2010 September | Finance Information - Mortgage, Debt, Credit Cards

Mortgage modification marathon draws masses to Los Angeles

About 30,000 are expected to seek help from counselors and bank representatives at the 100-hour event at the Los Angeles Convention Center put on by the Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America.

Thousands of homeowners lined up outside the Los Angeles Convention Center on Thursday with pay stubs, mortgage documents, credit reports and letters from their lenders.

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September 30, 2010 · Filed under finance

Billy Parish: Community Solar Pioneers

David Brosch had a problem many Americans can relate to. He wanted solar power, but wasn't able to put it on his house. His roof had the wrong orientation, a tree partially blocked the sun, and it was more than he could afford. Many of his neighbors were in the same situation -- some were renters, others were too busy to handle the process of an installation on their house.

They got together and formed a company, University Park Community Solar, and approached a local church with a large roof and good solar orientation. In exchange for placing solar panels on it's roof, the church would be guaranteed a long-term low price of electricity. David told us: "We wanted a project that could stand on it's own. Not one funded by donations, but something that was financially viable that folks would be willing to invest in. A solar project done right can turn a profit, so we thought, let's pool our money and do it together." Sounds simple enough, right?

As far as we can tell, no one had ever pulled off a project quite like that before. UPCS needed to come up with the right legal entity, faced Securities regulations that restrict non-accredited investors (i.e. non-wealthy people) from investing in the project, and had to figure out how to utilize federal credits that required "passive income" to apply it to. It took nearly three years but this Maryland group finally installed the 21.9 kW system this past May. It is believed to be one of the first community-initiated and owned solar electric systems in the U.S.

Brad DeLong: Economics for Parrots

It is said that the early nineteenth-century British economist J.R. McCulloch originated the old joke that the only training a parrot needs to be a passable political economist is one phrase: "supply and demand, supply and demand." Last week, US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that McCulloch's economics -- the economics of supply and demand -- was in no way discredited by the financial crisis, and was still extraordinarily useful.

It's hard to disagree with Bernanke's sentiment: economics would be useful if economists were, indeed, like McCulloch's parrots -- i.e., if they actually looked at supply and demand. But I think that much of economics has been discredited by the manifest failure of many economists to be as smart as McCulloch's parrots were.

Consider the claims -- rampant nowadays in the U.S. -- that further government attempts to alleviate unemployment will fail, because America's current high unemployment is "structural": a failure of economic calculation has left the country with the wrong productive resources to satisfy household and business demand. The problem, advocates of this view claim, is a shortage of productive supply rather than a shortage of aggregate demand.

Jeremy White: Why Negotiating with the Taliban Won’t Work

Originally Posted on Demagogues & Dictators

Recently announced plans by the Afghan government for negotiations with the Taliban have been described to me by Afghan colleagues as both the best and the last idea that remains for how to bring the bring the nine year war to a close. International security forces (ISAF) and the Taliban have been locked in a pseudo stalemate since the insurgent revival in 2007. While ISAF forces are more than capable of forcibly driving the Taliban from almost any area of Afghanistan, such offenses have roughly the same effect as squeezing a balloon. The more pressure you apply in one area the greater their presence will expand in another. As international support for the war has waned, the Karzai administration has come under intense pressure to negotiate with the nebulous Taliban leadership in order to provide its coalition allies with an honorable exit strategy. While such a plan might seem feasible from the perspective of those sitting in Washington and perhaps even Kabul, the realities of how the insurgency is structured discredit any hope for a lasting reconciliation.

During the course of interviews I conducted this summer in Kabul with members of the Force Reintegration Cell (F-RIC) at ISAF HQ I was shocked to learn that their plans for Taliban reintegration were based entirely on misconceptions about how the insurgency operates. The strategy, as it was explained to me, is to reward communities, not fighters, for allowing their "saddened brothers" to come down from the mountains and rejoin society. There are two major problems with this line of thinking. First of all, as anyone who has spent serious time in places like Kandahar and Helmand can tell you, most of the Taliban do not live in the mountains. The majority of the day-to-day insurgent fighters in fact live in the very villages in which they conduct their campaigns of fear and intimidation. Furthermore, if only communities that contain former insurgents are being rewarded with development money, we are suddenly going to find ourselves with many more fighters than we ever thought existed. Villages that were never known to have a Taliban presence before will inevitably begin blowing up their own roads in order to prove that they too are deserving of reintegration money.

TARP: The Long Goodbye

The Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, is over - more specifically, its legal authority expires on Sunday, so it cannot be used for new "bailout" activities (although legacy programs, with money already disbursed, could last 5 to 10 years.)

The first draft of its history, looking back over the last two years, may be this: TARP was an essential piece of a necessary evil - that is, it saved the American financial system from collapse, but it was put in place in a way that was excessively favorable to the very bankers who had presided over the collapse. And this sets up exactly the wrong incentives as we head into the next credit cycle.

Alberto Contador Tests Positive For Steroid

PARIS — Three-time Tour de France champion Alberto Contador of Spain tested positive for a banned steroid in winning this year's race and has been suspended by cycling's governing body.

A World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited lab in Cologne, Germany, found a "very small concentration" of clenbuterol in Contador's urine sample on July 21 at the Tour, according to a statement from the International Cycling Union.

Alberto Contador Tests Positive For Steroid

PARIS — Three-time Tour de France champion Alberto Contador of Spain tested positive for a banned steroid in winning this year's race and has been suspended by cycling's governing body.

A World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited lab in Cologne, Germany, found a "very small concentration" of clenbuterol in Contador's urine sample on July 21 at the Tour, according to a statement from the International Cycling Union.

Manisha Thakor : Gen X & Gen Y – Dialing Financial 911

Six Reasons Why Gen X & Gen Y Need Some Serious Financial TLC

â¢ They're scared: They've entered their adult years during a gut-wrenching economic and job market. With unemployment over 9.5%, they've seen their parents struggle. Over 7 out of 10 Americans are now living paycheck-to-paycheck.

â¢ They are making poor decisions: As a result of that fear they are not making the best long-term decisions for their futures. A recent ICI study shows only 34% of investors under age 35 are willing to take substantial risk with their retirement money - the exact time in their lives when they should take that risk.

Robbie Gennet: If Republicans Regain Control of Congress What Spending Would They Actually Cut?

You may have heard that the Republicans released a "Pledge to America" plan, a budgetary blueprint which reads more like a Pledge to Bankrupt America plan (the sequel!). Sure they include red meat items like medical liability reform and stricter border enforcement, a pledge to "honor families, traditional marriage, life, and the private and faith-based organizations that form the core of our American values" and copious pledges to reign in spending and attack our deficit and debt. Yet they were so short on specifics, that it got many wondering what they would actually cut. Considering the shrink-the-government Tea Party element infiltrating the Republican party, it's a question worth asking. President Obama spoke on CNBC last week and did what so far the mainstream media have failed to do: asked what the Tea Party actually wants to do to control spending. Here are his exact quotes:

"The problem that I've seen in the debate that's been taking place and in some of these Tea Party events is, I think they're misidentifying sort of who the culprits are here," said Obama. "As I said before, we had to take some emergency steps last year. But the majority of economists will tell you that the emergency steps we take are not the problem long-term. The problems long-term are the problems that I talked about earlier. We had two tax cuts that weren't paid for, two wars that weren't paid for. We've got a population that's getting older. We're all demanding services, but our taxes have actually substantially gone down."

"So the challenge, I think, for the Tea Party movement is to identify, specifically, what would you do?" he added. "It's not enough just to say get control of spending. I think it's important for you to say, I'm willing to cut veterans' benefits or I'm willing to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits or I'm willing to see these taxes go up. What you can't do, which is what I've been hearing a lot from the other side, is we're going to control government spending, we're going to propose $4 trillion of additional tax cuts, and that magically somehow things are going to work. Now, some of these are very difficult choices."

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