Three very good online videos about the sorry state of California’s economy are now available.

• Video: California’s State of ‘Depression’
• Video: Lining Up for Employment at Job Fairs
• Foreclosure Alley

Foreclosure Alley is really spooky. My main problem with that news report is that they never explained why people were leaving their possessions behind. People wouldn’t do that unless they are on the run. The other gaping question that was never answered is where the people from these huge communities went. Did they disappear, go back to their home country, or what?

These commentaries are long but worth reading to find out more about the mortgage meltdown. WARNING, they aren’t politically correct!

The Minority Mortgage Meltdown (contd.): How The Community Reinvestment Act Fits In

Karl Rove–Architect Of The Minority Mortgage Meltdown

Towards the end of the first ABC video Charlie Gibson stated that the nonimmigrant population of California has decreased by 1.5 million in the last ten years. huh? What is he talking about???

Gibson’s statement gives the impression that the population of California was depopulating due to out-migration, but just the opposite is happening! According to Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) the population is increasing by approximately one person every single minute, or 60 per hour. Perhaps what’s most interesting is where the population growth is coming from:

“In the last decade immigration and births to immigrants have accounted for nearly 100% of California’s population growth.” Diana Hull, President of CAPS, August 11, 2008

So, California’s population is increasing and immigration is at record highs. That got me to wondering, who are those nonimmigrants Charlie Gibson is referring to? With a little research I figured it out. The answer is intriguing but discouraging. (more…)

Daniel Pipes’ blog has a roundup of “Strange Sex Stories from the Muslim World”. Scroll down for the individual stories. He writes

The deepest differences between Muslims and Westerners concern not politics but sexuality. Each side has a long history of looking at the other’s sexual mores with a mixture of astonishment and disgust. Here are some examples from the Muslim side of the divide (in reverse chronological order) that have me, for one, shaking my head:

• Couple forced to divorce because of husband’s “inferior” tribal lineage
• Gang-rape victim sentenced to 100 lashes for adultery
• Male blackmail of female in Saudi ArabiaWhen the ancient Saudi practice of veiling women meets the contemporary use of camera-equipped mobile phones, a curious by-product has emerged, that of young men threatening to go public with pictures of young women. As Fatima Sidiya documents, a rash of such cases have occurred in the last six months.
• Saudi 8-year-old girl must await puberty to divorce
• Jordanian women agree to being beatenA survey conducted for unnamed United Nations agencies and including nearly 15,000 Jordanian families and 11,000 married women, aged mostly between 15 to 49 years old, found that around 20 percent of the women approve being beaten by their husbands to be disciplined. (November 26 2008)
• Indonesian Muslim imam charged for sex with a 12-year-old wife
• Male salesmen at Saudi lingerie shops
• Nigerian imam has 86 wives
• Saudi marriage officiant permits one-year-old girls to be married

[Vdare.com note: These marriages are only on paper, obviously. The husbands are only allowed to consummate the marriage when the "wife" reaches the age of nine.]

• Saudi imam details heavenly sexual delights
• Yemeni court grants an 8-year-old girl divorce
• Saudi tribal custom forbid husband ever seeing his wife’s face

Oh, yes, and all of these are taking place overseas. But if you’re in country that’s been colonized by Muslims, some of it may be taking place near you.

I see Kevin Lamb last night had to squash a reader’s effort to explain away the CPUSA’s enthusiasm for President Obama, and that Steve Sailer has highlighted some New York Times evidence of the Administration’s rapid move to socialize/politicize housing finance:

In the last six weeks alone, the Obama administration has essentially transformed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into arms of the federal government. Regulators have ordered the companies to oversee a vast new mortgage modification program, to buy greater numbers of loans, to refinance millions of at-risk homeowners and to loosen internal policies so they can work with more questionable borrowers

US Likely to Keep the Reins on Fannie and Freddie By Charles Duhigg March 2 2009

None of this can be a surprise to anyone who has read Steve’s book. As I noted in Does Obama know any Economics? there is a revealing passage in the Obama autobiography/self-celebration about his time at Occidental College, which Steve quotes:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends
carefully. The more politically active black students. The
foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors…At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy

Franz Fanon! Two decades after the end of French Algeria!

What kind of man wanted to hang out with Marxist professors in the final year of the Carter Administration?

The Stock Market has broken down out of a sideways pattern since Obama’s inauguration - to multi year lows. It must have read America’s Half Blood Prince!

Essential reading for the Obama era!

The dreams from his father are coming true.

From the New York Times:

U.S. Likely to Keep the Reins on Fannie and Freddie
By CHARLES DUHIGG

Despite assurances that the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be temporary, the giant mortgage companies will most likely never fully return to private hands, lawmakers and company executives are beginning to quietly acknowledge.

The possibility that these companies — which together touch over half of all mortgages in the United States — could remain under tight government control is shaping the broader debate over the future of the financial industry. The worry is that if the government cannot or will not extricate itself from Fannie and Freddie, it will face similar problems should it eventually nationalize some large banks.

The lesson, many fear, is that a takeover so hobbles a company’s finances and decision making that independence may be nearly impossible.

In the last six weeks alone, the Obama administration has essentially transformed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into arms of the federal government. Regulators have ordered the companies to oversee a vast new mortgage modification program, to buy greater numbers of loans, to refinance millions of at-risk homeowners and to loosen internal policies so they can work with more questionable borrowers.

What could possibly go wrong with more lending to more questionable borrowers?

Lawmakers have given the companies access to as much as $400 billion in taxpayer dollars, a sum more than twice as large as the pledges to Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, General Motors, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley combined.

Regulators defend those actions as essential to battling the economic crisis. Indeed, Fannie and Freddie are basically the only lubricants in the housing market at this point.

Interestingly, in Southern California, homes have started to sell again in the hardest hit exurbs. The secret? Foreclosures and price cuts of fifty percent or more. Nothing is selling in Santa Monica, where homeowners continue to believe that they just plain deserve seven figures for their four room shacks. (Santa Monica has some very small houses, along with some big ones — affluent people moving to Southern California before the invention of antibiotics preferred the dry Pasadena area to the damper beach). But out in the high desert, realism has returned and the number of sales has bounced back somewhat. (more…)

Here’s a valuable new study that answers some questions I’ve brought up:

Foreclosures in States and Metropolitan Areas: Patterns, Forecasts, and Pricing Toxic Assets
William H. Lucy and Jeff Herlitz
Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, School of Architecture, University of Virginia

National housing price declines and foreclosures have not been as severe as some analyses have indicated, and they are not as important as financial manipulations in bringing on the global recession. Most foreclosures have been concentrated in California, Florida, Nevada, and Arizona, and a modest number of metropolitan counties in other states. In fact, 66 percent of potential housing losses in 2008 and subsequent years may be in California, with another 21 percent in Florida, Nevada, and Arizona, for a total of 87 percent of national declines in these four states.

The methodology used here is to assume prices fall back to their ratio to incomes in 2000. Of course, 2000 was a prosperous year, so that would be a pretty soft landing.

California had only 10 percent of the nation’s housing units, but it had 34 percent of the foreclosures in 2008. California was vulnerable to foreclosures, because the median value of owner-occupied housing in 2007 was 8.3 times median family income, while the 2007 national average was only 3.2, and in 2000 it was lower still at 2.4.

They’re using RealtyTrac.com’s foreclosure statistics as of November 2008. Also, they’re using “family income” rather than the more usual “household income” income, which makes the housing price to income ratios less extreme (I believe the peak home price to household income ratio in California was 11X). They assume that if you are just a household, not a family, you probably shouldn’t be buying a house, which seems sensible.

Another vulnerability to foreclosures was seen in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, where more than 20 percent of mortgage holders in each county were paying at least 50 percent of their income in housing related costs.

But even in California, enormous variations existed among jurisdictions, such as in the San Francisco metropolitan area, where Solano County had 3.69 percent of housing units in foreclosure in November 2008, while only 0.24 percent of housing units were in foreclosure in the City of San Francisco, a 15 to 1 difference.

The exurban frontier got hit hardest. A lot of people in San Francisco have been there a long time, long enough to pay off even 30 year mortgages sometimes. Heck, they may have inherited the family mansion from a robber baron great-grandfather. But 80 miles out of town, there was nothing but dirt until recent years, so everybody has a mortgage. And everybody is scraping to get by. You wouldn’t live that far out of town if you had other options. As I’ve said, the second quartile got the most overstretched and then hit hardest: the people trying to keep their kids out of the underclass.

(more…)