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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FJB who wrote (1202910)	2/21/2020 7:29:45 AM
From: sylvester80	Respond to of 1574848

tRump LOSING: Mortgage spending at ALL-TIME LOW; US homeownership rate STILL BELOW pre-recession peak Sarah Paynter Reporter Yahoo FinanceFebruary 21, 2020 finance.yahoo.com Despite record-low mortgage rates, the U.S. homeownership rate is still lower than it was before the housing crash of 2008, and mortgage spending is at an all-time low. In fact, several metrics show that borrowers and lenders are still hesitant to take action after the Great Recession, according to a new study by LendingTree, a Charlotte, N.C.-based online lending marketplace. “There are a lot of folks who are ‘once bitten twice shy’,” said LendingTree Chief Economist Tendayi Kapfidze, who noted that part of the difference is because permissive lending created an unhealthy run-up in the homeownership rate before the crisis. View photos Graph by LendingTree. More The homeownership rate, 64.8%, is still 4 percentage points shy of pre-recession highs, according to LendingTree. Another metric of housing health, the rate at which people move, was at an all time low of only 9.78% in 2019, compared to 11.9% in 2008, according to U.S. Census data. Home purchases are down because homeowners are watching their budgets and taking on less debt, statistics show. Only 2.45% of mortgage holders were delinquent in 2019, the lowest level in a decade — mortgage delinquency rate was as high as 11.5% in 2010, according to LendingTree. And despite skyrocketing home values, surpassing its pre-crisis peak of $14.4 trillion to reach $18.7 trillion in 2019, homeowners are taking on less debt against their home, said Kapfidze. View photos Graph by LendingTree. More “Because home prices have appreciated, people could be accessing equity more easily, but they aren’t,” said Kapfidze. Mortgage spending is at an all-time low in the U.S. economy, partially because debt-to-income standards for lending are higher, said Kapfidze. Americans spent only 4.1% of disposable household income on their mortgage payments in 2019, the lowest percentage since the Federal Reserve began tracking the data in 1980. Mortgage lending standards are tighter than they were pre-crisis. In 2019, fewer than one in 10 mortgages went to subprime borrowers, compared to one in five pre-crisis. Meanwhile, 61% of mortgages now go to borrowers with a credit score over 760, compared to only 28% before the crisis, according to LendingTree. “Lending standards are much tighter. You need pretty good credit now, and there are not a lot of exotic products that increase affordability,” said Kapfidze.

To: FJB who wrote (1202910)	2/21/2020 7:32:36 AM
From: sylvester80	Respond to of 1574848

OOPS! Trump appoints a partisan propagandist to run the intelligence community. washingtonpost.com

To: FJB who wrote (1202910)	2/21/2020 7:41:44 AM
From: sylvester80	1 Recommendation Recommended By pocotrader Respond to of 1574848

OOPS! FEDS CHARGE trumptard FOR THREATENING TO KILL WHISTLEBLOWER ATTORNEY; MAGA=Many trumptards Are Getting Arrested... ROTFLMFAO politico.com The man allegedly emailed the attorney in November, calling him a “traitor” who “must die a miserable death.” By NATASHA BERTRAND 02/20/2020 12:37 PM EST Federal prosecutors in Michigan have charged a man with making a death threat against one of the attorneys for a whistleblower who initiated the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, according to newly unsealed court records. The man, Brittan J. Atkinson, allegedly emailed the attorney in November, calling him a “traitor” who “must die a miserable death.” The attorney, Mark Zaid, confirmed to POLITICO that he received the email the day after Trump held up Zaid’s photo and read some of Zaid’s tweets during a rally. “All traitors must die miserable deaths,” reads the email to Zaid that was sent on November 7. “Those that represent traitors shall meet the same fate. We will hunt you down and bleed you out like the pigs you are. We have nothing but time, and you are running out of it. Keep looking over your shoulder. We know who you are, where you live, and who you associate with. We are all strangers in a crowd to you.” Atkinson has been charged with violating laws governing interstate communications, which prohibit “any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another” and is punishable by up to five years in prison. The indictment follows months of rhetorical salvos by the president and his allies against the whistleblower, whose purported identity has been posted on social media and even read aloud in the Senate chamber despite federal laws that allow whistleblowers to remain anonymous in order to encourage them to report wrongdoing. Trump has tweeted about the whistleblower more than five dozen times since September, accusing the person of being part of the “deep state” and alleging that he gave the Intelligence Community inspector general false information. Nothing in the whistleblower’s original complaint, however, has proven inaccurate. Zaid and his co-counsel on the whistleblower case, Andrew Bakaj, wrote a letter to then Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire in September raising “serious concerns” about their client’s safety following remarks Trump made at the U.N. accusing the whistleblower of being a “spy.” “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now,” Trump said, according to audio of the remarks obtained by The Los Angeles Times. To Zaid’s knowledge, the indictment is the first time an individual has been charged with making death threats against him, he said. But it’s far from the first threatening email he and his legal partner Bradley Moss have received since taking on the whistleblower as a client. “@realDonaldTrump thank you so much for the specific commentary about my firm last night,” Moss tweeted on November 7, the day Atkinson allegedly threatened Zaid. “I woke up to a ton of hate mail and death threats. And I’m not even on this case.” "It's not appropriate for anyone to threaten another individual's life, regardless of political views," Zaid said. "My job was to ensure the rule of law was followed in how whistleblowers are treated. That role should not be negatively weaponized by partisans." "I hope this indictment sends a message to others that such behavior will not be tolerated by a civil society that is governed by law," he added. Whistleblower protection advocates and national security experts have warned that the president’s attacks on the intelligence community employee who first raised alarms about Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president last summer could lead to violence. The issue of whistleblower protection was a central focus of the intelligence community inspector general Michael Atkinson’s confirmation hearing two years ago, where he pledged to establish “a safe program where whistleblowers do not have fear of retaliation and where they’re confident that the system will treat them fairly and impartially.” Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, first noticed the recently unsealed indictment.