foreclosures
Everywhere, there is vacant real estate. Vacant storefronts, vacant warehouses, vacant McMansions and barns and especially big-city buildings stuck in some twilight of redevelopment or property speculation or repossession. The collapse of the Great Global Real Estate Bubble may have destroyed a lot of theoretical wealth, but it also left an abundance of places to [...]
Great news, everybody: After deliberately failing to help millions of American families stuck in vulture mortgages, the U.S. government is now giving those foreclosed homes to Wall Street for pennies on the dollar so that Wall Street can then rent the now-vacant foreclosures back to the same people pushed out during the Wall Street-caused housing [...]
Nobel Prize-winning economist the American Public overwhelmingly feels that America will probably collapse if the debt ceiling is not raised, but also feels like, eh, leave the debt ceiling where it is. A new WaPo/ABC News poll shows that 71% of Americans believe that failure to pay government debts would be catastrophic, and yet a [...]
The U.S. economy will continue to be terrible, as far as jobs and housing and state tax revenues, as long as the Housing Crisis continues. And, based on today’s news and basically all housing news for several years now, the collapse of the Housing Bubble is an ongoing catastrophe — with prices still falling, terrible [...]
Even though she bought some foreclosed stucco dump about an hour from Arizona State University’s “Cronkite School of TeeVee Journamalism,” Bristol Palin is not enrolled at this school, and the people in charge of this television academy in Arizona have told the local media that Bristol has nothing to do with the Cronkite TeeVee School. [...]
Nothing says “Merry Christmas” like the exciting news that 20-year-old Bristol Palin — known for getting pregnant as a teenager and not knowing how to dance at all — has bought a house! Hooray, Bristol! Times are tough for everyone, but somehow she scraped up $172,000 from under Sarah’s burrito wrappers on the couch and [...]
The Alaska Supreme Court carefully inspected your convoluted Lisa Murkowski “visual aids” and — after probably no deliberation — ruled unanimously that those MS Paint atrocities are actually unconstitutional visual impediments and are unfair to Alaska’s already hopeless electorate. So hooray, you’ve forced polling places to provide lists of the write-in candidates. Now Alaskan voters [...]
SCALING BACK AMBITIONS, HEH: What the banks and mortgage giants killed in the House’s latest bullshit Financial Regulation bill was the “Cram-down” legislation, which would have let bankruptcy judges force lenders to accept not only lower, fixed interest rates on underwater home loans, but also give judges the power to reduce the principal to reflect [...]
After dropping like a stone for the past three or four years, existing home prices in the United States went up a little teeny tiny bit in the second quarter of 2009. HOORAY WE CAN REFINANCE OUR WAY TO HAPPINESS AGAIN! So, the sales price of American houses went up by 2.9% between April Fools [...]
Remember all that talk about how the unemployment rate fell by .1 percent last month and this proved, definitively, that happy days were here again? Remember all the sailors kissing ladies in the streets, and the wonderful ticker-tape parades? Well, everything has gone back to being terrible, according to New Statistics.
Criminy! We have been hearing a lot about mortgages that go into default or foreclosure, and how the people holding these mortgages should talk with their lenders about renegotiating their loans. As a normal person with more than two (2) neurons flickering on and off in your brain, you probably assume that the goal here [...]
GOOD LORD: Here is the most tragic thing you’ll see today, “Foreclosure Alley,” from KCET in Southern California. Thanks to commenter qwerty42 for bumming us out. [KCET via Andrew Sullivan]
Oh God now it begins: our quadrennial debate about voter fraud versus vote suppression. The head of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan has decided that a wonderful way to protect against “voter fraud” will be to get lists of foreclosed homes and check those against voter rolls to make sure that people whose [...]
This is an actual fat cat named “Chunks” who is, of course, hiding under a chair in the green room of the MSNBC studio. Here’s how this obese monster got famous: “BLACKWOOD, N.J. — Turns out, the economy is the reason a 44-pound cat found lumbering the streets of New Jersey became homeless. The Camden [...]
