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Category: Big Mother (page 3 of 15)

August 10, 2011

What could be worse than Uncle Sam as the nation’s mortgage monopolist? How about Uncle Sam the monopoly landlord?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Associated Press:

The Obama administration may turn thousands of government-owned foreclosures into rental properties to help boost falling home prices.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency said Wednesday it is seeking input from investors on how to rent roughly 250,000 homes owned by government-controlled mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration. All of the homes are foreclosures.

The U.S. government rescued the two mortgage giants in September 2008 and has funded them since the financial crisis. Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee about half of the nation’s mortgages and nearly all new mortgages.

Converting the homes into rentals may reduce “credit losses and help stabilize neighborhoods and home values,” said Edward DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie.

Fannie and Freddie have been hoarding foreclosure inventory in Phoenix for months. Now I know why. Witness:

It also might meet the growing demand for rentals.

So would selling them, except then they would be owned and managed by people who are working for profit, not political functionaries.

But wait. There’s more:

Private investors could also be allowed to oversee the conversions.

That is to say, all the best Fed-friendly butt-buddies will be cut in on the graft.

And you thought the Federal government could not screw the housing market up any worse…

August 7, 2011

A practical governing strategy for the Republican party. It won’t happen, but at least it’s potentially doable, unlike everything else.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[Back to the top from November 3, 2010. –GSS]
 

Here’s what the Republicans won last night, most probably: The opportunity to be left holding the bag if the whole creaking kleptocracy crashes.

Here’s what they mostly can’t do, at least not right away: Cut spending or taxes. A huge and growing portion of the budgets at all levels of government are entitlement payments — a subsistence dole under various labels. We have taken a once-free people and turned it half-predator, half-prey — often with both halves living under one scalp, amazingly enough.

So what can Republicans actually do, right now, to deliver on their promises?

They can eliminate every form of business regulation, at all levels of government.

Civil court has always been more than adequate to deal with actual injury. Not coincidentally, statutory regulation is always anti-economic nonsense: Banning competitors (as with the real estate licensing laws), government make-work, monkey-see-monkey-do, superstition, ossified tradition, power lust, etc. If no one is getting hurt, what is being regulated out of existence is this: Human intelligence.

That’s significant for two reasons: We need for business people to get to work and to take a bunch of us along with them. If we decriminalize human intelligence, at least partially, it’s reasonable to expect to see more of it — to everyone’s benefit. But even without the innovations we currently forbid in many businesses and industries, business people need to be able to plan for the future. If they are constantly subject to a vast, unknowable array of ever-changing regulations, they will not take risks. This is news to no one.

So: I’m not talking about some kind of “temporary moratorium” on regulation. This is an old, old leftist dodge: If the cows start to look scrawny, let them fatten up a little before you take up the slaughter again. Alas, because Republicans often have no firmly-held philosophical principles, they fall for these stunts again and again — as with the Bush tax “cuts.”

No, what is needed is the complete eradication of regulation: Repeal the enabling legislation, pay off and dismiss the staff, liquidate the chattel- and real-property. (All of this will Read more

August 7, 2011

It’s not enough for the tea party movement to throw the bums out. To contain the federal government, we have to cut its powers.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[Back to the top from January 21, 2010. –GSS]
 

What a delight it is that the citizens of Massachusetts have risen up against the federal leviathan. All across the country, the tea party movement is furiously aboil, angry Americans anxiously awaiting the opportunity to pull some levers in a voting booth.

But if the current populist uprising is nothing more than yet another throw-the-bums-out movement, it will come to nothing. We threw the bums out good and hard in 1994, and yet the federal leviathan has done nothing but grow since then. By now the national government is so huge that it threatens to crush the nation and its people and productive plant beneath its enormous weight.

It is not enough to throw the bums out. To contain the federal government, we have to cut its powers. Nothing else will stop its long-term growth.

The United States was originally conceived of as a confederation of sovereign states. The states joined together for those common purposes that seemed to make sense to them, with each state retaining is sovereignty in all other matters.

That was the theory — the federal government was to be the hand-servant of the states. In practice, the federal government has usurped the power of the states from the very beginning, with the abuses becoming more bold and more comprehensive with each passing decade.

This turns out to have been a mistake — as we are discovering. Where each state is independent of all the others, each one can try different policies. The states can become the laboratories of democracy that the founding fathers envisioned.

But to achieve this, we will have to rein in the federal leviathan. The states and the people need to reassert their ownership of and control over the national government.

How? By constitutional amendment. Probably by constitutional convention, since it seems unlikely that sitting members of Congress will vote to circumscribe their awesome and terrifying powers.

But here, in a very short summary, is what needs to be done, if the head of steam built up by the tea party movement is not to be wasted. The text within the quotation marks Read more

August 7, 2011

A strategy for the Republican party that can actually win elections

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[Back to the top from November 6, 2009. –GSS]
 

The national Republican party is riven by an insuperable internal contradiction.

Out of one side of their mouths, Republicans wish to portray themselves as tax cutters, red-tape slashers, champions of liberty fearlessly hacking away at the slimy tentacles of the leviathan state. Ignore for the moment that they’re spineless jellyfish when it comes time to cut, slash or hack; this is how they wish to present themselves.

Out of the other side of their mouths, Republicans offer American voters an alternate set of slimy tentacles for the same old leviathan. The state they promise to shrink will simultaneously promote a nebulous family values agenda and forbid abortion. Republicans will simultaneously dismantle the Department of Education and supplant ecosocialist indoctrination with theocratic indoctrination. The leviathan state will lose the power to ban cancer drugs but gain the power to ban rap records.

Things fall apart. The center cannot hold…

Whatever the Republican party seeks to be in the states, in the counties, in the towns, what it cannot be at the national level is the party of both smaller and larger government. It can’t because as a strategy it makes no sense, and it can’t because there is no common ground between the liberty-seeking Republicans and the theocracy-seeking Republicans. Those two wings of the party can only fly apart in the long run.

But: There is a way around this: The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

If the national Republican party were to concentrate solely on shrinking the Federal leviathan to a strict adherence to the Constitution, devolving all of the usurped tentacular powers to the states to do with — or do away with — as they choose, the party could achieve these goals:

  • It would actually deliver on a promise, prompting universal amazement.
  • It would present to both of its contradictory wings the opportunity to achieve at the state and local levels what they cannot hope to achieve nationally.
  • It would result Read more
August 3, 2011

Defining Deals, Debts and Deficits

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’

Through the Looking Glass. 

Apropos of nothing, when you use the word CUT, what do you choose it to mean? 

Courtesy of the Cato Institute

July 29, 2011

Could Mortgage Rates DROP after a Treasuries’ credit ratings downgrade?

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

The dictated debt limit deadline looms and a credit rating downgrade, to US Treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities, seems likely.  Naturally, a spike in treasury yields is expected and a subsequent rise in mortgage rates should follow.   That’s right out of the senior year textbook, in most American business schools.

I’m not so sure the fixed-income markets will follow the textbook.  Mortgage rates might … do nothing in response the the credit rating downgrade.  Here’s why:

The credit ratings agencies lack……well…credibility.

The independent credit ratings agencies ( Moodys, Standard & Poors, Fitch, etc) have a reputation for being late on the scene.  They got hoodwinked with Enron, MCI/Worldcom, and Greece.  They were asleep at the wheel during the mortgage meltdown, issuing AAA ratings to CDOs, up until late 2007.  They are often considered to be too chummy with the issuers (the issuers pay their fee) and when the issuer is a government (with the power to regulate their business), they generally walk on eggshells.

The news may be baked into the market already.

The ratings agencies have been signaling a potential downgrade for months.  Clearly, raising the US debt limit will allow the Treasury to remain “liquid” but the agencies have said a downgrade is likely unless a substantive plan is enacted to reduce spending.  Cut, Cap & Balance, the “most extreme” of the proposals offered, still might not have been “extreme” enough to avoid a downgrade.  Both political parties are demonstrating that they lack the political will to address the long-term structural deficits, needed to bolster the Federal budget, to avoid the ratings downgrade.  Fixed income traders seem to be shrugging that off.

US Treasury securities are still considered to be the safest investment in the world.

Certainly there are better run countries than the US but their debt offerings lack SIZE; there ain’t enough of that debt for the real money.  Germany has its EU obligations hanging around in the background and Japan seems to be in worse shape than we are.  Chinese sovereign debt could be a consideration but the Chinese and Japanese still want their investments dollar-denominated.  The US is, for all Read more

July 25, 2011

The Sky is Falling… and So Are Loan Limits

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

There are more changes coming to the residential lending world (all those surprised by that, please stand on your head and whistle).  The Fed is maintaining the conforming loan limit of $417,000, but is lowering the non-conforming, conforming loan limits.  The what now?  A little background might help: in 2008 Fannie Mae’s charter was expanded to allow loan amounts in high cost areas (such as San Diego… yeah us!) to exceed the nationwide conforming loan limit of $417,000.  The most recent loan limit in San Diego County has been $697,500, thus making it exceedingly difficult for those of us who toil away in the real estate salt mines of America’s Finest City to keep beautiful San Diegans housed in the luxury to which they have become accustomed…

But as of October 1, the limit is dropping; in San Diego County it will be $546,250 and some wonder if this isn’t just a stepping stone on the way down to the original $417,000! 

As you might imagine, there is a long list of people who do not like this decision.  The National Association of Realtors has sent out an Emergency “Call for Action” message in response, suggesting “… a housing recovery depends on keeping mortgages affordable” and warning this decrease in loan limits will “make creditworthy borrowers unable to access affordable financing” (emphasis mine).  This raises an interesting question:

Should the government be providing affordable financing in high cost areas?

Hold on, let me ask that again, with a little more accuracy:

Should you and I be subsidizing mortgages for people buying $800,000 homes?

Wait… don’t answer that.  We don’t want to be insensitive to the needs of my fellow San Diegans and we certainly don’t want to interfere with the ongoing success of the “housing recovery.”   Let’s move on to the good news:

With the Fed in charge of “high cost” loans and a market unsure what the Fed might  do next… well, they were kind of the elephant in the room; there was no space for anyone else, which meant that until very recently, there were no true Jumbo loans to be found.  (Unlike jumbo shrimp, a jumbo loan actually means what it sets out to mean: a loan amount larger than Fannie Mae’s conforming – or in this case non-conforming, Read more

July 15, 2011

Just how carefully chosen was The Chosen One?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Angelo Codevilla, who brought us last year’s stunning essay, America’s ruling Class, is back again with an attempt at filling in the many, many blank pages in Barrack Hussein Obama’s back-story:

In our time, asking how a young man of scarce achievement got into position to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president courts the contemporary synonyms for “impious”: “birther,” “conspiracy theorist,” and, of course, “racist.” Granted, to inquire into what formed a president is not as important as to understand what he does. Nevertheless, because fully to know where anyone is going requires grasping whence he comes, let us open ourselves to wonder how, minus miracles, a 10-year-old boy without obvious talent who had lived in Indonesia since age six ends up with an eight-year scholarship to Hawaii’s most exclusive school; a scholarship to Occidental College; a transfer into Columbia University; acceptance into Harvard Law School, and editorship of its law review; and how he goes from job to prestigious job without apparently mastering any of the previous ones. No wonder some of Barack Obama’s supporters treat him as if he were anointed by an extraterrestrial power.

No less an object of awe and curiosity is the seamlessness of Obama’s mentality. Without marbling or inconsistency, it is serviceable as a definition of contemporary American leftism, and leads one to wonder what earthly environment could have produced such a pure specimen.

Intellectually, Obama has always been a consumer, having left no record of formulating new ideas or of penetrating old ones. Politically, he is a follower and figurehead: having grown up in the ever branching stream of socialist voluntary organizations, he surfed its leftward eddies, never forming or leading a faction. He was handed a safe seat in the Illinois state senate, a nearly safe one in the U.S. Senate, and was surprised when Harry Reid informed him that influential Democrats wanted to run him for president. The Democratic campaign of 2008 pushed against an open door. As president, he rides his party’s center of gravity.

In short, Barack Obama himself is not that remarkable. He can give a rousing political speech, of course, but Read more

July 4, 2011

SplendorQuest: A real-estate professionals’ guide to anarchy in the USA

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top. This is what independence means — independence from the tyrannical intrusions of government. You’ve been trained your whole life to recoil from ideas like this, but there has never been a better time than right now to ask yourself this question: How is the dispute resolution system you have in place now working out for you? — GSS

 
I thought about making a short movie addressing a host of common questions about the political philosophy we’ve been discussing, but I decided to undertake the task in text, instead. A video would be faster for me, but not so much for you. Plus, text is easy to search and easy to revisit, where video can be ungainly. So: FAQ-style:

What does this have to do with real estate?

Human liberty begins when you have a redoubt that is yours to defend from any would-be usurper. That’s real estate, and, as I write every year at Independence Day, the civilizations we associate with human freedom are those where ordinary people had the power to claim, own, use, enjoy, buy and sell the land. If you want for a real estate weblog to concern itself solely with surface-level bread-and-butter real estate news, you’ve come to the wrong place. If, on the other hand, you want to learn how better to defend your liberties, including your power to buy, sell and broker real estate, stay tuned. None of this is easy, but it is fundamental for understanding real estate as philosophy.

Isn’t anarchy a creed of chaos and violence?

1. No, that would be socialism in its collapsing phase.

2. No, that is what you have been told by people who want you to volunteer to be their slaves and toadies.

3. No. Anarchism as I define it is the politics of egoism, which itself is the ethics of self-adoration. People actively pursuing self-adoration will tend to avoid chaos and violence except when chaos and violence are the only means of avoiding even worse fates. When might this be the case? When socialism undergoes its collapsing phase, for example.

So what is anarchism “as you define it”?

What Read more

July 4, 2011

Private ownership of the land is the source not just of our freedom but of our civility and of our humanity itself

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top. Happy Independence Day! — GSS

 
This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):

The “cap and trade” bill that passed in the House of Representatives last week contains within it the seeds of a national building code. It rarely rains in Phoenix and it rarely fails to rain in Portland, but both cities will build new structures according to the dictates of some Washington bureaucrat.

Drive along 19th Avenue in Phoenix and you’ll pass block after block of condemned houses. They were taken by the city for the planned light rail expansion, now delayed. The neighbors are left to fight off the kind of vermin vacant homes attract while they worry what that blight is doing to their home values.

In Glendale, the city government is doing everything it can to prevent the Tohono O’Odham tribe from developing its own sovereign land as a casino.

The essence of the freedom we celebrate on Independence Day is the free ownership of the land. The Hoplite Greeks fought and died to protect their own lands. The Roman Legionnaires fought and died because their farms were their own property. A Cincinnatus — or a George Washington — lays down his arms because being a dictator is nothing when you can instead be a freeholder in the land.

The essence of our freedom is the free ownership of the land, and yet everywhere we turn, private property is subjected to one law after another, and everything that is not forbidden is compulsory instead.

This is a grievous error. The men who become Brownshirts or Klansmen or Khmer Rouge — the men who make up murderous mobs — are men without land. It is the husbandry of the land — each man to his own parcel — that most makes husbands of us, that sweeps away our willingness to live as brigands or rapists or thugs.

By robbing the private ownership of the land of its meaning, the state is, by increments, robbing its citizens of their humanity. No one burns down his own home, nor his neighbor’s home. But when the time comes that we Read more

June 29, 2011

Lay down with dogs and you wake up with fleas? Worse. If you decide to rape the taxpayers via NAR’s RAPAC scam you get… plague!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Phoenix Realtor Forum, the monthly newsletter of the Phoenix Association of Realtors:

Alas, the plague is a swarm of vampire-like locust Realtors. These are RAPAC’s objectives, according to the article, with interstitial commentary by me in bold text.

  • Mortgage Interest Deduction: NAR opposes any changes that would limit or undermine current law.

    That is, people who don’t buy homes on credit, including people who own their homes outright, people who rent and working poor people living in mom’s basement or in their cars, should subsidize the incomes of very wealthy people. If this doesn’t make you sick, you’re much too sick already.
     

  • Capital Gains Exemption: NAR opposes any changes to the capital gains exemption on the sale of a home.

    How much does the NAR hate real property? Why isn’t its position to eliminate all taxes, or at least all taxes on real estate?
     

  • Depreciation/Tenant Improvements: NAR supports efforts to establish a permanent rule that more accurately reflects the depreciable lives of buildings and to conform amortization periods for tenant improvements more closely to the term of the lease.

    More tax subsidies for the rich, rather than getting rid of taxes altogether.
     

  • Government-Sponsored Enterprises: NAR is recommending that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac be converted into government-chartered, non-shareholder owned authorities.

    Because it’s harder to hide the corruption if the SEC is pretending to pay attention to FannieMae and FreddieMac.
     

  • Mortgage Loan Limits: NAR supports making the current higher loan limits and formula permanent.

    Rich people need more subsidies!
     

  • FHA/Federal Housing Administration Programs: NAR is a strong supporter of FHA’s single- and multi-family programs.

    Poor people need subsidies, too!
     

  • NAR Credit Policy: NAR is calling on the credit and lending industries and regulators to reassess the entire mortgage lending policy structure and look for ways to increase the availability of credit.

    Because not enough unqualified buyers were rooked into buying homes they couldn’t pay for the last time we pulled these stunts.
     

  • Short Sales: NAR continues to push the lending industry to expedite short sales.

    Criminal penalties if they don’t? Don’t laugh. Government is nothing but force. If we are doing anything other than negotiating by means of the persuasions of the free market, one party is Read more

June 14, 2011

What We’ve Been Doing.

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Howdy Bloodhounds. Not a lot to say in the real estate world because I’be been working on the After Effects Demo Shop, Simplifilm.Com.

The Foundation for a Free Society commissioned us to make a video. So, obviously, we did. This one owes an homage to the clear thinking of Greg Swann (along, of course with Bastiat)

We make demo videos and we’re priced in the lower five figures per finished, written, voiced and rendered minute. This piece isn’t really representative of what we’re doing, but it fits the conversations that we’ve had here. It’s probably the last political thing we’ll do for a great long while. We’re immensely proud of it.

I can say for certain if Greg hadn’t provided some of the vocabulary it wouldn’t have been as good as it it is. Help the Foundation for a Free Society and give them some money. They are locked in and loaded, competent and winning. (Disclosure: some of their money might come back to us in the form of a video, but we assure you: we charged them less per minute – by 1/3 -than anyone else will ever pay).

May 12, 2011

Dispatch from the NAR IDX Rule committee Meeting

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

I’m sitting in the room @ NAR Mid-Year listening to the IDX Rules Committee trying to get its collective head around the use of IDX data on franchisor web sites, social media, and whether or not price change and days on market can be shown on IDX sites.

Its kinda like watching fleas on a dog debating whether not the dog should go swimming as if they had a say in the matter. Don’t these people ever learn? It was precisely by trying to control listings on the Web that they created an environment that was conducive to the growth of Trulia and Zillow and thus realized what they ostensibly fear — loss of control over the distribution of listings on Web sites and and the creation of an incentive for consumers to look for information they want on third party sites.

The Internet was designed to route around obstacles much bigger than a rules committee — like the nuclear obliteration of a network hub. Take away the ability to use IDX to sling listings to Facebook or the ability of brokers to say how long a listing has been on the market and what the price changes were and another channel will open up to provide that very information. It is the nature of the network.

For the record, the committee decided not to decide anything w/r/t social media, unanimously voted to keep a rule that prevents DOM and price changes from appearing on IDX sites, and — saving the most interesting for last — voted to suspend the rule they adopted last fall that enabled franchisors to use IDX on franchise domains.

Now these recommendations go before the Directors for a vote on Saturday which, as we learned in the “scraping” controversy, does not necessarily mean they will be followed. It will be interesting to see if the Directors decide to listen to their own subject matter “experts” (and I use that term very, very loosely) or choose to carry the franchisors water on their own.

On a side note, it was a lot of fun to sit here and re-read Greg’s recent Read more

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