$490 billion projected federal budget deficit for 2009. This does not include the full estimates of further war costs and the quarterly request for additional $100 billion that’s been happening since 2003. These estimates only hold if the economy does as well as the Bush administration is thinking, better than almost everyone’s current estimates, and inflation stays low, below almost everyone’s current estimates. So in other words, expect the actual projected 2009 federal budget deficit to be far higher than HALF A TRILLION dollars.
On the horizon are potentially huge bank bailouts/failures that will run billions of dollars and the potential for universal healthcare in the next 4-8 years or so, which I’m in full support of. Our budget is going to be in dire straits for the foreseeable future.
This ridiculous deficit/debt will only result in higher taxes, higher inflation, and lower services for the future. Something has to give. One way or another, the American people are truly going to have to sacrifice to meet their debts. We haven’t been sacrificing for the past 7.5 years as we ran up our credit. All for ill-needed tax cuts & wars.
From the above articles, there looks to be an additional 33% decline in real prices over the next 5 years for San Francisco. This is good news for those saving to buy a house in 5 years but bad news for everyone else. If you buy now and the prices sinks down 33% over 5 years, you’ll have negative equity even with a 20% down payment. Negative equity is a usual stop along the way to bank foreclosure. This is bad news for those looking to buy now.
The above graph is from PIMCO. See where we are right now at the beginning of a small cliff and how much farther down we have to go through 2010.
PIMCO’s Phil Gross argues that the best way to stop the coming decline is to restore affordable credit. Unfortunately, while Federal interest rates have declined from 5.25% to 2%, mortgage interest rates have risen from 5.5% to about 6.5%, currently. The way to do this is through some sort of legislation. He seems to be in support of the brand new housing bill that’s going on through, but I’m unsure as to how that will affect interest rates (I don’t know).
The other amusing solution that he throws out from a friend of his is the Government buying 1 million new/unused homes and blowing them up to reduce supply. This would likely work economically, but certainly not politically.
Gavin Newsom talking about new San Francisco solar power incentives, running for governor in 2010, and marriage.
The important news here is that there is going to be a San Francisco solar power rebate of $3k to build solar, $6k if you build solar from local businesses that use locally-trained employees, $10k if you build solar and are a non-profit, & $30k if you’re building non-affordable housing.
Sounds great to me! This is on top of California’s incentives & the federal solar incentives. How would you not build solar now?
This is actually great news. Whether or not this guy did or did not do anything wrong is besides the point. I don’t care if it’s potentially Al Qaeda-related. It’s besides the point.
Evidence gained from tortured captives is unreliable and often false. To admit something that’s completely unreliable as factual evidence is stupid. To torture someone in order to gain ineffectual evidence is very stupid. To debase the underpinnings of your society and completely legitimize the torturing of US Citizens by foreign powers through your own use of torture is blindingly stupid.
It’s nice to see someone open their eyes and, more importantly, their mouths on this. Putting it in the law books is the first step to banishing it all together.
This would mean any agency that receives federal grants would allow their employees to deny birth control if they wanted to. So, if some anti-abortion nut is working for a health agency that would regularly give out birth control as requested/needed and they decide their views don’t support contraception, they are protected if they want to force that on women coming to them for service/medication.
Read the link for all the details. Can CA secede yet?
We have seen further deterioration in the residential land portfolio during the second quarter. … M&I has $2.3 billion in residential land loans to individuals and developers. $1.5 billion, or 66%, are located in Arizona . The bulk of the Arizona loans, nearly 70%, are in Maricopa County . … LTVs are approximately 115%. Residential land accounts for $219 million of nonperforming loans of which 55% are based in our Arizona business unit.
LTV is the amount of a loan that is paid off. 0% means it’s paid off completely. 100% means nothing has been paid. 115% means people owe 15% more than when they did when they originated their loans. This is across all of their loans! And apparently, they’re stating that they took on NO subprime loans. When your regular prime loans have such high LTV, that’s a terrible thing for the state of the bank. Imagine what that means for all banks if even those who loan properly are getting hammered?
The consumer price index (CPI, which measures inflation) showed a 1.1% increase in consumer good prices in June alone. Average weekly wages, adjusted for above inflation, fell 0.9% in June as well. This crunch is going to hurt. The yearly inflation rate is 5.0%!
Higher inflation and/or lower wages. You’ll see more of this over the next year and a half. If you can, push for your raises as money is going shorter and shorter than it has in the past.
The other highest inflation level in the past 26 years was 1.3% immediately after Hurricane Katrina sent energy prices skyrocketing.
