Free Republic

Karl Denninger was one of the founders of the Tea Party back just a few years ago when some concerned conservatives wanted to fire back at the government for what they said was unjust practices. Today, similar sentiments are being echoed by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Is it right to make comparisons between the two groups? Denninger says that, yes, to some degree the comparisons are indeed accurate. The Occupy movement, however, can learn from some of the mistakes that he says the Tea Party succumbed to. “The problem with protests and the political process is that it is...

• Q2 jumps by 67 percent year over year • Buyers done in by ‘creative mortgages’ according to figures released Monday by Foreclosures.com, a Central Valley-based real estate investment advisory firm and publisher of foreclosure property information. "Year over year at the end of the second quarter of 2006, foreclosure activity in California has increased more than 67 percent," says Alexis McGee, president of Fair Oaks-based ForeclosureS.com. The once hot housing markets in Las Vegas and Phoenix are cooling off rapidly and defaults there are on the rise as well, she says. "Both Las Vegas and Phoenix were impacted by...

Tennessee ranks among the top 10 foreclosure rates in the nation for the first quarter of 2006, according to recent figures. Foreclosures in Tennessee were on the rise in the first quarter of 2006, with a 92 percent increase from the previous quarter and a 147 percent increase from the first quarter of 2005, according to RealyTrac's 2006 Q1 Foreclosure Market Report. The report shows a total of 11,718 properties which were in some state of foreclosure in Tennessee during the first quarter of 2006. National numbers show 323,102 properties in foreclosure for the first quarter of 2006, for increases...

Do higher house prices make a country richer? The answer is simply “no”. If the market value of the stock is raised, those who own it are made better off by as much as those who will buy their houses from them are made worse off. Higher prices merely redistribute income among residents, principally from the young to the old. So why do fast-growing economies tend to have soaring house prices and slow-growing ones the opposite? The answer is not that higher house prices make a country richer, but the opposite: the wealthier the country, the more expensive its housing....