Blog

Mortgages – 5 posts

FHA: Reaching Out to Condo Buyers – By BOB TEDESCHI – But last year, the federal government raised the maximum F.H.A. loan amount to $729,750 from $362,790 for high-cost areas like Manhattan and northern New Jersey. … Lenders can now approve condos without applying to the government, if they believe the condominium complies with F.H.A. lending policies.  … The government also relaxed rules that had limited the number of condominiums that would qualify for F.H.A. loans. Under the old rules, if more than 50 percent of a new development was unsold, the F.H.A. would deny a loan. Now, just 30 percent of a development must be sold before an F.H.A. borrower can qualify.  … – NY Times
————

New rules might be cutting home values – Dian Hymer – Are appraisals hurting home values?  If financing is involved, the answer is probably yes. Ever since May 1, when Fannie Mae’s new appraisal guidelines for home mortgages went into effect, buyers, sellers, real estate agents and loan originators have complained about the new process. It’s inefficient, often inaccurate and time-consuming. In some cases, it could be contributing to lower home prices. – SF Gate.com 

————

FDIC on REO Sales: Keep’em in the Dark! – Submitted by Bruce Krasting – … The answer is that the REO problem for the D.C. lenders and the FDIC is reaching a crisis level. …  There are approximately 55 million mortgages outstanding today. At least 10% will/have gone into default before this is over. Of those half will result in foreclosure. These numbers create an estimate of the Federal share of REO at about 1.5 mm homes. Depending on unemployment and the economy going forward that number could be much higher. Before this is over the Feds could own up to 5% of all residential RE.  … – Zero Hedge Blog

————

Combined Loan to Values Swell to 107% in July 2009: Equifax – By JON PRIOR  – … The average CLTV, a ratio used to determine the risk of default when more than one loan is used, for current Alt-A loans ballooned from 75% in July 2005 to 107% in July 2009 … – Housingwire

————

Freddie Mac says TBW losses ‘could be significant’ – Mortgage finance company Freddie Mac on Monday put its initial loss estimate related to the bankruptcy of Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp. at $500 million, and noted the figure could be much higher. – AP Yahoo

Government: 2 posts

Bullard Favors Extending Fed Asset Buying – BY MICHAEL DERBY – Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard wants the Fed to continue to buy mortgage-backed securities beyond the March 2010 cutoff to give policy makers more flexibility as they seek to shepherd the economy toward recovery. – Wall Street Journal

————

Jamie Dimon seen as good fit for Treasury – By MARK DeCAMBRE – As support for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wanes on Capitol Hill amid frustration with the Obama administration’s handling of the economy, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is emerging as a potential replacement.  Sources tell The Post that a number of policy makers have begun mentioning Dimon as a successor to Geithner, whose standing in Washington has suffered because of the country’s high unemployment rate, the weakness of the dollar, the slow pace of the recovery and the government’s mounting deficit. – NY Post

Life: 2 posts

Trading: Tiger Wood’s Secret is really the key to your success – Adam Hewitt – INO.com 
————

Runners and joggers increase in this recession – The Upside of the Downside? – Michael Panzner – In a country often lampooned as being populated with obese soda-swilling TV junkies, around 9.2 million people completed a certified foot race in the United States in 2008, up from 3.7 million in 1987. … Why the growth? … But that’s only part of the answer.  We live in a financially uncertain, violence-scarred world, and running “gives you something to control – you can’t control the stock market or the economy, but you can control your health,” said Lamppa. … – Financial Armageddon

Resources and Economy:  4 posts

Is that a Bubble in Your Natural Gas? Interview with Jim Lucier – Chris Whalen – The Institutional Risk Analyst  

————

Sulfur emissions – 16 Cargo Ships Worse than the World’s Automobiles – … Apart from the usual environmental rhetoric I ran across a rather startling article that claims that the 16 dirtiest cargo ships emit more sulfur per year than all of the cars on the planet. ... – Surly Trader 

————

on the future of oil – Oil’s Expanding Frontiers – By George Will – What city contributed most to the making of the modern world? The Paris of the Enlightenment and then of Napoleon, pioneer of mass armies and nationalist statism? London, seat of parliamentary democracy and center of finance? Or perhaps Titusville, Pa. – Real Clear Politics

————

NABE Panel:  Recovery Soon to Lose “Jobless” Label – … Reaffirming last month’s call that the Great Recession is over, NABE panelists have marked up their predictions for economic growth in 2010 and expect performance to exceed its long-term trend. “While the recovery has been jobless so far, that should soon change. Within the next few months, companies should be adding instead of cutting jobs,” said NABE President Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Point Loma Nazarene University. … – National Association for Business Economics

President Barack Obama continued the ridiculous tradition yesterday of pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey and sending it to Disneyland. New change.org Animal Welfare blogger had urged Obama to end this silly practice, but he didn’t listen.

On top of it all, even the turkey pardon seems affected by the racial bias that pervades our criminal justice system. I linked last year to a blogger who had pointed out that George W. Bush only pardoned white turkeys. Now it looks like his successor is keeping that tradition going. Apparently, Harry S Truman was the last President to pardon a black turkey.

On a more serious note, however, the turkey pardon reminds us that there are many people sitting behind bars today who could use a real pardon. One of them is occasional change.org guest blogger Michael Santos. Michael’s wife Carole wrote a blog post yesterday calling on the Obama administration to begin looking at some of the injustices festering within our federal prison system, and I can’t say it any better than her:

(more…)

En este blog, en su margen derecho, se encuentra disponible la sección “Consulta on-line”, en dónde pueden dejar sus inquietudes, o si bien pedir que trate temas específicos como hizo un lector el otro día pidiendome que publique algo de la Articulación Temporo-Mandibular.

Por eso aca les traigo un archivo descargable, que trata de la aplicación de los medios físicos en dicha articulación, orientándose mucho en la Fisioterapia como se darán cuenta. Próximamente prometo desarrollar la A.T.M desde el punto de vista Kinesiológico, o sea, utilizando como base ejercicios u otras técnicas aplicadas.

Online video has had a great month in October in the US. Viewers are up across the board, but there aren’t any surprises at the top, and Facebook is sitting at a more modest ninth spot rather than the third place other reports had put it at. YouTube once again played in a league of its own, with 12 times more videos streamed than its closest competitor Hulu, which has had a very good month.

Google streamed 10.5 billion videos in October in the US, making up 37.7 of the total number of videos watched this month. 99 percent of those were on YouTube, of course. Hulu followed with 855 million videos a 46 percent jump from the previous month. Microsoft rounds up the top three with 451 million videos watched across its online proprieties.

When it comes to actual viewers, things were mostly static. YouTube rules with 125.3 million unique visitors in October, basically the same as last month. Hulu saw some growth, from 38.7 million to 42.4 million viewers last month, but nothing like the jump it saw in videos watched, meaning that most users just watched a lot more videos.

The rising star, though, is Facebook which saw its audience jump from 31.1 million viewers in September to 41.1 million last month. Of course, with close to 100 million users in the US, the social networks has a lot of growth p… (read more)

Kami sekeluarga mengucapkan:

Selamat Hari Raya Idul Adha 1430 H.

Semoga kita senantiasa mendapatkan hidayah, limpahan rahmat dan ridho-Nya, serta diampuni segala kesalahan kita.

Bagi saudara-saudara yang sedang menunaikan ibadah haji, mudah-mudahan diberikan kelancaran dan kemudahan dalam menjalankan rangkaian ibadah haji, diberikan keselamatan dan kesehatan hingga kembali di tengah keluarga, serta menjadi haji mabrur.

Pada kesempatan ini pula kami mohon maaf lahir dan batin atas kekhilafan kami.

cakmoki & keluarga.

Posted in Events, Renungan, Umum Tagged: Hari Raya, Idul Adha, Renungan

Filed under: Government/Legal, Humor

Every state in the union is facing huge budget deficits and a number have turned to license plates as a way to raise some fast cash. First was New York, which recently unveiled a new “Empire Gold” license plate. The catch? Any citizen who wants to legally drive is required to buy one when his or her current plates expire. And they’re more expensive than the old ones to boot.

Speaking of boots, Texas is also planning to raise funds with license plates, but in this case it’s totally optional. The Lone Star state recently unveiled a spate of new vanity plates on MyPlates.com that cost between $55 and $195 smackaroos. The selection is as large as the state itself (and its hats) including standard Lone Star plates in crazy colors like hot pink and orange (Texas calls them Lone Star Pink and Lone Star Orange), as well as an Old West-themed plate and other Texassy designs.

Sure, $195 for a vanity plate is a lot, but the money’s divided between the state and its two partners in this joint venture: Pinnacle Technical Resources of Dallas and Etech Inc. of Nacogdoches. Regardless of the three-way split, the state is reportedly guaranteed $25 million over five years. Hey, if it’ll help keep a few extra public school teachers employed and essential services in tact, then its worth living down the fact that your state now offers a hot pink license plate.

[Source: USA Today via Star-Telegram]

Texas unveils new vanity plates to raise money for state originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 26 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

We have posted recently about HTC’s plan to release a capacitive stylus for the HTC HD2.  While the entry at Clove is pretty clear, we have spoken to our HTC contact and they denied any knowledge of its existence.

They will therefore be pretty surprised to see the above device, which appears to be a rebrand of Dagi’s transparent stylus, already widely available via e-bay for example.

It is somewhat disappointing that the secretive accessory is not the one detailed in HTC’s recent patent, which uses magnets instead of an electrically conductive surface, but if you are desperate for a stylus it’s likely any version will do.

Thanks YouHTC.ru, who is the source of the picture.

Emails look awfully outdated today when things like Twitter, Google Wave, and Facebook grab the headlines. Still, email-killers have come and gone and the communications service is alive and kicking with no signs of slowing down. WordPress decided to acknowledge this, albeit a tad late, with a new feature it’s launching for blogs using WordPress.com – email subscriptions.

“This is a very simple way for your readers to subscribe to your blog and receive updates by email. Anyone can subscribe, whether they have a WordPress.com account or not. All you need to do is add the Blog Subscription widget to your blog and then you and your readers are ready to go,” Auttomatic, the company behind WordPress.com and the open-source blogging platform, announced. “If a visitor is logged in to WordPress they need only press the Subscribe Me! button, otherwise they can enter their email address.”

All you need to do to get the feature on your blog on WordPress.com is to install the Blog Subscription widget Auttomatic just released. After this, any visitor to your blog will be able to subscribe by email, regardless if they’re using WordPress or not. The emails are formatted with HTLM so that the post keeps its structure, photos, videos, and the likes. There is also the option to receive a text-only em… (read more)

Divide your room with lights. This one is from XedMada.

“It’s quite simple really, for each unit you need just one Orgel paper lamp and one Dioder color LED unit. Take two of the bars from a Dioder LED kit, gently slide them under the bars on the top front inside of the paper shade of the Orgel paper lamp shade. Be careful not to poke a hole in the paper.

It’s easiest to slide the bars in one at a time then connect the two in the center and the power cord at one end.  Install the shade, again, careful not to rip the shade. The bottom bar just slips in from underneath once you have the shade installed and rests on the bottom inside against the lamps power supply.  A little double sided tape helps you keep it in place and properly focused. Run the cord of the top LED bar to the inside supporting pipe and down the back so it doesn’t cast a shadow.  In the photo I have two side by side, using one Dioder controller for the top colors and a second set for the bottom. Using the mini CFL replacement lamps I was able to meter a safe load of 5 of the units in one series (the box says only to use three in a series, but that’s with the higher draw tungsten lamps.)

An important side note: If you plan to use multiple LED sets together make sure to buy them all from the same batch.  Even a week later was long enough for me to get a different run of LEDs that didn’t quite match the color of the two sets I purchased previously.”

Here’s just a few of the more bizarre taxes that have been levied over the years;

Danegeld

History teaches us that you didn’t want to mess with a Viking because he would pillage, plunder and burn your village you before you even saw his pointy hat cresting the horizon.  Vikings were well aware that no one wanted to mess with them thus they used that reputation to their advantage.  Sure, they could have kept up all that pillaging, but it’s tiring and generally thankless work.  Better to have someone pay you to simply not do it.  But who would do such a thing?  Everyone, for generations, that’s who.

Vikings first received payment to just go away when they attacked Paris back in 845.  Happy that they could get ill gotten booty without suffering through the annoyance of hacking apart snooty, Dark Ages Frenchmen, the Vikings took their money and left.  For a while.  In 991, they returned and decided to sack part of England, but King Aethelred handed over 10,000 pounds worth of silver, which even to this day can ward off nearly any Norwegian.  It was also around this time, after their second pay off, the Vikings realized the rest of Europe was peopled by rich idiots and there was nothing stopping them from threatening to attack whenever they needed money for wenches and grog.

More payments were made to the Vikings in 1002, 1007, 1012 and 1016.  Payments up to this point totaled over 136,000 pounds of silver, enough to fund nearly one season for the New York Yankees.

In time, the tax became a useful tool to pay for whatever stuff the King needed money for, long after Vikings had retired to a paradise of non-bathing and obesity in some frigid retreat free from pillaging and Grendels.  William the Conqueror used the tax to pay for other wars and it’s likely most people went ahead with paying it out of fear that, even if it seemed suspicious, better than waking up with an angry Viking kicking the heck out of you.

Beards

ed7929

Obviously some governments really just needed money and didn’t particularly care how foolish they looked in their attempts to get it.  Henry VIII, not particularly known as the coolest head in history to begin with, decided to charge a beard tax on his people back in 1535.  He had his own beard that was likely living tax free up in the palace, but the common man was required to pay out if he wasn’t in the mood for shaving every day.  And given that this was 1535, your average Gillette razor was probably just a sharp piece of metal and shaving cream was your own panic sweat as you tried not to nick an artery.

Henry’s daughter brought the beard tax back during her reign and had it vary depending on the age and status of the man wearing the beard.  Presumably old, poor people with excellent Santa Claus beards were getting hit the worst while young knights in soul patches were just paying pocket change.

And because a good idea is timeless, in the early 1700s in Russia, Tsar Peter I introduced his own beard tax, meaning the Russian people either had to pay up or invest in scarves to make it through the winters.  

Everything

Speaking of Tsar Peter, it’s worth noting he didn’t stop at beards.  Whether through greed or insanity, Peter really wanted as much money as he could get his hands on, so he went about taxing pretty much everything that people would conceivably have handy.  He put a tax on beehives to keep those honey barons in check, he taxed horse collars so the people who weren’t walking wouldn’t get a free ride, hats got taxed, boots, basements, chimneys, food, clothing and anyone who was born a male faced a tax.  And because why stop there, births in general were also taxed, along with marriages and burial of the dead.  And if all you were doing was standing still, naked, in the middle of nowhere, you still owed a tax for something because a soul tax was introduced in 1718.  And if you believed you had no soul and were an atheist, then you owed a religious dissenter tax.

Illegal Drugs

TedsBlog

Probably under the theory that anyone’s worth a try, no less than 10 states have tried to place a tax on narcotics.  Yes, the very principle of the tax is kind of mind blowing, but states like Kansas decided it couldn’t hurt.  There, dealers are expected to purchase tax stamps to place on the product and they promise to take no personal information from the dug dealers when they show up to purchase the stamps.

Though it sounds pretty foolish on the surface, it’s actually a crafty ploy by the government to nab drug dealers during prosecution, as anyone who doesn’t purchase the stamps can also be charged with tax evasion, taking them down in an Al Capone reign of glory.

Long Distance Tax

~ Maryam ~

Few people realize it but from 1898 until 2006, if you had a phone, you were funding the Spanish American war.  For over 100 years, there was a 3% excise tax on long distance calls, the purpose of which was to help fund a war which took place between April and August of 1898.  As time went on, events like the First World War and the Depression continued to put a strain on the American economy, so the government kept the tax in place.  Years became decades and finally, in 2006, someone put a stop to a tax that had milked the populace for billions.  In fact, it was determined that $15 billion should be refunded to tax payers.

Flushing Tax

Roger Saunders

In 2005, Maryland introduced a $30 tax for flushing your toilet.  The plan was to put the money into repairing sewage treatment plants by effectively giving everyone in the state a pay toilet.  But if there’s one thing people don’t like it’s when the government imposes an intrusive tax that has a built in “no way out” clause, as very few of us are accustomed to going to the washroom outdoors these days.

Taxpayers were all hit, regardless of whether they had septic systems and private water sources or they were hooked up to the city, meaning many thousands of angry phone calls had to be fielded but since the plan was to pull in nearly $70 million in tax revenue, the state government wasn’t about to let this one go and most people who protested ended up paying eventually.

facing Martyrs Square, Virgin, Le Grey, & White a bulldozer is clearing ancient ruins to make way for yet another building…

UPDATE: a senior archeologist has confirmed that this land is being developed, but ample time will be given for a thorough archeological dig to excavate and document all potential artifacts before clearing the way for the foundations of the new building

tags: downtown, beirut, lebanon, real estate, building, bulldozer, heavy machinery, solidere

As an interesting factoid, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq have risen, historically, on 61.9% and 71.4% of Black Friday trading days according to the Stock Trader’s Almanac.

The Dow has gone up only 47.6% of the time, but who looks at the flawed Dow index these days.

Looking to December, the S&P500, Nasdaq, and Dow historically rose 1.7%, 1.9%, and 1.7% respectively on average during this final month.

Yet in a post election-year they’ve barely broken even on average, rising just 0.3%, 0.2%, and 0.8%.

Regardless, for many the trading year has probably already ended. No need to push one’s luck after the stock market rally we’ve seen to date.

Happy Thanksgiving.

(Dow & S&P since 1950, Nasdaq since 1971, via Stock Traders Almanac 2009)

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Bank Of America Bulls Snap Up Call Options (BAC)
• Why David Rosenberg Thinks Jim Paulsen Is An Embarrassing Perma-Bull
• David Rosenberg Slams "Perma-Bull" Jim Paulsen

The U.S. Mint has announced that will stop selling 1-ounce gold bullion coins. Demand has been so strong that they’ve effectively run out of 2009 American Eagle coins.

They sold 124,000 coins in November alone, after selling 115,000 in October and September.

Have no fear, they plan to resume coin sales in early December.

Reuters via CNBC: Produced from gold mined in the United States, the 22-karat American Eagles have been novel items among collectors and investors since their introduction in 1986. Each coin has a face value of $50 but it is sold by authorized dealers at a premium to the price of gold.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Panicked Gold Buying Forces Vietnam To Devalue Currency
• GOLD $1,182
• Get Gold Exposure For Just $940 An Ounce (ABX)

HP will be selling HP Pavilion dv6t Quad Edition Laptop for $999 at HPDirect.com on BlackFriday. This is $649 off the regular price of $1649. This Notebook comes with a powerful Intel Core i7 processor, 15.6” diagonal HD display, Nvidia GeForce GT230M graphics with 1GB of memory and Windows 7 Home Premium.

This Pavilion dv6 Quad Edition is designed for both multimedia and productivity. This laptop is good for multitasking as well as watching high-def movies, web surfing, presentation, documentation, editing high-def video and editing photos. It comes with an HDMI port so you can easily enjoy movies and photos on your TV by connecting a single cable between to your notebook. To get this deal visit HPDirect.com.

The basic configuration of the HP Pavilion dv6t Quad Edition starts at $999 and the recommended configuration starts at $1327.99 at HPDirect.com.

HP Pavilion dv6t Quad Edition Specification:

Source

The European Union Chamber of Commerce is warning that massive Chinese over-production in multiple industries could lead to a flood of excess products around the world. Such excess production could undercut developed-nation producers by pushing down prices.

This could trigger a substantial increase in calls for protectionism from both the U.S. and Europe, especially if the Chinese economy slowed down substantially and forced Chinese companies to find more foreign buyers.

WSJ: “The Chinese stimulus package has poured credit into increasingly questionable projects and will almost certainly increase direct and indirect subsidies to investment and manufacturing,” the report says. “China’s growth model requires that external demand – the European Union and the United States – be able to absorb the overcapacity it produces,” a prospect that is increasingly unlikely given the weak economic recovery in the developed countries. The chamber urged the U.S. and EU to help China change its policies to prevent a damaging eruption in trade disputes, which are already on the rise.

…

China’s government has also increasingly focused on the risks from the boom in bank loans and public-works projects. In recent months Beijing has announced restrictions on new investment on sectors it has identified as having excess capacity, and regulators have quietly moved to cool down the surge in bank lending.

“In many sectors the problems of excess capacity and redundant construction are still very serious, and in some areas they are even worsening,” China’s State Council said in a September statement. “It is not only traditional industries like steel and cement that are blindly expanding, but also new industries like wind-power equipment and polycrystalline silicon.”

Read more here.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• China Executes Two Men For Selling Tainted Infant Milk
• China Entering Winter With A Severe Natural Gas Shortage (UNG)
• How China’s Bank Regulator Could Slam The Markets

Lawsuits aren’t anything new for Google, but one in Italy could mean jail time for several Google employees if they’re found guilty. The four men are charged with several privacy violations and libel over a user-uploaded video, hosted on Google Video in 2006. The prosecutors are now asking for one year in jail for three of the executives, David Drummond, senior VP of corporate development and chief legal officer at Google, George Reyes ex-CFO at the company and Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel, and six months for libel for Arvind Desikan, senior product marketing manager at Google.

As expected, Google is defending its employees and believes the case to be without merit. “We did exactly what is required under European and Italian law,” William Echikson, a Google spokesman, told Bloomberg. “We took the video down when notified by the authorities. Seeking to hold neutral platforms liable for content posted on them is a direct attack on a free, open Internet and could spell the end of Web 2.0 in Italy. We will defend and support our employees.”

In 2006, several students from a Turin school uploaded a clip to Google Video of them bullying a classmate with Down’s syndrome. The video was up on the site for almost two months before being taken down by Google. The compan… (read more)

The Japanese yen has hit 14-year highs, proving that massive Japanese government debt can mean little when it comes to near-term currency strength.

Prepare for Japanese finance minister Hirohisa Fujii to fight back. In sharp contrast to American politics, Japanese officials must constantly advocate a weaker currency.

Bloomberg: “If currencies make abnormal movements, we may need to take appropriate action,” Fujii told reporters in Tokyo today. “Now we’re at the stage where we need to closely monitor movements in currency markets.”

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Credit Default Swaps Augur Yen Body Slam
• Dollar Tanks Again After Chinese Banker Urges State To Buy More Euro And Yen
• Japan Gives The Green Light To Dollar/Yen Traders

The Sun Oracle deal is dragging on with no end in sight. Oracle is sticking to its guns, while the EU is not letting go of its objections. The software giant has now asked EU regulators for a hearing set for December 10 to argue its case for buying Sun, according to Reuters citing people close to the matter. This comes after Oracle asked for more time to prepare.

While the fate of the deal isn’t any clearer, things are moving towards some sort of closure. Oracle announced its intention to buy Sun Microsystems, which had been struggling for the last couple of years, for $7.4 billion in spring. The deal was approved by Sun’s shareholders and later on by the US Department of Justice after a prolonged investigation. Things didn’t go so smoothly in Europe, where the EU’s Competition Comission extended its investigation of the deal with concerns over the open-source MySQL database system.

MySQL had become a big competitor for some of Oracle’s own database offerings especially on the lower end and the EU is worried that competition in the market would diminish if the deal were to go through. Oracle has expressed its support for MySQL and complained on several occasions about the investigation which was initially scheduled to last until January 19, 2010. Oracle claimed that the investigati… (read more)

Charles Barkley, Peter Facinelli, Leona Lewis

Add this to your queue
Added: Thu Nov 26 10:45:05 UTC 2009
Air date: Wed Nov 25 00:00:00 UTC 2009
Duration: 37:21