Kudos to the management company of my development for putting the hammer down on delinquent owners who don't pay their HOA fees but continue to collect rent. Starting today, the automatic gate clicker won't work for delinquent houses, and basic cable to those homes have been shut off. Is that unfair to the renters? Who cares? It's unfair to me and my wife who send in our fees on-time every month. As a matter of fact, the next step is to evict renters from those homes in arrears. Why should you collect income if you can't pay your HOA? Ba bye!
This is symptomatic of the oversold housing market, full of delinquent investors and overleveraged greedors. When steps like this are taken, more homes will go into foreclosure keeping the spiral trending down. How Bernanke could think this thing is going to turn around this year is insane.
The New York manufacturing survey posted its worst numbers ever. Paying more for gas and milk it turns out, doesn't represent a thriving economy. Please read the attached link to get a sense of how bad the banks have been covering up their losses. Credit default swaps are tough to explain, but the article addresses it well. Let's just setup a simple scenario. What's going to happen when a mortgage-backed CDO defaults for say $20 billion dollars? The banks that wrote CDSs against it will have to come up with the bonds from those mortgages to cover the losses. Problem is, the CDS on those bonds may total 10, 20, 50X the actual bonds' worth. So who gets paid and who doesn't? Furthermore, those CDSs are hardly regulated, who knows who even owns them to pay you if they go kablooey?
One of England's largest banks, Northern Rock, just got "nationalized." This is a nice way of saying it went bankrupt and the gov't is keeping it from going under. When asked what the shareholders in the bank will get, the Brits basically said, "oh, uh, we'll figure something out." I hope the same happens to Citi and BAC, then we can figure something out......
http://www.cnbc.com/id/23210754/site/14081545/page/4/
Grupo Prisa: Why the Sudden Rise?
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Today, I'd like to revisit Grupo Prisa (PRIS), a Spanish media stock I
recommended in the past and then got out of, citing concerns about Europe's
inabilit...
3 comments:
In 1807 there was no better place to live in the world than Great Britain...The sun never set on the British Empire.
The Albatross of Socialism has replaced the pigeons of Big Ben. What ever happened to the Britain we all knew and loved?
Instead of constant government subsidies...maybe just maybe things should be left to sort themselves out. Ron Paul makes a similar argument in the United States against an over-active Federal Reserve.
http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2006/cr021506.htm
STATE OF THE ECONOMY
First, I would like to say it is about time the HOA stepped up and is doing something about the mooches. Another great post on the state of our economy.
Second, a very telling sign of our vibrant economy is consumer spending. My wife and I were just at a ghost town the other day (AKA a mall) and I cannot believe how empty it was. Personally, I thought it was great. I typically hate going to the mall and dealing with crowds but this was tons of fun because there was no one there. Maybe I should buy puts in retail stocks.
Third, did you really get a post for Ron Paul on this site? WOW I guess there is a first for everything.
TC, the sun sets on every great empire; Greece, Rome, Britain....and ours is at the horizon. China and India will eventually put us out of business, especially if Americans continue to spend themselves broke and the gov't continues to encourage it.
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