latinos.)

Of course, different ethnic groups could simply have different tastes. Maybe blacks just enjoy jewelry more than whites do. Maybe they buy costlier clothes to deter slights from racist salesclerks. Maybe they spend more on cars for historical reasons, because of the freedom auto travel gave African Americans during the days of segregated trains and buses. Maybe they just aren’t that interested in private colleges or big-screen TVs. Or maybe not. Economists hate unfalsifiable tautologies about differing tastes. They want stories that could apply to anyone.

So the researchers went back to Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term conspicuous consumption. Writing in the much poorer world of 1899, Veblen argued that people spent lavishly on visible goods to prove that they were prosperous. “The motive is emulation—the stimulus of an invidious comparison which prompts us to outdo those with whom we are in the habit of classing ourselves,” he wrote. Along these lines, the economists hypothesized that visible consumption lets individuals show strangers they aren’t poor. Since strangers tend to lump people together by race, the lower your racial group’s income, the more valuable it is to demonstrate your personal buying power.

To test this idea, the economists compared the spending patterns of people of the same race in different states—say, blacks in Alabama versus blacks in Massachusetts, or whites in South Carolina versus whites in California. Sure enough, all else being equal (including one’s own income), an individual spent more of his income on visible goods as his racial group’s income went down. African Americans don’t necessarily have different tastes from whites. They’re just poorer, on average. In places where blacks in general have more money, individual black people feel less pressure to prove their wealth.

The same is true for whites. Controlling for differences in housing costs, an increase of $10,000 in the mean income for white households—about like going from South Carolina to California—leads to a 13 percent decrease in spending on visible goods. “Take a $100,000-a-year person in Alabama and a $100,000 person in Boston,” says Hurst. “The $100,000 person in Alabama does more visible consumption than the $100,000 person in Massachusetts.” That’s why a diamond-crusted Rolex screams “nouveau riche.” It signals that the owner came from a poor group and has something to prove.

So this research has implications beyond race. It ought to apply to any peer group perceived by strangers. It suggests why emerging economies like Russia and China, despite their low average incomes, are such hot luxury markets today—and why 20th-century Texas, a relatively poor state, provided so many eager customers for Neiman Marcus. Rich people in poor places want to show off their wealth. And their less affluent counterparts feel pressure to fake it, at least in public. Nobody wants the stigma of being thought poor. Veblen was right.

But he was also wrong. Or at least his theory is out of date. Given that the richer your group, the less flashy spending you’ll do, conspicuous consumption isn’t a universal phenomenon. It’s a development phase. It declines as countries, regions, or distinct groups get richer. “Bling rules in emerging economies still eager to travel the status-through-product consumption road,” the market-research group Euromonitor recently noted, but luxury businesses “are becoming aware that bling isn’t enough for growing numbers of consumers in developed economies.” At some point, luxury becomes less a tool of public status competition and more a means to private pleasure.

In Veblen’s day, the less affluent scrimped on their homes in order to keep up appearances in public. “The domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby, as compared with the éclat of that overt portion of their life that is carried on before the eyes of observers,” Veblen wrote, noting that people therefore “habitually screen their private life from observation.” By contrast, consider David Brooks’s observation in Bobos in Paradise that, for today’s educated elites,

it’s virtuous to spend $25,000 on your bathroom, but it’s vulgar to spend $15,000 on a sound system and a wide-screen TV. It’s decadent to spend $10,000 on an outdoor Jacuzzi, but if you’re not spending twice that on an oversized slate shower stall, it’s a sign that you probably haven’t learned to appreciate the simple rhythms of life.

Virtuous or vulgar, what all these items have in common is that they’re invisible to strangers. Only your friends and family see them. Any status they confer applies only within the small group you invite to your home. And the snob appeal Brooks pokes fun at corresponds to the size of the audience. Many friends may see your Jacuzzi or media room, but unless you’re on HGTV, only intimates will tour your master bathroom. A slate shower stall may make you feel rich, but it won’t tell the world that you are. As peer groups get richer, the balance between private pleasure and publicly visible consumption shifts.

Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff describe a similar pattern in their book, The Middle-Class Millionaire, which analyzes the spending habits of the 8.4million American households whose wealth is self-made and whose net worth, including their home equity, is between $1 million and $10 million. Aside from a penchant for fancy cars, these millionaires devote their luxury dollars mostly to goods and services outsiders can’t see: concierge health care, home renovations, all sorts of personal coaches, and expensive family vacations. They focus less on impressing strangers and more on family- and self-improvement. Even when they invest in traditional luxuries like second homes, jets, or yachts, they prefer fractional ownership. “They’re looking for ownership to be converted into a relationship rather than an asset they have to take care of,” says Schiff. Their primary luxuries are time and attention.

The shift away from conspicuous consumption—from goods to services and experiences—can also make luxury more exclusive. Anyone with $6,000 can buy a limited-edition Bottega Veneta bag, an elaborately beaded Roberto Cavalli minidress, or a Cartier watch. Or, for the same sum, you can register for the TED conference. That $6,000 ticket entitles you to spend four days in California hearing short talks by brainy innovators, famous (Frank Gehry, Amy Tan, Brian Greene) and not-so-known. You get to mingle with smart, curious people, all of whom have $6,000 to spare. But to go to TED, you need more than cash. The conference directors have to deem you interesting enough to merit one of the 1,450 spots. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a velvet rope.

As for goods, forget showing off. “If you want to live like a billionaire, buy a $12,000 bed,” says a financial-planner friend of mine. You can’t park a mattress in your driveway, but it will last for decades and you can enjoy it every night.

Anonymous said...

"only intimates will tour your master bathroom"

the first thing these people do is take anyone who comes inside on a tour of the whole place--including the master bathroom. they have big parties and make sure everyone has toured the master bathroom. what used to be a private indulgence has been coopted by the crass wannabes, thereby making fancy bathrooms conspicuous and tacky.

Anonymous said...

Many friends may see your Jacuzzi or media room, but unless you’re on HGTV, only intimates will tour your master bathroom. A slate shower stall may make you feel rich, but it won’t tell the world that you are.

One important point the writer misses here is that the owners of these extravagant bathrooms constantly talk about them and other home improvements with other middle-class millionaires, thus reinforcing their status within their own in-group.

LavaBear said...

July 28, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Another Temporary Fix
By Paul Krugman

So the big housing bill has passed Congress. That’s good news: Fannie and Freddie had to be rescued, and the bill’s other main provision — a special loan program to head off foreclosures — will help some hard-pressed families. It’s much better to have this bill than not.

But I hope nobody thinks that Congress has done all, or even a large fraction, of what needs to be done.

This bill is the latest in a series of temporary fixes to the financial system — attempts to hold the thing together with bungee cords and masking tape — that have, at least so far, succeeded in staving off complete collapse. But those fixes have done nothing to resolve the system’s underlying flaws. In fact, they set the stage for even bigger future disasters — unless they’re followed up with fundamental reforms.

Before I get to that, let’s be clear about one thing: Even if this bill succeeds in its aims, heading off a severe credit contraction and helping some homeowners avoid foreclosure, it won’t change the fact that this decade’s double bubble, in housing prices and loose lending, has been a disaster for millions of Americans.

After all, the new bill will, at best, make a modest dent in the rate of foreclosures. And it does nothing at all for those who aren’t in danger of losing their houses but are seeing much if not all of their net worth wiped out — a particularly bitter blow to Americans who are nearing retirement, or thought they were until they discovered that they couldn’t afford to stop working.

It’s too late to avoid that pain. But we can try to ensure that we don’t face more and bigger crises in the future.

The back story to the current crisis is the way traditional banks — banks with federally insured deposits, which are limited in the risks they’re allowed to take and the amount of leverage they can take on — have been pushed aside by unregulated financial players. We were assured by the likes of Alan Greenspan that this was no problem: the market would enforce disciplined risk-taking, and anyway, taxpayer funds weren’t on the line.

And then reality struck.

Far from being disciplined in their risk-taking, lenders went wild. Concerns about the ability of borrowers to repay were waved aside; so were questions about whether soaring house prices made sense.

Lenders ignored the warning signs because they were part of a system built around the principle of heads I win, tails someone else loses. Mortgage originators didn’t worry about the solvency of borrowers, because they quickly sold off the loans they made, generally to investors who had no idea what they were buying. Throughout the financial industry, executives received huge bonuses when they seemed to be earning big profits, but didn’t have to give the money back when those profits turned into even bigger losses.

And as for that business about taxpayers’ money not being at risk? Never mind. Over the past year the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury have put hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on the line, propping up financial institutions deemed too big or too strategic to fail. (I’m not blaming them — I don’t think they had any alternative.)

Meanwhile, those traditional, regulated banks played a minor role in the lending frenzy, except to the extent that they had unregulated, “off balance sheet” subsidiaries. The case of IndyMac — which failed because it specialized in risky Alt-A loans while regulators looked the other way — is the exception that proves the rule.

The moral of this story seems clear — and it’s what Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has been saying for some time: financial regulation needs to be extended to cover a much wider range of institutions. Basically, the financial framework created in the 1930s, which brought generations of relative stability, needs to be updated to 21st-century conditions.

The desperate rescue efforts of the past year make expanded regulation even more urgent. If the government is going to stand behind financial institutions, those institutions had better be carefully regulated — because otherwise the game of heads I win, tails you lose will be played more furiously than ever, at taxpayers’ expense.

Of course, proponents of expanded regulation, no matter how compelling their arguments, will have to contend with very well-financed opposition from the financial industry. And as Upton Sinclair pointed out, it’s hard to get a man to understand something when his salary — or, we might add, his campaign war chest — depends on his not understanding it.

But let’s hope that the sheer scale of this financial crisis has concentrated enough minds to make reform possible. Otherwise, the next crisis will be even bigger.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Wait! I think we're turning the corner!

Some nut just bought The First Home Sold in Yarrow!

So if I'm doing the math right, it should be sold out in the year 4012!

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Local experts weigh in on the bailout bill

A $7,500 federal tax credit for first-time homebuyers — one of the carrots in the housing rescue bill — is good, but it’s practically worthless if prospective homebuyers can’t secure a home loan because of stricter lending standards, said Rod Martino, a Bend mortgage broker with Trust Lending Corp.

“A tax credit means nothing if you can’t qualify for a loan,” said Martino. “I think the first-time homebuyer would be better served if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loosened up their lending standards.”

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Hmmm...

So legit economist Krugman says:

Mortgage originators didn’t worry about the solvency of borrowers, because they quickly sold off the loans they made, generally to investors who had no idea what they were buying.

Bend mortgage broker says:

I think the first-time homebuyer would be better served if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loosened up their lending standards.

Yes.... now it all makes sense.

Anonymous said...

Bend mortgage broker says:

I think the first-time homebuyer would be better served if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loosened up their lending standards.

Yes.... now it all makes sense.

*

Let's see, in BEND-BUBBLE phase 1 ( 2002->2006 ) all that could buy, did buy. That included those with a breath.

Now today a ton of losers, and almost all of the fellow CUNTS, I mean renters on this blog, consider themselves to 'first-time', .e.g. first-time in phase-2.

I think we can all know where this is going to go, if anyone notices the 'fucks' keeps getting bigger & harder.

I think this time you'll see zero-down, over 10% interest, albeit cheap prices, e.g. affordable/disposable homes, thus not only will you pay forever, the crap-shack will deteriorate within five years.

The longer you stay in BEND, and edoocate yourself, the less likely you'll ever BUY a home here.


I also think 'first-time' is a codeword for 'sucker'. It means someone who hasn't been fucked, doesn't have a fucking idea of what will transpire. Yes, I can see the the RE-HO is in desperate need of first time buyers, and yes traditionally FHA took care of first-time buyers.

The trouble of course today, I hope we're talking kids, and not some guy that just got out of prison doing 30, and went in at 18.

We all know that today kids generally DON'T have money. NOW I'll tell ALL you cunts a little secret. THE KIDS 20-30 that are educated are buying in urban areas in less than 3 miles of their job, which is usually in the core.

The demographics indicate nationally that siberian resource extraction islands of poverty like BEND OR, have NO fucking hope of selling crap-shacks to youth, who can afford to pay.

At BEST bend-or will continue to market itself to people waiting to die. Thus I see Bend becoming what it already is, Hemet-CALI. A place where old people who can't afford leisure-world, or Arizona wait to die in the desert.

Any economist will tell you, that the places where educated kids 20-30 go is the future. BEND-OR has NO FUCKING FUTURE.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Hard to tell from Clives graph, but we're well over 3,000 listings in Bend.

3,042

Bend residential only: 1,709.

Anonymous said...

A $7,500 federal tax credit for first-time homebuyers — one of the carrots in the housing rescue bill — is good, but it’s practically worthless if prospective homebuyers can’t secure a home loan because of stricter lending standards,

*

Especially useless where there are NO jobs, a place like BEND hardly needs to write-off or a tax-credit.

What is needed is cash-flow, real high paying jobs. Which is NOT going to happen.

Hell I didn't even get a kicker. Because I have no earned income, my income is all un-earned. You have to have a job to have gotten a kicker, and you have to have taxable income to make these credits work.

I'm all for the government subsidizing those that pay for the government. It's about time that only those that actually pay their taxes, get the benefits. Things are starting to change, albeit not apparently noticeable yet.

The sad thing is so few will have jobs, that only the elite will qualify for the benefits.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

all that could buy, did buy. That included those with a breath.

Exactly, they think that if they push just a little harder on the string, that something miraculous will happen. This country is 100% tapped out.

This is why I said many moons ago, they will literally have to IGNORE credit scores to fire up demand, at some point. Millions have the 7 or 10 year credit score curse, NO WAY will they buy, doesn't matter the interest rate.

The rest are Jap-like, stuck in WAY overpriced hovels, servicing debt 50-100% higher than what the thing is worth. Can't sell, ain't got no money for close & the bank would rather cut off its own pecker. So they just hibernate till job loss or something else throws them out in the street.

It's musical chairs, and everyone is looking around, ain't no chairs left & ain't no one standing when they start the music. So we sit...

Anonymous said...

Wait! I think we're turning the corner!

Some nut just bought The First Home Sold in Yarrow!


*

Was this NEWS front page in the BULL homee? This is a HOLLERN HOTEL!

I wonder if this guy who was the first to buy will make the NEWS when he off's himself?

People do stupid shit in the region and the BULL ( puppet for the HOGG ) jumps up & down, then when the sucker gets fucked, complete silence. I think we're see a pattern here.

Famous for a day, the day you BUY, after that your persona-non-grata, welcome to BULL COUNTRY.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

From Duncs blog:

There are real life consequences to opening a business. You could lose your shirt. Hell, based on the odds you will lose your shirt. Be sure that you have another shirt in the closet.

When I got to Cent OR, a fairly prolific business broker told me that 80% of all small businesses were techinically insolvent, and were only surviving because the spouse was providing corporate welfare.

I fully expect this stat to return in full force.

I remember this well: You could walk into virtually any small Bend business & you could smell the desperation. Nobody made squat.

Anonymous said...

The following cut&pasted by lava, is probably on of the best examples in a long time, of the fact that THERE is is NO DIFF between left&right, or REPUG or DEMO.

That our biggest and best pig institutions were created by liberals, yet kept in business by conservatives. There heart is kept inflated, and their wallet expands. The left&right have indeed perfected the perfect perpetual-money-machine, now if we could only get these kind of people, and this kind of innovation in BEND-OR.


*

"I recount all this now because it illustrates the perverse nature of Fannie and Freddie that has made them such a relentless and untouchable political force. Their unique clout derives from a combination of liberal ideology and private profit. . . . The abiding lesson here is what happens when you combine private property with government power. You create political monsters that are protected both by journalists on the left and pseudo capitalists on Wall Street, by liberal Democrats and country club Republicans. Even now, after all the dishonesty and failure, Fannie and Freddie could emerge from this taxpayer rescue more powerful than ever."

Anonymous said...

Regarding conspiracy, and end of the world non-sense.

Things are no more worse now, than say 1932, and actually in those days the pundit-press actually existed.

The internet lets us share the information, and thus we have a vague idea of how fucked up or government is, the fact is the government has always been ran by criminals. The USA has always been a KLEPTOCRACY.

What's interesting today, given their are no pundits in the press telling the truth, and soon the government will censor the internet, the future is going to be very interesting.

Soma anyone? I still say in the future, he who controls the AFGHAN poppy, controls the world. People, especially poor people are going to need lots of drugs to tolerate the misery, and denial, and hypocrisy of the USA in the near future.

LavaBear said...

American Murder Mystery

Hey Buster is this the article from Atlantic Monthly you mentioned earlier?

Anonymous said...

One of the reasons congress slipped the credit card deal in is that the irs had no way of tracking anonymous sellers on E-Bay and other internet selling sites. Now they can look at Pay Pal also that pays right out of your checking account. Not just credit cards.

Anonymous said...

AIPAC controls most US press, and O-BOMB-A has promised ISRAEL they'll get whatever they need. #1 neuter IRAN.

*

AIPAC is the MOST powerful lobby in the USA.

If a politician goes against AIPAC, they're destroyed within hours.

AIPAC is the front for the ISRAEL MOSSAD ( Israel CIA ). AIPAC is no more jewish, than the CIA is christian. It's NOT about religion, its about POWER. It's not about Judaism, its about Real-Estate (land).

Since the 1920's ADL perfected the usage of language and symbolism to control the debate and neutralize the opposition. This allowed ADL/AIPAC to steal Palestine with the blessing of the world.

To this day, ISRAEL is still only about stealing Arab lands, so that a few well connected people can make lots of money on REAL-ESTATE.

Today only IRAN has the balls to call ISRAEL what it is, and thus ISRAEL must destroy IRAN. With the power of AIPAC its no problem for the US government to justify nuking IRAN.

O-OBOMB-A will do anything to be prez, including sucking AIPAC cock, which he has been doing for a long time.

The CIA ain't christian, and the MOSSAD ain't jewish. MORON baboons will cry 'conspiracy' or 'anti-semitism', its irrelevant, because the MOSSAD&CIA are about MONEY, and NOT RELIGION.

The ADL was formed in the 1920's by the leaders of USA newspaper consortium. Even in OREGON our #1 paper the Oregonian is owned by NEWHOUSE one of the largest ADL fronts in the USA for publishing. The LIKUD party in ISRAEL is largely funded by SCHNITZER STEEL of Portland, OR, the largest steel recycler in the world.

Don't worry CUNTS, the ADL/MOSSAD don't give a FUCK about BEND-OR. The natural resources are gone.

I would like the MOSSAD to be the evil eye like Sauron, and the only thing that will ever get the MOSSAD to look towards BEND-OR, would be losing the Palestinian land, I think Bend, would make an ideal land for 'gods chosen people'.

Most Jews are just like MOST Americans, they don't have a fucking clue about what is really going on.

Anonymous said...

Blogger LavaBear said...

American Murder Mystery

Hey Buster is this the article from Atlantic Monthly you mentioned earlier?

*

Yes, its a MUST READ for this group, it's comes out and makes one assertion, but ignores the #1.

1.) That the section 8 housing essentially just moved crime from urban to sub-burban, and is now out of control.

2.) The thing that this article ignores, is that the urban powers that be, e.g. yuppification profited by transferring poor to the suburbs.

This is a liberal paper, they admit (1) that moving poor ( generally blacks ), just moved crime to the suburbs, in which case the police can't control it, like they can in the city.

They admit that all liberal uptopian idea of a black-person owning their own home in the country ( at government expense ), has been a failure.

What is most interesting is that MURDER is skyrocketing across the country in the SUBURB and there is nothing that can be done to contain.

The USA will implode,

This all gets back to why I said 2-3 weeks ago that O-BOMB-A will transfer the black-man to IRAN to die. There simply is no other way to prevent this country from descending into anarchy.

Regarding #2 the article only infers altruism gone wrong, it doesn't talk about all the well connect BOSS-HOGGS that got the urban renewal and made billions on selling the old black-homeland to white yuppies.

Lastly, like the article says, your NOT safe behind your gate at Pronghorn, they're coming to you soon.

Bewert said...

Re: Now they can look at Pay Pal also

Actually you have to provide Paypal with an EIN or SS number already.

Anonymous said...

When I got to Cent OR, a fairly prolific business broker told me that 80% of all small businesses were techinically insolvent, and were only surviving because the spouse was providing corporate welfare.

For high-income couples the small business provides a hobby for one spouse and a handy tax dodge (run all your personal expenses through the business and deduct them).

Anonymous said...

Wait! I think we're turning the corner! Some nut just bought The First Home Sold in Yarrow!

Hallelujah! Happy days are here again! Break out the Dom Perignon!

Dana Bratton was RIGHT (but only about three months premature).

Anonymous said...

Any economist will tell you, that the places where educated kids 20-30 go is the future. BEND-OR has NO FUCKING FUTURE.

Well, we do attract a fair number of 20-30 year olds, but they're overgrown adolescents who either are living off trust funds or working minimum wage so they can play outside with their snowboards / bikes / kayaks all day. Young people with brains and talent who want/need to make money don't come to Bend, Oregon.

tim said...

ICBINB,

No such thing as a "legit economist."

They are just fish and they swim around in schools.

Anonymous said...

Well, we do attract a fair number of 20-30 year olds, but they're overgrown adolescents who either are living off trust funds

*

I SAID "EDUCATED" 20-30, that be tomorrows PROFESSIONAL class, I know too well BEND is littered with the 20-30 idle un-educated class, or better yet the COCC student on the 20 year plan.

In the next twenty years, the most prosperous area in OREGON, will be the 3 mile radius around Downtown Portland.

The reason is that people with advanced education want to live there, commuting is out.

Like the guy said, if you can't make $100k in SF, your probably a moron. Ditto, if you can't make $80k or more in Portland, your probably a moron.

People will continue to go to BEND to play on the weekends, like they always have, but like it has always been WORKING in BEND is an oxymoron, unless you work for the government, and that too is an oxymoron.

In my experience the 20-30 yr old kids in BEND are mostly losers, 1/2 live with their 'retired' 45 yr-old equity-flipping parents, and the other 1/2 live ten to a house in BEND.

It seems like most of our homeless in BEND are over 45, I think that will soon change. I notice last summer a lot of kids living on the river in their trucks, mostly out by the Tumalo, or near Widgi off-road. They all told me across the board last summer that they were going to Colorado, where you could still have fun and not get fucked by the cops.

The 45+ crowd seems to have bikes, and the cops know there is nothing to tax, fine, or steal; thus they are left alone.

Last year you all may remember the city was doing the $500 towing game, and a lot of kids lost their auto's, as they couldn't pay the fine.

*

A recurring THEME here is YEH, we attract people, but the wrong kind of people, we attract young criminals, we attract equity-flipping parasites, and we attract CALI-LOSER's who are at the end of the fucking line.

As a land-lord, I very rarely see 20-30 year old applicants that have their shit together, I mean HELL we're talking about people who haven't got an education, almost 30, and no job moving to BEND. NOTE, its always been like a rock-star to POUR beer at Deschutes, there are NO FUCKING jobs. This is why MOST of the kids who have cali-ex-patriot parents, live with their folks in this fucking town.

Anonymous said...

Sorry to bring up AIPAC, "MURDER USA", and other non-Bend.

But the recurring theme here is fucking the world in the name of REAL-ESTATE.

It's NOT just BEND that is fucked. Look at the Atlantic-Monthly story about "MURDER USA", they shipped the niggers out of inner-city, so HOGG could flip the tenement into a CONDO. THEY HAVE FUCKED THE SUBURB. EVERYONE HAPPY?

LOOK at ISRAEL. Killing Palestinians for 80 years, and calling them 'settlers', just to create the image in the USA that Palestine was like the west, and Palestinians were savages ripe, ready to be slaughtered. Too settle the land.

Then we have BEND OREGON, where OUR HOGG took worthless land he inherited and with his CALI-MBA turned BEND into a killing field. Where his own BULL ( he owns the dirt under-neath ), will make a man who promotes a STD a hero, but ignore him if he loses, and NOTE almost ALL DO LOSE, except the HOGG himself.

The biggest NEWS of the year was the opening of TETHEROW, and when the DAY finally came, not a fucking mention.

Only promotion, and 'newness' is news in this town, failure goes un-said, only PROMOTION and INITIATION is news-worthy. This is the TOWN of mythology, a town of fairy tales, a town where there is NO bad news, only good news.

Everyday another 'gold miner' buys a kit, and goes for the gold, and that is news. The fact that NONE ever find gold, and often kill themselves because they have exhausted the family fortune, well that isn't news in BEND. Makes you think the BULL owns the Gold Mine Supply Store, and not much else. It certainly isn't a newspaper, and neither is the SORE.

Don't expect OPB (NPR) in BEND to fucking tell and/or write/speak the truth, they're owned by AIPAC. They'll only cover the killing-fields of BEND if a story fits into their own agenda.

Anonymous said...

"Don't expect OPB (NPR) in BEND to fucking tell and/or write/speak the truth, they're owned by AIPAC."

someone has AIPAC paranoia. i think there's a pill for that now.

Anonymous said...

There are TWO fucking groups in the USA that have soldiers, always ready and willing to die for the cause.

1.) Scientologists, aka ElRonHubbard, Dianetics,...

2.) ADL, MOSSAD, AIPAC; proctector's, aka Petite Jewish Femi-Nazi's.

Talking about the AIPAC, KKR is going public, rumor is they're going to buy blackstone. It keeps getting more interesting.


Nobody else really cares what anybody thinks. Mention the truth about 1or2 above, and there is no fucking fury comparable, but what the fuck? Right?

An opinion is like an asshole, every has one. That said, an opinion about 1or2 above, is suicide, and has always been so.

Anonymous said...

No fucking accident that Scientologists, and ADL/AIPAC folk use the same modus-operandi. They were all created by the same folks that created the CIA. Mind Fuckers hate it when you point out the guy behind the curtain pulling the controls.

The best part of all this is AIPAC&Scientology have the strongest presence in the country in Oregon, just not in our little Bend.

Anonymous said...

In summary, don't look for OPB(National Petroleum Radio ) to rescue Bend from genocide.

They're very selective on their reporting.

Anonymous said...

A Gentile handshake was made a long time ago. The Mormrons got the area east of Cascades, and ADL/AIPAC got the area west of the Cascades.

That cozy relationship has been in effect, since the Catholic Church got booted out back in the 1920's.

In the recent years with outing of Goldschimdt for fucking 12yr old girls ADL/AIPAC has lost ground, and the mormron church has made inroads into what is called Lake Owsego ( known as lake-no-negro ).

Eventually all of OREGON, will fall to MORMRONISM, thus its a joke to suggest that AIPAC/ADL rules OREGON in the future. It's all about history.

To this day, SALEM doesn't give a fuck about East-OR, so long as EAST-OR doesn't put its nose into West-Oregon. Kleptocrats on both sides of the HILL have made a killing since WWI.

There is a new-world-order in ORYGUN on the horizon, and thus we live in interesting times.

Anonymous said...

The best part of all this is AIPAC&Scientology have the strongest presence in the country in Oregon, just not in our little Bend.

*

The best part of all this is the kookery. AIPAC says they're gods chosen people. The Scientologist & Mormrons believe they came from outer space and that their god is an alien with a funny name.

Like Mark Twain said a long time ago, "Truth is always stranger than fiction".

I love Orygun.

A majority of folks in BEND believe that MAYAN crock of shit that the world will end in 2012, well that's partly true, at this rate everyone in BEND will be dead by 2012.

Anonymous said...

"A Gentile handshake was made a long time ago. The Mormrons got the area east of Cascades, and ADL/AIPAC got the area west of the Cascades."

Why are you ignoring the fact that the space aliens were also part of this agreement? You must be one of them.

Anonymous said...

The best part of all this is AIPAC&Scientology have the strongest presence in the country in Oregon, just not in our little Bend.

*

This could be the rhetorcial question of the day.

We got tons of fucking CALI's. We got boss-hoggs pimping RE. We got RE-HO's flat-backing for sales.

Down in CALI the PUBLIC-TENT-CHURCHES are HUGE, all that consumption, and lack of fulfillment creates a fucking RELIGIOUS INDUSTRY. Like "TOWER OF POWER", the biggest FUCKING BUILDING in ORANGE-COUNTY for years. A real tower-of-babel.

I think the reason we don't see AIPAC or Scientologists running Bend, is that history is so short here. Besides the little MILL-TOWN had already had all its natural resources exploited by the 1920's.

Bend really went NO-WHERE until the late 1980's. Probably had the BEND-BUBBLE kept going on 25%/yr APR, we would have every religious nut-case fighting here, for minions.

My theory is that we're just a flash in the pan gold-rush town, we're going down, and the professional religious warriors, just don't have time for a little shit-hole with no future like Bend.

p.s. PRO-AIPAC shitheads, I write about them cuz they're funny, they make me laugh. Just like Scientologist and Mormrons, they're funnier than shit.

Anonymous said...

Why are you ignoring the fact that the space aliens were also part of this agreement? You must be one of them.

*

Back in the 1950's at CALTECH Professor Feynman had a very good argument on this proposition.

It goes like this.

Given our entire human history, there is no evidence of 'contact' with 'ET'. Given this simple fact that it hasn't happened in our known past, its not likely to happen in our future.

Thus I too don't believe there has been contact, nor statistically will their be contact in our immediate future ( next 1M years ).

In terms of geologic time, perhaps ( +1B Years ).

In Astro-Physics you can calculate the probability of earth like planets having life-like organisms. The trouble is on average they're 100's or 1000's, of light-years away. We know that universe is around ten billion years old, and that life probably evolved only recently.

I think that statistically the likeness of contact is close to zero in the next 10,000 years or more.

Folks who say they 'talk' with aliens, or say their church has alien leaders, are in my humble opinion FRAUDS.

That said all of BEND is a fraud, and I see no reason that we the bloggers of Bend should not start out own church.

Bend is full of MYTHOLOGY, like everyone that builds a home or STD, or development gets rich. Trouble is you never hear about the downside ( death ).

Let's be honest Mormonism, Scientology, and AI/ADL'ism; is about FUCKING people, and taking they're money. The Mormons, Scientologists, and people who run Israel are constantly getting caught fucking someones child, higher than average.

The MORMRON church takes 15% of ALL, scientologists take ALL, and Well AIPAC takes whatever they want, and then bulldozes your house.

Duncan McGeary said...

"For high-income couples the small business provides a hobby for one spouse and a handy tax dodge (run all your personal expenses through the business and deduct them)."

Which is just great -- until they actually start to LOSE money. Most vanity businesses don't last long, because they are too much work.

Anonymous said...

One of the most provocative -- and insightful -- quotes I've seen in a long time: "Oregon is West Virginia with a beach."

It appeared in Dave Sarasohn's Sunday column: "Oregon invests in fixing potholes, not in changing paradigms," says Ron Fox, executive director of Southern Oregon Regional Economic Development Inc. "If you think of it, Oregon is West Virginia with a beach. It's a pretty scary future we have in terms of the global market."

That is SO fucking true. The backward, anti-intellectual, anti-education climate of this state just astounded me when I moved here more than 20 years ago. I never heard the phrase "over-educated" until I came to Oregon. Where I grew up, the idea that somebody could have TOO MUCH education would have seemed preposterous. I know one guy who was a fourth-generation logger whose father was furious because he saw there was no future in logging and decided to go to college and learn something else. The father was angry at the son for thinking he was "too good to work in the woods." (A West Virginia father might've gotten mad at his son for thinking he was "too good to go down in the mine.") My own blue-collar father was DELIGHTED that I went to college -- he would have been mad at me if I didn't.

Things have gotten a little better in the last 20 years. Oregon attitudes were in the 1930s back then; they're in the '50s now.

Duncan McGeary said...

There is even more churning going on downtown than I knew. Was just told that Robert's sold to their managers.

Is that true?

If so, it might make me the oldest business downtown in the same location and ownership.

That can't be right, can it?

Anonymous said...

Consuming in excess of what you're making, and pre-consuming all your future earnings is the road to complete disaster.

"The American Way of Life -- spending money you don't have on things you don't need to impress people you don't know." -- Thomas Merton, Jesuit and Zen master

And he said that back in the 1950s, so it isn't exactly new.

tim said...

>>If so, it might make me the oldest business downtown in the same location and ownership.

>>That can't be right, can it?

Oh dear. I'm going to have to update my "signs of the apocalypse" calendar.

Anonymous said...

Shit sounds like we got some new people here today.

"We report, you decide when to blow your brains out" FoxLikeNews@Bendbubble.blog

Anonymous said...

First it was the perpetual motion machine that Bend loved to love.

Then it was the perpetual-building-machine that Lord Hollern created.

Then it was the perpetual-money-tree.

Now we find out that most folks in BEND also believe in ET.

Yep, Edoocation was never at risk to be wasted in Oregon or Bend.

I moved here 40 years ago, I figured out in my first week here that I had gone back in time, to a place that NOBODY was educated. Shit having a high-school diploma in Oregon was like being a geni-ass.

Oregons two Universitys were 'cow' colleges. Daughters were sent to PDX to work as sex-etary's and get an ms degree, and the boys stayed home to log, ranch, or drink.

Note also FOLKS 30+ years the OREGON coast was not the beach it was NOW seaside was a little coney-island, the all the rest of the oregon-coast was the OZARKS, I mean it was fishin, and incest, and you could buy a home anywhere up and down the coast for $5000 or less, and that was in the 1970's.

I would agree that Oregon is West Virginia, but your giving the Beach way too much credit. I would liken it more like the Mexican coast, or African coast. It was just fishin villages and bars, and NOTHING else.

The boom at the oregon-coast didn't start until the 1980's when cali's found they could buy an ocean view for $50k. ... Now today they're paying $500k for a view in a place that you need a dry-suit to go into the water all year round.

Anonymous said...

Now today they're paying $500k for a view in a place that you need a dry-suit to go into the water all year round.

And that NEVER made any fucking sense to me whatsoever. $500K would buy you 100 years' worth of pretty nice vacations (or 50 years worth of DAMN nice vacations) in Hawaii, where the sun actually shines more than five days a year and you can swim in the water without dying from hypothermia.

Bewert said...

"Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature can not be fooled." -Richard Feynman

Duncan McGeary said...

"Oh dear. I'm going to have to update my "signs of the apocalypse" calendar."

The Downtowners of 20 years ago would have thought exactly that.

Anonymous said...

from the WSJ:

Rescue Package Contains Loophole
That Could Help You Keep Profits
July 28, 2008 8:37 p.m.

If you are in deep trouble on your mortgage, the new housing rescue package may offer you an almost unbelievable second chance.

It may make it possible for you to keep your home, slash your loan balance -- and refinance at cheaper rates, thanks to a taxpayer subsidy.

The kicker? If the housing market rebounds, thanks to a surprising loophole in the law, you should still be able to pocket nearly all the profits yourself.

Call this: Heads you win, tails you don't lose.

The apparent loophole was revealed by official sources on Capitol Hill as they explained the fine print of this convoluted law, which kicks in officially on Oct. 1. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, while calling the law "a mixed bag," was last night still analyzing the details.

So, how does the new housing rescue work?

First, not everyone qualifies.

It's for homeowners in crisis, not landlords. You must live in the home in question.

You must have taken out your mortgage before Jan. 1 of this year. (Yes, even if you were speculating on Miami real estate as late as last Christmas you qualify for the federal rescue. Incredible, but that's Uncle Sam for you.) Meanwhile, contrary to some earlier reports, those who borrowed before 2005 also qualify.

Your mortgage payments, as of March 31, 2008, also must exceed 31% of your gross income.

And you will have to be able to swear that you are genuinely in trouble and you aren't just throwing yourself upon the mercy of the rescue package as a ploy. It's unclear if anyone is actually going to check.

As long as you meet these conditions, and you are in financial trouble on your mortgage, your first step should be to approach your current lender.

You should ask the lender to accept the reality of the housing slump, write down the value of your home to current market prices, and your mortgage to 90% of that or less. In return, you can offer to pay them back the rest using a new loan provided with the help of the taxpayers via the Federal Housing Authority.

The banks get some of their money back. You get a new 30-year fixed-rate loan at a cheap interest rate, thanks to the taxpayer subsidy.

A lot of commentators think the banks are going to be the big sticking point in this program. They think bankers will be reluctant to accept that these loans have gone bad and to write them down.

They may be right – at least for a while. But sooner or later those holding lots of bad debt are probably going to realize that, in disaster areas like Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and California, they should take what they can get and move on.

After all, until they do their stock options are going to just keep falling in value. So they will have an incentive to take their medicine… or, to be more accurate, to force-feed it to their stockholders.

There will still be complications. Home equity lines of credit, second mortgages and the like are going to have to be sorted out. There will be some convoluted negotiations.

But once that's done, the way is clear for you to get a new 30-year fixed mortgage subsidized by the FHA. (You will also have to pay 1.5% a year on top of your interest as the cost of the insurance.)

The way the bill was written, Congress sought to make sure that the homeowners who benefited from this relief would not profit from it in due course. To that end, it stipulated that the FHA would claw back at least 50% of any profits that the homeowners made when they sold the home.

But in the fine print, there's a get-out clause. Homeowners should be able to escape most of this claw-back provision so long as they first refinance their FHA loan with a new private sector mortgage before they sell.

Obviously, if the market has rebounded enough for you to sell at a profit, it will probably have rebounded enough for you to be able to get a new mortgage without FHA help. And then you may get to keep most of your profits.

Write to Brett Arends at brett.arends@wsj.com

Anonymous said...

There is no problem ranting about the evils of excessive consumerism. There is a problem when you repeatedly say you hate people. Besides the fact that it is just plain cowardly and wrong the way you have done it, if your real name becomes associated with those comments good luck landing a job if your employer searches on your name. Your attempts to soften your bigotry in this post are really pretty pathetic. Your no saint and your many hateful comments continue to prove it. I bet many of the people you profess to hate are actually better people than you are.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...
There is no problem ranting about the evils of excessive consumerism.
You can leave now, the sooner the better....we love our guy.

Speaking of the bail-out bill..here is what I was talking about yesterday.
"There is a very controversial provision requiring that payment processors (think "PayPal") be required to issue 1099s to anyone who does more than $10,000 worth of business with them in a year. This generated many howls of protest over, once again, "privacy concerns." Uh, how come? If you have a bank account that pays interest, you get a 1099. I get a bunch of them every year for tiny amounts of interest. So what? Why is this in there? Its an attempt to stop the gross underreporting of income by various Internet Entrepreneurs, many of them "Powersellers" on eBAY, who have systematically run cash businesses and reported NOTHING in income and paid NO taxes. You think this isn't common? Yeah, right. I don't think this belongs in the Housing Bill but catching people who are outright tax cheats is, in my opinion, good. Then again I'm one of those guys who filed a book for my 1040 in April (since I trade actively) and wrote a big fat check to the Treasury, so there you have it." From Karl Denniniger at Market Ticker

Anonymous said...

Don't worry marge, I can only stand this circle jerk lead by St. Captain Obvious once in a great while, and only because Bend is so devoid of blogs. Carry on.

Anonymous said...

I have been on the coast for 30 years now and can't understand why the attraction now either ,but bring me the money cause I have lots of property to sell. I can't wait to get out of here.

Anonymous said...

I bet many of the people you profess to hate are actually better people than you are.

queston........why does his hate bother you so much? What makes you say other people are better? Who are you with the thought IHTBYB hates?

Do some work with these thoughts buddy, and you MAY find the trouble you have with this blog is a hate for yourself for getting caught up in the bubble and consumerism.....just maybe?
Let ihtbyb to his thing, doubt it is hate from the heart- well maybe and if that is the case well thats just what he needs to be doing. The hate is more of a hate for the mind set and where that mind set has taken this country and this community. one might even argue that this blog is attempting to protect and save people- ok enough-

As far as a job goes.....i would proably hire the guy for honest and forsight.

Anonymous said...

I bet many of the people you profess to hate are actually better people than you are.

queston........why does his hate bother you so much? What makes you say other people are better? Who are you with the thought IHTBYB hates?

Do some work with these thoughts buddy, and you MAY find the trouble you have with this blog is a hate for yourself for getting caught up in the bubble and consumerism.....just maybe?
Let ihtbyb do his thing. I doubt it is hate from the heart- well maybe and if that is the case well thats just what he needs to be doing. The hate is more of a hate for the mind set and where that mind set has taken this country and this community. one might even argue that this blog is attempting to protect and save people- ok enough-

As far as a job goes.....i would proably hire the guy for honest and forsight.

Anonymous said...

The guy posts today that he has to remain anonymous because why would I or anyone want to remain anonymous? Why not come out of the proverbial closet, and say who I am. Even BendBB? Who is he?

Well, we found out this week.People in Bend take their real estate seriously. Real serious. Dead serious. People around here will KILL when RE deals go South on them.


If that isn't paranoia I don't know what is. The real reason is that he would be identified as the guy who publicly posts his petty and irrational hatreds and then he would have to publicly answer for them. No way he'll ever do it, and no I'm really not that interested in who he really is anyway. He goes way beyond just posting about RE malfeasance and anti-consumerism. No need to point out examples just read the last entry.

Frankly I think he is a complete coward, huddling behind a keyboard and judging people he does not even know because they drive a particular vehicle, or have a certain look. You'd be quite happy in Berkeley, CA dude. The that attitude tastes like crap but goes real good with wine.

I'm posting this why? Because yes it does irk me that he hates everyone from out of state who might behave differently than he approves and has extended this with great but despicable ingenuity to any number of bizarre criteria defined by him (including simply being a hard worker). Also, because I think he should see that the picture he paints of himself as consequence of his hatred is quite unflattering. I think I'm done now.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

we love our guy.

Now you got me blushing margie... :-)


1) There is no problem ranting about the evils of excessive consumerism. There is a problem when you repeatedly say you hate people.

If you actually read hard, you can EASILY see I am ranting far, FAR more on the excesses of people, rather than their geographic point of origin.

I KNOW quite a few peep's from Cali... some are very cool people. Some are intolerant pricks. Yes, true of everywhere.

What really grates on me are the Cali-Spunkers who come here & think they are going "run this fucker" or "teach us a few things". It happens far, FAR more with inbound Cali-Spankers than ANY OTHER PEOPLE ON EARTH. THAT says something.

Take the Cali-Banger Test. THAT tells all. And I should say that I am considering a revision: If you have NO CREDIT CARD DEBTS, cut score 25%. Can you pay 100% CASH OUT OF BANK for your next auto? Cut another 25%. Is your house payment less than 30% of your combined paycheck(s)? Cut another 25%.

If you can AFFORD to buy shit... well, I may not agree with it, but your consumption is your call. It's consumption FAR in excess of people ability to pay it back, or even have a comfortable margin, that is killing this country. You should have a HELL OF A COMFORTABLE MARGIN in buying crap.

If you don't have a pretty thick margin, you can't afford it. Most people have ZERO MARGIN, they are living day-to-day, all paycheck to CC's.


2) Besides the fact that it is just plain cowardly and wrong the way you have done it, if your real name becomes associated with those comments good luck landing a job if your employer searches on your name.

Cowardly? Really? See, YOU are one of those INTOLERANT PRICKS who doesn't believe someone should be able to voice their opinions, and actually WOULD deny someone a job based on your MISPERCEPTIONS. Wake up White Peepul.

3) Your attempts to soften your bigotry in this post are really pretty pathetic.

So... softening the BIGOTRY wasn't up to snuff? OK, I'll go back to the hard core stuff, you motherfucking Cali-Banger dyke.

You OK now? Did that do it for ya?


4) Your no saint and your many hateful comments continue to prove it.

I'm no saint. Holy fucking shit, we're in some big shit now.

Now go back to Salt Lake, you fucking weirdo.

I'm no saint... I'll tell my wife that one. That's a good one...


5) I bet many of the people you profess to hate are actually better people than you are.

Agreed. Except for the butt-ugly Cali-Banger dykes.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

great but despicable ingenuity...

In your face Tim!

MY Ingenuity is Great! But also despicable... Dammit.

Awesome. "great but dispicable ingenuity".

I'll remember that one. I like it.

I thank you for your insightful, yet idiotic comment.

Anonymous said...

You are completely whacked! You really would love Berkeley, CA. For all your talk your no different. The mix of irrational hatreds, blanket social critiques, self righteousness, intellectual snobbery, presumed technocracy and hypocrisy are just about perfect. And goes great with wine.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Frankly I think he is a complete coward, huddling behind a keyboard and judging people he does not even know because they drive a particular vehicle, or have a certain look.

If that "certain look" happens to be ass-ugly Cali-Banger dykes, then yes, I am judging your looks. Please, go back to Cali. Or go to Eugene, they love you bitches.

I think you may have MISJUDGED me & maybe a few of the commenters as reserved wall flowers.

Lady, you obviously ain't gone after Buster yet. He will make you CRY. He refers to those he LIKES as CUNTS, PUSSYS, and REHO's.

You best go get in your magic bus, munch a little carpet & head back down to Solvang, or where ever the hell you came from.

Happy Hour is over, and he's coming...

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

The mix of irrational hatreds, blanket social critiques, self righteousness, intellectual snobbery, presumed technocracy and hypocrisy are just about perfect.

OK, "presumed technocracy":

A system of governance where people who are skilled or proficient in their respective areas of expertise govern. From the Greek words ”technos”, meaning skill and "cracy" ”rule of” or ”power”. A type of meritocracy based on people's ability and knowledge in a given area

technocracy

Technocracy ("techno" from the Greek tekhne for skill, "cracy" from the Greek kratos for "power") is a governmental or organizational system where decision makers are selected based upon how highly skilled and qualified they are, rather than how much political capital they hold.

You're right. That "technocracy" thing sounds awful! My God! And I've PRESUMED it! AHHHHHHHHH!!! The horror!!!

tim said...

>>In your face Tim!

How did I get involved in this particular train wreck? Why you invoking me? :-)

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

And I do thank you for calling my prejudices "just about perfect".

Now you go strap on that humungous dildo, cuz your butt ugly dyke girlfriend is getting lonely....

Anonymous said...

Buster isn't even worth it. If there was a spam filter I'd just edit him out. I have skipped every post that guy has written for weeks since they are all the same. Really so are your posts like his lately but the fevered pitch and melodrama succeeded in drawing me out to attempt to mirror back to you how lame, pathetic, uninspired, hateful, and repetitive you have become. You obviously have a brain and a readership so you should do something better.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

How did I get involved in this particular train wreck?

Dude, I figured you for a argumentation ambulance chaser!

Its pretty well known that your a stickler punctuation and speling.

Yeah, there's 3.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

lame, pathetic, uninspired, hateful, and repetitive

Which one "drew you out", you say?

I'm just trying to give people what they want. I need feedback. Was it the "hateful" that brought you back again & again? Or my "lameness"?

Or was it the "repetition"? It was the repetition, right? I knew it! I knew it was the repetition. Repitition kicks ass.

Anonymous said...

It was boredom. I love Bend, there are almost no blogs. Despite how bad this one is, I occasionally learn something new, usually from the comments.

Anonymous said...

It's funny you keep mention Cali-Dykes. Seriously your blog could be written by one. Are YOU one? You sound like one, which is why I brought up Berkeley. I have nothing against them. Do you realize what you sound like? Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?

Anonymous said...

"It happens far, FAR more with inbound Cali-Spankers than ANY OTHER PEOPLE ON EARTH. THAT says something."

that's just because california is next door and very populous. in vermont, they will tell you that it happens far, far more with new yorkers.

tim said...

>>Yeah, there's 3.

No, four. It's, you're, for, and spelling.

Some fights I watch. Some I jump into. Can't really tell you how to predict which are which. :-)

Anonymous said...

It's ugly here tonight.

All because buster went after ADL/AIPAC, Scientology, and Mormronism. The three legged stool of ORYGUN.

I told you that there were topics that be taboo.

Well the issue has been reduced to 'hate'. Which in this era of abstract 'o-bomb-a-ism' the feel good word is 'HOPE'. The feel bad word is 'hate'

Good people 'hope', bad people 'hate'.

Four legs good, two legs bad. Some animals are more equal than others. Orwellian-ism is alive and well in Bend.

What the fuck is "HOPE" for what? What the fuck is "HATE"?

I would hate to hope that this town will ever change, even if ALL the CALIS left, and took all the dykes, cali-ism is in the blood here going back generations. Its going to take more than a 6-8 bad years of economic back-peddling to flush, Bend the toilet.

We HATE what you liberal fuck-heads have done to this town. We HATE what the right-wing folks do to keep policy of the left intact. Like was posted earlier today by LAVA, which succinctly defined BEND, the left creates fucking pie-in-the-sky programs, and the right keeps them maintained into perpetuity.

JR is an example what started as a UTOPIA ( garden-of-eden ), is now fully supported by Knife-River ( endless profit ).

Chomsky even has a word for this left+right shuffle, its called "Manufacturing Consent".

There is NOTHING wrong with HATE, its as HUMAN as love. Hell 'HOPE' is for bambi, a self reliant man/woman doesn't HOPE something will happen. They make things happen. One doesn't 'HOPE' for dinner, one gets off his ass early in AM, and finds dinner.

We have a lot of newbies in the last few days. I completely agree with fresh-blood that the reason is that blog's are few in BEND, and places where people can say their mind are even fewer. Thus folks flock to this rock in the desert, and leave their mark.

I have said many a times, that this is a mob town, and people will kill. It is essential for everyones safety to remain anonymous.

Suicides will become all too common, and it will even become easier to disguise an act of aggression as an accident. There has NEVER been a better time to be anonymous in Bend.

Anonymous said...

"No, four. It's, you're, for, and spelling."

Don't forget to put two spaces after a period that ends a sentence.

Anonymous said...

Cali-Dykes.

*

Shit homee you really opened lid off the cesspool tonight.

Well first of all not all dykes are created equal. They couple just like pigeons, and there is always a DOMINANT&SUBMISSIVE. The correct term is 'baby-dyke' for weak, and 'butch-dyke' for the strong. Baby-Dykes are always smaller and cute, butch-dykes are always big, mean, fat, and very-very ANGRY ( there's that HATE again ). They hate everything and especially MEN. That's why they bundle up with the women that most men prefer, the smaller ( not fat ) cute ones.

Now in ORYGUN most dykes are Femi-Nazi-Jew Dykes, they're usually similar to the mongoose small yet vapid, and NOT very cute. These dykes don't even partner, as the BULL ( big butch dykes ) don't want them. Cute petite dykes can't stand them, thus they spend all their time in politics, normally the democratic party.

Don't even get me going on Fag's, cuz they're almost always republican in Orygun. Besides, we're talking about dykes.

I don't think there are yet any dykes on our perky little site, and I'm not looking forward to the day they appear. In fact I rarely see them in Bend. Dykes as a rule-of-thumb don't exercise, well the cute young baby-dykes do, but BUTCH, I mean BITCH that's why shes a HOG. Well BUTCH DYKES don't like women to exercise, cuz you know they only do that for men. In Bend there are simply too many women all dolled up, and dykes hate that shit, one reason dykes are so fucking ugly, is that they aren't allowed to wear make-up, or other shit that might hide their mug.

I don't think we have any dykes here Homee.

I think that given things are so slow, and dying in Bend, that folks are just looking for some cheap entertainment, and they wander over to our site, for some abuse.

I don't think a real fag would waste his valuable time on our site, a real fag by definition must fuck ten times a night, I'm not even sure if Bend has sex clubs anymore.

My point here is that BEND would be a real fucking boring place for dykes or fags. Thus the odds that one wonder on our site is miniscule.

Anonymous said...

Don't forget to put two spaces after a period that ends a sentence.

*

Keep up the good work tim, I think you got him in a corner now.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

There's Yet Another Puff Piece on KTVZ:

USA Today salutes Bend as real estate 'bargain'

I'll let you go there for the story, but the comments are great:

>>Bend, ruined? Sorry that happened about 10 years ago. Save the town? From what? Our quality of life has gone way down. I recently took a trip to La Grande Or, I could not believe my eyes! People waving at me as I went down the road! I thought, "this is bend 10-15 years ago". It was great. But, on going downtown you could see Bend, coming on strong. One nice eatery wanted $55 for a steak dinner. WOW! But is was still small town. So, if you want small town, it is still out there, go and find it. Do I hate growth, sure, but we all need it to live here. We have nothing to offer the "normal, average" person. (without a lot of money) So I too say, " let them come" I can tell you though, I have an eye on eastern Oregon property. It is WAY down. Might retire there some day.

>>Why is everyone so upset at the article? Yes, here we all know that it is B.S. However, I think attracting a few more suckers is only going to help those of us who are already here. By hook or by crook, we've got to keep bringing new bodies into this town or else those of us who are here are going to feel the pain. And I mean EVERYONE - business, local government, medicine, high tech, low tech - everyone except maybe the 50 people or so who work for the Federal government.

Sorry but now IS the time for fluff pieces if there ever was one. It would have been nice if in 2005 the media would have pointed out that there was a housing bubble - they seem to be interested in exposing it now when we really need people to buy more real estate. Right now we need everyone on board to smile and SELL.

>>Will whoever is feeding these stories to USA Today do us all a favor and SHUT UP! Its damned difficult enough as it is saving up trying to purchase my first home in this town, a real home not a pre-fab. My wife and I keep watching prices fall and fall, hoping we'll find something decent that will come within our range. The prices, even right now, are so outrageously overinflated its just sick! Honestly Bend, you're a great town, but you ain't no Boulder or Sun Valley or even a Portland! Prices are way, way, way higher than they should be for the area. I make $55,000 a year and all I can afford right now is to rent. Yes rent. Its pretty damned ridiculous that in this town a person making 55K can't afford a decent home.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Case Schiller out today, for May 2008:

Composite 10 --

May 2008 vs 2007: 181.48 vs 218.34, -16.88%
Apr 2008 vs 2007: 183.39 vs 218.94, -16.24%

Losses actually still accelerating there.


Composite 20 --

May 2008 vs 2007: 168.54 vs 200.12, -15.78%
Apr 2008 vs 2007: 170.00 vs 200.53, -15.22%

Losses accelerating there as well.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Top YoY losers:

Vegas & Miami: Down 28%
Phoenix: Down 26%
LA, San Diego, San Fran: Down 25%, 23%, and 23% respectively
Tampa: Down 20%

Winners? None really.

Charlotte: 0%
Dallas: Down 3%
Portland & Denver: Down 5%
Seattle & Boston: Down 6%
Atlanta, Cleveland, NYC: Down 8%

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Hmmm... might have to extend out my prediction of Rock Bottom. I really thought we'd seen the maxing out of loss acceleration, but no...

Believe it or not, DETROIT was the only market with YoY percentage losses that were less than the previous month.

Yup, DETROIT.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Although Chicago & Cleveland experienced higher YoY losses in Mar than in Apr or May. They also look to be decelerating their losses somewhat.

The rust belt is probably going to be the first to recover.

Cali-Banger markets are still getting killed.

Geez, who knew?

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Geez, who knew?

Yeah, that was a sarcastic, rhetorical question for you USA Today referred NOOBS.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Oh crap... Here comes FATTY

Deschutes makes U.S. 'Top 20 Skinniest' list

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

That "skinniest" bullshit is even worse than the house tout pieces, cuz that thing draws fatty like flies to shit.

One of the very few remaining good things about Bend, is it has decent numbers of The Hotness. Just bone-smoking hot chicks who walk around in next to nothing.

We do NOT need fatty.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Interesting post over on BendBB (remember: proxy only):
http://bendeconomy.informe.com/construction-loan-woes-spread-to-the-northwest-dt4157.html

Sara E. Hasan, an analyst at McAdams Wright Ragen, Inc., said stalled housing construction has been increasing loan losses around Portland, Ore., and nearby Vancouver, Wash., as well as Bend, Ore. Problems in those markets are tied to California real estate woes, because so many people have been leaving that state for the more affordable Pacific Northwest, Ms. Hasan said. "But if fewer people are able to sell their houses in California, then fewer are able to trade up for houses up here." The area around Puget Sound has not been hit as hard, because the technology and aerospace companies based there make the local economy less dependent on real estate growth, she said. But several analysts said nonperforming assets are on the rise even in that area.Brett Rabatin of First Horizon National Corp.'s FTN Midwest Securities Research Corp. said nonperforming asset ratios should peak for most of the Pacific Northwest banking companies in the fourth quarter or the first quarter. Most of the nonperformers will likely be in construction portfolios, though weakness could spread to home equity lines of credit and commercial and industrial loans, Mr. Rabatin said.

For the $1.1 billion-asset Columbia, troubled construction loans led to a $206,000 loss for the second quarter. It had earned $3 million a year earlier. Columbia increased its provision 143%, to $5.7 million, as nonperforming assets rose nearly tenfold, to $42.2 million, or 3.81% of total assets. That ratio had been 0.44% a year earlier and 1.13% in the first quarter. Mr. Morford wrote in a research note that Columbia has been trying to reduce its residential construction exposure, but the total construction portfolio actually increased $1 million from the first quarter, to $292 million, or 31% of total loans. About $215 million of that portfolio was related to residential projects (versus $228 million in the first quarter).

Matthew Anderson, a partner at the Oakland, Calif., consulting firm Foresight Analytics LLC., said real estate delinquencies at Pacific Northwest banking companies have risen the "highest and fastest" in construction loans. For the 32 commercial banks in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho that had reported second-quarter earnings as of July 23, the nonaccrual construction loan rate was 3.8% of total real estate loans, compared with 2.1% the previous quarter and 0% a year earlier.


You can see from that "highest and fastest" quote, that we really are the tail of the curve.

Columbia (CBBO) went from being a solidly profitable & secure, to a Troubled Bank in just 1-2 quarters. NPA's up 10 fold? Man, that is death. $22.40 down to $4.45 this year. Even CACB is holding up (barely) better than that.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Cali-Banger headline of the day in the Bull:

"Bridesmaids’ duties may include Botox injections; Cosmetology treatments are on the rise for wedding parties"

My God.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Home prices fell at record pace in May: S&P
Tue Jul 29, 2008 9:58am EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Prices of U.S. single-family homes plunged at a record pace in May from a year earlier, with each of the 20 regions monitored showing annual declines for a second month, according to the Standard & Poor's/Case Shiller home price indexes reported on Tuesday.

The S&P/Case Shiller composite index of 20 metropolitan areas fell 0.9 percent in May from April, bringing the measure down 15.8 percent from May 2007.

The decline was slightly less than expected and not as severe on a monthly basis as in April. Seven regions showed increases on a month-over-month basis, providing a "possible bright spot" for U.S. housing that otherwise continues to weaken, S&P said.

"We are not going to get too excited about the data yet as it is not seasonally adjusted and prices tend to be higher during the spring selling season," said Michelle Meyer, an economist at Lehman Brothers in New York.

Falling home prices are seen at the crux of a growing crisis in foreclosures as homeowners find themselves "underwater," with the value of their homes now less than their loans.

Expectations that prices will continue to fall into 2009 also makes refinancing of loans tougher, leaving homeowners in high-cost mortgages peddled during the housing boom.

Economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected the monthly and annual drops would be 1 percent and 16 percent, respectively.

S&P said the composite index of 10 metropolitan areas fell 1 percent in May, for a 16.9 percent year-over-year drop.

Regions that saw some of the largest gains during the housing boom, such as Miami and Las Vegas, were the worst performing markets in May. Miami home prices fell 3.6 percent in May from April for a 28.3 percent annual drop. In Las Vegas, prices in May slumped 2.9 percent, for a 28.4 percent decline from a year earlier.

tim said...

>>Don't forget to put two spaces after a period that ends a sentence.

Let me guess--your typing teacher taught you that.

It's incorrect. These days, you'd would only do that only do that with a monospaced font.

Modern fonts are designed so that a single space is proper.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

not as severe on a monthly basis as in April...

Uh, yes it was. It was worse. I checked my figures above a few times, and am pretty dang sure, it was worse.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Don't forget to put two spaces after a period that ends a sentence.

I saw that 4th error right as I hit submit. Which I *think* really means there were 5 errors, not 4.

I knew it would appeal to the Grammariticians.

Hey, it's a perfectly cromulent word.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Both Merrill & Lehman seem to be in a race to be the next Bear Stearns.

Merrill actually broke it's Jul 15 lows today, while Lehman has not... yet.

Fannie & Freddie have had huge rebounds off those Jul 15 panic lows, but have also fallen hard from the euphoric highs set on Jul 23.

CACB set a decent interim high the 23rd as well, but got crushed on disastrous earnings on the 24th, right back to its all-time closing lows.

The financials remain a mixed bag in the extreme S/T.

tim said...

Watching people trying to time the bottom of financials is an excellent spectator sport.

Me, I have no idea.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Merrill Sells $8.55 Billion of Stock, Unloads Money-Losing CDOs

By Bradley Keoun

July 29 (Bloomberg) -- Merrill Lynch & Co., the third- biggest U.S. securities firm, sold $8.55 billion of stock and will liquidate $30.6 billion of bonds at a fifth of their face value to shore up credit ratings imperiled by mortgage losses.

Thank God we had this bubble, I really think it's working out well.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Watching people trying to time the bottom of financials is an excellent spectator sport.

Yup. I almost became a participant, had my finger on the button. Luckily, I went and laid down till the feeling had passed.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Merrill cont:

The company sold 380 million shares for $22.50 each, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Merrill closed at $24.33 yesterday and fell $1.21, or 4.9 percent, to $23.12 at 10:04 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading.

Temasek Holdings Pte., the Singapore-owned fund that became Merrill's biggest investor by acquiring shares in December, agreed to buy $3.4 billion of the new stock, Merrill said yesterday in a statement. The New York-based company is paying Temasek $2.5 billion to offset losses on its earlier investment. Merrill will also book $5.7 billion of writedowns in the third quarter.

Almost $19 billion of net losses in the past year forced Chief Executive Officer John Thain to backtrack from assurances that the firm had enough capital to weather the credit crisis. Since taking the post in December, Thain has raised $30 billion in an effort to keep pace with mounting charges on mortgage bonds amassed by his predecessor, Stan O'Neal. Standard & Poor's cut the firm's debt rating last month and signaled that more downgrades were possible.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Illustrates the PERILS of financials. Fine & dandy one day, damn near broke the next.

DO NOT believe the "It's almost over" hype in this sector. They HAVE TO say this. Else they got an IndyMac bank run on their hands.

Anonymous said...

Yup. I almost became a participant, had my finger on the button. Luckily, I went and laid down till the feeling had passed.

*

Yeh, homer perhaps its time to list some books. It's never a could idea to catch a falling knife in RE or stock.
The bad news ain't out yet, we know this is worse than post 911, and that took the DOW to 7500 or less.
We got a long way to go, its still an early election year, look for next year, and then see how things are.
There really aren't value stocks anymore, hell everything has been sucked dry.
Capital preservation is what you want in these times.
Sure go ahead the throw away $5k or dabble on your bet, but its silly to think that your hunch about RE going down for years is correct, but not correct for stock.
The problem is that 90% of USA is the consumer, and he is broke, and given $500k/person debt in just terms of guv-debt, we have now reached the 'ice age' for usa consumer debt.
Sure there will be a few niches, but they have been played.
The ONLY WAY to win the stock racket, is to do your own IPO's, and sell the paper to turkeys, that is how money is made.
You know that dot-com days was a fluke, just like RE flipping was.

Do I have to reference the 1000's of text-books on the stock market that show that consistently for all time, the public-trader gets fucked?

Anonymous said...

The USA Today story has only two sources -- the president of COBA and the ED of EDCO. Hardly a balanced picture. Very lazy "journalism."

rotorman said...

Since the Bull didn't say anything about him I'll give a little history of Jay Audia. His father started the Country Store grocery in Sunriver. As a young man in the late '70s and early '80s he opened a small store in Sunriver. At the same time he bought a house from me on a real estate contract. The business did not work and he defaulted on my house. This is public record. However, to his credit, after I took the house back, he made good on all the back interest payments he owed me. That's a whole lot better than most people would do today. Later he ran the Country Store and Market Place, bought the hardware store and gas station in Sunriver. He also developed some condos on the river near Denfield Paint. He was big into exotic and collector cars. I think he probably lived large. However, he was involved in the community and gave to charities. While I had no contact with him since the '80s, I think his death is a loss to the community.

Anonymous said...

Today over at Dunc's blog, he clearly is pissed off with the discussion of religion & politics. His issue is the recent shootings, and that if people dared not travel those issues there wouldn't be 'get along problem'. The trouble is the candy store is closing, and the pigs at the trough are agitated. The purpose of this blog is to survive in BEND-OR, to ignore the wiz behind the curtain is to ensure your own demise. Lastly, this again proves the assertion that one needs to be anonymous in this mob-ran fraud of a town known as BEND, cuz a public face will mark you for execution.

>> DEAR DUNC,

The trouble with your proposition dear dunc, is that politics&religion have long been intertwined.

The way it works, and perhaps you have been buried so long in the comic books, and selling such to peers, that you have missed the essential power mechanism of ORYGUN.

That be that certain religious groups have been allowed to run much of Oregon city's and County's forever, so long as the owner of the Natural Resource Colony we call Oregon, sent the money home to the owners of the colony.

Said religious groups don't care inherently about money, they want power, and they want to make sure that government jobs, what we in Orygun call 'good paying jobs' are primarily given to the correct flock.

To ignore the religion & politics is to ignore the man behind the curtain ( wiz of oz ).

*

Oregon has always been a plantation state all the way back into the turn of the last century. New York Bankers financed the liquidation of the Trees. Even your LORD-HOGG-HOLLERN didn't get the town outright, it was still held in MINNESOTO by Brooks-Scanlon ( family ).

Long ago the owners of Oregon realized that letting the right religious nut-cases of the day run the right city, would ensure that 'consent' for every crazy fucking kleptocrat bullshit would get approved.

Thus we have the liberals creating great ideas like 'public transportation' and 'conservatives' like Knife-River enjoying the excavation PORK. The liberals are largely the religious aspect of who runs ORYGUN on the emotional basis, but the POWER/MONEY is end the end sent out of town to the likes of Knife-River HQ, not of this state.

Quimby said...

>> At the same time he bought a house from me on a real estate contract. The business did not work and he defaulted on my house. This is public record.

If what you're saying is true (damn, I'm lazy), you're basically naming yourself so please don't think that you're anonymous anymore Rotorman.

Anonymous said...

The USA Today story has only two sources -- the president of COBA and the ED of EDCO. Hardly a balanced picture. Very lazy "journalism."

*

The city budget, called COVA/VCB/DVA spends millions on bringing journalists here for all expense paid vacations in exchange for advertising.

This is right on the city's website. It says its cheaper to buy a journalist, and ship him/her here, and wine and dine him/her, and then when he/she gets home they'll write a story.

This is ALL paid for with taxpayer money.

Given that the ONLY real stake-holders in Bend are COBA&EDCO ( stake-holder is new-world-order jive for those who fucking matter ), it makes sense. COBA/EDCO decide who gets the free vacation, and they're at the party with the journalist while they're here. The reporter doesn't even have to do a call back, as they're given a script from COBA, "Best in 20", you all know.

Let's NOT even act surprised, after all the WHOLE plan I have discussed above is on the fucking city-website, they're like fucking geni-asses, for having figured out how to manipulate 'journalists'. Like the city thinks they invented the 1920's payoff, sort of like buying donuts for cops, and having them look the other way.

Yeh, who wouldn't want an all expense paid vacation in BEND, on a per-diem at tax-payer of BEND expense. All you have to do is publish the COBA script.

The town is a fraud, and its not even a conspiracy, cuz the whole fucking plan is a public document.

Then outsiders wonder why all of BEND are a bunch of CUNTS.

Everyone here assume's that everytime lord-Hollern sells a crap-shack it will trickle down.

Bewert said...

Speaking of Indymac, I wonder how prevalent shit like the following is at other public banks, CACB, Columbia, Umpqua, etc.

INDYMAC: MY EXPERIENCE

I’ve shared some tidbits with you in the last month about my experience at IndyMac as their chief commercial appraiser from October 2001 to the end of March 2002. Now that IndyMac has been seized by FDIC and their legal staff presumably unemployed, I will tell the rest of the story. Some people tell me that it must have been hell for me, but I look back on it as an adventure, like sailing into the “Perfect Storm”, a perfect storm of corruption and incompetence, and living to tell about it.

I first became acquainted with IndyMac through OTS appraisal examiner Darryl Washington, MAI. Darryl used to examine my appraisal department each year when at Home Savings of America, which was acquired by WAMU in 1998. During the summer of 2001, I had a chance encounter with him at a jazz concert. I asked him what he had been up to, and he told me that he had just completed the first examination of IndyMac Bank, which had just received its savings and loan charter only a year before. He said, “Vern, they could use a guy like you.”

Several weeks later I saw the chief commercial appraiser position for IndyMac Bank posted on Monster.com. I responded with a cover letter that started with “Darryl Washington of the OTS suggested that I contact you….” Apparently, that was the right way to start the letter. IMB’s chief credit officer called me soon, asking “do you know Darryl Washington?’ I said “Yes, he examined my department annually at Home Savings.” His next question was “Do you know how to deal with him?” I assured the chief credit officer that I was used to dealing with the OTS and Darryl and that I could get IMB into compliance with OTS appraisal regulations.

After 3 interviews, IMB wanted me to start right away, because the OTS was returning in November. I started on 10/15/01 and had a month to familiarize myself with their commercial lending practices until the OTS showed up.

At the end of my first week, there was an urgent need to field review an appraisal of a subdivision in the Sacramento area. I went up there on the weekend, but also took along some other recent appraisal reports from the Sacramento area. One of the other appraisal reports concerned me. A residential subdivision had been appraised as “80% complete”, but when I visited it, it had only been rough-graded, probably no more than 15% complete. When I returned to the office on Monday I asked who the construction inspector was for that region. I was told that there were two inspectors for the Sacramento area; one was CEO Mike Perry’s father and the other one was Mike Perry’s father-in-law. The loan officer on the deal was Mike Perry’s younger brother, Roger, who had recently been hired. His previous experience had been as a cop. Thereafter I heard of favoritism towards relatives of Mike Perry and “FOMs”, and the chief credit officer advised me to take special care of Mike Perry’s brother. (“FOM” was IndyMac jargon for “Friend of Mike”.)

I reported my Sacramento findings in a private memo to the chief credit officer, who then distributed it to the senior managers at the construction lending subsidiary known as the Construction Lending Corporation of America (CLCA). The senior credit officer from CLCA, the manager who most resembled Tony Soprano, was the one to call me. He asked “Are you sure you saw what you said you saw?” in a rather chilling manner. He said he had been on site with Roger Perry and had seen things differently. After that call, I asked the chief credit officer why CLCA’s senior credit officer would want me to recant my report. He told me that the senior credit officer received sales commissions for every loan made, which seemed to me like a blatant conflict of interest.

All appraisals were ordered by the loan officers from a list of approved appraisers maintained by LandAmerica. I was not allowed to order appraisals, but I recognized many names on the LandAmerica list as well known, reputable appraisers. What I began to observe, however, was that loan officers were learning which appraisers were more “flexible” than others. My areas of concern were extraordinary assumptions, lack of feasibility analysis, and false information given to appraisers.

As an example, I read an appraisal of a vacant, former Costco warehouse which had been purchased for $2 million several months before, but was appraised for $17 million based on a fabricated rent roll composed of tenants that had never signed a lease or a letter of intent. Only one tenant actually moved in. I told the loan officer that I could not accept the appraisal report, as it was hypothetical. He wanted me to approve it, any way, with the understanding that no funds would be disbursed until the prospective tenants could be verified. I told him that I wasn’t going to approve a hypothetical appraisal. The loan was funded, any way.

My only substantive encounter with CEO Mike Perry was in November 2001. I was summoned late to an impromptu meeting of senior executives in the board room. When I arrived, the meeting was already underway. The tone of the meeting was very different than senior executive meetings at other companies I had worked for. Mr. Perry, a man in his thirties, was spinning ideas and executives who were 10 or 20 years his senior were behaving like “yes men”, competing to agree with his ideas. There were lots of raised hands and enthusiastic participation. He seemed to be enjoying this, in an immature, megalomaniacal way.

Then he turned to me with an idea. He asked me if I, as the chief commercial appraiser, had the regulatory authority to change the discounted cash flow models in each subdivision appraisal, which might have the effect of changing appraised values. I said that I could possibly do it, but why? He smiled and said "Don't housing prices always go up?" (Was he really too young to remember the early 1990s?)

I told him that it wasn’t a good idea, because we were already hiring competent appraisers who had more local knowledge than I had. Unless I could show that their analysis was flawed, it would be inappropriate for me to change the appraisals. That answer seemed to anger him. At the end of the meeting, the chief credit officer tried to introduce me to him, but he turned his back on me.

I later learned that Mike Perry was hired as CEO of IndyMac at the age of 30 when it was spun off by Countrywide. He had been an accountant at Countrywide and a protégé of Countrywide founders David Loeb and Angelo Mozilo.

When the OTS arrived mid-November, my review duties were handed over to LandAmerica. I was to spend full time responding to findings from OTS examiner Darryl Washington. In the ensuing month it became increasingly obvious that the main reason I was there was to refute OTS findings and serve as window dressing for an institution that scoffed at or was wholly ignorant of federal regulations. Many, if not most, of the senior executives had come over from Countrywide, which was an unregulated mortgage bank.

One of the craziest violations of OTS regulations was underwriting loans based on appraised values well above purchase prices. For example, a prominent Sacramento developer purchased a piece of land for $18 million, a price most reasonably supported by the comps, but it was appraised and underwritten at a value above $30 million, the rationale being that this developer added value to the property just by buying it. This does not satisfy the USPAP and federally accepted definition of market value, however. The appraisal firm was the same one used for the supposedly 80% complete subdivision.

I was present at several confrontational meetings between the OTS and FDIC examiners and CLCA executives. It seemed that IMB was intent on refuting every finding and using me towards that end. I was criticized for not arguing enough with the examiners.

After the examination was over, there was an unsolicited appraisal report waiting for me on my desk. A piece of land next to an airport had recently been purchased for $24,375,000 and was almost immediately appraised for more than $65 million based on the owner’s plans to build an airport parking lot. This was three months after September 11th, 2001 and average parking lot occupancy at this airport had declined from 73% to about the low fifties. The appraisal lacked a sales comparison approach and its feasibility analysis was based on pre-September 11th data. The feasibility analysis was done by the same consultant who caused the city of Los Angeles to lose millions on the parking garage at Hollywood and Highland. The appraisal was done by an unapproved appraiser who had previously caused my previous employer, Home Savings, to set up a $17 million loan loss reserve on a hotel he appraised for $450 million and the loan defaulted within a year. The report was delivered less than a week after it was ordered by the IMB loan officer, leading me to suspect that it had already been completed for someone else, most likely the borrower. I told CLCA executives that I could not accept the report and that I considered it to be biased. I tried to get the appraiser to change the report, but he immediately called the chief lending officer, who must have then instructed him to ignore my request.

Despite my stated objections to the appraisal report, the chief lending officer told the Loan Committee that I had ordered and approved the appraisal, and they funded a $30 million loan. Thereafter, there was sustained pressure on me to approve the report. I responded that I would have to write my own report, since the original appraiser would not make changes. This bought me time. Meanwhile, the airport, who had previously owned 80% of the parking spaces in the area, was suing the developer and erected a fence to keep people from walking from the parking lot to the terminals.

The chief lending officer also pressured me to accept another unsolicited appraisal of a Sacramento-area subdivision. This report was based on an “extraordinary assumption” that a road led to the subject property. When I went up to Sacramento to see the property, there was no road.

In January I went to Sparks, Nevada, to review an appraisal of the last phase of a condominium project. The first phase, with condos on the golf course, was a success, but the last phase was on the opposite side from the golf course and actually sloped below grade. The appraiser made an $8000 downward adjustment for each unit, and I questioned whether $8000 was adjusting enough. That provoked warnings from several executives, including the chief credit officer. The developer was buying the land from David Loeb, IndyMac’s Chairman of the Board (and co-founder of Countrywide), and I was warned that challenging this deal could get me fired. Soon after, the chief credit officer came to my office with a representative from human resources to announce that my initial 90-day probation would be extended for another 90 days, as CLCA executives had complained about my lack of cooperation with them. The HR rep had a look of horror on her face the whole time he delivered this message.

I finally finished my own airport parking lot appraisal report in late March, the same week that the Bush Administration laid off most of the OTS examiners. I don’t know which event precipitated my termination. My appraisal of the airport parking lot estimated the stabilized value at $37 million in year 2003 and the value upon completion as $31 million in 2002. These appraised values were considered insufficient to support the $30 million loan.

IMB gave me two weeks’ notice of my impending termination and offered me $25,000 severance pay if I turned over all documents and signed a non-disclosure agreement. I told them that state law required me to keep records of all of my appraisals and reviews, and that $25,000 was not enough. After a few days of seeing that I was not cooperating, I was summoned to a final meeting with the chief legal officer and “chief people officer”. A written statement indicated that I was being terminated for having a “communication problem”. I asked for examples of my communication problem, but none were presented. (I later recounted, during a deposition, that I was left alone with the chief legal officer for a few minutes of awkward silence. I then asked him, “Doesn’t it bother you that I am being fired for a communication problem without any evidence against me?” He said, “Not at all.” This cracked up my attorney.) After the meeting, I was escorted back to my office by a large security guard to collect my personal belongings, and then I was escorted out of the building, with my toothbrush in my left hand and my toothpaste in my right hand.

During these last days I contacted OTS about the abuses going on at IMB and said I had documentary evidence. They flew in to Burbank to meet me and they debriefed me for a couple of hours. They were upfront about how the flow of information had to be one way, from me to them, and not vice versa. I had to call my friends at IMB to find out how OTS was responding. The OTS paid a special visit to IMB and called for an internal audit to investigate my allegations. The first audit was considered a whitewash, and the OTS called for a re-audit. Interestingly enough, there was even a document produced that supposedly indicated my approval of the appraisal of the “80% complete subdivision”.

The second audit corroborated most of my allegations and the OTS called for certain personnel changes. The president and senior credit officer of CLCA were ousted; the chief lending officer had his loan approval privileges removed. Chairman of the Board David Loeb suddenly and coincidentally retired at the same time. He died 5 months later.

Interestingly enough, at about this same time, I read in the press of IMB receiving a “corporate governance” award from some organization, for having an impartial and effective board of directors.

I had an excellent attorney. Besides suing for wrongful termination, he showed me that I could actually sue for discrimination. Many states, including California, have laws that prevent discrimination against employees who are upholding public policy, which was the very reason that got me fired. Other bank appraisers should take note of this. USPAP and OTS appraisal regulations are public policy.

In interrogatories sent to IndyMac during the litigation, they were once again asked to demonstrate evidence of my “communication problem”. The only evidence provided was a memo from me about a borrower “trying to deceive us” and a memo from a loan officer complaining that I actually called Union Pacific Railroad concerning one of his deals, a subdivision being built close to a railroad right-of-way. I was told by the loan officer that the track was no longer used, but Union Pacific disclosed to me that it was still being used once a day during the evening hours.

Interestingly enough, in the six months of unemployment and underemployment which followed my termination, I rented many videos, one of which was “The Insider”, the real-life story of Dr. Jeffrey Wygand, who blew the whistle on the tobacco industry to Sixty Minutes and was also fired, coincidentally, for having a “communication problem.”

Most of this information is already publicly disclosed in my lawsuit, filed 7/15/02 in Los Angeles Superior Court, Case Number BC277619, for anyone wanting further details. As for the results of that lawsuit, the only thing I can legally say is that “the matter has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of both parties”.

Vernon Martin


Source: http://appraisersforum.com/showthread.php?t=141764

Lots more dirt about "funny" appraisals on that forum.

Anonymous said...

I don't think you could be an 'appraiser' in the last fifty years if you didn't report what the selling realtor wanted to see, you certainly didn't get the job.

Most banks like Indy, and CountryW has their own appraisers that followed company line.

What is MORE interesting is how many banks are precarious and ready to go like Indy??

We know that 200 are on the FED list, and they will not tell us who, as that would cause a run on these banks.

There is probably more like 2,000. We also know that most regionals will fail, cuz like BEND they put all their marbles on one retarded horse, such was the problem of not diversifying and investing in one HOT locale.

I think an 'honest appraiser' is/was an oxymoron. EVERYBODY did an appraisal quid-pro-quo.

Everybody picked COMPS that accomplished the outcome.

It was all nod&wink from the realtor all the way to the bank, the bush-tribe wanted to insure that they had a second term, and turned the easy-money spigot FULL ON. Now all kinds of people are getting sucked into the outcome vortex.

tim said...

Remember that IndyMac was not even on the Fed list when it went under.

When it happens, it's quick.

Anonymous said...

"Speaking of Indymac, I wonder how prevalent shit like the following is at other public banks, CACB, Columbia, Umpqua, etc."

I doubt anywhere near what you see here. Remember, IndyMac was the Tan Man's baby, just like Cuntrywide.

Anonymous said...

Remember that IndyMac was not even on the Fed list when it went under.

When it happens, it's quick.

*

Is that really true? Nobody knows who is on the FED list, only the FED's are allowed to see the list.

Where did you hear that IndyMac was already on the list?


I wish we could all see the list, whats the point? Well the job of the FED is to protect the banks, and not the depositors. Its an old boys club, and not all those on the list will go under, so they say.

Likewise just cuz your NOT on the secret list, doesn't mean your going to survive, the list most likely is very political.

I'm sure there are some very good newsletters that you can purchase that ranks all the banks.

FYI, I prefer good OREGON credit unions, they don't fuck around with depositors money, are very careful who they loan to.

Anonymous said...

Just don't have more than a months bill pay in the above forementioned banks here in Bend. I only put about 2k in a month at CABC to pay bills. Also keep 2 months bills in cash at home if needed.
I am trying to find the site I was on at work computer today. It quoted John Gilbraith about how the stock market kept"hitting bottom" and fools kept jumping in for 3-4 years. Same with our housing market...guess USA Today knows our bottom was a couple months ago and the cheerleaders of Bend want the fools to jump in. NOT!!! 396k peak to 270k trough and reported 315k going uo now? NOT!! This month the tick is back to 275k so far. Don't jump yet in Bend RE or the stock market.

BY the By...please stay on topic..I don't give a fuck what you all think about the politicans or our great leader @BB2

tim said...

"Ely noted that the bank, hobbled by massive defaults on loans made at the height of the real estate market, was not on the FDIC's list of troubled institutions as of March 31."

It got onto the list in June, so it was on the list briefly before going under.

My point is that the Fed didn't see IndyMac coming.

Two more, at least, have gone under since.

LavaBear said...

>>Two more, at least, have gone under since.

And we're just getting started. Check here on Friday to see who is next.

FDIC bank closures

tim said...

Why wasn't IndyMac on list?

http://tinyurl.com/6mow42

LavaBear said...

>>Why wasn't IndyMac on list?

Because they never expected Senator Shumer to out IndyMac. I'm pretty sure the FDIC knows they are fucked. Their job right now is to make sure people freaking out isn't on the 6 o'clock news. They are now scrambling to find "buyers" for the bad banks on their list and praying it doesn't get real bad. And it's all "managing" the issue. Putting a bank like IndyMac or Wamu on the list is not "managing" perceptions, it would freak people out.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Why wasn't IndyMac on FDIC problem list?

Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, says "everyone expects regulators to be ahead of the curve, but they never are. It's hard for regulators to be proactive. If the FDIC was beating the hell out of IndyMac a year ago, the congressmen that represent IndyMac would have been all over them."

Whalen says the problem list understates the number of troubled banks. Of about 9,000 institutions, "we have identified about 10 percent that are in significant distress and another 10 to 15 percent headed in that direction," he says.

Whalen says the problem list should be closer to 900 companies instead of 90.

Ely predicts that the second-quarter list "will be a lot bigger. But I have a feeling they don't want to put a real big one on there. It starts a guessing game: Who went on, who went off."

Bewert said...

FYI--Inn of the 7th

Chariman Pape has called a board meeting for August 11, 2008 at the INN.

July 30th, 2008
Another rushed meeting has been called to discuss and vote on IMPORTANT issues that we will all live with for years. If at all possible, please attend this meeting to give your input. You might ask yourselves why the hurry when the lawsuit still hangs over their heads, with a court date of Sept. 11, 2008. Further developments will be posted here soon.

Bewert said...

My little sister used to be a bank examiner for the FDIC. A commercial mortgage company hired here away 5 or 6 years ago. I'll try to find out what she knows about "THE LIST".

Anonymous said...

BP the 'list' has NOTHING to do with FDIC that is working for WE the people, the thread is about the "FED", e.g. the Federal-Reserve a board of bankers.

BP do you understand the separation of concerns.

My gawd did I drink a lot, but the music was good.

Anonymous said...

Chariman Pape has called a board meeting for August 11, 2008 at the INN.

*

I have paid no attention for awhile, but WHO in the fact voted PAPE as 'chairman'??

That sounds to me like a FOX hurding a bunch of chickens to the slaughter house.

The good news is that the chickens are retired federal prosecutors ( before BUSH baptized the DOJ ).


Thus the good news is PAPE will eventually get fucked in the ass.

INN@7th, just one more example of WHY you should never even think about buying a share, time-share, or full-share of a FUCKING CONDO in BEND.

Anonymous said...

Whalen says the problem list should be closer to 900 companies instead of 90.
*

Thanks HOMEE mee thinks the 200 was pulled out of someone's arse, again 9,000, lets assume that 7200 are fucked ( 80% ).

We live in interesting times, now how much stock are you going to buy HOMEE?

Anonymous said...

My point is that the Fed didn't see IndyMac coming.

*

I understand your point tim, your one of the MAIN CUNTS.

Given that the FED has about 1M-X information that we don't have, I simply can't believe 'they didn't see it cummin' )

Just like they'll not see CACB cummin'

WRT to FDIC given BP brought it up, the INSURANCE reserves are 1% thus this is why they only want to have 200 on the list of 9,000, whoops 2% but like they said not all on this list will go down.

If the boyz FED&FDIC has all on the list it would be much more than the FEDERAL-RESERVE 'RESERVE' which is 1%, thus the BOYS are setting us up for ONE BIG FUCKING OH-SHUCKS.

Now how much stock in Banks are you going to buy homee?

There has never been a better time to own non-USA assets.

Anonymous said...

Blogger LavaBear said...

>>Why wasn't IndyMac on list?

Because they never expected Senator Shumer to out IndyMac.

*

Lava, I think what we have here is a 'confidence game', I mean your saying IndyMac wasn't on the LIST, but NOBODY knows what was on the list, except the FED and perhaps the FDIC, but the public by definition is NOT allowed to know the 200 on the list.

WRT Shumer, I would agree that the DEM's & REP's are KNEE deep in the shit, as I have said all along, Tribe-Bush was running the show, but the SENATORS&CONGRESSMAN who are tenured are knee deep in the shit, then that is why they're all rich.

Anonymous said...

Ok, Now lets cut the FUCKING SHIT.

If your were a foreigner you would have to be a complete fucking IDIOT to hold DOLLARS or USA stock.

Our government has ran out of lame-arse excuses, they say that 200 are on a 'FED' list, but I agree with homer's cut&paste that of 9,000, it's more like 80%, we already KNOWN that most regionals like CACB are fucked, but MOST regionals are fucked.

Right now the 'talk' is all about controlling the USA public, the world is already voting with their wallet by dumping the dollar, and the Wall-Street-Junk-Paper ( stock homer ).

While BEND may go down slow, as we're not really in BAD debt yet, the USA is going to go down fast, as our burn rate is so fucking high.

Again, a common over-looked factor for JQ-PUBLIC brought by BP, that I usually ignore is FDIC, but they are by law only required to maintain a 1% reserve, thus ONLY the first 1% in line gets paid, all the others get fucked, this is why its so fucking essential to be the first in line.

This is why the WSJ is current edoocating the 'good people' to to their money OUT, cuz its only a matter of time that the other 99% get fucked.

Anonymous said...

If the FDIC was beating the hell out of IndyMac a year ago, the congressmen that represent IndyMac would have been all over them."

*

It's more complicated, FDIC already has a list that exceeds their ability to pay, they're problem is reducing the list.

Your going to see more "Who would have known", sort of reminds us of our little BEND-OR, "Who would have known that BEND RE wouldn't return 25% APR/YR forever?

Anonymous said...

BY the By...please stay on topic..I don't give a fuck what you all think about the politicans or our great leader @BB2

*

Marge, How about another pic of those razor clams?

Anonymous said...

USA Today knows our bottom was a couple months ago and the cheerleaders of Bend want the fools to jump in. NOT!!!

*

Even if BEND were a bargain, I doubt that anyone foolish enough to BUY into RE still exists.

Hell Florida, CALI, ... all the speculator states, a smart person wanting a bargain would be down in New Orleans, or hell Atlanta there are deals, as they hit bottom a long time ago.

Our BEND, sheeeeeeeet its going to be another 4 long years, before we even quit Notice-of-Defaults ( we can't say NOD's anymore, as BP is covering Notices of Death for Deschutes CO ).

tim said...

>>This is why the WSJ is current edoocating the 'good people' to to their money OUT, cuz its only a matter of time that the other 99% get fucked.

It's funny. Before IndyMac, everyone seemed to think banks were 100% safe. Now everyone is scared.

People lost a lot of money in IndyMac because of the 100k insurance limit. Those people were either lazy, or they didn't think they could lose it.

Anonymous said...

Shit you bubble heads are right on again..... i was a broker in cali pre peak and we would have to go through 3 appraiser at times to get a report that showed the value we needed, the poor buyers would ask......."should i be concerned?" Following the ethical guidlines of the NAR my duty to the seller, my replie was of course not...don't you see this other appraiser says its ok (that appraiser was of course semi promised the remander of a subdivison) this shit went on sooooo much that nobody even thought twice about it.

Crazy the things you do in life then admit to a bunch of winno bubblefuck cali haters. But at least there is some place to find logic in this f' d up market.The real estate gang threw a bunch of shit in the air now it is just starting to land on them.

The ethics in the RE world is kinda funny. When I came to Oregon the RE board forced me to go to some ethical class....it was mandatory. The speaker was going off on disclosures- speaking of if you are representing a buyer and you once knew someone that worked on the house..ie my moms boyfriend did the plumbing 5 years ago, that must be disclosed...ok fine whatever....I asked, "do you think it is our resonsibility to inform our buyer about the various arguments that this real estate market is very fragil and the bottom could drop big time????", the replie from the NAR ethics instructor NO, that is not your job as a realtor......hmmmmm

The RE gang is going to get a BIG make over in the next 10 years, shit 10 years ago we still drove to the local RE board to pick up the paper report of homes for sale. There was no high speed internet and the websites out there were few and far between. Today information is avaible at anytime within moments, want a RE contract and disclosure, Google it. I've heard Title compnies will take control in the future , I recently sold something in Cali (and yes i moved here recently, and oh boy i even used to sell real esate-fuck off...i know) anyway, the Title company sent me the contract and handeled all the paper work. With short sales and forclosures the banks dont want to pay agents. The RE gang will survive, but what it looks like in 5 years will be VERY different then 2005.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

I understand your point tim, your one of the MAIN CUNTS.

Cali-Bangers: this is what happens when he LIKES you.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Now how much stock in Banks are you going to buy homee?

None, so far...

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Of about 9,000 institutions, "we have identified about 10 percent that are in significant distress and another 10 to 15 percent headed in that direction," he says.

This guy expects that around 25% of all US Banks are in trouble, or about 2,250.

Folks, if you're in a publicly traded bank/brokerage, keep your eye on the stock price. When it breaks $10... start thinking. When it breaks $5, contact another bank. If you're still there when it hits $2, get your ass out.

And remember the above price movements happened simultaneously for Bear Stearns, so keep your eyes open for anything weird... like it dropping from $60 to $30 in one day.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

The Don't Pay, Walk Away lifestyle takes hold...

America's house price time bomb
By Michael Robinson
BBC World Service

With the American housing market in its worst crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Bush is authorising new legislation to pave the way for massive new government intervention designed to slow the slide.

The intervention would come as a little known quirk of US law threatens to drive down house prices even faster.

Faced with seemingly never-ending falls in the value of their properties, some American home-owners are taking radical action; they are choosing to walk away from homes and their mortgages.

In May 2006, at the height of the housing boom, Karen Trainer bought a $500,000 apartment in California - with money borrowed from her bank.

By this year, Karen still owed $500,000 on her mortgage, but her apartment was worth $200,000 less.

So she was deep in negative equity and, to make matters worse, the interest rate on her loan was about to increase.

"I thought 'this is crazy'," Ms Trainer says. "It just does not make financial sense."

Take the hit

As a successful professional, Karen could comfortably have managed the higher mortgage payments her bank demanded.

Instead, she decided to stop her mortgage payments altogether and let her bank repossess her apartment.

Her credit record will be badly damaged by the decision, but Ms Trainer expects this to recover soon.

"Generally speaking, within 5 years you are about back where you were, so my husband and I decided we'll take the hit and live with it."

Over to the bank

In California and much of the rest of America, there is a powerful incentive for homeowners such as Ms Trainer to walk away from their mortgage obligations.

Though banks can repossess and sell the homes of borrowers who stop paying their mortgages, under a legal quirk originating in the Great Depression of the 1930s, banks cannot easily pursue borrowers for any balance outstanding on the main mortgage on their homes.

Consequently, by walking away from her apartment, Ms Trainer has also walked away from the loss on her property.

Her bank gets stuck with that.

Unthinkable option

Traditionally in America there is a social stigma attached to those who default on their debts, which should be a deterrent to walking away from your home.

But according to Susan Wachter, professor of real estate and finance at Wharton School of Business, in the depth of this crisis the social attitudes to such actions are changing.

"This is the kind of conversation that's going on at cocktail parties, at swimming pools," Professor Wachter says. "And suddenly this option which was truly unthinkable in the past becomes thinkable."

Worrying development

Ms Trainer says she feels no moral obligation to go on paying a loan on a property that is going to go on losing her money. She says her friends support her decision.

"I think people are taking a more cold-hearted look at it," she says.

"Is the bank going to pay for my retirement because I was a good girl and paid my mortgage, even though legally I didn't have to?"

Professor Wachter believes that, to date, most people have had their homes repossessed because they could not manage the repayments.

The trend of people now positively choosing to walk away because it makes financial sense to do so is a worrying new development.

"The dangers are extraordinary," Professor Wachter says.


"If all that is needed is that the house value is less than the mortgage value, there is a large number of homeowners in the United States who are in that situation".

No renegotiation

In the city of Stockton - the foreclosure, or repossession, capital of the US for 2007 - estate agent Kevin Morgan sells repossessed houses on behalf of the banks that now own them.
According to him, walking away has become commonplace.

"I would say it's probably 70% of the volume of our foreclosures right now," he says.

"It's a business decision for their family that the smartest thing they can do is walk away from their home."

As a sign of the changing times, some 60% of borrowers do not even bother to contact their banks to attempt a renegotiation of their loan, Mr Moran explains.

"They stop paying and they stop talking," he says. "They just plain walk away."

Total disaster

It is impossible to know for sure how many of the people who are now walking away from their homes could have gone on paying their mortgages.

But Professor Nouriel Roubini of New York University, one of the first economists to warn of the dangers of the American house price boom, believes the number of people positively choosing to walk away is growing rapidly.

"This is becoming a tsunami of voluntary defaults," Professor Roubini says.

"The losses for the financial system from people walking away could be of the order of one trillion dollars when the entire capital of the US banking system is only $1.3 trillion.

"You could have most of the US banking system wiped out, so this is a total disaster."


Which is why it is not just US policymakers who are hoping America's new, multi-billion dollar initiative to stabilise the housing market will succeed in its aims and thus make walking away less attractive.

Because if it fails, the economic fallout could be felt far beyond America's shores.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Karen Trainer bought a $500,000 apartment in California

Purebred Cali-Banger of the Highest Order: 100% selfish, fuck you, no-pain, instant-default douche bag, with 100% SUPPORTIVE CALI FRIENDS.

This Cali-Spunker CAN afford the payments, but just does not give a shit about anyone except her own S/T pleasure & consumption.

Awesome. Don't Pay, Walk Away. Where else could it have really started?

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Bend RE types coud learn a thing or two by NOT trying to reflate the bubble:

C.A.R. Median Home Prices Down 37.7% In June

Home sales increased 17.5 percent in June in California compared with the same period a year ago, while the median price of an existing home fell 37.7 percent, the CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® (C.A.R.) reported today.

"Sales were driven in part by large shares of deeply discounted distressed sales in many parts of the state," he said. “With lower prices and favorable interest rates, affordability also has improved significantly in recent months, paving the way for many buyers to purchase their first home."


OK, COBA & COAR: Do you understand that trying to reflate prices simply prolongs the pain, plain & simple. Until we hit some level of affordability given local incomes, it'll continue DOWN.

And that level is probably down somewhere between $150-200K medians.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

ECONOMIC ANALYSIS:
Thinking About Umbrellas
by Fred Cederholm

I’ve been thinking about umbrellas. Actually I’ve been thinking about the housing bubble, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, The American Housing Rescue & Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008, agenda, and reality. Umbrellas are definitely useful items to have in a backup arsenal of protective gear when the sun is shining, or there is a threat of rain. They even serve to keep the user somewhat dry and protected when there is a gentle drizzle, or shower. Unfortunately they don’t do much good in a monsoon, a hurricane, a tidal wave, flood, or tsunami. An ark would do you far better.

You see, the debacle of the housing/real estate bubble continues to ratchet up on the scales of severity—growing exponentially in losses, write-offs, impact, and negative spin-offs. The unwinding crisis and ramifications have just progressed up the ladder a few more rungs. We are not yet at the top (or should I say the bottom)—far from it! The banking/financial systems behind real estate financing underwriting are in crisis. Far too many people assumed obligations for housing mortgages they could not service and could never ultimately pay off under the best of times and conditions. It began as the tragedy of Sub-Prime and Alternate-A loans, whereby if the borrowers had a pulse, they got the loan at a teaser rate of interest they could only theoretically afford. Mortgage resets triggered a rash of delinquencies, defaults, and foreclosures. An already existing market glut of “spec” houses was joined by a flood of re-sales and walk-aways. The spiraling glut impacted the sale prices of all properties.

These Sub-Prime and Alternative-A loans were packaged and re-sold to investors as CDO’s (Collateralized Debt Obligations), where investors bought dollar-denominated blocks of “generic” debt that were NOT property specific. The losses, write-downs, and write-offs on these "investment instruments" already tally in the hundreds of BILLIONS, and we are only getting started. The rush to unload properties keeps impacting the reselling and market values of an ever-larger block of homes—originally financed by borrowers who had met the more stringent income and down payment requirements of a Fannie Mae and a Freddie Mac. These two had packaged the paper on what “were” a higher quality of mortgage-backed derivative investment paper. These, too, are now in the tank and sinking fast.

The on-the-market glut of properties for sale has pushed prices down pretty much across the nation—the largest price declines occurring on the two coasts and in the sunbelt. Households who had enjoyed paper equity gains in double digits saw those completely evaporate; now they're saddled with mortgage obligations far in excess of their properties' sales (recoup) value. They, too, are upside down/underwater.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac hold about half of the $12 TRILLION outstanding mortgage paper and are now looking at write-offs/write-downs in the TRILLIONS for their investors. They can’t re-sell or redeem the paper they have out there, much less re-market more for new or take-out loans. The system is not only in crisis, it is tottering on the brink of a complete meltdown.

Last week saw Congress railroad through The American Housing Rescue & Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008. This has been dubbed the “bailout of Fannie and Freddie.” If you think this 700-page bill actually “reimburses” borrowers/lenders for “any to-date or future losses” with Uncle $ugar picking up the tab, you are dead wrong! For now the Act authorizes the Treasury/FED to buy up upwards to some $25 BILLION of Fannie and Freddie paper to fund new mortgages for home buyers who meet established criteria. Another bureaucratic watchdog agency is established to keep the forward-moving Fannie and Freddie on the up and up. Existing homeowners (and those up-beyond-their-eyeballs in debt) qualify for some new tax credits on the property taxes they pay—even if they don’t itemize deductions. The National Debt ceiling is goosed up $800+ BILLION more!

The brouhaha behind the bill is pretty much spin, hype, and hot air. It doesn’t “fix” anything and certainly won’t even mitigate much of the pain. It only buys some time. Its caveats stress that the liability/costs to the taxpayers won’t exceed the $25 BILLION figure, so why is the ceiling on the National Debt being raised 32 times that amount?

Oh yeah... it’s an election year—so here is your umbrella! Cheers!

Anonymous said...

"You could have most of the US banking system wiped out, so this is a total disaster."

*

Yep, interesting times.

NOTE CUNTS that this excellent article came from the BBC, how many months/years until we see such journalism from the BULL? Before or after they exit BEND, and move HQ to Walla-Walla?

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

I ask: Is this NEWS?

Bend touted for home 'bargains' - one for $6 million

Could a $6 million home be considered a bargain? In another city definitely, but in Bend it's among the most expensive homes ever on the market.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

KTVZ: Why don't you just run made up bullshit like this?

"Hey, Regiiina, come look at this USA Today article. It has a $6,000,000 home in Bend, Orygun.

Well, my Lord, here in SAN FRANCISCO, a run down apartment is $6 million! We could sell this 1,200sf crapper of ours for $19 million I'm pretty sure, and take the proceeds to this Bend Orygun place, pay cash for 2 decent sized MANSIONS, and still have enough left over to fuel our CONSUMPTION DRIVEN INANE lifestyles!

Perfect!"

Anonymous said...

This guy expects that around 25% of all US Banks are in trouble, or about 2,250.

*

That's a good estimate HOMEE, but that is ALL on average, the estimate for 'regionals' is like 80% are saddled with too many non-performing loans, e.g. too many 'walk-aways' on the fucking books.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

Only Bend media could see the rationale & wisdom behind a national article on Bend home affordability, which features a $6MM home.

My Lord.

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

And if you GO to ktvz.com, you'll actually see they did 2 STORIES on this one article.

You thought I was redundant...

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