In my never ending quest to understand more about why we are currently in a recession and why my house is worth less than a brace of Latte's from Starbucks, I seek insight from teh intertubes. I found such insight at the Church of the Apocalyptic Kiwi - (who were also inspirational during the presidential race, fyi) Enjoy!
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
A middle-aged couple who bought a home in my neighborhood are in a terrible situation. They paid too much for their new house, which needed a lot of repairs, and they failed to aggressively work to sell their existing home. Therefore, they now have two houses.
They continue to live in their original home while their new house (two houses away from where I live) has been vacant for three years and it is falling apart. I’m not talking about chipped paint. There are huge holes in the roof that are causing the house to rot out.
Check out the garage roof too:
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People who know a lot about rehabbing houses tell me that if this house and garage don’t get immediate attention, they will need to be completely torn down.
Saturday Night Live presented this skit wherein Timothy Geithner graded the bank stress tests:
TMP has presented a terrible, yet not surprising, description of the enforcement arm of the SEC. Based on this detailed description of this dyfunctional enforcement arm, no wonder securities fraud has been running rampant. Oh, and on a related note, Huffpo reports that:
The inspector general tasked with overseeing and auditing the Federal Reserve knows pretty much nothing about what the Fed is doing. . . . She did not know where the Fed has invested its $2 trillion on the liability side of the balance sheet. "I do not know. We have not looked at that specific area at this particular point on," she said.
Could you ever imagine George W. Bush scolding credit card companies for "ripping off" and "abusing" American consumers? Barack Obama is proposing to do away with the fine print and to do away with profits that depend on misleading hard-working families by hiding fees and penalties. He wants to sign a bill reforming the industry by Memorial Day.