NewsTrust - Real Estate - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

Phoenix rising: Can “the world’s least sustainable city” go green?

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:35:00 -0800

Grist - By Greg Hanscom - Feb. 13 - What was the most surprising thing that came out of Andrew Ross’s two-year research stint in Phoenix, Ariz.? For my money, it’s this: People who live there (weirdly) don’t expect their desert civilization to collapse around them at any moment. “One of Ne

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A Liberal Is a Villager Who’s Been Screwed By a Mortgage Servicer

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Firedoglake - By David Dayen - Mar. 06 (Opinion) - Sometimes it takes only a little shared experience to recognize the major problems in our society. For Milbank to understand the mortgage crisis, he needed to experience it first-hand. And he recognizes that he’s one of the relatively luckier ones; borrowers without his income stream or resources are being forced into foreclosure when they confront these situations.

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Rx for Catastrophe

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 13:55:00 -0800

Miller-McCune - By Melinda Burns - Jan. 23 (Review) - A book on disaster law and policy urges stronger federal intervention to shore up natural barriers and protect the most vulnerable members of the community. A photograph of a bayou in Louisiana. One law professor looks at disaster law and policy in the

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Nobel Prize Winner Joseph Stiglitz Calls for Jail Time for Corporate Crooks

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

dailyfinance.com - By Sam Gustin - Nov. 12 (Interview) - An institutionalized system of skewed incentives allowed Wall Street bankers and other corporate executives to gamble with America's wealth and then get away largely scot-free after the house of cards came tumbling down, plunging the U.S. into the worst economic crisis in decades and destroying trillions of dollars of wealth worldwide. That's the analysis of Joseph Stiglitz, an internationally renowned economist and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics. (His latest book, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, is just out in paperback.) See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/c4QeuD

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The Next Boom

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Matthew Yglesias - By Matthew Yglesias - Oct. 25 (Opinion) - Even people who are eager to move to denser urban neighborhoods are almost shockingly hostile to the idea of anything in the existing neighborhood being redeveloped in a denser way. So it seems to me that any change that happens, if it does happen, will have to take place on a longer time horizon than Doherty and Leinberger seem to have in mind since there’s a lot of persuasion work that has to be done.

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It's Time For Jail Terms

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Digby's Hullabaloo - By Digby - Oct. 14 (Opinion) - People should go to directly jail at this point, do not pass go. The real estate market is still officially f***ed and while everyone wants it to "find its bottom" coddling the big financial institutions and their crooked subsidiaries and contractors has not worked all that well for average Americans at any point in this ongoing crisis (or for Democrats for that matter.)

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Scare the Hell out of Bankers: It's the Key to Recovery - New Republic

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By James Galbraith - Jul. 09 (Opinion) - The financial crisis in America isn't over. It's ongoing, it remains unresolved, and it stands in the way of full economic recovery. The cause, at the deepest level, was a breakdown in the rule of law. And it follows that the first step toward prosperity is to restore the rule of law in the financial sector.

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Where Power Lives

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Observer - By Tom Acitelli - Mar. 24 (Interview) - As the city's fortunes have changed, so have its neighborhoods. We plot where New York's A-listers now live, and profile two buildings at the center of the shift. Don't have an Observer.com account? You can use your Facebook account instead. The New

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Is the American dream a nightmare?

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

GlobalPost - By Susan E. Reed - Apr. 23 (Opinion) - The hidden menace of homeownership. It was a startling and controversial conclusion. But now it is beginning to make more sense. It turns out that a high rate of homeownership just might be bad for the economy.Homeownership has been a long nurtured desire of many Americans. Public officials relaxed mortgage requirements 10 years ago because they wanted everyone to live the dream. It seemed to be great for the economy, until the crash last year.

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Calling the hardship department

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Pilot & Today - By Joanne Palmer - Jan. 28 (Opinion) - I have morphed into what realtors call a “motivated seller.” My furniture fantasies have disappeared. I now daydream about a high-paying, full-time job with benefits and eating something besides pasta for dinner. I am in the worst financial shape of my life. This is a hard thing to admit, especially since it’s my own darn fault.

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Wash Post's Pearlstein: Anyone opposing the bailout is ignorant

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Oct. 02 (Opinion) - Pearlstein -- and so many other bailout cheerleaders -- scorns those same concerns as grounded in stupidity and ignorance when they come from the ugly, loudmouth, teeming, insubordinate masses who refuse to obediently bear the massive debt being tossed on their backs.

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Why the Bailout Sells America Short

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Nomi Prins - Oct. 01 (Opinion) - The $700 billion bailout bill that failed in the House after a dramatic Monday afternoon vote addressed many things, but not the regulatory vacuum that allowed Wall Street to get us into this mess. Wrapped in a bipartisan bow, this plan--dubbed a "rescue" package on the Hill and a "bailout" elsewhere--will neither save the economy nor permanently shore up Wall Street.

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Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson, U.S Treasury Department

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Real Clear Politics - By Henry Paulson - Sep. 19 (Press Release) - We must now take further, decisive action to fundamentally and comprehensively address the root cause of our financial system's stresses.

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Heck of a Job, Bernanke

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - Sep. 13 (Opinion) - Lehman has been going down for weeks, despite having the privilege of borrowing money from the Federal Reserve using its junky mortgage bonds as collateral. The next question is whether Henry Paulson, the rough-mannered Secretary of the Treasury, and Ben Bernanke, the milder- mannered Fed Chairman, get into their ambulance and scream off to the rescue once again.

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Wall Street Sank Freddie and Fannie

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Dean Starkman - Sep. 09 (Opinion) - Wall Street dominated the subprime market, which crashed the credit market, which crashed the asset values of Freddie and Fannie, obliterating their (very thin) capital bases and leading us to this moment. Listen, you'll get no elegies from me for these government-sponsored candy stores. It's clear they used their taxpayer-supported advantages in the financial markets to keep their regulators at bay and buy protection from Congress. That stinks. The Wall Street Journal today smartly reminds readers of the staggering size of the GSEs' lobbying bill--$170 million over ten years. Ponder that one for a second. As their time was running out, they spent $3.5 million in the first quarter alone on forty-two lobbying firms. That's $83,000 a piece-- probably enough to pay the sushi bills.

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A Look at the Financial Crisis

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman, Danny Schechter, Max Fraad Wolff, Juan Gonzalez - Jul. 17 (Interview) - SCHECHTER: The FBI...[has] 1,200 investigations underway...into Bear Stearns... IndyMac, and other banks. So, I think when the dust shifts, you know, finally, we're going to find out that this is a criminal action--cabal, really--by people in the market who were out, driven by greed, to make as much money as they can. The victims of all this can be seen in the mounting foreclosures that are sweeping the nation.

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Developing the New "Capitalists' Man"

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Dean Baker - Apr. 28 (Opinion) - For example, in some of the rapidly deflating bubble markets, many homeowners are in situations where they owe $400,000 or $500,000 on a home that today is worth $100,000 less than the amount of their mortgage. In this situation, homeowners can effectively save $100,000 if they stop paying the mortgage and let the bank foreclose on the house. . . . As a committed capitalist, we might expect Mr. Paulson to applaud people taking initiative and acting to improve their plight. Instead, he is insisting that these homeowners should ignore their self-interest and act in the interest of the banks.

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Wells Fargo Challenged on Racial Inequities

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

United for a Fair Economy - By United for a Fair Economy - Apr. 25 (Press Release) - Wells Fargo's Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) report for 2006 shows a substantial increase in high-cost, subprime loans . . . African-Americans were 3.69 times more likely than whites and Latinos were 1.82 times more likely than whites to receive a high-cost loan from Wells Fargo in 2006.

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Mortgage Mess . NOW - PBS

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:02:26 -0800

NowPublic - Nov. 15 (Press Release) - NOW connects the dots to see the extent to which recklessness, corruption and greed created this subprime mess that now threatens to undermine our entire economy. David Brancaccio talks to Rep. Keith Ellison, who grew up in North Minneapolis and who has pushed legislation to address the crisis. He also talks to Ameriquest whistleblower Mark Bomchill, who explains the competitive "boiler room" culture that encouraged brokers to aggressively push mortgage products they knew clients would be unable to repay.

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Unequal Fallout from the Bursting Mortgage Bubble

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:31:11 -0700

Common Dreams - By Jeremy Koulish - Aug. 31 (Opinion) - While the American dream of home ownership has turned out to be merely a house of cards for hundreds of thousands of families, the costs of the mortgage crisis are not being shouldered equally by those at the top of the economic ladder.

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Debt Crisis: No Bail-Outs for Loansharks

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 23:22:24 -0700

AlterNet - By Paul Krugman - Aug. 19 (Opinion) - Many on Wall Street are clamoring for a bailout - for Fannie Mae or the Federal Reserve or someone to step in and buy mortgage-backed securities from troubled hedge funds. But that would be like having the taxpayers bail out Enron or WorldCom when they went bust - it would be saving bad actors from the consequences of their misdeeds. ... Yet our desire to avoid letting bad actors off the hook shouldn't prevent us from doing the right thing, both morally and in economic terms, for borrowers who were victims of the bubble.

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