Ben Carson at HUD: Pyramid Scheme?

Last we heard of retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, he was proposed for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, presumably because he lives in a house and once lived in a city. We assume President-elect Trump will appoint a city planner as Surgeon General.

Dr. Carson’s fascination with Egyptian pyramids may influence U.S. cityscapes during the Trump administration. On the other hand, his spokesman told the press that Ben Carson thinks he’s unqualified to run a federal department. Any department. Oh, and the good doctor recently diagnosed the HUD-administered Fair Housing laws as “communist.”

More:

“Ben Carson Is Trump’s Pick for HUD Secretary, for Some Terrible Reason,” Eric Levitz, New York Magazine

“Ben Carson for HUD Secretary, Why?” Kriston Capps, CityLab

“Stop Treating HUD Like A Second-Tier Department,” Andrew Flowers, FiveThirtyEight

Update:

“Turns Out Ben Carson Didn’t Grow Up in Public Housing,” Adam K. Raymond, New York Magazine

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The Texas Housing Boom: It’s a Wash

The floods in Texas have claimed lives, destroyed homes and property, washed out bridges and roads. On the other hand, observes Dennis Mersereau, at least that crippling drought is history. 20 inches of rain fell on Texas in the past month, a volume of water that’s enough to turn Rhode Island into a lake.

Texas is prone to gully-washers and toad-stranglers, thunderstorms that turn washes and arroyos into rivers, and rivers into inland seas. Every couple of decades there’s a big one, but in the past 20 years Texas gained about 10 million new residents, and many bought houses. The big problem with the resulting housing boom: New housing built in flood-prone areas.

More:

“In Texas, the Race to Build in Harm’s Way Outpaces Flood-Risk Studies and Warming Impacts,” Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times

“Texas Is Paying the Price for Its Lack of Flood Infrastructure,” Kriston Kapps, CityLab

Related:

“Texas, Oklahoma Floodwaters Contain Sewage, Other Pollutants,” Jane J. Lee, National Geographic News

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Disposable. Sustainable. Plastic Bottles of Coke.

Q:  What’s full of empty calories, packed in disposable plastic, saves energy, helps Earth’s ecology, and improves the lives of the world’s poor?

A. Coca-Cola in 1.5 liter plastic bottles.

No More Foreclosed Homes

What’s all this blather about falling real estate values and home foreclosures? Stuff and nonsense.

Just look around you. There are no more “Foreclosed Homes” —  just “Bank-Owned” houses and “Motivated Sales.”

Just ask any Realtor®.

 

Caution:There are many underperfoming assets on the Real Estate Euphemism Market today. Not all semantic shifts and short sales of logic are bank-approved. Demand documents written in a language actually understood by some living human population without third-party approval.

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Hypocritical Housing Policy

It is the height of hypocrisy when self-proclaimed Free Market Fundamentalists support subsidizing borrowers through tax law and mortgage assistance and approving billions in lender bail-outs.

Allow housing prices to be determined by use value, not resale value (speculation). 

Stop debasing The American Dream by reducing it to a cheap sales pitchfor real estate

 

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Astronomics

 

The economy. What happened?

 

At last: An explanation that doesn’t depend on blind faith in some “Invisible Hand of the Market” or sleight-of-hand conspiracies in the Swaps market. Dr Neil Hair of Sydney, Australia offers this insight:

The House That Todd Built?

This is the house that Todd built. Perhaps. Todd Palin claims he built his family’s house on Lake Lucille (above) in 2002 with the help of a few “buddies” who are building contractors. At the same time, less than a mile away,  Palin pals and political contributors were building the monument to Sarah Palin’s stint as the Mayor of Wasilla (pop. 5500), The $12.5 million dollar Wasilla Sports Complex. Were the Complex contractors Todd’s “buddies?” If so, is this unethical or illegal?

Who let the Sharks Out?

Senator John McCain’s “town hall” debate mortgage distraction isn’t new, isn’t his, and is not sufficient to stem the collapse of the U.S. economy. It is a another McCain tactical distraction meant to keep the discussion away from assessing blame for this financial debacle. Understandable, since the finger points to Senator McCain and those close to him who made “deregulation” an article of faith and pursued it with religious fervor. They got it, so we got this crisis.

The $700 billion financial rescue package already provides for mortgage mitigation. The current administration’s “Paulson Plan” is three-fold, calling for stabilization of the financial sector, removing bad mortgages from the picture, and launching some sort of general economic stimulus program. So much for the argument that a McCain Administration would not be a four-year extension of Bush policies.

Bush Housing Crisis Policy 4 — Too Big to Ignore

Continued from Inventive Interventions

September 2008.

Uh-oh. What’s that rumbling noise? The very earth is shaking! An earthquake? The sound of stomachs on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange? No. It’s AIG.

What is an AIG? American International Group, a collection of businesses. Some sell insurance. Some sell conventional investment instruments. But the biggest business of AIG is selling something kinda like insurance, kinda like a security. Not insurance or equities, of course; those are regulated. Who can make big bucks off those? AIG sells credit default swaps, CDSs, agreements that AIG will buy your debt-based securities if they lose money.

Now that’s a relief. Who cares if the subprime mortgages underlying securities go bad just because loan officers are giving mortgages to anyone who breathes and claims to have a job? In a world of skyrocketing housing and securities prices, AIG swaps pieces of paper called CDSs for money and prospers.

AIG credit default swaps fan the flames of the hot housing and finance markets. Build more houses; sell more houses with subprime mortgages; bundle bales of mortgages; sell slices of mortgage bundles as securities; trade mortgage-backed securities to each other, union and government retirement funds, mutual funds, world markets, world governments. U.S. Mortgage-backed securities are hot! They can’t go bad; they’re guaranteed by AIG-issued CDSs, and those AIG swaps are backed by . . . um, backed by . . . uh-oh.

Bush Housing Crisis Policy 4 — Inventive Interventions

Continued from Fashioning Solutions

In March 2008 George W. Bush, champion of privatizing the Social Security program, decides to socialize the U.S. financial system instead. Investment firm Bear Stearns (founded in 1923, weathered the 1930s Great Depression without laying off employees) receives a toxic shock from the subprime mortgage meltdown — it holds umpteen-gazillion-dollars-worth of securitized mortgage toilet tissue.

For some reason, investors are reluctant to give Bear Stearns the billions it needs to avoid bankrupcy just because some of its hedge funds collapsed and, okay, it “wrote down” (lost) a couple of billion dollars in mortgage-backed bonds in 2007. A Bear Stearns death-watch ensues; everyone — even naked people! — buys “short positions” on the firm, betting it will fail. Vultures sightings are reported on Wall Street.