n a few weeks we will make a choice that will decide our future.
I follow an economist named Bob Proctor. He has called the top and bottom of every market crash since the 70s correctly.
Also, he perfectly predicted the current real estate market meltdown and the picture he paints about what will happen in the next couple years
is terrifying.He thinks it will be worse then the great depression.
The banks in the U.S. are going under one after the other. Countrywide the largest morgage bank in the world,Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch which are 3 out of the top 5 wall street firms. Also, Fanny and Freddy Mae which hold 50 percent of the home loans in the United States.
The government took them over because they are essentially bankrupt.If they didn't the entire financially system would virtually shut down, the stock market would crash and we would suffer beyond what any of us have seen before.
McCain just like Bush " doesn't understand the economy".
That not just my opinion its his own words. Not only does he not understand how to fix it but he does not understand exactly what is broken.
It is no surprise that he doesn't. The people that make up these securities use complex mathematical models very few people understand.
Bush and McCain both can take the credit for this mess since they helped deregulate the laws that were protecting us.
Bush's economic advisor Phil Graham wrote the deregulation bill that allowed banks to take huge risks with all of our future.
Now, Phil Graham is the head of McCain's economic policy.He is also McCain's choice for the next secretary of the treasury.
No one in this country can afford for that to happen. The last time Bush met with his economic advisors was in March. He either didn't care or didn't realize that anything was wrong. Phil Graham had the guts to say that we are in a mental recession after he helped create the worst economy meltdown in our lifetime.
It will take the best and brightest minds in the world to get us out of this nightmare. As bad as Bush has done, McCain would be
even more destructive because things are in much worse shape. The next president will not inherit a surplus like Bush did but a tanking economy and a 11,600,000,000,000 (trillion) dollars deficit. Most of it Bush created and it will take decades to pay it back.
If you do what you have always done then you will get what you have always got.
When it comes to policy Bush and McCain are the same 90 percent of the time.
So why are the polls even close then ?
The chairman of McCains campaign recently said that people don't vote on issues they vote on a personality composite. Which means he is trying to sell you personality instead of results.
He believes people will vote against their own interests.
Let's teach him we are smarter than that .
Hold them accountable NOW! while it will still help.
Elect Obama Biden 2008
Is This the Right Time To Buy?
Why bank-foreclosed homes are getting even cheaper.
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A few weeks ago I was cruising the real-estate Web sites, looking at homes for sale in my suburban town, when I came across one that surprised me: a nearby, nearly new, 5,000-square-foot Cape Cod with a four-car garage on a nice piece of land. The price? Just $699,000. Even in the current downturn, that's lower than I'd expect for a house this big. So even though I'm not in the market to move, I read the listing more closely. I quickly noticed it was "bank-owned," which explained the lower-than-expected price. Then in the fine print was another detail: while the bank was offering a traditional agent's commission, there was an additional incentive: an extra 2 percent for any agent who brought them a signed contract by Sept. 30.
It's a sign of the times. As Congress listens to administration officials explain why taxpayers should offer hundreds of billions to help bailout banks that are teetering due to investments in bad loans, homeowners far from Wall Street or the Capitol continue to feel the direct effects of these mortgages gone bad. According to RealtyTrac, banks now own a record 820,000 homes, up from 224,000 at the end of 2006 and 440,000 at year-end 2007. By the end of 2008, says Rick Sharga, senior vice president at RealtyTrac, banks may own as many as 1.2 million homes—equal to about one third of all the homes for sale in America. And as those inventories grow, so does the pressure to sell them.
"The banks are getting more aggressive and starting to offer incentives to people to move these properties," Sharga says. On some listings, banks are offering to sweeten the commission by a percentage point or two. On some properties, they're offering a lump-sum bonus. Based on what Sharga is seeing, the incentives are typically used when a foreclosed home has been sitting for a long time.
RealtyTrac has not noticed extra incentives for agents if they sell a house by a certain date, but other professionals have. In a way, that's not surprising. Banks have to file quarterly financial statements, which include their balance sheets, so it's only natural they'd like to get distressed properties off the books. In the mutual-fund business, portfolio managers have long engaged in "window dressing," the perfectly legal practice of selling stocks before filing deadlines to make a portfolio appear more attractive. Likewise in the auto industry, smart shoppers typically wait until the end of the month to shop, knowing that commission-hungry salesman are more apt to be flexible, to add one more sale to their monthly tally to increase their bonus. As more banks try to move properties, can house hunters strike better deals on bank-owned homes at the end of each quarter?
Fran Yerardi sees some signs of that. Yerardi is a Boston-based real estate investor who buys dozens of homes each year. In the last year, he says, banks have become a lot better at plowing through their inventory of foreclosed homes, and that's partly because they're putting in more incentive compensation for the agents who list their homes. "What we're seeing is they drag their feet [at] the beginning of the month—they'll hem and they'll haw, they won't accept your price," Yerardi says. "Then they'll say 'We accept your price and we need to close by next week'." He believes this is because the agents get bonuses for monthly sales. "We're seeing a ton of that."
Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online real-estate brokerage, also believes banks are increasingly time-sensitive when it comes to selling foreclosed properties. "Many buyers are oblivious to the quarterly and annual [filing deadlines]," he says, pointing out that it's not just banks that face pressure to make quarterly numbers but also builders. Kelman says he's seeing larger discounts from banks, particularly in northern cities like Boston and Chicago, where fewer homes sell during snowy winters. "We think what's driving this is a general anxiety among banks and sellers that properties which don't sell this fall will be on the market until the spring of 2009," Kelman says.
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