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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (27051)	12/30/2007 12:18:49 AM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217758

If Elroy reads that he'l faint!! Reality is being buried under ten feet of ground, TJ! If it surfaces the electorates won't elect the presidenticial candidates not even to catch straw dogs!! There's people still thinking that's business as usual, not realizing that they are not fed nude and crude reality by the media. The measures to be implemented will be painful. Cuts will be deep. This -what you're seeing now- is that cotton bud the doctor applies to numb a little. There will be total pull out of Iraq in haste. There will be mothballing of armed forces apparatus. There will be no time to plan. It will be just done. US won't suffer too much. The real pain will fall in Europe. The US has an economy that can be geared for export at competitive prices as USD reaches 2/Euro. 80 JPY/USD. Parity with BRL. RMB 5/USD. CAD.50/USD. The US then becoems a export juggernaut. But Europe will be have a mayhem. Biggest problem is to readjust the economy from a consumer economy to a exporting one.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (27051)	12/30/2007 12:44:09 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 217758

Leadership hard at work trying to find someone to blame. The message is: -- Don't even look at the root cause. Economy. -- Feed electorates easy to see scapegoats -- Don't remove the 'feel good effect' (thus the cotton bud to numb) -- Postpone as much as you can the painful and deep cuts -- Do not discuss possible scenarios and outcomes Once election is over knife is going to wielded left and right. All bad news at a single go. Blame past incumbent. Pull out total. A positive outcome of all that is that there won't be Pyrotechnics like sending Tomahawks in Iran as departure from the region. All money the US military caste could extort on the back of the "fight against terror" has already been accomplished.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (27051)	12/30/2007 7:40:04 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217758

This site is a spoof, but the fun is barbed, because it's entirely too true. predatorylendingassociation.com "Payday lenders" charge about 500% interest, and target poor neighborhoods, and military bases. I actually have clients who have loans at a 500% interest rate. If that's not usury, I don't know what is. Fact is, subprime lenders make a LOT of money targeting the poor. Download and read "Bankrupt Profits: The Credit Industries Business Model for Postbankruptcy Lending." papers.ssrn.com >> Dollars from deadbeats No discussion of credit woes in the American economy is complete without a raging flame war between those who believe government should prevent "predatory" lenders from taking unfair advantage of borrowers, and those who believe that borrowers who can't pay what they owe are deadbeats who deserve to be publicly mocked, if not shackled and thrown directly into debtor's prison. Echoes of this hallowed clash can be heard in the ongoing debate over what to do with all those subprime mortgage borrowers currently experiencing the joys of resetting ARMs and receiving foreclosure notices in their mail. Let 'em rot in a dungeon built from their own stupidity, cry those who always pay their credit card bills on time and never fail to read the fine print. Most of 'em are scammers who knowingly abused the system, they say. Either that, or recklessly foolish to the point where they deserve nothing less than a night in the stockade. If you happened to follow the tos and fros in the debate over the new federal bankruptcy law passed in 2005, which made it much harder for Americans to declare personal bankruptcy, you will no doubt find this rhetoric familiar. The credit industry, which lobbied hard for bankruptcy "reform," framed the issue as one in which something had to be done about all those immoral people running up credit card bills that they knew they wouldn't be able to pay back. And why not? They could always escape their debts by declaring bankruptcy. Never mind that there was next to zero empirical data supporting this argument. The credit industry won the day. Some day soon, now that Americans are once again running up their credit card bills as they try to find a way to keep afloat without the help of magically appreciating home prices, we may find out exactly how smart this "reform" will turn out to be. In the meantime, it might be useful to go back and review exactly how the credit card industry treated, in practice, Americans who had already declared bankruptcy, even as it was castigating them, in rhetoric, as wastrels and scoundrels. Surprise! Bankrupt Americans get all kinds of love from the credit industry. According to data compiled and analyzed by Katherine Porter, a law professor at the University of Iowa, in the superb "Bankrupt Profits: The Credit Industry's Business Model for Post-bankruptcy Lending": . . . Creditors repeatedly solicit debtors to borrow after bankruptcy. Families receive dozens of offers for new credit in each month immediately after their bankruptcy discharge. Some offers specifically target these families based on their recent financial problems, using bankruptcy as an advertising lure. Other credit offers emanate from the very same lenders that the families could not repay before bankruptcy. While not every lender will accept a "profligate" bankrupt as a customer, debtors report being overwhelmed after bankruptcy with a variety of credit solicitations from many sources. Lenders offer families most types of secured and unsecured loans. Survey data compiled by the Consumer Bankruptcy Project reveals: * Just one year after bankruptcy, 96.1 percent of debtors were recipients of credit solicitations. * One year post-bankruptcy, these families reported that creditors sent them an average of more than fourteen credit offers per month. * Industry researchers report that the average American gets six credit offers each month. * A vast majority of debtors had received credit solicitations that specifically mentioned their bankruptcy. Nearly 88 percent of debtors reported that lenders had referenced the debtor's bankruptcy in their credit marketing. Why? Why would a credit industry that was lobbying Congress to protect it from being abused engage in such willful self-flagellation? In the first year after filing, many families face financial difficulty and must cope with declining or stagnant incomes. People in financial distress are more likely to have revolving accounts, to have exceeded their credit limit, and to use cash advances (which carry a higher interest rate), creating what some researchers have termed "attractive cash flows." These families may be slow to pay; they may make only small payments; they may incur huge fees; and their balances may negatively amortize. But they cannot seek bankruptcy relief. It is precisely this constellation of features that makes post-bankruptcy families particularly profitable for lenders. The pitiful truth is that, if you are in financial distress, you are flashing dollar signs at credit issuers. According to Porter, decades of research indicate that "job problems, illness/injury or family break-up were pandemic in the bankrupt population." In other words, people tend to declare bankruptcy because traumatic financial events force them to do so, not because it was their plan all along. And the credit industry knows that. The strong overall pattern of credit offers to bankruptcy debtors suggests that creditors themselves reject a view of bankruptcy filers as either immoral individuals who chronically fail to honor their obligations or as strategic actors who are apt to abuse legal protections to avoid debts. And where do we end up? If lenders' intense solicitation of such customers indeed is driven by these families' propensity to pay late, go over the limit, and revolve large balances, society may wish to prohibit or constrain such lending. Well, that's what a civilized society might wish to do. What the United States will ultimately decide is another question. salon.com

To: TobagoJack who wrote (27051)	12/30/2007 7:55:20 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217758

One good thing Bush (and Congress) finally did (12/20/07) is repeal the collection of income tax on "cancellation of debt (COD) income" -- phantom "income" that the taxpayer never actually received. Example: we've been encouraging our clients caught up in the mortgage meltdown to file bankruptcy in order to avoid having to pay income tax on hundreds of thousands of dollars of mortgage deficiencies they never pocketed. Having to explain to clients that they owe income tax on money they never saw has been, shall we say, challenging. Rather than encourage short sales we've discouraged them due to COD income tax. Example: my clients, John and Jane Doe -- have a house with an insane mortgage they cannot pay, after their ARM readjusted, and the monthly payment went from $2500 to $5000 overnight. They make a decent income but that's just too much. Zero credit card debt, cars paid for. They wanted to do a short sale, and I advised them to at least explore this, as I was hoping that Congress or Bush would repeal COD on short sales, but the real estate lawyer at my office advised them to file as he is not an optimist, as I am. We haven't filed yet, so will revisit the scenario this week. I need to look at some other ones, I am fairly certain that there are at least two that are in the process of preparation that won't need to be filed after all, assuming they can find someone to buy their house at a loss, and the lender to agree that a paying borrower, even at a lower price, is better than a bank owned house. I am cautiously optimistic. Fewer bankruptcies is fine by me, I have far more work than I can handle. It should be better for the economy as a whole, if potential homebuyers can pick up distressed properties at a lower price rather than have row after row of empty bank-owned homes.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (27051)	12/30/2007 11:24:12 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217758

TJ, bankruptcy and other processes are excellent warnings to people not to use money other than as a transaction medium. Hoping that it will be a 30 year store of value while a dodgy debtor repays a loan at 8% is madness. Legal bankruptcy is official acknowledgment that the money is not even worth the paper it isn't printed on. If savers are not robbed regularly, they will mistake the currency as being worth something. If savers wish to lend to somebody, they had better make sure the collateral covers the debts and that nobody is in line ahead of them or can cut in ahead of them [such as hungry children, tax departments etc]. With bankruptcy disallowed, lenders become more careless, like drivers with cars with ABS brakes on dry roads instead of mechanical brakes in a 1950 car on a snow covered road. They use up the safety factor and will take on greater risks, expecting the community to go to the trouble of enforcing a ridiculous contract which was obviously made with a mentally defective person [such contracts are not enforceable in the same way that contracts with 3 year olds are not allowed]. Mqurice