Opinion

Today’s Labor Day and man I got the blues; I’m thinking about my own personal work-history. I am old enough to remember back to the early 1980’s when the unemployment on Labor Day in 1982 was 10.1%, whereas today’s is 9.7% even while the reported unemployment and underemploy [Read More]

Wall Street is back at it again and the same formula is being used, even as they search for new ones. Those exotic investment schemes that were dreamed up on the Street: the MBS subprime and Alt A mess, the Credit Default Swaps and Collateralized Debt Obligations, the countless options, futures and [Read More]

J.P. Morgan Chase, one of Wall Street's most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in America and so does Bank of America, even though it’s tarnished by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, and so does Wells [Read More]

I remember back in 1979 when Teddy Kennedy was promoting his health care for all plan and virtually everything he said made perfect sense to me but maybe that was because I had just lived in Vancouver, B.C., in Canada for six years and had two daughters born there and was then living in Sacramento, [Read More]

A lot of people are having their homes foreclosed on who shouldn’t be because they did not have the information, the knowledge that the mortgage broker or loan originator did and failed to consult an attorney before signing a document that they may have not fully understood. They were taken a [Read More]

I will declare a beginning to the end of this recession/depression when equity returns to the housing sector and I mean positive not negative equity and our present rate of deflation turns into inflation. Let me explain that. When a home appreciates people tend to refinance when the interest rates [Read More]

TARP … PPIP … TALF … Government programs … just what we need more government programs to help get us out of the mess we’re in, right? Well, yeah, according to Timmy Geithner and Benny Bernarke because that’s what they’re doing. Okay, we all agree that [Read More]

If you could get paid a thousand dollars in cash just for “assuming” someone’s three-hundred and thirty-three dollar debt, would you do it? I hand you a check for $1,000 and all you have to do is say: “Okay I’ll take on your $333 debt because I have the money in my ba [Read More]

“One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.” I’m sure you’ve heard that saying before but what the fed is doing, to me, is unbelievable and borders, in my opinion, on insanity. Today, a lot of financial sponsors, some are called asset management firms, have forme [Read More]

It's that time of year again when we will receieve our State Property Tax. If you're like me and a long time Florida resident then you probably had a rude awakening last year to find out that even with the increased homestead exemption and the substantial drop in property value, you still p [Read More]