My housing graph in Chinese

Apparently, word gets around:



Click on the screen shots to see the actual web pages.

A link to my housing graph labeled "CLICK HERE" can also be found at the very bottom of a recent NBC Los Angeles news story.

Barack Obama trying to assassinate Americans overseas

The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says:

No person shall...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

Apparently Barack Obama, the constitutional scholar, never read that part.

President Obama has less respect for civil liberties than George W. Bush. While President Bush happily imprisoned and tortured American citizens in violation of their constitutional rights, he never tried to kill them. President Obama is trying to kill them.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

One policy where Obama has gone further than Bush/Cheney in terms of unfettered executive authority and radical war powers is the attempt to target American citizens for assassination without a whiff of due process. ...

That Obama was compiling a hit list of American citizens was first revealed in January of last year when The Washington Post's Dana Priest mentioned in passing at the end of a long article that at least four American citizens had been approved for assassinations; several months later, the Obama administration anonymously confirmed to both the NYT and the Post that American-born, U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was one of the Americans on the hit list.

Yesterday, riding a wave of adulation and military-reverence, the Obama administration tried to end the life of this American citizen — never charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime — with a drone strike in Yemen, but missed and killed two other people instead. ...

If someone is willing to vest in the President the power to assassinate American citizens without a trial far from any battlefield — if someone believes that the President has that power: the power of unilaterally imposing the death penalty and literally acting as judge, jury and executioner — what possible limits would they ever impose on the President's power?

It's amazing how much more raw power presidents wield than the U.S. Constitution grants them. Only Congress has the power to declare war, yet President Obama has apparently made Yemen a war zone without congressional authority. Only the courts have the power to judge someone guilty of a crime, yet President Obama has decided to unilaterally impose the death penalty on four American citizens. Our anti-war, Nobel Peace Prize-winning president is Bush in sheep's clothing.

The really troubling thing is that presidential power grows unabated from one president to the next and no one tries to stop it.

Conforming loan limit to come down in high-cost areas

As The New York Times reports, the conforming loan limit in high-cost areas will come down soon:

By summer’s end, buyers and sellers in some of the country’s most upscale housing markets are slated to lose one their biggest benefactors: the deep pockets of the federal government. ...

By summer's end? Really? Autumn begins on September 23. The change occurs on October 1 — after summer's end.

For the last three years, federal agencies have backed new mortgages as large as $729,750 in desirable neighborhoods in high-cost states like California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Without the government covering the risk of default, many lenders would have refused to make the loans. With the economy in free fall, Congress broadened its traditionally generous support of housing to a substantial degree.

But now Democrats and Republicans agree that the taxpayer should no longer be responsible for homes valued well above the national average, and are about to turn a top slice of the housing market into a testing ground for whether the private mortgage market can once again go it alone. The result, analysts say, will be higher-cost loans and fewer potential buyers for more expensive homes.

Michael S. Barr, a former assistant Treasury secretary, said the federal government’s retrenchment would be painful for many communities. “There’s always going to be a line, and for the person just over it it’s always going to be an arbitrary line,” said Mr. Barr, who teaches at the University of Michigan Law School. “But there is no entitlement to living in a home that costs $750,000.” ...

The federal government last year backed nine out of 10 new mortgages nationwide, and losses from soured loans are still mounting. Fannie Mae, which buys mortgages from lenders and packages them for investors, said last week it needed an additional $6.2 billion in aid, bringing the cost of its rescue to nearly $100 billion.

The fact that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are losing billions of dollars on recent loans means that they have been giving people loans for less than the cost of the loans. It's funny how politicians scolded banks for engaging in "reckless lending," then proceeded to engage in the same activity themselves.

U.S. housing decline accelerating

According to Zillow.com, in Q1 2011 housing prices experienced their biggest quarterly decline since 2008:

Home values posted the largest decline in the first quarter since late 2008, prompting many economists to push back their estimates of when the housing market will hit a bottom.

Home values fell 3% in the first quarter from the previous quarter and 1.1% in March from the previous month, pushed down by an abundance of foreclosed homes on the market, according to data to be released Monday by real-estate website Zillow.com. Prices have now fallen for 57 consecutive months, according to Zillow.

Last year, the housing market showed signs of improving as price depreciation slowed in some markets and stabilized in others. In response, a number of economists began forecasting that housing would hit a bottom in late 2011, then begin to recover. But the improvements, spurred by federal programs that gave buyers up to $8,000 in tax credits, proved fleeting. Sales collapsed when the credits expired last summer, and prices in many markets have been falling ever since.

While most economists expected sales to decline after tax credits expired, the drag on the market has been greater than many anticipated. "We expected December and January to be bad" as the market reeled from the after-effects of the tax credit, said Stan Humphries, Zillow's chief economist. But monthly declines for February and March were "really staggering," he said. They indicate "a reflection of the true underlying demand, which is now apparent because most of the tax credit is out of the system, and it's being completely overwhelmed by supply." ...

Prices are decelerating in large part because the many foreclosed properties that often sell at a discount force other sellers to lower their prices.

Personally, I think that if the federal government hadn't tried to artificially prop up housing prices in 2009-2010, the market would already have hit bottom and we'd be seeing recovering housing prices now. The desire to avoid housing pain in 2009 simply delayed the pain until 2011.

Foreclosures continue to rise even as mortgage delinquency rates fall

Mortgage delinquency rates have been falling for a while now—down 12% in March alone—yet foreclosure rates continue to creep upward.


In the longer term I expect that declining delinquency rates will eventually lead to declining foreclosure rates, but apparently we're not there yet.

U.S. home-ownership rate continues to decline

After rising to an all-time high during the upside of the bubble, America's home-ownership rate is now back down to where it was in 1998:

In the first quarter, 66.5% of Americans owned homes, down from 67.2% a year earlier, the Census Bureau reported. The rate last hit this level in 1998.

During the boom, when easy credit made mortgages available with less regard for income or ability to pay, the ownership rate surged to a record 69.2% in 2004′s second and fourth quarters and stayed near that level until the recession deepened.

Now, some industry watchers expect the rate to slip below 65%. Housing experts say each 1% decline in the home ownership rate represents the movement of one million households to rentals. Some people can’t buy homes, while others just don’t want to.

How to fix the American economy

The Economist lays out America's systemic economic problems, which politicians and the public ignore:

PESSIMISM about the United States rarely pays off in the long run. Time and again, when Americans have felt particularly glum, their economy has been on the brink of a revival. ...

On the plus side, it is hard to think of any large country with as many inherent long-term advantages as America: what would China give to have a Silicon Valley? Or Germany an Ivy League? But it is also plain that the United States does indeed have long-term economic weaknesses—and ones that will take time to fix. The real worry for Americans should be that their politicians, not least their president, are doing so little to tackle these underlying problems. ...

Of course, plenty more could be done to spur innovation. The system of corporate taxation is a mess and deters domestic investment. Mr Obama is right that America’s infrastructure is creaking. But the solution there has as much to do with reforming Neanderthal funding systems as it does with the greater public spending he advocates. Too much of the “competitiveness” talk is a canard—one that justifies misguided policies, such as subsidies for green technology, and diverts attention from the country’s real to-do list.

High on that list is sorting out America’s public finances. The budget deficit is huge and public debt, at over 90% of GDP when measured in an internationally comparable manner, is high and rising fast. ... Neither party is prepared to make the basic compromises that are essential to a deal. Republicans refuse to accept that taxes will have to rise, Democrats that spending on “entitlements” such as health care and pensions must fall. ...

Below the radar screen, America had employment problems long before the recession, particularly for lesser-skilled men. These were caused not only by sweeping changes from technology and globalisation, which affect all countries, but also by America’s habit of locking up large numbers of young black men, which drastically diminishes their future employment prospects. ...

All this means that grappling with entrenched joblessness deserves to be far higher on America’s policy agenda. Unfortunately, the few (leftish) politicians who acknowledge the problem tend to have misguided solutions, such as trade barriers or industrial policy to prop up yesterday’s jobs or to spot tomorrow’s. That won’t work: government has a terrible record at picking winners. ... Stemming the decline in low-skilled men’s work will also demand more education reform to boost skills, as well as a saner approach to drugs and imprisonment.

The most popular web browsers

This graph shows the most popular PC & Mac web browsers in early May, 2011, based on visitors to my websites. The sample size is 1,424. My stats are pretty close to the stats listed in The New York Times:

About 45 percent of computers use one of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browsers, according to StatCounter, a Web analytics firm, while Chrome has only about 18 percent of the market. ... Firefox, a browser produced by Mozilla, has 30 percent of the market while Safari, Apple’s browser, has only 5 percent.

According to Wikipedia, back in 2004 Internet Explorer had about a 90-95% market share. Competition is a good thing.

The browser race is closer than it appears. While it looks like a four-way battle of web browsers, it is really a three-way battle of rendering engines because Chrome and Safari both use WebKit. Based on the stats of my visitors, the rendering engine battle looks like this:

1. Trident (Internet Explorer) — 45%
2. Gecko (Firefox) — 30%
3. WebKit (Chrome & Safari) — 25%
   

"Sam, are you trying to flip his house?"

A nice little real estate joke from 1:10 - 2:10:

The Daily Show - To Kill a Mockingturd - Reaction to Bin Laden's Death
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Is a Ph.D. worth the time and effort?

Here's an interesting tidbit from The Economist regarding Ph.D.'s:

PhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor’s degree. A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%. In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master’s degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education. Only in medicine, other sciences, and business and financial studies is it high enough to be worthwhile. Over all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master’s degree.

This does seem to disagree somewhat with the statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, which showed that in the U.S. there is a smaller earnings gap between a bachelor's and a master's degree than between a master's and a Ph.D. Of course, the Census Bureau doesn't control for whether someone could have gotten into a degree program but chose not to enroll.