Masters of the Universe category archive

Outside investors scarf up properties.

The New York investment fund had buyers in 11 metro Atlanta counties for auctions that March day. Since November, it has bought more than 200 properties in the region, and has its sights on 2,500 more.

As the metro housing market begins to rebound after a dizzying fall, investor-buyers like Fundamental REO are driving an outsize share of the activity. Their purchases help stabilize prices but also foster concerns about the longer-term effect of neighborhoods filled with bulk-purchased homes owned by out-of-state investors.

Last fall, investor-buyers accounted for 26 percent of all Georgia home purchases, according to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Once attended mainly by smaller mom-and-pop buyers, monthly county foreclosure auctions have — since last summer — been overrun by industrial-scale buyers with millions to spend.

Not good news.

I can’t find the links right now, probably because the stories have passed into the archives of my ex-local rag, but in Philadelphia, many vacant and dilapidated properties are owned by New York investment outfits who are just sitting on them. (Others, of course, are owned by the city, which got stuck with them when the owners disappeared, and by local citizens down on their luck.)

Remember, it’s the New York boys who got us into this mess with their phony securitized mortgage bags of air.

More at the link.

Zoe Williams pities the rich, suffering gazallionaires. A nugget (emphasis in the original):

8. Some people, especially people who aren’t rich, have no idea how small a £2m house can be.

Mansion? YOU CALL THIS A MANSION? I wouldn’t make my enemy’s dog live in it, it’s not even near a park.

More at the link.

Your responsible fiscals at work.

On the morning of Dec. 19, 2012, in a Torrance courtroom, Larry Delassus’ heart stopped as he watched his attorney argue his negligence and discrimination case against banking behemoth Wells Fargo.

His death came more than two years after Wells Fargo mistakenly mixed up his Hermosa Beach address with that of a neighbor in the same condo complex. The bank’s typo led Wells Fargo to demand that Delassus pay $13,361.90 — two years of late property taxes the bank said it had paid on his behalf in order to keep his Wells Fargo mortgage afloat.

That typo was just the beginning of the ordeal.

Once they had their teeth in him, they refused to let go.

Via C&L.

Via PoliticalProf.

A master of the universe no more: another Georgia bank sinks into a sea of red. Bank no more on

Frontier Bank, LaGrange, Georgia

She’s been much in the news for banning telecommuting at Yahoo.

You remember Yahoo. They mounted a large ad campaign a decade or so ago to convince people to use a brand name to mean “web search.”

And then people did start using a brand name to mean “web search.” They called it “google.”

Now we know how she could manage to build a nursery at her workplace so she can bring her baby to work with her.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer received a $1.1 million bonus for her first five-and-half months running the Internet company.

The award disclosed Wednesday supplements Mayer’s annual salary of $1 million and $56 million in long-term stock compensations that she received after Yahoo lured her away from Google (GOOG) to become its CEO last July.

That’s a bonus of about $1,270 per hour or a total hourly rate of twice that, not counting the stock.

In three days, she gets paid more than the quite arbitrary annual “poverty leveL” for a family of eight in the United States.

And she’s not even on Wall Street, where bonus babies make the big bucks.

Think about it.

MarketWatch counts down the ten companies with the worst reputations.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Ken Eisold, in a piece headlined “Crime without Punishment,” marvels at the implications of Daniel Gross’s theory as to why banksters still stalk the streets. A nugget:

(Quoting Gross) “The greatest triumph of the banking industry wasn’t ATMs or even depositing a check via the camera of your mobile phone. It was convincing Treasury and Justice Department officials that prosecuting bankers for their crimes would destabilize the global economy.”

So just as banks deemed “too big to fail” are supported to keep the economy robust, now, the argument goes, all but the most inconsequential financial institutions have to be supported because prosecuting those who violated the guidelines and laws would send the wrong message. This is not only an extraordinary vulnerability in our jerry-built financial system, but also “moral hazard” on an astonishing scale.

The bonus babies, entitled to profit from incompetence:

Via Kavips, who explains

But what Bloomberg points out, by deducting the subsidies from the reported profits of the top five banks, that without the subsidies, there would be no profits.

The bonuses being paid to all top bank executives, are our money that we are subsidizing. The dividend payouts being received by every stockholder, is a give-you-something-free right from the US Treasury.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Michael Price evaluates proposals, most in Europe, to curtail bonuses for banksters.

A nugget:

In addressing the behavioral and cultural characteristics of banks that could lead to another financial crisis, it makes sense to focus on bonuses, because incentives created by bonuses are at the heart of so many other problematic behaviors. By this I mean incentives not just to take risks—such as gambling with huge sums of other people’s money—but also to engage in the deceptive practices that some bankers employ to minimize their risks. Practices such as, for example, blatantly deceiving their buyers about the nature and prospects of their financial products, or rigging the Libor rate to the benefit of themselves and the harm of everyone else. Engaging in this kind of callous disregard for everyone who doesn’t happen to be one’s self would be much less tempting if there weren’t such vast, direct, and immediate rewards for getting away with it.

Read the rest to understand how the banksters’ compensation system provides incentives for skulduggery.

Will Bunch explains why Comcast honcho David Cohen thinks Pennsylvania’s wingnut governor, Tom Corbett, is the bee’s knees and the cat’s meow:

From Cohen’s penthouse view, all that culture war stuff that blares from his Comcast-powered cable TV set — even from MSNBC, now about to be a wholly owned property of Comcast — must sound pretty silly. Because the reality is that Big Business doesn’t really care how much we fight about guns or abortion, or how it all turns out. When it come to the stuff that matters in their world — whether it’s taxes (and loopholes), or consumer protection, or punishing white-collar criminals — there are no Democrats or Republicans. There’s nothing resembling a two-party system at all.

There’s just the 1 Percent Party. And there’s a 99 percent chance that you’re not in it.

Read the rest.

David Spade takes on those smarmy insincere celebrity product endorsements (warning: language).

(Take that, Robert Vaughan.)

Senator Warren wants to know why the regulators haven’t thrown the book at the folks who cook the books. Watch the witnesses dodge the question.

Via New York Magazine’s Kevin Roose, who has commentary.

Mastering the universe no more:

Covenant Bank, Chicago, Illinois

has bitten the dust.

Go south, young man.

Six Florida cities rank among the best places to buy foreclosures in 2013, according to a report by RealtyTrac.

Topping a list of 20 metropolitan areas is Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, the Irvine, Calif.-based real estate data firm said.

RealtyTrac looked at four criteria in tallying the “best places:” the supply of foreclosure inventory; foreclosure sales as a percentage of all transactions; the average percentage discount on foreclosures; and the annual percentage change in foreclosure activity in 2012 compared with 2011.

Also among the top 20 metro areas for buying foreclosures is Lakeland (No. 5), Tampa (No. 6), Jacksonville (No.7), Orlando (No. 9) and Miami (No. 12), according to the RealtyTrac report.

More “best places” at the link.

Methinks ’tis not a good way to become a “best place.”

It would seem that this is what passes for innovation these days.

New regulations that capped certain credit card fees, coupled with a dip in card usage, have resulted in consumers paying millions less in penalty fees over the past three years.

The bad news? Credit card issuers are busy dreaming up new types of fees to make up for the shortfall.

(snip)

Consumers soon could find themselves charged for a lost or second card, for paper statements and even for not using their card enough or for making too many calls to customer service.

Some issuers have started charging from $1 to $5 for customer service calls beyond a certain limit per billing cycle, Mr. Hammer said.

Innovation as defined by Paulie Walnuts.

Kathryn Haralson had already fielded calls from debt collectors at her home and work. They even phoned her daughter at college.

So when Haralson, 47, logged into her Facebook account one day, she was surprised by an unwelcome inbox message: a request to call “Mr. Rice” about her debt.

“It’s not like they needed to go on Facebook to find me,” Haralson said. “I was in contact with them all the time. That crossed the line.”

The government is considering regulating this sort of thing.

I’m all for it.

I used to get phone calls for the person who used to have my phone number. I don’t know anything about the previous possessor of that number except that she apparently owed a lot of people a lot of money. It reached the point that we just let all calls go right to the answering machine.

One outfit called four or five times a day, every day. When I tried to call them back, their automated “response” system made Verizon, whose customer service phone system is designed to keep callers from talking to real live human beings, look like a model of customer friendliness.

I finally made them go away by writing them a letter and copying my elected representative incongruously assembled.

Thom explains the engine of corruption.

Via Raw Story.

Mastering the universe no more . . .

1st Regents Bank, Andover, Minnesota