More History Rhyming

Home Sales

Home SupplyWhile much of the focus has been on the slow decline of commercial real estate, we are also seeing significant declines in single family home sales.

We need to remember that the 2008-2009 housing crash was not the result of home prices falling.  Instead it came from home price increases falling from 10-15% to just 5%, which prevented over-leveraged buyers from refinancing.

Sales of existing single-family homes fell by 1.9% in July from June, seasonally adjusted, the second month in a row of declines, to an annual rate of 3.69 million sales, sinking deeper into the mud at the bottom that sales have been in for four years, according to data by the National Association of Realtors today.

………

Supply of single-family homes rose to 4.6 months in July, the highest since the summer of 2016.

Supply is a function of inventory and sales – how much inventory there was at month-end in relationship to sales during the month. Sales sank deeper into the mud at the bottom, while inventories rose to 1.4 million single-family homes for sale.

While "regular" interest rates are high, real interest rates (regular interest rates - inflation) have actually remained quite low.

My prediction is that we are going to see a reckoning in the real estate markets sooner rather than later. 

Nope

So it looks like Donald Trump is trying to put his name back on and shut down the Kennedy Center again.

Because his feelings are hurt when the judge told him that putting his name on the facility was unlawful. 

If I were judge Cooper, I'd be throwing the entire board in jail for contempt.

The board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted on Thursday to inscribe President Trump’s name on the building beneath the main signage, according to two people with direct knowledge of the proceedings, aggressively testing a federal judge’s order.

According to the resolution approved by the Trump-allied board, the inscription underneath the institution’s name would read: “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.” The board’s decision, which directs officials to act by “all legal means,” came shortly after it voted to move forward with Mr. Trump’s plan to shutter the building for renovations.

Restored and renovated by Trump? 

Is he swinging the hammer? Nope.

Is it his money that is being spent on this? Nope. 

F%$# this. 

………

The move appeared to attempt to find a creative workaround to a provision in the federal law governing the Kennedy Center that says “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas.”

………

Both decisions will be subject to the scrutiny of the judge who, in response to a lawsuit from a Democratic lawmaker, found that the board had been “derelict” in considering the closure plan before approving it originally. Mr. Trump announced in February that the center would close for two years, with the objective of transforming what he called a “tired, broken and dilapidated” institution.

The board voted on Thursday to close the Kennedy Center’s main building while keeping a newer addition to the campus, known as the Reach, open for limited programming and to operate as an active memorial to John F. Kennedy. 

………

Outside arts administrators have suggested the financial realities for cultural organizations are far different from what the board is projecting, saying institutions typically do anything possible to avoid closure so they do not lose ticket revenue and donors. Ms. Beatty’s lawsuit questioned the true reasoning for the closure plans, arguing that it may be an effort to mask a financial downturn stemming from the president’s takeover.

Gee, ya think? 

I do hope that the judge goes postal on their flabby white asses.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And initial and continuing claims fell, but there are some other indicators of trouble ahead.

Applications for US unemployment benefits fell last week, suggesting the labor market remains stable.

Initial claims decreased by 8,000 to 208,000 in the week ended July 11, according to Labor Department Data released Thursday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 217,000 applications.

Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, dropped to 1.81 million in the previous week, also lower than expected.

New filings have fallen back to historically subdued levels after spiking in May and early June. Meanwhile the jobless rate declined last month, adding to evidence that employers are generally holding onto their workers even though some sectors such as technology are shedding jobs

Meanwhile long term unemployment has become increasingly problematic.

By most key metrics, the U.S. labor market is in fine shape: the economy has added jobs for four straight months, much improved from late last year, and the unemployment rate has drifted down to 4.2%.

Yet nearly two million Americans have been locked out of the job market for at least half a year.

The long-term unemployed—people without work for 27 weeks or more, the longest period the Labor Department reports in each monthly jobs report—accounted for 27.3% of all unemployed people in June, up 4 percentage points from a year earlier.

That is hovering near the highest level since late 2021, when the labor market was recovering from the Covid-19 shock. This can be perilous, since the six-month mark is when many job seekers lose severance or unemployment benefits.

Also, we are seeing increasing signs of trouble in the housing market.

Pending home sales plunged by 5.4% in June from May, seasonally adjusted, to the lowest level for any June on record, down 0.3% from the abysmally low levels in June last year, down 36% from June 2021, 37% from June 2020, 34% from June 2019, 32% from June 2018, and down 20% from June 2011, during the Housing Bust, according to data from the National Association of Realtors. Its data only goes back to mid-2010.

This is now the fourth year that demand has been in the deep-freeze, amid the highest supply of existing single-family homes in 10 years and of existing condos in 14 years.

Pending home sales fell in all regions, with the index plunging by the most in the Midwest, plunging to record lows in the West, and plunging in the South to the lowest level for any June and the sixth-lowest for any month in the data’s history going back to mid-2010 (historic data via YCharts):

 I think that we are in for a world of hurt.

This is Borgia Pope Sh%$

A particularly abusive order of the Catholic Church, the Congregation of Christian Brothers, have been found to be systematically transferring their assets to an ecclesiastic shell company to avoid having to pay victims.

These assets were transferred to, "Edmund Rice Education Australia," which has taken over their schools in recent years.

Just as an FYI, Edmund Rice was the founder of Congregation of Christian Brothers.

Funny, innit? 

Adam* pauses briefly, his voice catching slightly down the phone line. He’s contemplating how to describe the unprecedented new legal tactic the Christian Brothers Catholic order is deploying against him and hundreds of other abuse survivors.

“It’s not human,” he says. “It’s just not human.”

The Christian Brothers had an oversized role in the church’s industrial-scale abuse of children. A staggering 22% of its brothers were alleged perpetrators – the second highest rate of any Catholic order.

………

Now, the order is telling a court it is broke.

This week, the Christian Brothers applied for a court-ordered moratorium on all remaining civil cases lodged against it by survivors. If granted, it would permanently halt at least 200 civil claims.

This week, the Christian Brothers applied for a court-ordered moratorium on all remaining civil cases lodged against it by survivors. If granted, it would permanently halt at least 200 civil claims.

The order says it wants to instead sell its remaining property portfolio – 36 properties, worth about $216m – and divvy up the leftovers between a range of creditors, including survivors, using a scheme run by retired judges. It has already confirmed the sell-off will not provide enough cash for it to pay creditors all of what they are owed.

But a trove of church property records obtained by Guardian Australia tells another story – one that survivors have not been made aware of.

A Guardian investigation can reveal that the Christian Brothers has spent the last decade transferring large, multimillion-dollar property holdings for amounts of $1 to a separate Catholic church entity which is not part of the proposed sell-off scheme.

The beneficiary of the $1 property deals is Edmund Rice Education Australia, an independent organisation created in 2007 to assume control of schools previously associated with the Christian Brothers like Waverley College in Sydney, Trinity College in Perth and St Joseph’s Nudgee College in Brisbane.

I am not sufficiently proficient in Australian vernacular to properly describe this.  Perhaps my reader(s) could help me herem

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 Rather than leading with the unemployment numbers, I think that we need to look at the news about home sales, where the soft pedal the the obvious conclusion.

The short version is that sales are falling largely in relatively inexpensive properties, so sales fall, and the average, and the median, home prices rise, because the bottom half has shut down.

It's arithmetic 101, and it mirrors what happened in 2008-9

U.S. existing home sales unexpectedly fell in June as tight inventory boosted house prices to a record high and the Middle East conflict kept mortgage rates elevated, pushing potential buyers to the sidelines.

The report from the ​National Association of Realtors on Thursday underscored the growing affordability hurdle faced by many young people pursuing the so-called American dream of homeownership. Still, economists expected the housing market to make a small contribution to economic ‌growth in the second quarter for the first time in more than a year.

………

Home sales dropped 2.4% last month to a ​seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.09 million units. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast home resales would climb to a rate of 4.20 million units. Home sales have been bouncing around a 4 million unit pace for years now, ​with NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun noting a similar trend happened during the 2008 Great Recession.

That being said, this week's unemployment report was not great either, with initial claims being basically flat, and continuing claims rose 8K to 1.814M.

Initial claims decreased by 2,000 to 215,000 in the week ended July 4, a period that included the Independence Day holiday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 217,000 applications.

Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, edged up to 1.81 million in the previous week, according to Labor Department Data released Thursday.

With oil prices spiking again and little prospect for rate cuts from the Federal Reserve, this ain't good.

Epstein Island 2

I cannot understand why the Albanian people are so upset about Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump stealing the largest Albanian island on the Aegean.

Actually, I can understand why there are massive protests in Tirana.

The plan to gift the Sazan Island to the Trump Crime Family is infuriating to me, and I am 7 time zones behind the Balkan nation.

There is a nonzero chance that Jared Kushner will play a pivotal and entirely accidental role in bringing down the government of Albania. Over the last several weeks, the Balkan nation has been roiled by protests stretching from the capital, Tirana, to rural coastlines and cities around the world. The demonstrations were sparked by the government’s giving the green light to firms linked with Kushner to develop a 10,000-bed luxury resort near the city of Vlorë on the Narta Lagoon and protected wildlands in Zvërnec. Kushner and Ivanka Trump also have plans to turn Sazan Island, which belongs to a national park, into a smaller coastal enclave for the wealthy. On Saturday, some 200,000 people turned out as anger spread from the Kushner project to other luxury developments. Roughly 200 protesters in northwestern Albania tore down barbed-wire fencing around the construction site of a non-Kushner-linked five-star resort on the Adriatic Coast. As one participant told Reuters, they were demanding “compensation” for 200 local families whose “land has been seized.”

International coverage of the protests in Albania—a country relatively unfamiliar to many in the United States—has focused largely on the environmental concerns being raised by demonstrators, and the projects’ ties to the Trump family. The fledgling Kushner resorts threaten pristine wilderness and critical ecosystems that sustain a rare colony of the world’s largest freshwater birds, endangered Albanian water frogs, and loggerhead turtles. Among the species that stand to be affected are flamingos, whose last remaining habitat in Albania could be threatened by the developments. But the “Flamingo Revolution,” as the wide-ranging, horizontalist movement has become known, is about much more than flora, fauna, or Donald Trump. As Albania vies to become a top tourist destination and a member of the European Union, the ongoing protests aim to do nothing less than upend its political system. “At the core of this protest is not just environmental issues,” said Gresa Hasa, a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law and the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz. “This is a fight for freedom and democracy, and a future where the resources and the state works for all of us and not just for some of us, and where we are not excluded from our own beaches and public spaces.”

………

It’s no secret that the Trump family has been eager to make itself richer while the patriarch occupies the White House. Here in the U.S., awareness of these activities hasn’t yet made much of a dent in Trump’s grasp on power. Abroad, however, it may help bring down politicians who thought they could use that grift to their advantage. Let’s hope Americans take note.

The Trumps are a cancer on the entire world.

Of Course He Did

It's no surprise that Donald Trump has announced that he will block a popular and bipartisan housing bill unless Congress makes it illegal for Black and Brown people to vote.

OK, "Illegal," is a bit of hyperbole.  He just wants to make it as difficult as is humanly possible.

What does the "Save America" Act have to do with housing?  Nothing at all.

Despite rare and overwhelming bipartisan support, a US bill aimed at lowering the cost of housing for Americans is being held hostage by Donald Trump.

The president said he won’t sign the 21st Century Road to Housing Act until the Senate meets his demand to pass the Save America Act, which would dramatically change voting regulations by requiring proof of citizenship at voter registration and significantly curtail mail-in voting.

The housing bill, which was passed with large majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives after months of negotiations, represents one of the biggest efforts in decades to increase the supply of housing and reduce prices. On Wednesday morning, however, Trump claimed it was of “minor importance”.

Trump is trying not to spend the rest of his life in prison, so the voter suppression bill, and the ballroom, and the f%$#ing reflecting pool, are all that he cares about.

History Rhyming

So, in addition to seeing localized housing price declines, we now see housing starts falling to a 6 year low.

It smells like 2008. 

May housing starts fell to the lowest level since the pandemic disrupted construction six years ago, the U.S. Census Bureau announced Tuesday. Builder confidence has dropped recently because of higher material and financing costs.

The change threatens to exacerbate housing shortages and disrupt recent progress in most states toward building enough new housing for new residents.

Starts were down to an annual rate of 1.17 million, the lowest since April 2020, and an 8.5% drop since May 2025. The drop since last year was especially severe in the South, down 15%, and the West, down 11%, but the Northeast saw a 19% increase and the Midwest increased 6%.

These numbers vary from region to region, but it's more like they are taking turns.

Fasten Your Seatbelts. It’s Going to Be a Bumpy Ride

The Producer Price Index (PPI) rose by 1.1% in May.

I don't mean that it rose by a 1.2% annualized rate, I mean that the price numbers went up by 1.1% in a single month.  The same thing happened in April, so this is not a 1 month blip, and the 12 month PPI is up 6.5%. 

Prices charged by American producers continued to charge higher in May, the Labor Department said Thursday, marking another month of elevated wholesale inflation.

The producer-price index rose by 1.1% last month, following an equal increase in April. Analysts polled by The Wall Street Journal were expecting a 0.7% increase.

Over the past 12 months, the PPI is up by 6.5%, the fastest wholesale inflation since 2022.
Energy prices explained a good deal of the elevated trend, rising by more than 10% in May alone. But even excluding food, energy and trade-services categories, wholesale prices were up by 0.8%, a rapid one-month increase.

 The Fed is going to raise rates this week.

The Apotheosis of a Libertarian Community is an Out of Control HOA

Case in point, a massive survivalist bunker complex currently embroiled in litigation.

It sounds a lot like every Home Owner Association horror story that you have ever heard.

Row upon row of concrete bunkers with steel blast doors peek up from the rolling grasslands—like hobbit holes for the apocalypse.

There are 575 of them, clustered on a former munitions depot near South Dakota’s Black Hills and billed as “The Largest Survival Community on Earth.” The pitch: Ride out nuclear war, the next pandemic or societal collapse in relative comfort.

Yet for many residents, the dream has soured. The threat hasn’t come from Armageddon, but from friction that resembles a suburban homeowners’ association battle.

Lawsuits, countersuits and disputes are piling up over septic systems, property taxes, off-leash dogs and a growing list of community rules. The legal skirmishing has reached the state supreme court—twice. Promised amenities, including a restaurant bunker, a pool bunker and a horse-stable bunker, have yet to materialize. Guns have been drawn, and there have been offers to settle things with fists. The developer denies wrongdoing and says complaints come from a few malcontents.

………

The doomsday enclave, known as Vivos xPoint, is the brainchild of Robert Vicino, a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur who had a vision in 1980: He needed to build a large underground structure to protect 1,000 people from a coming “life-extinction event,” according to the company’s website. He since has developed a global network of such communities.

In 2016, Vicino began working with local ranchers to convert the long-abandoned South Dakota property—far from “known nuclear targets” and “high-crime anarchy zones” (read: cities)—into a compound for “like-minded survivalists to ride out ‘the event,’” as Vivos puts it. Vicino later bought the property outright, according to his son, Dante, Vivos xPoint’s director of operations.

No bear problem this time, at least not yet.

How is This a Bad Thing?

America's lamest newspaper, the New York Times, just bleated their worry that new taxes on ultra expensive 2nd homes might make living in New York more affordable.

The hed reads, "New Taxes Helped Cool London’s Housing Market.Could That Happen in New York?"

That implies that this might help ordinary people looking to live in the city.

The rest of the article is hand wringing about the possibility that this tax might result in losses for the ultra-rich and real estate developers.

To quote Emilio Estevez from the movie Repo Man, "F%$# that."

When these folks win, everyone else loses.

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan for a yearly surcharge on second homes in New York City worth $5 million or more could be an elegant political move — one that taxes the rich who don’t live in the city full-time.

If approved, the so-called pied-à-terre tax will be a populist win that avoids levying new taxes on constituents of Ms. Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York.

But real estate agents and economists say the tax could be catastrophic for the city’s housing market, hurting not the superrich investors who park their money here, but the very middle- and lower-income citizens it’s designed to benefit.

As to how this would hurt the, "Very middle- and lower-income citizens it’s designed to benefit?"

Crickets. 

The moneybags who, "Have historically made up nearly half of the homeowners in prime London neighborhoods," did not make those neighborhoods more affordable, they made them less affordable.

There is a mention of billionaires leaving London, and that some of said billionaires threw pocket change at charities.

They further claim that, "Smaller landlords threw in the towel, taking tens of thousands of apartments off the market and constricting supply."

Which means that these titans of industry are going on an Ayn Rand style, "Capital Strike," which has never happened in history. 

The Guy Schumer Hand Picked to Succeed Him

It's Brian Schatz ("D"-HI) who has gone to extremes to suck up to big money lobbyists.

Yeah, that's gonna win elections. 

As my colleague Bob Kuttner explains, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tim Scott (R-SC) have moved through a bipartisan housing bill supported by President Trump that if signed would represent the most (only?) progress of the second Trump term. The bill passed 89-10, reflecting awareness that housing affordability is a critical subject to loosen public anger over an economy that doesn’t work for most of them. The bill mostly adds funding to build housing, tackles land use rules, and lifts restrictions on manufactured housing that could lower costs of construction.

But on Wednesday, there was apparently only one provision worth talking about on the shambling mound that used to be Twitter: a requirement that investment companies that build single-family homes in order to rent them out (a strategy that has advanced over the past decade known as “build-to-rent”) and have over 350 properties sell them after seven years of rent collection. This was the subject of forceful objection by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), the heir apparent to Chuck Schumer in the Senate Democratic leadership.

Schatz called this particular measure “positively Soviet,” described it as “an effort to demonize people who want to build rental housing for folks,” and claimed it was a “drafting error,” presumably to embarrass its authors into a fix. “There is literally no reason to do it this way, and it would take like a two-line fix. But what we were told last week was, I’m sorry, the bill is closed,” he said.

………

That’s because this wasn’t about a policy change, but a signal to the people who actually do build-to-rent for mass amounts of properties, who aren’t families or pension funds as Schatz intimated, but private equity firms. They have been the ones loudly objecting to this measure. He was effectively telling the industry that he was on their side, and in opposition to their most hated opponent, Sen. Warren.

His vote did not matter.  It was not needed.  He could have told Private Equity that there was no point in his voting no with this much support.

He didn't because he wants to demonstrate his slavish fealty to them. 

History Rhyming

The delinquency rate for commercial mortgage-backed securities has hit 12.3%, almost 1 in 8.

This is higher than it was in the worst parts of the Great Recession. 

Fasten your seat-belts, we are in for a bumpy ride. 

The delinquency rate of office mortgages that have been securitized into commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) spiked by over a percentage point in January to 12.3%, once again the worst ever, and 1.6 percentage point above the worst moments of the Financial Crisis, according to data by Trepp , which tracks and analyzes CMBS.

The CMBS were sold to institutional investors around the world, such as pension funds, bond funds, insurers, etc. The banks that originated the loans are off the hook.

High vacancy rates in new fancy office towers allow companies to move from an old tower to a new tower when the lease expires, thereby upgrading and downsizing at the same time. This “flight to quality” is pulling the rug out from under older office buildings.

 This game of musical chairs is about fail catastrophically.

Just How Small is Donald Trump's Penis Anyway?

It appears that Donald Trump is so upset that people and performers are avoiding the Kennedy Center like the plague that he has announced plans to "refurbish" the complex which would result in it being closed for 2 years.

To be clear here, he's talking about knocking it down, and erecting another gold plated monstrosity in yet another example of architectural self-aggrandizement and bad taste.

We need to burn down everything that he built when he is gone.

President Donald Trump said Sunday that he plans to close the Kennedy Center for roughly two years for the facility to undergo construction. The proposal comes amid a series of cancellations and internal upheaval since he took over the arts institution and presidential memorial nearly a year ago and remade it in his name and image.

“I have determined that The Trump Kennedy Center, if temporarily closed for Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding, can be, without question, the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “In other words, if we don’t close, the quality of Construction will not be nearly as good, and the time to completion, because of interruptions with Audiences from the many Events using the Facility, will be much longer.”

Under Trump’s proposal, which he said is subject to board approval, the Kennedy Center could close on July 4, coinciding with America’s 250th anniversary, with construction beginning immediately.

“Financing is completed, and fully in place!,” Trump wrote. “This important decision, based on input from many Highly Respected Experts, will take a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center … and turn it into a World Class Bastion of Arts, Music, and Entertainment, far better than it has ever been before.”

Needless to say, anyone with any connection to the Kennedy Center, including members of the Kennedy family.

History Rhyming

While the market collapse of 2008-2009 came as a surprise to me, in retrospect, the signs were there.

They weren't big things, but an increasing number of little things.

Over the past few weeks, we have: 

• A stealth bailout of Wall Street by the Federal Reserve: Basically, they are shoveling money out the door using the Fed's repo (repurchase agreement) facility.  Basically selling assets overnight and buying them back in the morning for quick cash.
• Private Repo is skyrocketing as well: Meaning that there is a multi-Trillion game of musical chairs without any chairs.  Waiting for the music to stop.
• Home sellers are yanking their homes off of the market at an unprecedented rate, with listings falling to a 30 year low.
• Home buyers are walking away from signed deals at an unprecedented rate. ⅙ of all signed contracts were walked away from in December.

I cannot predict when, but we are careening toward a Lehman moment. 

It will appear that nothing is happening, and then it will happen all at once. 

Partying Like It's 2009

In both Finland and Canada investors, many of them small investors are suddenly discovering that the real estate investment funds that they had their savings in will not let them withdraw money.

It ain't exactly a money market breaking the buck, as happened at the start of the Great Recession, but it seems to me that it might be the tide going out as the tsunami comes in.

Real estate funds have long been sold as low-risk investments, but that has not turned out to be the case as Finland's housing market started dropping.

Today, ten real estate funds in Finland have restricted investors' ability to withdraw their money.

Two years ago, many small-time investors had a rude awakening when they realised that they could not redeem their holdings in almost a dozen real estate funds.

As the housing market slowed, many investors began wanting to sell their fund shares. But with few buyers for the underlying properties, the funds lacked the cash to honour redemptions.

The lockup began in September 2023, when Ålandsbanken's housing fund — with over 6,000 owners and assets exceeding 700 million euros — became the first to postpone redemptions.

………

Ålandsbanken told Yle it is protecting the fund's value by not selling properties at a loss. 

Let me translate, "Protecting the fund's value by not selling properties at a loss," from the original Finnish.  It translates to, "We are insolvent, but we hope to keep the game of musical chairs going until things work out."

And, oh! Canada:

Andre El-Baba never imagined an investment fund could trap him.

A lifelong property manager from Vancouver, he’d spent decades navigating real estate markets and thought he understood risk. So when he put money into Romspen Mortgage Investment Fund in 2022, it felt like a safe, sensible choice. Such private real estate funds had become a popular way for Canadians to invest in developing new houses and condominiums, riding a construction boom that had lasted two decades. They offered solid returns, regular payments and the ability to cash out at will.

Then the gate slammed shut.

Not long after he and his father invested a combined C$2 million ($1.5 million), Romspen announced it was blocking withdrawals — a last-resort tactic that lets funds avoid selling assets when too many clients want to pull out their money. The principal Andre assumed would always be within reach was suddenly sealed off, with no timeline for release. He’s getting only a thin, 2% stream of monthly income in return — far less than expected. Every month, Andre’s account statements tell the same story: The cash is still there, but he can’t move it.

………

To be sure, this is not Canada’s Lehman Brothers moment. The development industry has other sources of capital, including C$13 billion of government money Carney plans to inject into a new agency to build affordable homes. But the gating crisis is a harsh reckoning for everyday Canadian investors, who for decades treated real estate as a safe bet.

Let me translate THIS from the original Canadian, "This is not Canada’s Lehman Brothers moment," translates to, "This is not Canada’s Lehman Brothers moment……… SO FAR." (Ce n'est pas encore le moment Lehman Brothers pour le Canada... JUSQU'À PRÉSENT. for the Quebecois out there)

This is going to get ugly fast.   

Here We Go Again

With rising interest rates, and rising house prices, potential buyers are heading back to more exotic and risky mortgage products.

We're partying like it's 2008: 

Mortgage demand overall weakened again last week, even as interest rates fell slightly. For those still in the market, though, they are looking increasingly to adjustable-rate loans to get the lowest interest rate possible.

………

For those who are buying or refinancing, somewhat riskier adjustable-rate mortgages are gaining in popularity, as they offer lower interest rates. Rate terms on ARMs can be fixed for up to 10 years, but the loans are considered riskier, as they can adjust higher depending on market conditions when the fixed term expires. 

It appears that we have learned nothing in the past 17 years. 

Mao Was Right About Landlords

Guess what?  Landlords now demanding their tenants' logins to their payroll systems.  (Alternate link here)

Whey want you to log in through an app called Argyle, which scrapes an enormous amount of data from your employer/payroll website.

I'm feeling charitable today, so I'll just suggest that landlords and executives at ApproveShield be arrested tried and jailed, and not, as Mao Zedong did, that the legal niceties be ignored and a bullet be put in their head.

Landlords are using a service that logs into a potential renter’s employer systems and scrapes their paystubs and other information en masse, potentially in violation of U.S. hacking laws, according to screenshots of the tool shared with 404 Media.

The screenshots highlight the intrusive methods some landlords use when screening potential tenants, taking information they may not need, or legally be entitled to, to assess a renter.

“This is a statewide consumer-finance abuse that forces renters to surrender payroll and bank logins or face homelessness,” one renter who was forced to use the tool and who saw it taking more data than was necessary for their apartment application told 404 Media. 404 Media granted the person anonymity to protect them from retaliation from their landlord or the services used.

……… 

The person said earlier this year they were verifying their income in order to start a lease at an apartment complex in Atlanta. The apartment complex used a tenant screening service called ApproveShield, the person said. The landlord required 60 days of pay history, or four pay stubs, the person said.

ApproveShield is in-part powered by a tool called Argyle, which verifies peoples’ income. It does this by having people log into their corporate employer HR services, such as Workday, and scraping information stored within. I’ve covered Argyle before, when I found it was linked to a wave of suspicious emails that offered people cash for their workplace login credentials. 

The renter said ApproveShield’s Argyle-powered widget asked them to log into their employer’s Workday. That's when they noticed something unusual.

“Argyle hijacked my live Workday session, stayed hidden from view, and downloaded every pay stub plus all W-4s back to 2024, each PDF seconds apart,” they said. “Workday audit logs show dozens of ‘Print’ events from two IPs from a MAC which I do not use,” they added, referring to a MAC address, a unique identifier assigned to each device on a network. 

Yeah, this is hacking.  Even if the accesses were approved by the renter, they would violate the terms of of service of literally every payroll system out there.

I know that jails are overcrowded, but we can let out some shoplifters and drug addicts to lock these people up forever.'

Or we can take off and nuke the site from orbit.  It's the only way to be sure. 

Ouch

It looks like a simple case about deed covenants, but it is much more than that. 

The case, Hilo Bay Marina, LLC and Keaukaha Ministry LLC v. the State of Hawaii is about a parcel of land sold to a Mormon Official in 1922 by the State of Hawaii.

There was a covenant placed on the transaction that required the land to be used for religious purposes.

The current owner, David Owens, who wants to use this land for commercial purposes, sued over this restriction, claiming that it was an unconstitutional government endorsement of religion.

The district court ruled against him claiming that such actions were customary for the time, but the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled unanimously for Owens, part of their justification being that when the Hawaii state constitution was adopted in 1950, this was clearly unconstitutional under this document.

This seems to be a pretty run-of-the-mill case, except that one of the Justices, Todd Eddins issued a concurrence where he explicitly accused the Supreme Court in general, and Chief Justice Rpberts in particular, of bias, partisanship, hypocrisy, corruption, and incompetence.

Over the past few months, a growing number of sitting judges have expressed public skepticism toward the Supreme Court as its conservative supermajority rapidly contorts the law to favor Donald Trump and conservative causes. While these criticisms mark an important spark of dissent, they sound downright timid compared to recent excoriations of SCOTUS out of Hawaii’s highest court. In particular, Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins has emerged as one of the judiciary’s most astute and merciless critics of the Roberts court. In both concurrences and majority opinions, Eddins has taken aim at SCOTUS’ radical expansion of gun rights, disregard for women’s equality, and embrace of plutocracy, among other travesties. In his opinions—as well as in an interview with Amicus last year—the justice has laid out a comprehensive critique of the “horrors and treachery” that SCOTUS passes off under the guise of “originalism.”

Last week, Justice Eddins dropped another withering indictment of the Supreme Court’s recent rulings, using its embrace of Christian nationalism as a jumping-off point. On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the justice’s latest opinion and why this kind of institutional resistance to SCOTUS is so important. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

………

Mark Joseph Stern: Property owners challenged a deed restriction, enforced by the state, that required their land to be used for “Church purposes only,” or else ownership would revert back to Hawaii. The Hawaii Supreme Court unanimously struck down that restriction as a violation of the Hawaii Constitution’s establishment clause. But the court unanimously refused to interpret the Hawaii Constitution in line with recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on religion and instead maintained a sturdier separation of church and state.

Justice Eddins went even further in a concurrence joined by two other justices. He flamed the U.S. Supreme Court for choosing to “steamroll” the First Amendment’s separation of church and state by mandating government support of religion. He wrote:

The federal wall cracks. The Supreme Court’s recent religious clause cases wreck the relationship between free exercise and non-establishment. … The Roberts Court casually dismisses the lessons of American and world history, the warnings of prominent early Americans, and the judiciary’s storied legal minds. Bad things happen unless government and religion are completely separated. 

Dahlia Lithwick: Justice Eddins also wrote about something you and I have been talking about for a long time, which is the conservative supermajority making up facts. He called out Kennedy v. Bremerton, the notorious “praying coach” case, writing: “As it often does, the Court repackaged and whitewashed facts to achieve a desired outcome.” This is the same point that Sherrilyn Ifill has made on the show about how the record in that case, and so many others, is ignored.

Mark Joseph Stern: Right—he wrote that Kennedy wasn’t a one-off; it “typifies the Roberts Court’s ideology-driven jurisprudence. Pretend law and pretend facts sub for real law and real facts.” And if that weren’t enough, Justice Eddins took aim at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence from just last week in a decision allowing ICE to engage in racial profiling. He wrote that Kavanaugh “conjured facts” that are objectively false by claiming that ICE was simply doing “brief stops for questioning.” And he cited that decision as proof that “even cases that concern core freedoms succumb to brazen factual misrepresentations.” I find it incredibly satisfying to see a judge acknowledge all of these lies after you and I and everyone else have been getting gaslit by SCOTUS for so long. As he wrote: “Pretend law is not law.” 

Dahlia Lithwick: But there’s more! Justice Eddins decried Shelby County v. Holder, accusing the chief justice of “daydreaming a textually-unsupported rule” to maim the Voting Rights Act. And he condemned last year’s immunity ruling for Trump as “disabling the rule of law and enabling executive branch lawlessness with make-believe law.” Then he suggested that the immunity decision shows an utter lack of “institutional competence.” And that’s not all: He also flamed originalism as a “glitchy new methodology” that imposes “value judgments” from the “mostly racist and misogynistic very old days.”

I'm sure that Justice Alito will experience major butt-hurt over this, but the 6 conservative Justices are clearly out of control, and they believe that they are entitled to be corrupt, biased, and incompetent.

They are not entitled, they are self-entitled. 

Here is the video which led me to the Slate article: 

 

Hold on to Your Wallet

Whenever someone proposes a law to, "Spur investments," particularly in real estate it means that ordinary folks are going to get f%$#ed like a drunk sorority girl.

Case in point, Washington, DC's proposed new tenant laws. 

This won't encourage investment, it will just turbocharge gentrification.

I guess that, "F%$# the poor is the real national pastime of America. 

D.C.’s eviction laws and tenant protections are getting overhauled under legislation the D.C. Council passed Wednesday, policy changes that proponents say are intended to attract housing investment as the market is floundering.

The RENTAL Act — or the Rebalancing Expectations for Neighbors, Tenants and Landlords Act — will speed up the eviction process as a court backlog and citywide crisis in unpaid rent have threatened the solvency of affordable housing developers across the District, leading to fears that the city could lose affordable housing.

The bill also creates exemptions to a decades-old tenant protection law that allows tenants a seat at the negotiating table when their building goes up for sale, provisions that supporters argued would ease regulations that investors could find burdensome but that drew loud opposition from tenant rights advocates.

Council member Robert C. White (D-At Large), chairman of the housing committee, said the city had to confront a housing crisis and take bold action to reverse the downward trend in new housing investment, or else housing would only become more expensive.

Or the city could condemn abandoned properties and require denser development, perhaps even building homes themselves.

Even DC municipal government would find it difficult to lose money on DC real estate.