Free Republic

Why Biden thinks the Chinese Communists are “not bad folks” and “not competition for us.” “Biden Gets China,” headlined the January 2, 2012 report in The Atlantic. As author Steve Clemons explained, “Vice President Joe Biden will take the lead on the administrations next phase China policy.” This marked a shift to a “strategy of engagement with Biden at the top,” that allows the US to deal with China’s likely next president from a Vice President to a Vice President/Next President status -- and to continue both the Departments of State’s and Treasury’s ongoing engagement with other designated key Chinese...

...Biden on Friday announced that Cathy Russell, the head of the powerful White House personnel office, would leave to assume the role of executive director of UNICEF.... ...A longtime adviser to the Bidens, Russell served in the White House and State Department during the Obama administration. She was U.S. ambassador for global women’s issues under former President Obama, a role that Biden highlighted in Friday’s announcement....

US Home Prices Just Accelerated At Their Fastest Pace On Record According to the Case-Shiller indices, home prices in America’s 20 largest cities have exploded at 14.88% YoY in April – the highest since Nov 2005…Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle reported highest year-over-year gains among 20 cities surveyed… All cities are seeing home prices appreciate at double digits (a little higher than The Fed’s 2% “goal”). But, on a national scale, it gets even worse. Case-Shiller’s National Home Price Index rose 14.59% YoY in April – that is the fastest pace of home price inflation on record (back to 1988) That...

The Silver Tsunami is estimated to hit in earnest as the number of seniors aged 60 or older who pass away each year rises during the 2020s and 2030s. In the decade from 2007 to 2017, roughly 730,000 U.S. homes were released into the market each year by seniors aged 60 or older. From 2017 to 2027 and from 2027 to 2037 that number is set to rise to 920,000 and 1.17 million per year, respectively. This means more than 27% of today’s owner-occupied homes will become available by 2037... In Central Texas, Romeo Manzanilla, 2020 President of Austin Board...

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) rolled out a plan to offer grants up to $25,000 to low-income black individuals to help with a down payment and closing costs on home purchases.At first glance, to the economically uninformed, this seems like it's a good idea. We want as many people as possible to own homes for many obvious reasons.Why not subsidize low-income buyers with a $25,000 grant? This would mean that it would be easier to buy a house in a low-income area. The more houses that are bought, the higher the demand, and prices will rise, benefitting everyone.But as with all...

EXPERTS say 3D-printed houses will be "mainstream by 2025", and could put an end to Britain's housing crisis. A new report details how Brits are less than a decade away from enjoying lower house prices thanks to a robot revolution in the construction of homes. 3D printing, or "additive manufacturing", is a process of layering up a material to build complicated structures. It works just like regular home printers – but instead of ink, a 3D printer will use materials like plastic or metal. Using giant 3D printers, it's been proven possible to quickly and cheaply build homes. Sadly the...

A pair of top Obama-appointed bank regulators still serving in the Trump administration could spark another mortgage meltdown by lowering credit standards and encouraging risky lending practices. Democrat Mel Watt, who is serving a special five-year term as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is pushing the mortgage-lending giants he regulates — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — to offer home loans to deadbeat borrowers with shaky credit, setting up conditions for another housing-market crash, industry officials warn. Meanwhile, the other Obama holdover — liberal Democrat Richard Cordray, who continues to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau through 2018...

As the effects of the housing crisis further recede, markers of distress are declining, with one notable exception: Among the batches of severely delinquent mortgages bought by institutional investors, foreclosures are on the rise. The trend is a reminder of the reasons many community advocates resisted allowing institutional investors to buy delinquent mortgages in government auctions that began in 2010. Wall Street, those advocates said, shouldn’t be rewarded for its role in creating the housing crisis with the chance to buy for pennies on the dollar the very assets whose values it dented. The government auctions promised a risk-sharing solution...

You'd be forgiven for thinking that all is right with the housing market these days. With prices and sales both soaring nationally, the housing panic of 2007 seems like an all-but-forgotten nightmare. But it's still very much with us. The prestigious State of the Nation's Housing report for 2017, published by Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies just last week, touts the newfound health of the housing market. "A decade after the onset of the Great Recession, the national housing market is finally returning to normal," the report says. "With incomes rising and household growth strengthening, the housing sector is...

Posted 2008 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. Romans 8:35,37 KJV All the outrage over Bernie Madeoff is pretty surprising. Sure he bilked people out of everything they had, putting them in financial disaster and bankruptcy? So he lied to people over decades taking everything they saved in a fraudulent investment Ponzi scheme bankrupting Pension/Charity and College funds. So he was lying to investigators about those cooked books...

On Tuesday Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of “cheering” the housing crisis that saw millions of Americans lose their homes. Hillary Clinton was probably hoping her comments during the crisis would not surface.

The elite Wall Street bank announced on Thursday it reached a $5.1 billion deal to put to rest claims made by the government over its toxic mortgage deals. ... Goldman said it has agreed to pay a $2.4 billion civil penalty, pay $875 million in cash and provide $1.8 billion in consumer relief.

New foreclosures may be back to nearly normal, but the mess from the epic housing disaster in the last decade is far from gone. Bank repossessions, the final stage of the foreclosure process, jumped 66 percent year over year in the third quarter of this year, according to RealtyTrac, a foreclosure sales and analytics company. It's the largest annual rise ever recorded in bank repossessions by RealtyTrac. More than 123,000 homes went back to the bank in just three months. "In states such as New Jersey, Massachusetts and New York, a flood of deferred distress from the last housing crisis...

It wasn't greed that caused the mortgage mess. In large part, the mess was the product of government policies designed to increase home ownership among the poor and ethnic minorities. Today Peter Wallison points out how Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA created a demand for bad mortgages that encouraged mortgage brokers to generate millions of them. From the Wall Street Journal: Mortgage brokers had to be able to sell their mortgages to someone. They could only produce what those above them in the distribution chain wanted to buy. In other words, they could only respond to demand, not...

They're doing it again! When the last housing bubble burst, politicians blamed "greedy banks." They said mortgage companies lent money recklessly, making loans to people with dubious credit, for down payments as low as 3 percent. "It will work out," said the optimistic bankers. Regulators didn't disagree. Everyone said, "Home prices will keep going up." And home prices did -- until they didn't. The bubble popped in 2007. Lots of people were hurt, and politicians took more of your tax money to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac along with reckless banks. They also gave the Federal Housing Administration...

A former member of a panel created to examine the causes of the financial crisis of 2007 says government policies that were really at the core of the crash are being quietly resurrected by the Obama administration, and that they are creating another housing bubble similar to the one that burst more than eight years ago. Appearing Friday on The Mark Levin Show, Peter Wallison, author of the new book “Hidden in Plain Sight,” and the Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Financial Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said that the federal government “was the central player” in the...

Subprime Scandal: We've long suspected the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wasn't honest in examining events before the meltdown. But an ex-commissioner says the probe was actually a full-blown political cover-up. In a just-released book, former FCIC member Peter Wallison says that a Democratic Congress worked with the commission's Democratic chairman to whitewash the government's central role in the mortgage debacle. The conspiracy helped protect some of the Democrats' biggest stars from scrutiny and accountability while helping justify the biggest government takeover of the financial sector since the New Deal. Wallison's sobering, trenchantly written "Hidden in Plain Sight: What Really Caused...

It's not in the printed text, but the most revealing words in President Obama's seventh State of the Union address came near the end. After the scripted line, "I have no more campaigns to run," elicited Republican applause, Obama ad libbed, "I know, because I won both of them." Thus the last quarter of Obama's presidency resembles the first quarter, when he shut off discussion with House Republicans by saying, "I won." But his second winning percentage was lower than his first -- the only American president of which that can be said -- and the House now has a...

Subprime Scandal: We've long suspected the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wasn't honest in examining events before the meltdown. But an ex-commissioner says the probe was actually a full-blown political cover-up. In a just-released book, former FCIC member Peter Wallison says that a Democratic Congress worked with the commission's Democratic chairman to whitewash the government's central role in the mortgage debacle. The conspiracy helped protect some of the Democrats' biggest stars from scrutiny and accountability while helping justify the biggest government takeover of the financial sector since the New Deal. Wallison's sobering, trenchantly written "Hidden in Plain Sight: What Really Caused...

What caused the financial crisis? How can we prevent another one from happening again? The answers you most often hear to those questions are (1) greed and deregulation and (2) the Dodd-Frank law. But they're patently inadequate. Greed -- or the desire for monetary gain -- has always been with us and always will be. And no one has convincingly linked financial deregulation to the crisis. Dodd-Frank, enacted to increase regulation, confers too-big-to-fail status on very large financial institutions, which incentivizes unduly risky behavior and penalizes smaller competitors. The real problem was housing finance, argues my American Enterprise Institute colleague...