The Future of U.S. Housing – Projections of Household Formation, Loan Modification Data, 500,000 Option ARMs Still Active, and a Decade of Stagnation.
Take what you knew about projecting housing for the last fifty years and throw it out the window. The big problem with using models post-World War II is that they base growth on a baby boomer population that was the largest affluent middle class cohort known to the world. That model is now disappearing. Some […]
Stock Market Hustle – Three Ways Wall Street has Created a New American Serfdom. The Overly Expensive Mortgage Deduction, Wall Street Pseudo-Rally, and Attacking the Poor.
Last week the S&P 500 almost reached an impressive 80 percent gain from the red abyss seen in March of 2009. This puts this stock market rally up in the ranks of the strongest and fastest market turnarounds in history. Yet on Friday news of Goldman Sachs betting on toxic mortgages sold to clients brought […]
The Great American Bank Heist – On the Day we Reach a Monthly Foreclosure Filing Record Banks Announce Record Profits and the Stock Market is up 80 Percent.
It is rather fitting that on the day we hear about banks reaching record profits once again, because after all it is so difficult to borrow at zero percent and gamble in the stock market and make a gain, that we also find out that March was the highest month of foreclosure filings ever (and […]
The Invisible Recovery – 40,000,000 Americans Receiving Food Stamp Assistance – Since 2000 23 Million Americans have been added to the Food Assistance Program.
The latest food stamp data for January of 2010 shows that 39,430,724 Americans are receiving food stamps or are part of the supplemental nutritional assistance program (SNAP). If you make the acronym and name long enough and with a neutral undertone average Americans won’t fret that 40 million of their fellow neighbors are one government […]