Finance

I honestly don't think it's a good idea for banks to go into the real estate business, but that's what bankrupt homeowners are forcing them to do. Why? Because once they walk away from their homes, the bank can't come back to get more of their money :

Foreclosure used to be a last resort, something that hard-pressed homeowners would scrimp and plead to avoid. But as the subprime lending crisis sweeps up millions of borrowers nationwide, some are deliberately choosing foreclosure as an early option.

As their home values tumble and their mortgages rise, these "walk away homeowners" decide to cede their houses to their lenders.

"It's throwing good money away after bad" to pay an escalating mortgage on a home that's plunging in value, said Army Sgt. 1st Class Nicklaus Skaggs of Vacaville. He and his wife, Tishara, stopped paying their mortgage in February. They signed up with a new company called You Walk Away to help guide them through the multi-month foreclosure process.

Well, here's a quick run down on the timeline of events that led to this disaster.

I am running out to pick up the kids, but will be back with more. I just twitted that I feel the stock market is like a really bad telenovela. So now I feel compelled to blog why. Gotta go pick up the kids first.

Energy Efficiency Finance Forum
The Next Generation in Financing Clean Energy

April 10-11, 2008
Opening Night Gala April 9th, 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.

The Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington, Virginia

Are you poised and positioned to take advantage of the explosion of financing opportunities in the energy-efficient landscape?

The Energy Efficiency Forum will be held April 10-11, 2008 at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. Reservations should be made at least 30 days prior to the start of the Finance Forum. Please advise the reservation agent that you are attending "FRA's Energy Efficiency Finance Forum" to receive the negotiated conference discount rate. Within 30 days of the conference (after March 10, 2008), prevailing hotel rates may be quoted because the conference rate will no longer be guaranteed. Book early! The hotel will sell out.

More info here.

Register here.

Preliminary Agenda Here (PDF)

I have a friend looking for work in the corporate world. It's been rough, one of the reasons being she is competing for work with people at least 20 years younger than her.

We were musing about how far away we are from realizing the middle class dream of a steady and retirable job as well as that house in the suburban sky. Compared to our parents, our education far exceeds them; yet when it comes to actual middle class accomplishments, boy are we lacking.

Then I read this :

Foreclosures Spurring Blight In Central Valley

[...]
As California house prices soared, cities in San Joaquin County attracted buyers priced out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Developers built more than 30,000 new homes in the last six years. But with the spike in adjustable mortgage rates the flood of buyers turned into a flood of defaults - 11,000 in the county in the past 18 months.

Not long ago an overgrown area with a murky pool that Blackstone toured was someone's backyard paradise, but now foreclosure has taken it all away. There and at hundreds of other properties across the county, even the swimming pool has become a hazard - a source of mosquitoes and West Nile Virus.

County workers who used to patrol swamps and streams now do their work in neglected back yards.

It gets worse though. Those who believed they could gamble their future on a no-down no-interest loan that would balloon 5, 10 or 15 years down the road are now gone. As in war, it's the survivors who stay behind to cope with the neverending pain left by the wounds of the mortage meltdown :

It's Sunday morning. Imagine you are in the church of culturekitchen. Now imagine this is our collection plate.

Let's talk about money.

Believe it or not but we don't make more money with more traffic. We make more money with more people going into the advertisers sites through our ads.

I have been tracking for the past few months how Google handles the CTR (click-through rate) for this site. Unfortunately, with Google I have no control over what I can charge for advertisng. They impose the click-thru rate on the site. How do I know they are pricing click-thrus on our site? I have a widget running on Firefox that allows me to track the CTR for Adsense.

I have noticed that we get penalized for getting more traffic but not more click-thrus. Yup. If traffic goes up, then Google reduces the amount per click we get. So for example, we were doing more than $1/click last month. We have 50% more traffic this month, so they've downgraded our CTR to $.060.

Now, you have to understand : I am not asking you to endlessly click through their ads. I will actually get thrown out of the Google Adsense program if I request that from you. It is explicitly state in their Terms Of Service agreement.

What I am asking you to do is something a bit different; especially since, if traffic does increase, I can charge more money through our BlogAds.

At BlogAds, we set the price. The more traffic one of my sites gets, the more I can charge for advertising.

Do you get the conundrum? On the one hand, more traffic but less clicks looses us money from Google Adsense. Yet more traffic translates into higher adspace pricing through BlogAds.

So what I am asking you to do? Help us increase the quality of the traffic to our site.

Every once in a while, a bill erupts from the bowels of the Congress that lays out, with crystalline clarity, what the priorities of our republican masters are. Case in point: the Financial Data Protection Act of 2006.

Several states, including New York and California, allow you to pre-emptively freeze your credit in case of identity theft. This new bill, heavily promoted by the financial services industry, overrules those state laws and requires that you provide proof - such as a police report, which of course you must file first - of an actual criminal act committed by identity thieves before you can freeze your credit. Of course, this also makes you financially liable for that first criminal act and for any subsequent ones befoe the freeze; better hope your local precinct works fast.

But it gets even better.

The bill overrides all existing state consumer protection laws, neuters the states' Attorneys General, and federalizes data security standards. These existing laws, on the books in 29 states, require companies to notify you if there is a security breach that results in the compromise of your data - such as when, for example, the military-republican complex recently lost 26 million veterans' information. Instead, the bill re-assigns responsibility for enforcement of data security to the Treasury Department, which is not equipped to handle this task. Given that the bill budgets only $1,000,000 for nationwide implementation, that seems unlikely to change.