Tuesday, December 18, 2012

How Wal-Mart Used Payoffs to Get Its Way in Mexico - Yahoo! Finance

How Wal-Mart Used Payoffs to Get Its Way in Mexico - NYT
Wal-Mart de Mexico was an aggressive and creative corrupter, offering large payoffs to get what the law otherwise prohibited, an examination by The New York Times found.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

The devil in Case-Shiller housing details - Yahoo! Finance

The devil in Case-Shiller housing details - Yahoo! Finance
Some analysts say that the NAR report may present a too-rosy view of that market. Case-Shiller house prices are historically slightly more conservative than price data from the NAR, mostly because the report adjusts for the size of homes being sold, while the NAR’s price index does not. The result is that NAR’s numbers jump when homes at the high end of the market sell strongly, and larger and more expensive homes have lately been selling particularly well, says Jed Kolko, chief economist at real-estate listing site Trulia. “This is why the NAR median sales price has risen so much more than other indexes.”

Young U.S. Adults Flock to Parents’ Homes Amid Economy - Bloomberg

Young U.S. Adults Flock to Parents’ Homes Amid Economy - Bloomberg

Dow will repeat 2007-2008 peak-crash cycle - Paul B. Farrell - MarketWatch

Dow will repeat 2007-2008 peak-crash cycle - Paul B. Farrell - MarketWatch : 
You can never trust Wall Street bulls, they’re lying to you 93% of the time.

March 1999: Harry S. Dent, author of “The Roaring 2000s.” “There has been a paradigm shift.” The New Economy arrived, this time really is different.
October 1999: James Glassman, author, “Dow 36,000.” “What is dangerous is for Americans not to be in the market. We’re going to reach a point where stocks are correctly priced … it’s not a bubble ... The stock market is undervalued.”
August 1999: Charles Kadlec, author, “Dow 100,000.” “The DJIA will reach 100,000 in 2020 after “two decades of above-average economic growth with price stability.”
December 1999: Joseph Battipaglia, market analyst. “Some fear a burst Internet bubble, but our analysis shows that Internet companies ... carry expected long-term growth rates twice other rapidly growing segments within tech.”
December 1999: Larry Wachtel, Prudential. “Most of these stocks are reasonably priced. There’s no reason for them to correct violently in the year 2000.” Nasdaq lost over 50%.
December 1999: Ralph Acampora, Prudential Securities. “I’m not saying this is a straight line up. ... I’m saying any kind of declines, buy them!”
February 2000: Larry Kudlow, CNBC host. “This correction will run its course until the middle of the year. Then things will pick up again, because not even Greenspan can stop the Internet economy.” He’s still hosting his own cable show.
April 2000: Myron Kandel, CNN. “The bottom line is in, before the end of the year, the Nasdaq and Dow will be at new record highs.”
September 2000: Jim Cramer, host of “Mad Money.” Sun Microsystems “has the best near-term outlook of any company I know.” It fell from $60 to below $3 in two years.
November 2000: Louis Rukeyser on CNN. “Over the next year or two the market will be higher, and I know over the next five to 10 years it will be higher.”
December 2000: Jeffrey Applegate, Lehman strategist. “The bulk of the correction is behind us, so now is the time to be offensive, not defensive.” Another sucker’s rally.
December 2000: Alan Greenspan. “The three- to five-year earnings projections of more than a thousand analysts ... have generally held firm. Such expectations, should they persist, bode well for continued capital deepening and sustained growth.”
January 2001: Suze Orman, financial guru. “The QQQ, they’re a buy. They may go down, but if you dollar-cost average, where you put money every single month into them, I think, in the long run, it’s the way to play the Nasdaq.” The QQQ fell 60% further.
March 2001: Maria Bartiromo, CNBC anchor. “The individual out there is actually not throwing money at things that they do not understand, and is actually using the news and using the information out there to make smart decisions.”
April 2001: Abby Joseph Cohen, Goldman Sachs. “The time to be nervous was a year ago. The S&P was overvalued, it’s now undervalued.” Markets fell 18 more months.
August 2001: Lou Dobbs, CNN. “Let me make it very clear. I’m a bull, on the market, on the economy. And let me repeat, I am a bull.”
June 2002: Larry Kudlow, CNBC host. “The shock therapy of a decisive war will elevate the stock market by a couple thousand points.” He also predicted the Dow would hit 35,000 by 2010.
The Dow didn’t bottom until October 2002 at 7,286, down from 11,722. The Iraq War started in April 2003. Soon after, Enron, Spitzer and Sarbanes-Oxley were distracting us from all the insanity of the 2000 crash, the bear market and the 2000-2002 recession. 

Home prices climb for fourth month in row - Economic Report - MarketWatch

Home prices climb for fourth month in row - Economic Report - MarketWatch

Thursday, May 10, 2012

How Hewlett-Packard lost its way - Fortune - A glimpse at the Boardroom/Executive suite shenanigans. Do these guys ever think about the lives of the thousands of the employees they play with?

Thursday, May 03, 2012

Why US house prices won't recover : Taking inflation into account , home prices are down to 1895 levels - http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-us-house-prices-wont-recover-2012-05-01-1225310

Monday, April 30, 2012

Home ownership rate drops to 15-year low :
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/30/us-usa-economy-housing-idUSBRE83G0T120120430
"Credit might get easy for creditworthy borrowers, but you are not going to see the same drive to bring in the broader demographic into home ownership you had in the early 1990s and 2000s. Renters are going to be renters, they will not become buyers,"
 

Saturday, April 28, 2012

"My job was to corrupt high officials in countries and get them to accept huge loans to sign off on them to make a lot of money." - John Perkins - CNBC - Corporate America and Bribery - http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000085781
 

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Wells Fargo Insiders Detail Foreclosure Fraud Practices: ‘It’s Exactly Like An Assembly Line’ - http://ow.ly/arsCM
Half of new graduates are jobless or underemployed - http://ow.ly/arsmK

Wednesday, April 04, 2012

The problem with Home Prices - Big Picture - http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/04/the-problem-with-home-prices-part-3-or-5/

The Case for Remaining a Renter - SmartMoney -

http://blogs.smartmoney.com/advice/2012/04/04/the-case-for-remaining-a-renter/

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Shiller: Housing Has “Chance” to Bottom But Suburban Prices May Not Recover “In Our Lifetime” ow.ly/9UOjO

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Million-dollar foreclosures rise as rich walk away
Over 36,000 homes valued at $1 million or more were foreclosed on -- or at least served with a notice of default -- in 2011, according to data compiled by RealtyTrac, which tracks foreclosures. While that's less than 2% of all foreclosures nationwide, it represents a much bigger share of foreclosure activity than in previous years.