By Evelyn Black, on May 13th, 2009
 Sales of Ford Motor Company’s trademark pick-up trucks and SUVs were down 28% for the month of June, sending the DOW plunging into bear territory again, along with news of the worst inflation yet this year and oil prices today nipping at $143 per barrel. It’s sad really, but also more than a bit maddening.
I’m old enough to remember Ford’s slogan from bygone (and definitely better) days:
Ford Has a Better Idea!
Here and now I want to say to Ford, cool, let’s have it! Time for that better idea guys, and let’s make it snappy, shall we? Because so far, all I’m seeing is lots of panic and punditry, lots of CEO dithering and blathering, but a noticeable dearth of those famed better ideas. It’s as though the whole country has become mesmerized with helplessly watching the steady upward movement of oil prices, kind of like in those old black and white cartoons where some cute loopy farm animals lay around and wipe their brows as the temperature climbs higher and higher and the mercury finally busts out the top of the thermometer with funny sound effects.
I got an email from Common Cause today, which informed me that the 1927 Ford Model-T got 20 miles to the gallon, and the 2007 Ford Taurus gets 28 miles to the gallon.
That’s an improvement of 8 miles to the gallon in 80 years.
Now I know that designing automobiles is hard and complicated stuff and girls just can’t possibly understand it, (especially girls like me who work in call center bank jobs), and that we should really leave these issues to guys with engineering degrees and pocket protectors and CEOs in expensive suits, and not try to butt in where we don’t belong. Still, I’m thinking 80 years is enough time. They’ve had their chance and then some. I’m thinking that at this point, even a bunch of girls could definitely can do better than an 8 mpg improvement. It wouldn’t even have to be a bunch of particularly brilliant girls.
Seriously, we could set it up like on of those dippy reality show competitions that are all over cable TV right now, (there are, for example, dog groomer reality show competitions, interior designer reality show competitions, cooking host competitions…you name it, it’s on cable as a reality show competition). So why not a “design a better Ford” reality show competition, girls only! What do we possibly have to lose?
Say you put Kathy Griffith, Paris Hilton, Cindy McCain, Oprah, and Katie Couric in a little room and said, ” OK girls, here’s the deal: You have eighty years to design a cute inexpensive little car that gets at least 50 miles to the gallon. The first one to come up with a viable design gets out of this little room and wins a Tesla, a gift certificate at Tiffany’s, and a whole new wardrobe from Saks (with Stacy and Clinton from What Not to Wear not even in the same universe, let alone the same store.)” Here’s a Blackberry, $5000, and some paper for each of you. Have at it and may the best woman win.
I’m telling you, that show would be over in about three episodes, if not sooner. Ford would have its better idea, some lucky girl would have a Tesla, some diamonds, and a new wardrobe, and the day would be saved.
You’re welcome.
Not that I expect anyone from Ford to pay any attention to me mind you. That ‘you’re welcome’ was sarcasm in case you didn’t pick up on that. You see, I’ve had to interact with Ford Motor Company before, so I know exactly what we’re dealing with here, and trust me, it ain’t pretty.
Let me tell you a story by way of illustration.
 In 1991 my mother died and left me a small amount of money. I bought a house and an IMac, and I had just enough left to buy a small car. Now at that time, GM was building a horrible little car called a GEO Prism that got great gas mileage; well over 50 miles to the gallon. It was all over TV, but could I find a single GEO Prism on a single Chevy lot? I could not. I was shown a Cavalier. No, I said, I don’t want a Cavalier, I want a GEO. I went to another dealer who said, “We don’t have any GEOs right now, but if you give me your address and phone number, when we get one in, I’ll personally drive it over to your apartment and let you test drive it before any one else even sees it.”
That was just creepy.
At my third GM dealer, no one would even talk to me. Lots of guys in bad polyester doing not much of anything seemed to be roaming about everywhere, but the very whisper of the word GEO sent them scrambling into their little locked offices.
Fine, I thought, I’ll call Ford. So I did. I called the Ford dealer closest to me and asked for a salesman. I got one. Once the salesman was on the phone I said, “You have a small car called an Escort. Do you have any Escorts on your sales lot right now?” Yes, he said they had a gazillion Escorts. “If I come there right now, with cash, will you sell me one of your gazillion Escorts? And I warn you, don’t toy with me, you are my fourth dealer today, and I’m in no mood for BS.” He assured me he would be beside himself with delight to have the pleasure of selling me a Ford Escort in exchange for my cash money.
Half an hour later, I was driving around in a blue Ford Escort with a balding man in a red polyester leisure suit, who was busy regaling me with tales about what was wrong with each of his former three wives. Finally I stopped the car, looked him straight in the eye and said, “Stop it. I don’t care about your personal life or anything else about you. You are being very inappropriate. Please be quiet and only answer questions I ask you so that I can make this decision.”
We got back to his office. I decided to buy the blue Escort for $12,730. When we sat down to sign the papers, he said that he would have to go talk to his manager about the price. I said, “I’m offering you the sticker price. Don’t tell me that nonsense about your manager. Everyone knows you don’t really talk to your manager, just sell me the car for God’s sake.”
He went to talk to his manager anyway, grinning all the way. Then I saw them both grinning and looking at me. Ha, ha. They knocked $500 off the sticker price (unasked) and threw in an FM radio and cassette player. I said thanks, gimme the car.
About a month later, Ford Motor Company sent me a lovely brochure along with a questionnaire asking me how my recent buying experience went, and how could it be improved? So I told them. In detail. Why on earth, I wrote, do all car dealerships hire these creepy losers to stalk the lots when over 50% of the people buying cars are women? Are you trying to make us hate you? Because if so, it’s working.
I only recount this story to show that 1) Ford doesn’t want to have a better idea, it wants to sell trucks to guys, 2) an affordable car that got over 50 mpg was available over 15 tears ago, so what is the big issue with building one now? and 3) the women of America should forcibly take over Ford Motor Company right now and start running it intelligently while there is still time.
I’m thinking, if their stock falls much farther, taking them over shouldn’t even be all that expensive. It could easily be a bloodless coup, especially if we all wear heels when we show up.
Now, who wants to talk color palettes?
By Evelyn Black, on April 14th, 2009
With the recent turnaround in the stock market, happy days are here again, at least for a minute. And yet, if you are very, very still, you will a hear a faint rustling in the background, like something scary sneaking up on a rabbit.
That rustling you hear is everybody sneaking around looking for anybody to blame for our current economic distress. Soon we will witness a free-for-all blamefest.
Let me just get a jump on here that while no one is paying attention.
First of all, I don’t believe that we are witnessing the bursting of an ‘oil bubble.’ What we are seeing now is a combination of 1) an expected drop in prices due to a drop in demand and 2) a reaction to market turbulence that sent the dollar dropping rapidly against the euro. This happy time won’t last. It’s a blip on the screen; a shiny reflection on the water that survivors stranded on a deserted island briefly mistake for a rescue ship.
Calm down. It’s not a rescue ship. We really are doomed.
So let’s get back to naming names and assigning blame. Who caused this mess? Was it Alan Greenspan? Was it day traders and short sellers? Was it oil and commodities speculators? Whom should we string up for this? I think there is plenty of blame to go around, but it doesn’t seem to be settling in the right places. It may never settle there. That doesn’t mean I can’t assign it in my own special way, right here, right now:
Bad CEOs.
Why is it that if I go to the restroom too many times on my shift I get in trouble, but if our CEO loses us billions of dollars by making risky investment decisions that go bad, he gets to retire with a golden parachute of $132 million? Personally, I call that bad management. I mean, I could run our corporation into the ground faster and better and all I would require by way of a parachute is a single million dollars. That’s all I want, not a penny more. You see, right there I could have saved our stockholders $131 million but did anyone ask me? No. I’m not waiting by the phone either.
Dumb voters.
It really is the economy stupid. What did you think the spoiled son of a Texas oilman was going to do for you anyway? What ever made you think for one single second that he even cared? Molly Ivins sounded the alarm about Dubya over and over again, in book after book, and she kept on sounding it right up until her untimely death last year, but did anyone listen? They did not. You know those chickens that will be in every pot? First they have to come home to roost. That’s what’s happening right now. Try and catch one if you can. You’ll be needing the protein.
Consumerism.
Who ever heard of an economy that could sustain itself simply by buying tons of cheap crap from China? Which economic theory lays that possibility out in a way that makes even marginal sense? I used to like to troll the bargain end-caps at Target as much as the next woman, but no more. Even if it means the terrorists win, my pocketbook has forced me back to ‘use it up, wear it out, make it do’. I have been forced to ’stretch’ meat with noodles and mashed potatoes. Next I’ll be making Depression Cake. We should have known this all along, but, flush with cash, many Americans overspent while the housing boom was booming, and now that it’s bust, the party is over. Expect the next waive of credit defaults to be unsecured.
Congress.
Investment banks should not be allowed to chop up bad in debt and package it in ways that make it untraceable, then trade it in insane ways that bring down entire retail institutions. That is the sort of high risk gambit that regulation was invented to address, but no one in Congress got around to passing any regulation. Could it be because they themselves were making too much money while things were going well? No, that’s too cynical. Still, they have been less than effective. The current legislation meant to help out the five million homeowners expected to lose their homes this year to foreclosure, if passed, will help about 400,000 people, if the banks agree to work with them. It leaves the decision up to the banks. But it hasn’t been passed yet. There’s talk of a veto. God help us, because Congress won’t. You can count on that.
That’s my short list for today. I’d like to see a parade of CEOs held accountable for horrible decisions and unfathomable losses. I dream about that.
I may as well dream. You know what happens when we let dreams die.
By Evelyn Black, on November 10th, 2008
Can the U.S. economy possibly get any scarier or more complicated?
The short answer is yes, it can. The longer, more complicated answer is that the looming (potential) failures of Ford, GM, and Chrysler present long term sustainability problems for a middle class that is already clamoring for short term, emergency solutions.
Ford recently announced third quarter losses of $129 million but admitted to having burned through $7.7 billion in operating costs during the same period. GM announced a staggering loss of $2.5 billion. Chrysler, by all accounts, will be belly up by the start of 2009 if the government is unable to broker a merger with GM, and all three are begging Washington for a second $25 billion in low-interest loans to keep them all afloat until the current economic crisis passes.
The announcement of these stunning losses and the request of additional federal money came alongside industry announcements of even more lay-offs and possible suspension of the plans for research and development of new, more fuel-efficient American cars. Without a more competitive product than the big trucks and SUVs of the past 15 years, it’s hard to see how and when things will get much better for the U.S. auto industry, but unfortunately the problems go much deeper than that.
Retail sales fell of a cliff in October across the board, with the exception of Wal-Mart, which saw a 2% increase in sales. Even sales of luxury items fell; items which in the past have been fairly recession-proof. Stores like Saks and Bloomingdales posted some of the worst figures of all. Job losses for October came to just under a quarter of a million, bringing the unemployment rate to a 14-year high of 6.5%, and this, by general agreement, is only the beginning of the labor effects of the recent credit crunch.
All of this bad news is hitting right before Christmas, a time when retail stores generally expect to be ramping up for the November and December sales that will carry them through the rest of the year. This year, those sales may not materialize at all. Circuit City is shutting down 120 stores for good, right before Christmas, just to stay solvent, and other big box stores that usually hire extra help for the holidays are actually terminating permanent workers to reduce costs.
The fact is that people are not buying anything right now. Even if the Big Three could produce a car that runs on air and then start shipping it to car lots tomorrow, most Americans would be unable to qualify for loans to buy these magical air cars, even if they had jobs or money to put down on them, which fewer and fewer people do with each passing day. The recession is looking like it will be long and hard, with many analysts seeing a turn-around no sooner than 2010.
When Henry Ford first started to build automobiles in the U.S., he made the radical decision to pay his assembly line workers incredibly well. He did this not out of a sense of altruism or social justice, but rather to expand his business plan so he could market his cars to everybody, thereby making more money for himself. In making this decision, he not only enabled his workers to buy the cars they were building, he also ended up creating a thriving American middle class.
Over the course of the past 30 years several developments have increased profits for U.S. corporations and their stockholders, while at the same time putting downward pressure on the mostly industrial middle class. Changes in U.S. trade agreements allowed industry to flee the U.S. rapidly and dramatically, forcing formerly middle class workers into low-wage jobs in the service sector.
As the good industrial jobs disappeared, corporations also began to eliminate middle-management white color jobs with middle class salaries. Most of the corporate jobs left in the U.S. today are entry level service sector jobs, often in call centers or tech support, with little opportunity for advancement or career development. Not much remains between the bottom of the corporate pyramid and the CEO, and what does remain is under constant pressure to produce more profit for less reward.
In fact, in most of these workplaces (the classic cubicle farms of the ‘Dilbert’ comic strip) a management style designed to turn over employees in one to two years remains firmly in place. While this rapid turnover keeps labor costs low, it also creates a very unstable, low-paid workforce with no special loyalty to any one job and not enough annual income to commit to a four-year auto loan.
In other words, the middle class jobs that created the ‘consumer economy’ are largely gone with the decline of the Big Three and the loss of myriad other U.S. industrial jobs, both related and unrelated. Steel, textiles, electronics, computer chips—all of these items are made overseas now. When people don’t have good jobs and can’t get credit, they can’t spend money. When people can’t spend money, more people lose jobs.
Short term, the U.S. will have to find a way to keep people in their homes, keep them warm and fed, and stabilize housing and financial markets. Those challenges would be daunting in and of themselves for even an economic Mozart. Deficit spending seems unavoidable at a time when the national debt is already completely out of control.
But long term, the U.S. will have to find a stable job base that can support a middle class and do whatever is necessary to keep those jobs here. If that doesn’t happen, if we don’t see something on the horizon to replace the dead industrial base, then all the stimulus packages Congress can dream up won’t prevent a long and painful period of poverty and contraction in America.
Gas prices are finally coming down.
Unfortunately we’re running on fumes and our credit cards are being declined.
What happens next will have long and lasting effects, not just on the economy, but on the health and security of the nation.
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By Evelyn Black, on October 27th, 2008
Why, oh why, did the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression have to hit during a presidential election year?
The ‘Fear Index’, also known as the VIX (or, officially, the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index) is a financial tool that measures market swings or volatility. The higher the VIX goes, the scarier the market looks, and the more panicky investors feel. Until very recently, few people had heard of the VIX and even fewer cared about it, but ever since the credit crunch took hold a few weeks back, the VIX has been a staple number on nightly cable news channels. On October 17, it hit 70.3, the highest fear rating ever recorded since the VIX was first introduced in 1993.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t really need a VIX rating to convince me that people are scared. Insiders and investment specialists do have a practical use for an exact day-by-day volatility measurement. People like me, however, who write for economics blogs and read the financial sections of the major newspapers for sport, tend to get a general sense of the mood of the country simply by watching how many people in our own communities are completely melting down at any given moment.
Here’s a basic formula I’ve devised that any nonprofessional can use to measure financial fear:
1) Take the number of personal friends and family members who have lost at least 30% of their 401(k), and 2) divide that by the number of emotional outbursts about the economy that you have personally fallen victim to on the day you are measuring, then 3) multiply that final figure by the chocolate available in your household by 10:00 p.m. on any given weeknight, and 4) eat all the chocolate before someone else in your house gets to it.
Perform that equation and I guarantee you will discover that Americans are pretty scared right now.
Sadly, fear is a big stick that can be useful in political campaigns, especially with only days left until November 4th. Think you might need some help with that adjustable rate mortgage pretty darn quick? Socialist! What, do you think the government is supposed to wipe your chin and put you to bed! On the other hand, do you think you deserve the tax breaks you got under George W. Bush for finally, after 50 plus years, making it to a 50% income bracket? Fat cat! What are you, some kind of AIG executive or something? I’ll bet you eat homeless people for breakfast, you scoundrel!
The rhetoric surrounding the already significant economic mess is off the charts emotionally right now, and I submit it does not help the current situation one bit. What can we make of the term ’socialist’ in an environment in which the U.S. Treasury has just admitted it is considering nationalizing the banks? Which is more ’socialist’: a nationalized banking system, or a universal healthcare system? Don’t taxes by definition always redistribute wealth (unless we’re talking about a flat tax, which we aren’t)?
On a related note, if people who earn over $250,000 are actually about to be financially eviscerated by Barack Obama’s plan to rescind the Bush tax cuts, how is it that Cindy McCain paid just 20% of her 2007 income ($2 million of a total income of $10 million) but my household got stuck paying 27% on a microscopic fraction of that amount? OK, I know that question isn’t entirely logical, but it does beg a related question: Are taxes really the central issue here? Or do we just need access to much, much better accountants?
The economic political waters are about as muddy as they can get right now, and that’s useful because confusion and rhetoric throws people back on their own fears and emotional prejudices instead of their capacity for rational analysis of the issues at hand.
I’ll be frank: I have no clue what is going to happen next.
There, I said it.
You know, there are people in the world who spend years and years in Zen meditation practice just to someday, hopefully, somehow, train their minds to live completely in the present moment. Here in America, we’ve suddenly been given that gift free of charge by means of a financial meltdown. If we want, we can choose to simply admit that we are at a completely unrecognized moment in historical time, that no one is certain how this is all going shake out, and then we can just wing it, as it were.
That’s what will ultimately end up happening anyway.
In Zen meditation, when practitioners get caught up in projecting what might or might not happen and in thinking so fast it starts to make a soft whirring noise inside their own heads, the Zen master will often come up behind that practitioner and whap him or her upside the head with a big stick to snap that person out of it. Right now I see an excess of stick wielding Zen masters and a shortage of humble practitioners. If one more Zen master starts in on my own head, seriously, I’m going to…
Well, I’m going to do exactly what I’m currently doing: baking lots of chocolate things and eating them while I still can.
Here’s the scoop (as I understand it): We are either in for the hardest, longest recession in U.S. history or a mild downturn of one to two years followed by complete recovery. We are either about to become a socialist nation with requisite neo-WPA posters in every heavily-taxed home, or else we’re about to give the obscenely wealthy all the rest of our money and stuff, whatever little we have left, even our cats. These dueling outcomes will destroy us by fire or ice, but the important thing for us to understand is that, either way, we will indeed be destroyed.
No wonder people are scared!
I submit we may soon be looking at C) None of the above.
In the meantime, keep your stick to yourself, would you please?
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By Evelyn Black, on October 23rd, 2008
In an op-ed piece of October 17’s New York Times world-famous entrepreneur and financier Warren Buffet urged American investors to return to the stock market and bet on the long term future success of the United States. “Buy American,” Buffett’s headline reads. “I am.”
The essay was a vote of confidence from a successful guy at a time when America badly needs a vote of confidence from somewhere, anywhere, for anything.
But is Buffett’s advice valid?
The gist of Buffett’s analysis is that when markets tumble, the best time to buy stocks has historically been before recessionary effects hit the broader economy. As Buffett explains it,
During the Depression, the Dow hit its low, 41, on July 8, 1932. Economic conditions, though, kept deteriorating until Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933. By that time, the market had already advanced 30 percent. Or think back to the early days of World War II, when things were going badly for the United States in Europe and the Pacific. The market hit bottom in April 1942, well before Allied fortunes turned. Again, in the early 1980s, the time to buy stocks was when inflation raged and the economy was in the tank. In short, bad news is an investor’s best friend. It lets you buy a slice of America’s future at a marked-down price.
Or, if you need a more shorthand rule of thumb: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.”
It’s hard not to like Warren Buffett, a guy who admitted openly on a recent televised interview that 1) his clerical staff pays higher income taxes than he does, and 2) that’s not right. No, he’s not out pestering the IRS to accept additional taxes from him as a mea culpa, but he does go out of his way to encourage Americans, to back American businesses, and to responsibly critique U.S. government policies, all the while managing to still enrich Warren Buffett in the process.
If there’s such a thing as an Everyman CEO, Buffett is the guy.
Still, many analysts see hard times ahead for the U.S. for many decades, not just many years. While it’s true that ‘buy low, sell high’ is still a decent way to conduct yourself in regard to the stock market, it’s also true (and Buffett admits it in the NYT essay) that the U.S. could be in for a prolonged decline before we see a Renaissance. What that means is that unless you are young and careful with what you purchase, this might not be a great time to jump into the stock market: Not because America will never come back–of course it will come back eventually–but because you may or may not be around when it does, and you may or may not pick the company that will thrive in whatever nation America is about to become.
Because the America that existed up until this month? That nation is effectively gone now.
What we are witnessing right now is for all intents and purposes the decline of an empire. How far will we fall? The most positive estimates have the U.S. going through a severe recession with a continued drop in housing prices, rising unemployment, and frequent government intervention through 2010 at least and possibly longer. Those are the optimists.
Pessimistic forecasts invoke Mad Max movies and survivalist nightmares.
I think the truth will, as usual, be somewhere in the middle, with the downturn being more severe than predicted in the press but less apocalyptic than predicted by the conspiracy theorists. Will some people find ways to get rich during these difficult times? Yes. Some people always do. The Chinese sign for crisis is also the sign for opportunity (whether it really is or not!) and so on and so forth.
But will most of us prosper?
No.
Most of us will be lucky to hang on to what we have, and any little bit of money left over will probably not be spent on stocks. Not for a long time.
What that means is that, while the stock market may be close to bottoming out at this point (who can say?), and while certain stocks might be worth buying right now for that reason (which stocks, even Buffett isn’t saying), the ability of most people to buy anything is going to go away for a long, long time, starting this Christmas if not sooner.
We are likely to see a stock market bottom, whenever it comes, followed by years of flat-lined market activity. Gains will be modest and unpredictable. Old standbys will go the way of the dinosaur and some surprising start-ups will briefly appear like shooting stars. Good guessers with lots of cash will be rewarded, but most people will just hang on until whomever we are going to be as a nation emerges clearly out of the 2008 smoke and carnage.
Many have made a credible case that the housing bubble was really an extension of the tech bubble and that, by replacing one bubble with another, we only forestalled and worsened the effects of an economic crisis that has been building for decades, not years. Manufacturing is no longer the foundation upon which the American middle class builds its wealth and security. We have been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs, and a lingering distaste among many for the abuses of the labor movement that led to the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa and the coronation of Ronald Reagan continues to keep us from doing what we need to do to shore up wages and opportunities. It’s fine to have beliefs, economic or otherwise, but here’s a fact that flies in the face of fiscal dogmatism: People can’t spend money they don’t have.
Not anymore they can’t, anyway. Not with credit markets frozen and jobs disappearing into the October mist like so many spectral visitors from America Past. With Christmas approaching, retail chains where I live are laying off employees.
Anyway you slice it, our “consumer culture” seems to be DOA. A victim of fiscal cardiac arrest.
So what does America do now? We don’t make things. We’ve lost the tech battle to China and India. We’ve tapped out our oil. Our young people are uneducated and unwell. And the final death rattle of a declining culture–rampant consumerism–is about to become a morality tale told to children around the wood stoves of the future by grandparents who lived through The Crash of 2008.
I appreciate Buffett’s encouragement, his faith in American business, and his willingness to step forward as a cheerleader right now. But I submit that the crisis we are facing is not so much a financial or economic one as it is an identity crisis, the biggest identity crisis we have faced as a nation since the Civil War.
Who are we and who do want to become?
The answers to these critical questions will determine our future prosperity.
Let’s hope and pray we get them right.
By Evelyn Black, on October 20th, 2008
A recent article splashed across the front page of the mid-size mid-western city where I live tells a surprisingly unfamiliar story about how ordinary people have pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars by investing in subprime real estate. Though the current financial crisis has brought about intense discussion about the moral hazard of borrowing beyond one’s means, as well as the irresponsible underwriting that went hand in hand with the subprime borrowing fever, much less attention has been paid to the phenomenon of mortgage fraud.
We know mortgage fraud mushroomed during the boom times of subprime loans. Yet it continues to hover just off the main radar screen, remaining conveniently just outside of public awareness. What exactly is mortgage fraud anyway?
In the case recounted in my local paper, two men–let’s call them Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones–decided to go into the real estate development business by buying up properties in depressed neighborhoods, ‘flipping’ (that is, renovating) the houses they bought, and then selling the houses or renting them out and thereby making a profit on their investment.
So far, that doesn’t seem like a bad idea, especially when credit is readily available and the houses in question are close to a university or a major manufacturing center, or are part of a boom market like some areas in Florida or California. We’ve all watched TV shows on the Learning Channel and on the Discovery Network that chronicle the adventures and misadventures of these flipping entrepreneurs, and many of us have vicariously enjoyed their journeys while eating Cheetos and keeping our own hands soft and clean.
What we don’t see, however, are the house flippers who never flip, never sell, and then default on the loans.
Here’s how it works:
Mr. Smith buys a home in a slum neighborhood for $20,000. He hires an appraiser to value the home at $80,000. The appraiser is committing a crime at this point–the house is not worth $80,000 in anyone’s imagination–but the appraiser and Mr. Smith know each other and are working together to defraud the mortgage industry. Mr. Jones comes along and offers to buy the house (which is actually worth $20,000 or slightly less but is now appraised at $80,000) for $100,000. Mr. Jones is a ’straw buyer’. He doesn’t really want to own the house; he is working with Mr. Smith and the fraudulent appraiser.
Mr. Jones approaches an out-of-state mortgage broker who, not knowing or caring too much about the value of local real estate, is only too happy to make Jones a loan of $80,000 or even $100,000. When Mr. Jones explains he will be improving and then reselling this hot property, the broker envisions repeat business and repeat commissions when Jones buys and flips his other houses.
Mr. Jones then repeats this same process with a dozen or more other properties, all in league with Mr. Smith and his fake appraiser. They pocket the profit on the homes ($60,000 or $80,000 on just the first one alone) and then Mr. Jones proceeds to default on every single mortgage, sticking the out-of-state company who wrote the first mortgage with a $100,000 debt on a nearly worthless house.
 Although FBI tables show that mortgage fraud has increased dramatically in recent years, the cases that are actually investigated are really just the tip of a very large iceberg. The FBI doesn’t have anything close to the staff it needs to launch a thorough and comprehensive investigation into this kind of scam because of the sheer volume of cases since 2006 alone.
In my own town, with our own local Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones, neither man has ever been formally charged with anything and neither have paid anything to the mortgage companies that made them the loans. The FBI will neither confirm nor deny whether the two of them are under investigation for fraud. These two men, under their own initiative, have purchased, sold, and defaulted on over 60 homes in the worst neighborhood in this city over the past two years for a net profit of over $1.5 million for Mr. Smith and over $750,000 for Mr. Jones. Their defaults account for more foreclosures in that specific neighborhood than all the other individual foreclosure cases combined.
Both Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones now claim to be disabled and speak to the press only through their spouses, who both insist no wrongdoing has occurred. None of the homes were ever rented or improved. All of them are currently vacant and in a state of serious disrepair. Mr. Jones never took out a single building permit. He claims that he planned to do the work himself but health issues intervened.
Is it possible that these two men are just a couple of enterprising fellows who fell down a flight of stairs at the same rather convenient time? I guess so. Is it likely?
What do you think?
A new and particularly nasty wrinkle on this scheme is called foreclosure fraud. While many different scenarios can be set up, by far the most common involves a ‘foreclosure rescue’ agency that approaches (or is approached by) a longtime homeowner behind on his or her house payments. You’ve probably seen signs posted around your town that say, “We Buy Houses!” Many of these agencies are set up to defraud people in danger of foreclosure. If you try to track them down or investigate them, all you will find is a list of post office boxes and vague nonspecific names attached to no specific person.
Here’s how it works: The foreclosure rescue agency offers to buy the house from the mortgage company about to foreclose on the property and then rent it to the homeowner for a set period of time, during which the homeowner hopes to improve his or her financial situation. At the end of that mutually agreed-upon period (typically two or three years), the foreclosure rescue agency promises to then resell the property to the homeowner on terms they can actually afford. The rescue agency claims to make their money on fees and appreciation, the people get to stay in their house, and everybody is happy.
Except, what really happens is that the minute the homeowners sign the house over to the ‘foreclosure rescue’ folks, the rescue agency runs right out to the easiest lender on the farthest block, cashes out the equity in the home, then disappears off the face of the earth, leaving the homeowner still about to foreclose and owing more in some cases than the house is even worth.
 Foreclosure fraud is off the charts in recent years and is growing so fast no one is quite sure how many people have been hit. If you are in danger of foreclosure, read up on some of the most common schemes before you agree to talk about your situation with anyone except your original lender.
As we listen to the most recent attempts to bail out and/or stabilize the U.S. economy, we have also been hammered by lots of campaign rhetoric meant to push our emotional hot buttons by assigning blame for the current mess to individuals we might already mistrust or dislike: certain ethnic groups, minorities, members of certain financial occupations, Wall Street bankers, mortgage brokers, Democrats or Republicans, and so forth. What we are witnessing is a veritable frenzy of blaming, and it gets to be contagious. For some reason, it feels reassuring in times of crisis to find a scapegoat, to blame somebody, anybody, for what is happening. Blame, when properly or improperly placed, always creates the illusion of control. We think that if we find the right person or persons to blame, we can then proceed to hold them accountable and then fix the problem at hand.
While the need to assign blame is completely understandable, especially in an election year, it unfortunately obscures the sheer volume of criminal activity that took place at every level of commerce during the height of the housing bubble. Even at the most basic level–the level of buying a single house–an underpaid local reporter was able to uncover millions of dollars of what was, for all intents and practical purposes, most likely out and out fraud. And that’s just in one small mid-western city. All the poor people on that entire side of town didn’t cause as much damage as those two guys and their fast thinking. And that’s at the very lowest, most transparent level of the whole mess. Now multiply that scenario by every city in the U.S., and square with every level of finance and speculation, and you’ve got the mother of all criminal messes.
So far, few people are going to jail for any of this. But maybe at some point a few should.
At the very least, it’s food for thought.
By Evelyn Black, on October 13th, 2008
For at least a year now, ordinary people in the United States (people the press has been referring to as “Main Street”) have known that the economy was starting to slow down at the same time that prices were rising uncomfortably fast.
Now, some economists are finally starting to admit that, yes, the U.S. probably went into recession somewhere around January of 2008. U.S. economic growth is expected to go officially negative by the end of this year, and this negative growth pattern is expected to continue and worsen throughout most of 2009, if not longer, driven by job losses, a continued drop in factory orders, and falling home prices that still have a long way to fall before the housing market stabilizes.
On October 3, the U.S. Labor Department announced that 159,000 jobs were lost in September, much higher than the expected loss of 100,000 jobs. Orders for durable manufactured goods declined by 4%, almost double the 2.5% figure expected by analysts. Even the service sector flat-lined in September, hovering just barely above the 50 point threshold that signals economic growth.
Although the House of Representatives finally did pass the $700 billion credit market rescue package on  October 3rd, by the time the bill was at last on its way to the White House for the President Bush’s signature, that same credit crisis had already pushed the State of California into a $7 billion budget shortfall, with the real possibility of not being able to meet payroll this month, and the State of New York into a shortfall of $1.6 billion, expected to worsen next year. California may have to turn to the Federal Reserve to borrow if credit isn’t available by the end of October or else face a total shut down of state government.
It is not at all unusual for economists to declare a recession in retrospect or for consumers to feel the recessionary effects before the experts do. This is partly because economists have varying criteria for labeling an economic slowdown recessionary (two consecutive quarters of negative growth is just one rule-of-thumb) and partly because it takes awhile to accumulate enough data to analyze and declare a trend. So often the effects of a recession are felt long before it is formally announced.
However, this time the economic trouble feels like it runs much deeper; and the unease accompanying the acknowledgment of this trouble feels closer to panic. While caution is almost certainly wise at times like these (Why create panic if taking care with words can restore calm?), it is also true that, at every step of this current economic crisis, experts have erred on the side of minimizing the depth of the turn-down. With each new catastrophe, someone important was out in front of cameras declaring that the housing market was bottoming out and the economy was about to turn around. Each catastrophe was expected to be the last. Until the next catastrophe. The phrase “a river in Egypt” springs to mind.
Eventually, the public quit believing the experts. Soon the public ignored the experts entirely, believing instead that positive spin was all that was really available from such persons: the hard truth was to be found instead in the price of milk, the number of overdrafts in a personal checking account, a declining 401(k) balance marked with a red double-digit loss percentage. Let the experts spin until they puked: the truth is that when the money is gone a week before payday arrives, you don’t need an expert to explain that times are getting tough.
By the time Henry Paulson and a seemingly exhausted, sincerely frightened Ben Bernanke went before Congress (was it really only a couple weeks ago?) with their request for $700 billion right now and a prohibition on any oversight or prosecution, it seemed obvious to all that Wall Street’s unending font of optimism had very suddenly run dry. Wall Street seemed to learn what Main Street had known all year in the space of only a few days. How can that be? Lots of people were asking themselves this same question, all at the same time.
All of which brings me to the current situation and the grotesque chasm that seems to have opened up overnight to separate the folks on Wall Street from the folks on Main Street and to separate Main Street from its supposedly representative democracy. To paraphrase the famous line from Cool Hand Luke, what we have here is not just “…a failure to communicate,” but rather a total breakdown in trust.
So what are we looking at here? A recession similar to the recession of the early 90’s with a light at the end of an admittedly dark tunnel? Or are we instead, as New York Times op-ed columnist and economist Paul Krugman says, truly on “The Edge of the Abyss”?
If you ask Wall Street that question today, you may or may not get an answer that spins. There comes a time when all that is left for anyone to do is breathe and pray and cross their fingers.
If you ask Main Street this question today, you will probably get an earful.
It won’t be pretty.
Neither will the year ahead. Or the one after that. Let’s hope our new leadership has a strong spine and a better plan. We’ll all be needing both.
By Evelyn Black, on October 10th, 2008
On October 7, American Express revealed that they will begin limiting their customers’ access to credit based on both where they shop and which bank holds their primary mortgage. While there is nothing in the law that prevents American Express (or any other credit card company) from doing this, the announcement is noteworthy coming from what many assume to be the creme de la creme of unsecured personal credit lines.
The credit crunch is about to hit the consumer pocketbook in a big and personal way, starting with credit card companies looking for ways to limit or freeze personal credit lines. The reasons for the lowered limits are not always obvious, and they may or may not have anything to do with the customer’s financial balance sheet. American Express would not reveal the stores or banks that they considered “risky,” but if you happen to have an association with one of them, however tenuous, look to see your credit limit lowered or arbitrarily frozen very soon.
According to the consulting firm Innovest StrategicValue Advisors, banks will charge off nearly $96 billion in delinquent credit card debit in 2009, nearly twice the amount charged off in 2008. Many customers who very recently had access to home equity lines of credit, business lines of credit, or unsecured bank loans are now seeing these sources dry up due to the credit crunch. As a result, they are leaning on the option of last resort: credit cards. Credit card issuers are falling all over themselves trying to get ahead of the problem.
In a worst case scenario, a good customer (as in, a customer who pays on time and has been doing so for years) could see his or her credit limit arbitrarily lowered and then exceeded before even realizing that had happened. Sometimes, just the interest accruing on a large balance will exceed a lowered credit limit before a customer has any time to do anything about it. Once the limit is exceeded, the credit card issuer can and will hike the interest to 32%, charge over-limit fees, and push the customer even closer to default.
Why would credit card companies do this?
Because credit card companies can’t just close an open line and demand payment in full; what they are doing instead is encouraging customers to transfer their large balances elsewhere. Look for balance transfer fees to jump dramatically as well in coming months (or weeks) as banks and other financial firms look to discourage these balances from hopping aboard their own sinking ships.
According to Carol Kaplan of the American Bankers Association,
(Banks) have suffered a lot of losses and they are doing whatever they can to reduce risk. They have people that work all day and all night who try to come up with new formulas to assess risk.
These risk assessment formulas are getting much stiffer and much more conservative almost overnight. Anyone with a credit card balance that is in excess of 30% of the limit will likely see changes to the limit itself and the rate and fee structure in the very near future, and some analysts are recommending that customers carry a balance of no more that 10% of the limit in order to avoid punitive fees and rate hikes.
What this means for consumers who, since 2006, have had to rely ever more on their credit cards to pay for basic services, food, and taxes is that the last well of credit is about to run dry, leaving them with only their inadequate incomes to cover costs this winter and Christmas season. Add this to the fact that home heating oil and natural gas are expected to increase by double digits this winter and the fact that many people still haven’t paid off last year’s heating bills yet, and you have a recipe for disaster.
The Federal Reserve, Congress, and the U.S. Treasury are still intently focused on simply stabilizing Wall Street right now. The $700 billion bail-out package is looking ever more anemic in the face of a world market crisis, the credit crunch has not abated at all at the interbank level (the LIBOR rate is still rising, and commercial paper is still impossible). Understandably, the systemic cardiac arrest is getting the first response, inadequate though it may be at the moment.
But not too far down the road, the same financial credit stroke is about to hit American households one by one, right at the beginning of winter and the start of a holiday season that promises to be one of the most dismal on record.
Let’s hope something works. Soon.
By Evelyn Black, on October 8th, 2008
The U.S. stock market has been nothing if not volatile this year, especially over the course of the past few weeks. As the current credit crisis tightened and the world watched in horror, what most people saw was the stock market spiking and plummeting, often on mere rumor and speculation, and sometimes on the strength of what seemed like nothing at all. We’ve gotten used to this show, and for many people, it has become a source of rage and disgust.
The 777 point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average after the defeat of the House $700 billion rescue package was dramatic and scary. By most accounts, about $1 trillion was lost in a single afternoon. I personally lost a quarter of my 401(k). The very next day, however, more than half of that loss was recouped on the mere hope that some kind of bill would in fact pass by the end of the week, even though it was impossible to know what kind of bill that might be.
Meanwhile, radio talk shows were busy interviewing everyone who had ever held any kind of opinion about anything related to finance, and some of it was not just misleading, it was nuts.
For instance, at one point I heard the crisis described as something that would “…make it harder for people to get car loans and would also cause small businesses to have to use their credit cards instead of lines of credit with their banks.” At the other end of the spectrum was a semi-hysterical comment by a cable news pundit who said, “People want to know if they will be able to use their ATMs by the end of the week!”
Both of these remarks are misleading.
First of all, the ATM issue is not an issue. Sometimes ATMs don’t work even when there isn’t a credit crisis. The things actually run out of money sometimes, often on Sundays, and on top of that they are subject to computer software glitches, mechanical breakdowns, and all sorts of other gremlins that are just part of life. Stuff happens with ATMs, and the credit crisis is not the kind of “stuff” that happens to them. It’s not related at all. You have no more reason to worry about your favorite ATM now, this week, than you ever have.
So calm down.
The other remark is just as misleading though. If auto loans are harder to get and business trips are put off, that’s bad for the economy, certainly. But explaining the credit crunch this way gives the impression that it is something that will just make people tighten their belts a bit, and tightening our belts is something that the overwhelming majority of us feel is long overdue and probably a good thing. I have noticed a real effort on the part of the media not to scare people. Fine. But let’s be honest at least.
The real scare with a credit crunch has nothing to do with your purchasing habits and everything to do with the fact that so many businesses, including big banks, run on short term credit. By short term I mean a day, a week, sometimes a month. A business needs this credit to even out cash flow so it can function properly. So, for instance, the garden center where you work as a clerk probably makes about 80% of its money in May and June. The rest of the year, your paycheck is likely written on a line of credit from the bank. This is true of many businesses, especially retail and construction. Profit is not spread evenly over twelve months.
Free flowing credit is good for business because, over the course of a year, if a business still makes lots of money during that May and June flower frenzy, they will turn a profit and stay current on their short term lines. The bank stays happy, the business stays happy, and you stay employed and get paid in checks that don’t bounce. You take those good checks to your bank and spend the money on stuff, and the world goes round and round like it should.
When credit gets too tight, it’s like throwing a wrench into the gears of that whole system, and commerce grinds to a halt. When commerce grinds to a halt we get a recession, or worse.
That is the fear that is behind the current attempt to “rescue” the U.S. financial system fast, but it is just abstract enough to be a non-issue for the average person. We all see that DJIA looping up and down like an out-of-control hang glider, and we think, that’s nuts. Those guys deserve to fail.
What is harder to understand is that, if those guys fail, they will retire to their homes in Martha’s Vineyard and Connecticut and Vale, and we will lose our jobs and wait in line to buy milk because, if you don’t buy it on the day it comes in, you don’t get any.
I believe that the truth is that that might happen anyway, no matter what Congress does or doesn’t do. But I also think part of the problem right now is the complexity of the situation and opaque nature of the mess our economy is currently in. The stock market is only the thermometer, and it seems to be a broken thermometer at that: One that works sometimes and other times seems completely, psychotically detached from any day-to-day reality.
The excesses of the financial world and the real estate bubble have left us with a loss of trust in our leaders and our business, and they in turn have all lost trust in each other. Nothing good happens financially in an environment in which there is no trust, and once lost, trust is a very hard commodity to lay one’s hands on.
So it’s no wonder that the American people are overwhelmingly against any government intervention in this historic economic mess. What is frightening is that by the time people do realize that this mess is going to hit them personally, and hit them hard, it may well be too late.
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