| At the end of this month, the US Federal Reserve is due to freeze its programme to purchase Fannie and Freddie agency MBS that it implemented in the wake of the financial crisis. Logic might suggest that could potentially deliver a jolt to the market. |
| he degree of assistance that the Fed has provided has been eye-poppingly large: right now it is holding some $1,200bn of MBS |
| in the past couple of years, the Fed (and others) have poured so much money into the system, that this has made it painfully hard for mainstream fixed income investors to get returns, without taking very wild risks. |
| During the past two years, the full impact of the collapse of the securitisation market has been largely concealed from most investors – let alone American politicians – because of the sheer scale of government assistance on offer. |
| investors have been lulled into something of a false sense of security |
Bolivia, Ecuador, Switzerland and California are advocating different kinds of legal protection. Is there a trend emerging? | Cruelty to animals, it is said, is often a precursor to graver crimes. So would there not be some usefulness to a registry of individuals convicted of felony animal abuse? Legislators in California want the Golden State to be the first to establish such a record — just as California was the first in the nation to create a registry of sex offenders. |
| The goal of the registry, which would list crimes against both pets and farm animals, is to make it easier for shelters and animal-adoption groups to identify people who shouldn’t be allowed access to animals. It would also be a boon to law enforcement because animal abuse, the bill’s authors’ say, often escalates to violence against people. |
| The bill’s biggest stumbling block may be the funding it would require. Created with the assistance of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the bill would raise the approximately $500,000 to $1 million necessary for its launch through a 2- or 3-cent tax per pound of pet foodRead more at www.time.com |
“Addressing homelessness (in all its forms) should be the number one priority of any compassionate society.”
– EdmundBurke | Although people 50 and older are traditionally a small part of the homeless population, their numbers have grown as the economy has stagnated. |
A snapshot of the Sacramento area’s graying homeless population shows a group that came to the streets as a result of midlife job loss and health problems, not chronic addiction and mental health issues. |
And at the Gathering Inn, which feeds and shelters Placer County’s homeless, 27 percent of people seeking services each night are age 50 to 62 – up from 10 percent in 2004. |
Growing subsidence risks, apart from being expensive for owners, are liable to drive down prices on properties built on clay or sand. | Extreme weather possibly linked to climate change, as well as construction on less stable ground, have provoked unprecedented foundation failures in houses nationwide. Foundation repair companies report a doubling and tripling of their business in the last two decades with no let-up even during the recession |
| Clay soils, like those beneath the houses of Mr. Derse and Ms. Wilson, shrink during droughts and swell during floods, causing structures to bob. And because sandier soil loses its adhesive properties in dry conditions, it pulls away from foundations. Heavy rains cause it to shift or just collapse beneath structures. |
Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association indicates that since the 1990s there has been an accelerating trend nationwide toward more extended dry periods followed by downpours. Whether due to random climate patterns or global warming, the swings between hot and dry weather and severe rain or snow have profoundly affected soil underneath buildings. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
1. Both consumer confidence and sentiment have fallen unexpectedly.
2. After-tax personal incomes adjusted for inflation have flattened.
3. Sales of both new and existing homes took a surprising stumble.
4. Orders for most durable goods are down.
5. Manufacturing has slowed.
6. Jobless claims are up.
7. Fourth-quarter GDP growth came largely from a slower pace of inventory liquidation, not from an increase in consumer spending.
8. And, as a matter of fact, consumer spending weakened last quarter. |
Kellner also points out that consumer confidence has dropped to a nearly 30-year low, new home sales hit record lows, existing home sales are at a seven-month low, and even unemployment claims rose six of the past eight weeks. Read more at dailyreckoning.com |
The pace of job losses in the US economy continued to ease last month, with
private sector employers axing 20,000 jobs in February, compared to 60,000
in January.
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The figures from the payrolls firm ADP raised hopes ahead of official job
market statistics from the US Labour Department, which are due at the end of
this week. Worried by the severity of recent snow storms in the north east
of the country, analysts currently expect the report to show that the
world’s largest economy lost 50,000 non-farm jobs last month, compared to
20,000 in January.
Read more at www.independent.co.uk |
| There has been a tremendous surge in the use of local currencies over the past two decades. Today there are over 2,500 different local currency systems operating in countries throughout the world. Since 2002 there has been an upsurge in local currency experiments. Such currencies aim to raise the resilience of local economies by encouraging re-localisation of buying and food production. The drive for this change has arisen from a range of community-based initiatives and social movements. |
| Exchange is one of mankind’s most basic and demonstrated rights. LCC believes local currencies are an established basic right and basic need, preceding state, federal, and global controls. In a balanced scenario a local currency would interact with national and global currencies, but also stand on it’s own, weathering the changing conditions outside it’s local sphere. The LCC has been established as a private member association, a peer-to-peer private-contract forum to serve the needs of its members.Read more at localcurrencycouncil.org |
It is not so much a decline, as a rotting from within, leading to the sudden collapse. Another metaphor would be an earthquake after years of pressures building up on the tectonic plates. | All these complex systems share certain characteristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes — what scientists call “the amplifier effect.” Causal relationships are often nonlinear, which means that traditional methods of generalizing through observation are of little use. Thus, when things go wrong in a complex system, the scale of disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate. |
| in such systems, a relatively minor shock can cause a disproportionate disruption. |
| empires exhibit many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems — including the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly. |
| If ever an empire fell off a cliff, rather than gently declining, it was the one founded by Lenin. |
| most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises. |
empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse.
Read more at www.latimes.com |
Arms manufacturing and dealing is the most successful growth industry. | In the area of durable goods, only about 4.4% of them, on average, were purchased by the pentagon over the last 17 years. But since the beginning of the financial crisis, durable spending by private industry decreased…while pentagon spending went up. The most recent figures show that 8% of durable orders are now bought by the military. |
| The numbers may show an increase in durable goods sold, but tanks and armored personnel carriers don’t lead to genuine growth. They lead to Soviet-style zombie growth…by the government, of the government, and for the government. The rest of the economy shrinks. |
| Fannie Mae guarantees almost a third of the $12 trillion home mortgage market – or about $4 trillion. And guess who guarantees Fannie Mae? You do!Read more at dailyreckoning.com |
In its submission to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), Foundem, a
price comparison site, accused Google of posing an “immediate threat to
competition and innovation”.
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Foundem asked the FCC to include search engines in its proposed Open Internet
rules.
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“Search engines have become the internet’s gatekeepers and are arguably
as essential a component of its infrastructure as the network itself,”
the filing states. “Google’s overwhelming dominance of search and
search advertising, coupled with its ability to arbitrarily penalise rivals
and systematically favour its own services, makes the need for search
neutrality particularly pressing.”
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Is this the lull before the storm for US mortgages?
