Free Republic

WASHINGTON — Who is paying for the two-month extension of the payroll tax cut working its way through Congress? The cost is being dropped in the laps of most people who buy homes or refinance beginning next year. The typical person who buys a $200,000 home or refinances that amount starting on Jan. 1 would have to pay roughly $17 more a month for their mortgage, thanks to a fee increase included in the payroll tax cut bill that the Senate passed Saturday. The White House said the fee increases would be phased in gradually. The legislation provides a two-month...

Single-family originations will likely dip in 2012 because of fewer refinances, according to Frank Nothaft, chief economist at Freddie Mac. The market will see a refinance burnout, Nothaft said, with a dwindling pool of eligible borrowers and higher mortgage rates by the second half of 2012. Nothaft projects $1.3 trillion in single-family mortgage originations in 2011, compared to $1.14 trillion in 2012 and $1.07 trillion in 2013. The Freddie Mac projections for 2012 come as a Pew Research Center study showed a record-low number of adults married in the U.S. About 51% of all adults were married as of 2010,...

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Moscow today, in the largest of more than 70 protests across Russia, to voice their anger at alleged election fraud and to demand that the results of the parliamentary elections be cancelled, a new election be held, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin resign. Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, one of the organizers of the rally, explained the protesters’ demands to ABC News. “Our demand is to cancel these criminal elections, because Putin stole about 13 million votes. Secondly, to fire Mr. [Vladimir] Churov, who is responsible for the election and to...

Imagine that you are in the business of lending money. At one time, the business model was simple; money was lent to people who had a high probability of repaying it. The rules were then changed by federal government in the interest of "fairness," with laws passed such as the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and federal agencies like Housing & Urban Development (HUD) activated. To stay in business, you must follow the government's dictates. Then the government changes the rules again by changing the percentage of loans that go to certain types of borrowers in the interest of "fairness." Just...

Stocks closed in negative territory in thin, shortened trading Friday as investors were reluctant to go long ahead of the weekend and amid ongoing worries over the euro zone. The Dow and S&P posted their worst Thanksgiving week since the Great Depression on a percentage basis. The Dow Jones Industrial Average erased their gains to finish lower, led by H-P [HPQ 25.39 -0.39 (-1.51%) ] and Chevron [CVX 92.29 -1.46 (-1.56%)]. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq also ended lower, logging a seventh consecutive decline. Some traders are watching for 1,150 on the S&P as the next key level. The...

Why work in America?

For decades we were warned that when the Baby Boomers started to retire that this country would be facing a retirement crisis of unprecedented magnitude. Well, that day has arrived ladies and gentlemen. Back on January 1st, the Baby Boomers began to retire and more than 10,000 of them will be retiring every single day for years to come. Most of them have not saved up nearly enough money for retirement. At the same time, private sector pension plans are failing all over the place, hundreds of state and local government pension plans from coast to coast are woefully...

Thanksgiving is the holiday that pulls families together, squeezing them around a table for a feast of turkey, tradition and togetherness. We encourage conversations meant to be personally relevant, but sometimes they turn into a horizontal Babel, with each generation speaking in a different tongue. It's a stretch to identify an entire generation by its tastes in fashion and music, but such tastes offer strong clues. You can separate boomers from Generation Xers and millenials by who prefers the Beatles, Michael Jackson or Lady Gaga. Seniors who came of age during World War II still groove on Glenn Miller and...

Dee Dee Myers, former press secretary to President Bill Clinton, goes on Meet the Press and calls Newt Gingrich a political "sociopath." Does moderator David Gregory call her out? Nope. To the contrary, Gregory proceeds to play a clip of convicted felon Jack Abramoff accusing Newt of "corruption." View the video here.

The tar sandhills near Mills in north central Nebraska, through which the Keystone XL pipeline is planned to be built. The woman seated before the row of suited state legislators in her red Husker team hoodie was choking on tears. She had grown up on a farm in Nebraska. Her parents had grown up on farms, in the days before electricity and running water, and now she said generations of toil and sweat could be destroyed in an instant by a $7bn pipeline project. A leak from the pipeline, which would run from the tar sands of Alberta to the...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Home prices dropped in nearly three quarters of U.S. cities over the summer, dragged down by a decline in buyer interest and a high number of foreclosures. The National Association of Realtors said Wednesday that the median price for previously occupied homes fell in the July-September quarter in 111 out of 150 metropolitan areas tracked by the group. Prices are compared with the same quarter from the previous year. Fourteen cities had double-digit declines.

Will Baby Boomers be the last generation to enjoy the modern concept of a leisure-filled retirement? It's a worthy question to ponder in light of a new Pew Research Center report showing a growing wealth gap between young and old in the United States. Using government data over the last 25 years, Pew found that households headed by those over 65 have made "dramatic gains" in economic well-being, while those headed by younger adults have fallen steadily behind. In 2009, elderly households possessed 42 percent more median net worth than their same-age counterparts had in 1984. Young adults veered in...

Despite all the evidence of the past several decades, you still have not grasped one simple fact: that, just about a century after the last one ended, we engaged in a great civil war, one that will determine the kind of country we and our descendants shall henceforth live in for at least the next hundred years — and, one hopes, a thousand. Since there hasn’t been any shooting, so far, some call the struggle we are now involved in the “culture wars,” but I have another, better name for it: the Cold Civil War In many ways, this new...

Dustin Hoffman’s graduate is rooting for Mitt Romney. Woodstock’s attendees are donating to the Republican National Committee. Haight Ashbury’s residents are complaining about big government. The long-haired, dope-smoking, free-loving baby boomers are becoming majority-Republican and politically indistinguishable from their elder cousins in the so-called “silent generation,” according to a new Pew Research Center study. That’s the takeaway lesson from a comprehensive new study of the baby boomers’ changing political attitudes released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

Winding down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was never going to be easy, given the mortgage giants' market dominance and the housing lobby of Realtors, home builders, banks and others arrayed against reform. But if even a Republican House of Representatives can't take a baby step toward a private market after some $142 billion in taxpayers losses, who will? It's a question that House Speaker John Boehner might consider as he reads a letter that Florida Republican Bill Posey and New York Democrat Gary Ackerman are circulating to fellow Members for signatures. The letter supports an amendment to an appropriations...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: As I mentioned, "With his jobs plan stymied in Congress by Republican opposition --" this is the New York Times. The truth is his jobs plan is stymied in Congress by his inability to get Democrats to vote in majority for it. "-- President Obama on Monday will begin a series of executive-branch actions to confront housing, education and other economic problems over the coming months, heralded by a new mantra: 'We can’t wait' for lawmakers to act.' According to an administration official, Mr. Obama will kick off his new offensive in Las Vegas --" where he...

Banks Not Wanting to Lend is a myth. It’s a trendy thing to blame the banks for not wanting to lend, but it’s not reality. Don’t get me wrong…most everything else might be able to be blamed on them, but not this. This is what makes the problem in mortgage and housing so fundamentally grave. It’s just not as easy as lowering rates, doing a mass refi event, or pulling Foreclosures off the market. After nearly 5 years, if there was an easy fix (such as printing trillions of dollars in order to try to create inflation) housing would be...

Most people have no idea that Wall Street has become a gigantic financial casino.  The big Wall Street banks are making tens of billions of dollars a year in the derivatives market, and nobody in the financial community wants the party to end.  The word "derivatives" sounds complicated and technical, but understanding them is really not that hard.  A derivative is essentially a fancy way of saying that a bet has been made.  Originally, these bets were designed to hedge risk, but today the derivatives market has mushroomed into a mountain of speculation unlike anything the world has ever...

Congressman: Obama should unilaterally ‘refinance every home mortgage’ [VIDEO] By Nicholas Ballasy - The Daily Caller 11:43 PM 10/21/2011 Virginia Democratic Rep. Jim Moran told The Daily Caller on Thursday evening that President Obama should “refinance every home mortgage” without congressional approval in order to “reset the economy.” “Absolutely, I think [Obama] should do that but there are not a lot of places where he can act unilaterally,” Moran told TheDC during Conservation International’s Oct. 20 dinner in Washington, D.C. “If he chooses to act unilaterally,” Moran said, “the likelihood is that there will be language in the appropriations bills...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The percentage of Americans who owned their homes has seen its biggest decline since the Great Depression, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The rate of home ownership fell to 65.1% in April 2010, 1.1 percentage points lower than it was in 2000. The decline was the biggest drop since the 1930s, when home ownership plunged 4.2%. The most recent decade-over-decade drop, however, only tells half the story. Home ownership during the 2000s "was really high in the middle of the decade, up to almost 70% at one point around 2004," said Ellen Wilson, a survey...