College Is Wildly Exploitative: Why Aren’t Students Raising Hell?
Colleges wear the cloak of liberalism, but in policy and practice, they often embody a corrupt and cutthroat system of power and exploitation
Read more...Category Archives: Real estate
View from the Past: Banks Preferred Lending to Businesses, Not Collateral
Why the rise of collateral-based lending has been bad for our economic health.
Read more...The Revival of Cities and the Urban Land Premium
The popularity of certain cities is explained by their attractiveness for innovative enterprises and high-educated top talent. Is this a durable trend?
Read more...Dick Fuld Continues to Exhibit Advanced Case of Wall Street CEO Derangement Syndrome
It appears that having the financial crisis analogue to the captain of the Titanic carry on in the stereotypical super-entitled Wall Street CEO manner was too much for the tender sensibilities of CNBC.
Read more...The Great Land Banking Scam Exposed
It should come as no surprise that real estate kingpins buy political favors on a regular basis. A new study estimates the payoff.
Read more...Wall Street’s Nemesis, Benjamin Lawsky, to Resign in June
Yesterday was a sad day for American citizens. Benjamin Lawsky, the Superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, announced that he was resigning in June.
Read more...Wolf Richter: How Soaring Housing Costs Impoverish a Whole Generation and Maul the Real Economy
Housing costs are beyond the reach of many middle class earners. And while that is no news, housing has been the engine of past recoveries. So inflated home prices are part of why the economy will stay mired in low growth.
Read more...The Foreclosure Crisis Caused a Great Migration in Miniature
Several commentators picked up on the relationship between the events in Baltimore and the dearth of economic opportunity that leads to a sense of hopelessness. But precious few added the component of the foreclosure crisis, a dislocating event that has few parallels in American history. A new paper in the American Sociological Review by Matthew Hall (Cornell), Kyle Crowder (University of Washington) and Amy Spring (Georgia State) puts numbers to this, and shows that we really had a small-scale version of the Great Migration, the shift of African-Americans from the rural south to the big cities of the north. This migration hollowed out and segregated African-American and Latino communities to an even greater degree than where they already were.
Read more...The Continuing Depopulation of Detroit
Detroit is getting the same treatment as Latvia and Ireland, and we are already seeing similar results in Greece, with most people who have good foreign job prospects taking a hike. But while Latvia and Ireland stabilized at much lower levels of output and have started to recover from their, Detroit, like Greece, looks like a failed state. And this is perversely seen as acceptable in America.
Read more...How Pending “Trade” Deals Would Undermine Zoning and Local Land Use Rules
A key principle of land use in the United States is that homeowners can often veto new buildings on nearby land that other people own. A trade agreement that’s currently in the works could have a huge impact on that long-established system of local control.
Read more...Bill Black: How the “Super Crunchers” Became the “Super Torturers” of Finance Data
Many of the concerns about Big Data focus on the surveillance apparatus used to collect it, or on the naive modeling approaches, like attributing causality to mere correlations. Here Black addresses an established problem: that of deliberate abuse of models.
Read more...CFPB Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Proposal May Enable Redlining
CFPB’s HDMA proposal includes no reporting requirements to determine whether mortgage servicers are treating distressed borrowers equally.
Read more...Federal Credit Programs and the Birth of Lemon Socialism
We regularly criticize government-subsidized lending as a terrible way to achieve policy goals. This interview with Sarah Quinn focuses on how Federal credit subsidies have grown and changed over time, with a major objective being to mask the extent of the support.
Read more...Tom Adams: The Ocwen Meltdown: When a Company Discloses Conflicts of Interest, You Should Believe Them
By Tom Adams, securitization professional for over 20 years and partner at Paykin, Krieg & Adams, LLP. You can follow him on Twitter at @advisoryA It’s been a while since I wrote here about Ocwen Financial Corporation http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/02/tom-adams-ocwens-servicing-meltdown-proves-failure-of-obamas-mortgage-settlements.html , the large non-bank mortgage servicer, but things haven’t gotten any better for the company or its […]
Read more...Bill Black: Meet Citi’s Ethical Underwriter Who Fought and Won: Sherry Hunt
How Citi ran into a buzz saw and lost a False Claims Act case when it tried stymieing whistleblower Sherry Hunt. But true to form, the DoJ took the easy way out.
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