Obama and the second great depression

I read Amity Shales "The Forgotten Man" that describes all of the mistakes that FDR made during the thirties. The Great Depression was not a failure of capitalism. It was created by government meddling and punishing the private sector.

Obama has followed FDR's model quite successfully so far. He has created an atmosphere of business uncertainty, demonized business and "the rich". This is the second time in history that Keynesian economics has proved to be an utter failure.

Will the US electorate learn from history and reject Obama. FDR fooled people for a decade.

Read "regime uncertainty and the great depression"

Obama's leadership style

Caroline Glick has provided the most concise summary of what Obama is doing to the US

Subversive leadership

Obama’s leadership model is the model of subversive leadership. Subversive leaders in democracies do not tell their citizens where they wish to lead their societies. They hide their goals from their citizens, because they understand that their citizens do not share their goals. Then once they achieve their unspoken goals, they present their people with a fait accompli and announce that only they are competent to shepherd their societies through the radical shift they undertook behind the public’s back.

New web sites

I've been working on adding new websites with SiteBuildit.

In addition to Investing in Rental Properties I have built two new sites


I'm already earning more profit from these web sites then the cash flow from 5 houses without the risk or investment

Analyzing a potential rental property - what to look for

If you're thinking about buying a house for an investment rental property, what factors should you consider? I give lots of guidance about due diligence and environmental issues to look out for here at Rental Property Analysis

Stopping Junk Mail and Annoying phone calls

One of the best ideas I ever came across on the Internet was the location of web sites to stop junk mail, get on the No Call List and Opt out of Credit card offers. This has literally saved me hundreds of hours per year that I can focus on making money or just relaxing. Taking action is really simple and takes no more then a few minutes for each registry, but great in reducing wasted time. Most highly recommended.

Finding Money for your investment rental property purchases

The banks, despite receiving billions from the Fed continue to hold onto their money and not lend to investors. This requires some creative real estate investing ideas to circumvent the problems. Here are a few ideas for real estate investors:

• Seller financing


• subject to financing


• rent to own investing


• 401k loans


• hard money loans
• family loans
• peer to peer lending

Hope some of these financing ideas stir your creative juices.

Investment Property Capital Gains

Need to figure capital gains taxes for your investment property? Use this page on investment property capital gains to get an idea of how much to pay the IRS if you sell your rental property

Fire! Why every renter and landlord need insurance

The first rental property that I purchased during my second attempt at being a landlord had a fire last week. The tenants had just moved in 5 days previously and had a fire in the fireplace. They went to sleep at 1:30 and the smoke alarms woke their kids at 4am. Luckily the previous tenants had moved and I had replaced the smoke alarms (the previous tenants had disabled them). The smoke detectors saved the lives of these tenants.

Unfortunately for the tenants they did not have renters insurance. However, I did have landlords insurance policy which covers loss of rental income. My policy also has a clause which requires the insurance company to cover any upgrades required to meet building codes. This is a lifesaver since my locality requires that any time a building permit is issued upgrades to older homes are required.

Buying a House for Investment

How do you go about buying a house for rental property investment? Basically, it is the same process for buying a house that you might live in. However, you must know local rental incomes for houses and it is best to buy what many call a "starter" home. This makes it easy to use rent to own investing to ensure that you receive the highest rental income possible.

50 Tips for Investing in Rental property

I've compiled a list of over 50 tips for investing in rental property here. Many have links to more detailed explanation of what to do.

Will the banks ever lend again?

During the early part of the last decade banks seemed to have unlimited money available to lend. Credit card offers poured into my mailbox, "no doc" loans for buying property were common. 100% financing for investment property was easy to obtain.

No more - during the past 18 months all of my HELOC's have been cut to zero. Funny, in my location (western NY) property values never sky-rocketed as they did in other parts of the country. And while other housing markets are seeing a big burst of the bubble, my market has continued to climb in value. Despite this, the automated valuing programs that banks use to assess property value seem to use a "one size fits all" approach.

I had several unsecured lines of credit available to me that have also been cut. In fact, every time I make a payment, the credit limit is cut some more. Despite my debt load dropping 10% during the past year and never being late for a single payment, my credit score is dropping like a rock as my balance increases relative to my total credit available.

What to do? Actually, I am reducing paying off debt and increasing the amount I send to my emergency cash reserves. It seems like not what Dave Ramsey would advocate, but if something major happens I can no longer count on borrowing from a bank.

Even Peer to Peer Lending sources like LendingClub have become more selective.

Despite what our government officials tell us, the money lenders tell us not to expect much of an economic recovery for a long time to come.

Circular Firing Squad that is the EU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D0VhS8qXT0&feature=player_embedded

Real Estate Rent to Own Working Great

A couple of years ago I tried my hand at flipping real estate. However, after months of being unable to sell my flips in 2007 (in hind sight just before the big real estate crash), I started using lease-options to keep the property occupied.

Now after over 2 years my rent to own strategy has been remarkably successful. I detail all of the methods I use to this strategy here at rent to own homes secrets.

I haven't had a stretch of more then a week when any of my properties is unrented.

Obama's unconstitutional theft

An apt quote to think about on one of the worst weeks of US history from Thomas Jefferson

"To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare others, who, or whose fathers have not excercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principal of association -- 'the guarantee to everyone of a free excercise of his industry and the fruits thereof'"

Supporting GOOH

My disgust with the political class has never been higher. Career politicians succumb to the corrupt influences of big government and continue to look out for their own self-interest rather then the interests of the constituents that they represent.

As such, I've joined a movement to replace all 435 members of Congress with new bodies. Tim Cox has started a group called Get Out of Our House which aims to replace incumbents with new bodies.

People worry that we shouldn't get rid of the "good ones". But even Washington had the sense to step down after two terms.

The process for selecting citizen candidates is a good one. I urge all readers to click on the link and join the fight.

The Government Bully

With the Senate approval of a health care bill we come one step further to having the arrogant elitists in Washington jam something down our throats that the large majority of American citizens do not want. In NY neither my Congressman nor Senators have been even willing to listen to the concerns of their constituents in an open forum, believing that they know what is best for us.

There are major Constitutional difficulties with these bills

• forcing private insurance companies to provide services at costs that do not allow them to profit
• The creation of "death panels" which cannot be abolished without 67% of future Representatives voting to do this (this is the rationing board that will be established when the inevitable shortages occur)
  
• forcing taxpayers to fund abortion *which takes away our right to "life")
• preventing firms from going around the system for people that would like to get other services
• forcing citizens to buy something that they may not want or need

In all my life I have never seen such a perversion of the political process. In American history only the attempt by the Democrats to open slavery to Kansas and Nebraska is as extreme. That ultimately ended very badly with the Civil War.

The Truth about Global Warming Scandal Comes out

A hacker has extracted hundreds of emails that show the enormous cover-up and dishonest science that global warming extremists have used to deceive the world. Link here

• The emails suggest the authors co-operated covertly to ensure that only papers favorable to CO₂-forced AGW were published, and that editors and journals publishing contrary papers were punished. They also attempted to “discipline” scientists and journalists who published skeptical information.

• The emails suggest that the authors manipulated and “massaged” the data to strengthen the case in favor of unprecedented CO₂-forced AGW, and to suppress their own data if it called AGW into question.

• The emails suggest that the authors co-operated (perhaps the word is “conspired”) to prevent data from being made available to other researchers through either data archiving requests or through the Freedom of Information Acts of both the U.S. and the UK.

It's been my contention for as long as I have blogged here that this whole AGW stuff was complete nonsense. Now it appears that the perpetrators of this fraud were not brain-washed but only liars.

Al Gore - the most dishonest politician in America's history - may he face criminal prosecution!

Is this the smoking code?

Data without manipulation

For those curious about what "hide the decline" means

some historical perspective

Gold, the US$ and a Train Wreck

The price of g0ld has recently spiked over $1100 an ounce after sitting under $1000 for several months. Meanwhile the value of the US dollar has continued it's slide downwards. The Fed recently stated that they will continue with their easy money policy until unemployment starts to pick up. With unemployment likely to keep moving up, it means that the Fed will continue to flood the world with dollars.

What does this mean? Is this 1978 when gold will increase in price by a factor of 5 in 18 months and inflation soared to our highest levels? One can't but help to think that history is set for a repeat. If other commodities follow the price of gold, a second economic collapse might be in the offing.

The Fed is stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can't lower interest rates anymore. If they do the right thing (like Volcker - raise interest rates), it will hurt the current politicians as unemployment rises. If they do nothing, another massive bubble will blow up and create a train wreck bigger then we saw last year.

Goldman Sachs and the price of oil

The more I read about Goldman Sach, the more I see them as an evil company - the type of company that gives capitalism a bad name. Heres a story about how GS and some of the oil companies are manipulating oil futures markets

GS is making these "round trip" trades without actual oil ever exchanging hands. GS will sell an oil contract to BP and BP will sell the same contract back to GS. The price goes up, other traders see the high volume of trades and jump in, driving the price even higher.

Right now the world demand for oil is very low. Oil tankers are sitting full with no place to pump their cargo, yet the price still keeps going up.

The point of the futures markets was for companies to hedge against future prices increases or drops. Now an unregulated ICE outside the US has become a dark pool where insiders can drive up the price of oil to pad their outrageous bonuses.

Will the government investigate this? I doubt it. Paulson was from GS as well as Geithner. Sometimes, I feel like a crazy conspiracy theorist.

Wall Streets War on investors

Whenever I get excited about stocks I read something like this and get discouraged again. High frequency "flash trading" and "dark pools" - no wonder capitalists get a bad name.