Re: how can we be ready,

[Guest guest]

Three, or better yet, six. Don't forget medicine and water or water

purification methods and fuel if you live where it gets cold. You are

right of course, most people refuse to believe that it will happen or

they minimize the possible consequences.

>

> is it a good idea to stock 3 months food and supplies and think about

> ways to avoid contamination,the prpagander is makeing most people bury

> their heads in th sand hoping it wont happen before antivirals and

> treatments are ready

>

[Guest guest]

It's also a good idea for people to educate themselves so that their anti-contamination measures grow from knowledge rather than from fear and panic.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Eleanor Roosevelt

From: moira hood <moirahood@...>Subject: [Flu] how can we be ready,Flu Date: Friday, December 12, 2008, 1:37 PM

is it a good idea to stock 3 months food and supplies and think about ways to avoid contamination, the prpagander is makeing most people bury their heads in th sand hoping it wont happen before antivirals and treatments are ready

[Guest guest]

But fear is the best motivator. The problem is that people are not

afraid enough. Only the truly educated have fear commensurate with

the threat. And in this case the threat is so enormous that the

truly educated person is very, very afraid. And ideally it is their

fear that drives them to preparation. And preparation is the only

defense against not only the pandemic, but he all-consuming panic that

will accompany it. So, become afraid now and avoid the rush later on.

>

> From: moira hood <moirahood@...>

> Subject: [Flu] how can we be ready,

> Flu

> Date: Friday, December 12, 2008, 1:37 PM

>

>

>

>

>

>

> is it a good idea to stock 3 months food and supplies and think about

> ways to avoid contamination, the prpagander is makeing most people bury

> their heads in th sand hoping it wont happen before antivirals and

> treatments are ready

>

[Guest guest]

Greetings, my friend. Don is right: nothing like hanging to

wonderfully focus a man's mind. And we do need the focus that fear

provides.

I remember chatting with a nuclear war survival planner years ago who

said that if the Russians attacked with missiles and took out only our

big cities, then that only would be enough to destroy the usa because

along with our big cities would go the big railroad yards. And after

they went, we would have no way to get food to market.

Today any number of other situations are imaginable from biowarfare

against our agricultural section to a new disease at home, etc. Even

something like the current riots in Greece might prove a problem for

them if it goes far enough: and the USA may yet have problems as we

continue to bail out corporations while homeowners move into tent

cities, a move that CBS-tv 60 Minutes said would accelerate as the

next wave of the financial crash hits the USA. Prudence dictates--and

the government has asked--that people keep a supply of food and

necessities ready at home. Three to six months may well be adequate.

I am not sure if this is what the Mormon religion prescribes for

them, but many other groups do this.

Some people even automate this by building revolving lazy susan

turntables into a pantry so that they can keep several months of

canned goods: cans are categorized by month made and so can be used up

and replaced within the usage deadlines.

>

> It's also a good idea for people to educate themselves so that their

anti-contamination measures grow from knowledge rather than from fear

and panic.

>

> Do one thing every day that scares you.

> Eleanor Roosevelt

[Guest guest]

A Second Mortgage Disaster On The Horizon?

New Wave Of Mortgage Rate Adjustments Could Force More Homeowners To

Default. Pelley reports on the mortgage crisis that's far from

over, with a second wave of expected defaults on the way that could

deepen the bottom of the U.S. recession. Page 1 of 4, Dec. 14, 2008

(CBS) When it comes to bailouts of American business, Barney and

the Congress may be just getting started. Nearly two trillion tax

dollars have been shoveled into the hole that Wall Street dug and

people wonder where the bottom is.

As correspondent Pelley reports, it turns out the abyss is

deeper than most people think because there is a second mortgage shock

heading for the economy. In the executive suites of Wall Street and

Washington, you're beginning to hear alarm about a new wave of

mortgages with strange names that are about to become all too

familiar. If you thought sub-primes were insanely reckless wait until

you hear what's coming.

One of the best guides to the danger ahead is Whitney Tilson. He's an

investment fund manager who has made such a name for himself recently

that investors, who manage about $10 billion, gathered to hear him

last week. Tilson saw, a year ago, that sub-prime mortgages were just

the start.

" We had the greatest asset bubble in history and now that bubble is

bursting. The single biggest piece of the bubble is the U.S. mortgage

market and we're probably about halfway through the unwinding and

bursting of the bubble, " Tilson explains. " It may seem like all the

carnage out there, we must be almost finished. But there's still a lot

of pain to come in terms of write-downs and losses that have yet to be

recognized. "

In 2007, Tilson teamed up with Amherst Securities, an investment firm

that specializes in mortgages. Amherst had done some financial

detective work, analyzing the millions of mortgages that were bundled

into those mortgage-backed securities that Wall Street was peddling.

It found that the sub-primes, loans to the least credit-worthy

borrowers, were defaulting. But Amherst also ran the numbers on what

were supposed to be higher quality mortgages.

" It was data we'd never seen before and that's what made us realize,

'Holy cow, things are gonna be much worse than anyone anticipates,' "

Tilson says.

The trouble now is that the insanity didn't end with sub-primes. There

were two other kinds of exotic mortgages that became popular, called

" Alt-A " and " option ARM. " The option ARMs, in particular, lured

borrowers in with low initial interest rates - so-called teaser rates

- sometimes as low as one percent. But after two, three or five years

those rates " reset. " They went up. And so did the monthly payment. A

mortgage of $800 dollars a month could easily jump to $1,500.

Now the Alt-A and option ARM loans made back in the heyday are

starting to reset, causing the mortgage payments to go up and

homeowners to default.

" The defaults right now are incredibly high. At unprecedented levels.

And there's no evidence that the default rate is tapering off. Those

defaults almost inevitably are leading to foreclosures, and homes

being auctioned, and home prices continuing to fall, " Tilson explains.

" What you seem to be saying is that there is a very predictable time

bomb effect here? " Pelley asks.

" Exactly. I mean, you can look back at what was written in '05 and

'07. You can look at the reset dates. You can look at the current

default rates, and it's really very clear and predictable what's gonna

happen here, " Tilson says.

Just look at a projection from the investment bank of Credit Suisse:

there are the billions of dollars in sub-prime mortgages that reset

last year and this year. But what hasn't hit yet are Alt-A and option

ARM resets, when homeowners will pay higher interest rates in the next

three years. We're at the beginning of a second wave.

" How big is the potential damage from the Alt As compared to what we

just saw in the sub-primes? " Pelley asks.

" Well, the sub-prime is, was approaching $1 trillion, the Alt-A is

about $1 trillion. And then you have option ARMs on top of that.

That's probably another $500 billion to $600 billion on top of that, "

Tilson says.

Asked how many of these option ARMs he imagines are going to fail,

Tilson says, " Well north of 50 percent. My gut would be 70 percent of

these option ARMs will default. "

" How do you know that? " Pelley asks.

" Well we know it based on current default rates. And this is before

the reset. So people are defaulting even on the little three percent

teaser interest-only rates they're being asked to pay today, " Tilson

says.

Page 2 of 4 Dec. 14, 2008

(CBS) That second wave is coming ashore at a place you might call the

" Repo Riviera " - Miami Dade County. Munoz used to sell real

estate; now his company clears out foreclosed homes.

" Business is just going through the roof for us. Fortunately for us,

unfortunately for the poor families who are going through this, " Munoz

explains.

" I wonder do you ever come to houses where the people are still here? "

Pelley asks.

" Absolutely, " Munoz says. " That's really a sad situation. I'd rather

not meet the people. "

Asked why not, Munoz says, " It's not easy to come in and move a family

out. It's just our job to do it for the bank. It's just the nature of

what's going in the market right now. "

Munoz says his company alone gets about 20 to 30 assignments per day.

" And we're one of the few companies right now who are hiring. We have

to hire people because the demand is so high, " he tells Pelley.

People who've been evicted tend to leave stuff behind. The next house

is usually much smaller. Banks hire Munoz to move the possessions out

where, by law, they remain for 24 hours. Often the neighbors pick

through the remains.

Once the homes are empty the hard part starts - trying to find buyers

in a free-fall market.

Miami real estate broker Zalewski talks like a man with a lot of

real estate to move. " We have 110,000 properties for sale in South

Florida today, 55,000 foreclosures, 19,000 bank owned properties.

Sixty-eight percent of the available inventory is in some form of

distress. They need someone to clean it up. "

Asked what the name of his company is, Zalewski says, " It's called

Condo Vultures Realty. "

What does that mean?

" That in times of distress, and in times of downturn, there's

opportunity. And you know, vultures clean up the mess. A lot of people

seem to think they kill, but they don't actually kill, they clean, " he

says.

The killing, in Miami, was done by the developers back when it seemed

that the party would never end. They sold hyper-inflated condos at

what amounted to real estate orgies-sales parties for invited guests

who were armed with option ARM and Alt-A loans. " There were red ropes

outside. They had hired cameramen, and they had hired photographers to

almost set the scene of a paparazzi, " Zalewski remembers.

" They were hiring fake paparazzi? To make the customers feel like they

were special? " Pelley asks.

" You were selling a lifestyle, " Zalewski says.

Asked what roles these exotic mortgages played, Zalewski says, " They

were essential. They were necessary. Without the Alt A or option ARM

mortgage, this boom never would've occurred. "

It never would have occurred because without the Alt As and the option

ARMs, many buyers never would have qualified for a loan. The banks and

brokers were getting their money up front in fees, so the more they

wrote, the more they made.

" They stopped checking whether the income was even real. They turned

to low and no-doc loans, so-called 'liar's loans' and jokingly

referred to as 'ninja loans.' No income, no job, no assets. And they

were still willing to lend, " Tilson says.

" But help me out here. How does that make sense for the lender? It

would seem to be reckless, in the extreme, " Pelley remarks.

" It was, " Tilson agrees. " But the key assumption underlying, the

willingness to do this was that home prices would keep going up

forever. And in fact, home prices nationwide had never declined since

the Great Depression. "

On the way up, everyone wanted in. No one expected to feel any pain.

People like acupuncturist Rula Giosmas became real estate speculators.

Page 3 of 4 Dec. 14, 2008

(CBS) Giosmas says she bought about six properties in this last

five-year period as investments. She says she put 20 percent down on

each. Now they're all financed with option ARM loans.

Asked what she understood about the loans, Giosmas says, " Well,

unfortunately, I didn't ask too many questions. I mean in the old

days, I would shop around. But because of the frenzy, and I was so

busy looking to buy other properties, I didn't really focus on

shopping around for mortgage brokers. "

" But if you're investing in real estate, you're buying multiple

properties, you should be asking a lot of questions, " Pelley remarks.

" Why didn't you ask? "

" I was busy. I was really busy looking at property all the time, all

day long, " she replies.

She also acknowledges that she didn't read the paperwork. Now she's

losing money on every property.

" You know that there are people watching this interview who are

saying, 'You know, she was just foolish. She was greedy and foolish.

She was buying small apartment buildings and wasn't paying enough

attention to how they were financed,' " Pelley points out.

" My full-time job is I'm an acupuncturist. So, this was just a side

thing, " she says.

Giosmas says she was misled and she hopes to renegotiate her loans.

But many other buyers have simply walked away from their properties.

One Miami luxury building was a sellout, but when 60 Minutes visited,

a quarter of the condos were in foreclosure.

Zalewski says one of those condos was originally purchased in October

2006 for $2.4 million. Now he says the asking price from the lender is

$939,000.

And there are tough years to come because, just like the sub-primes,

the Alt-A and option ARM mortgages were bundled into Wall Street

securities and sold to investors.

Egan, who runs a credit rating firm that analyzes corporate debt,

says he expects 2009 to be miserable and 2010 also miserable and even

worse.

Fortune Magazine cited Egan as one of six Wall Street pros who

predicted the fall of the financial giants.

" This next wave of defaults, which everyone agrees is inevitably going

to happen, how central is that to what happens to the rest of the

economy? " Pelley asks.

" It's core. It's core, because housing is such an important part.

We're not going to get the housing industry back on track until we

clear out this garbage that's in there, " Egan explains.

" That hasn't cleared out yet. We haven't seen the bottom, " Pelley remarks.

" It's getting worse, " Egan says. " There are some statistics from the

National Association of Realtors, and they track the supply of housing

units on the market. And that's grown from 2.2 million units about

three years ago, up to 4.5 million units earlier this year. So you

have the massive supply out there of units that need to be sold. "

" What with the housing supply increasing that much, what does it

mean? " Pelley asks.

" It means that this problem, the economic difficulties, are not going

to be resolved in a short period of time. It's not gonna take six

months, it's not gonna 12 months, we're looking at probably about

three, four, five years, before this overhang, this supply overhang is

worked through, " Egan says.

Page 4 of 4 Dec. 14, 2008

(CBS) In the next four years, eight million American families are

expected to lose their homes. But even after the residential meltdown,

Whitney Tilson says blows to the financial system will keep coming.

" The same craziness that occurred in the mortgage market occurred in

the commercial real estate markets. And that's taking a little longer

to show. But there are gonna be big losses there. Credit cars, auto

loans. You name it. So, we're still, you know, we're maybe halfway

through the mortgage bubble. But we may only be in the third inning of

the overall bursting of this asset bubble, " Tilson says.

" Does that mean that the stock market is gonna continue plunging as

we've seen the last several months? " Pelley asks.

" Actually we're the most bullish we've been in 10 years of managing

money. And the reason is because the stock market, for the first time

I can say this, in years, has finally figured out how bad things are

going to be. And the stock market is forward looking. And with U.S.

stocks down nearly 50 percent from their highs, we're actually finding

bargains galore. We think corporate America's on sale, " Tilson says.

The stock market will still have a lot of figuring to do with more

troubling news on the horizon. The mortgage bankers association says

one out of 10 Americans is now behind on their mortgage. That's the

most since they started keeping records in 1979.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/12/12/60minutes/main4666112.shtml

Click to the website to watch the video.

[Guest guest]

So, as I understand it, 60 Minutes believes that we have three to five

years of waves of financial crash ahead of us: and THEN the

Dubya Bush economic depression may finally hit bottom. Or it may just

have reached the end of the crash. Waves that I know of and expect

are the second mortgage crash, as mentioned in the article, the crash

of the travel/hotel industry, the crash of the shopping malls and

restaurants (Bennigans beat this by closing all of their restaurants

nationwide three months ago), and the crash of the insurance industry

which has invested heavily in shopping malls. And then there is the

crash of the gambling industry, as the casinos go under. And no one

is sure where this will end.

Now, Greece is hit by riots among discontented young people who spent

years working for their degrees so that they could take their place in

the unemployment line. Riots have spread across Europe. How long

before this hits America? The numbers of unemployed and homeless etc

in America have just begun to grow. The USA must expect substantial

turmoil as we continue to enter the Bush Depression.

And we may yet see Mr. Obama running our soup kitchens and a WPA type

employment program. I just wish that the GOP had not already put two

wars on the charge card.

[Guest guest]

And do not forget the article in our archives that the month supply of

coal that USA power plants keep is not enough. Not if a deadly flu

hits the coal miners. So perhaps fuel and a generator are not a bad idea.

>

> Three, or better yet, six. Don't forget medicine and water or water

> purification methods and fuel if you live where it gets cold. You are

> right of course, most people refuse to believe that it will happen or

> they minimize the possible consequences.

[Guest guest]

There are two types of fear - the type which causes a person to educate himself/herself and to mobilize resources, and the type which paralyzes people. The former is infinitely better because it is a reasoned fear, not a panicked fear.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Eleanor Roosevelt

From: Don <DCFrench@...>Subject: [Flu] Re: how can we be ready,Flu Date: Sunday, December 14, 2008, 9:15 AM

But fear is the best motivator. The problem is that people are notafraid enough. Only the truly educated have fear commensurate withthe threat. And in this case the threat is so enormous that the truly educated person is very, very afraid. And ideally it is theirfear that drives them to preparation. And preparation is the onlydefense against not only the pandemic, but he all-consuming panic thatwill accompany it. So, become afraid now and avoid the rush later on. > > From: moira hood <moirahood@. ..>> Subject: [Flu] how can we be ready,> Flu> Date: Friday, December 12, 2008, 1:37 PM> > > > > > > is it a good idea to stock 3 months food and supplies and think about > ways to avoid contamination, the prpagander is makeing most people bury > their heads in th sand hoping it wont happen before antivirals and > treatments are ready>