Links and Minifeatures 2009 04 29 Wednesday

Come back Thursday morning for the Consumer Focused Carnival of Real Estate

For those who missed my article on Home Valuation Code of Conduct (the new appraisal standards), or just decided not to believe me, here's a video explaining a lot of the practical points once again. They don't get everything, but they do manage to paint a basic picture of the most common issues we are facing.

HVCC is here. Even if you were applying for a loan today (April 28th), the lenders have already implemented it. I've been insisting upon every loan HVCC compliant for a couple weeks now. Even if you got a signed dated loan application done before May 1st, it is entirely common that lenders insist upon another application at a later point and use that as the origination date. What happens if you've done a non-HVCC compliant appraisal? The answer is that you're going to pay for another appraisal.

The video is aimed at agents, but the general public can get some good information out of it. Here's some important information about it I've already discovered: Lots of agents are in denial about this. Most of them are going to lose multiple transactions before they figure it out. Make sure your agent isn't one of them.

HVCC is a foetid rotting cow carcass full of its own excrement, the moral equivalent of a royal monopoly from the middle ages. It doesn't help lenders, it doesn't help buyers, it doesn't help sellers, It doesn't help owners trying to refinance, it doesn't help agents, it doesn't help loan officers and it doesn't even help appraisers. Indeed, it harms all of these. Nonetheless, we have to comply until such time as the outrage causes politicians to repeal it or do something that's actually better. I'd advise being ready for a long wait, because the appraisal management companies (who it does help by distorting the appraisal process and adding the Appraisal Management Company layer/bottleneck to the process) have some heavy duty influence.

I just got this email:

Dear NAMB Member,

IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED! Today the House Financial Services Committee will
hold a mark-up session on H.R. 1728 to decide which provisions will be
included in the bill. Please contact your Congressmen and urge them to
support the Childers/Miller Amendment (which imposes a 12-month moratorium
on the Home Valuation Code of Conduct ["HVCC"]). Click here
to find your Congressman's contact
information.

In addition, please stress the importance of Title I, Section 103 that was
carefully drafted and negotiated as part of HR 1728. This Section does its
part to ban incentivized compensation from all distribution channels while
still protecting mortgage brokers' ability to earn a living. It offers true
consumer protection.

You must act NOW! Below are talking points to assist in your conversations.
Preserve your ability to make a living by urging your Congressmen to vote
for the Childers/Miller Amendment in H.R. 1728!

_____

Talking Points:

I. Support the Childers/Miller Amendment
A) Imposes a 12 month moratorium on the HVCC.
B) Additional information about the HVCC is available here
.

II. Title I, Section 103: YSP
A) Protects small business.
B) Bans incentivized compensation from all distribution channels.
C) Provides true consumer protection: protection from incentive-driven
practices while still allowing competition in the market.
D) Consumers want zero-point or no cost loans. In order to make a living and
compete with larger banks, brokers must be able to earn indirect
compensation as part of the rate or financed into the mortgage amount.

I don't blindly parrot anyone's talking points, but they're mostly right.

The Politics of Liberal Amnesia

Or maybe the speaker missed what former CIA Director (and Bill Clinton appointee) George Tenet writes in his memoir, "At the Center of the Storm," about the CIA interrogation of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

"I believe none of these successes [in foiling terrorist plots] would have happened if we had had to treat KSM like a white-collar criminal -- read him his Miranda rights and get him a lawyer who surely would have insisted his client simply shut up. In his initial interrogation by CIA officers, KSM was defiant. 'I'll talk to you guys,' he said, 'after I get to New York and see my lawyer.' Apparently he thought he would be immediately shipped to the United States and indicted in the Southern District of New York. Had that happened, I am confident that we would have obtained none of the information he had in his head about imminent threats to the American people."

Sometimes the necessary steps are in conflict with the desire to see ourselves as "nice people," or "the good guys." This isn't a novel; it certainly isn't a Hollywood movie. The end has not been predetermined by a scriptwriter, and there are no certain choices. One of the few certainties is that if we let our need to be seen as "the good guys" control us too much, innocent people will die. Perhaps a lot of innocent people - perhaps our own families. And that is one thing real "good guys" do not do - sit around wringing their hands because in order to prevent a great evil they must perpetrate a smaller one.

I'm not involved in the day-to day decision-making of what is still a War on Terror, no matter what the current administration's lawyers are calling it this week. I have never been directly involved with anything similar. But I have been following the decisions, their rationale, and their results for thirty years now. The decisions that we are making to act like lawyers determined to uphold the law, rather than fighters determined to win a war, are going to get lots of Americants killed. Perhaps they will even cause us to lose. And that is emphatically not a good thing.

"Scooter" Pelosi

Richard Fernandez has been there

I fear that one day, perhaps soon, and perhaps under Barack Obama's Presidency, that an attack on US soil will be made which will dwarf 9/11 both in destructiveness and brutality. And I predict that when it happens, many of the people who are now baying for the prosecution of Bush era officials will be demanding that they be protected -- at all costs. They demand protection not because they are morally inferior, intellectually infirm or ideologically corrupted, but because survival is the first rule of life. Anybody who has gone through a hospital ward and heard the patients, request and then demand their pain medication knows that to the question "how far can you go?", there is no easy answer. Nobody really knows the meaning of "last and desperate" until he's been there.

"How far are we willing to go?" isn't an easy question, and any attempts to treat it as one are doomed to failure, because there will be a successful attack we could have averted by going further. I might agree, both now and then, that going further will be something we shouldn't have done. But most people don't - won't - stop and think rationally when something punches them emotionally. The mood in the country today is very different than it was seven and a half years ago before the Bush Administration had kept us safe against subsequent attacks for seven years. Run a search engine for some random articles from September 12th, 2001 on for the next six months. That's likely to be the mood the country will be in after the next successful attack - the survivors anyway. Actually, it will probably be stronger.

It's a cheap and tawdry trick to, with the current perception of safety, project an unalloyed "The US doesn't do any of that ever because we're the good guys." Explode one suitcase size "dirty nuke" in New York Harbor or San Francisco Bay or any of a long list of other candidates, and that stance will become a political non-starter. Until we allow ourselves to forget again that the real world has people with differing agendas who won't hesitate a single microsecond to commit mass murder if it furthers their cause even slightly.

Arlen Spector switches parties

Specter, 79 and seeking a sixth term in 2010, conceded bluntly that his chances of winning a Pennsylvania Republican primary next year were bleak in a party grown increasingly conservative

and

Tuesday's switch was not Specter's first.

He was a Democrat until 1965, when he ran successfully on the Republican ticket for district attorney in Philadelphia.

His career moves and votes paint a very coherent picture. Arlen Specter acts as he does not out of any inborn conscience. If he did, I'd respect him. He acts as he does to advance his political career (if you want to take issue with this, name me at least one time in his Senate career he stood up to be counted in a way that was likely to cost him votes). He votes to maintain his political career. He will do anything to get 50% plus one of available votes and stay in office one more term.

But let me ask: What is the value of electing a weathervane?

Leaders don't act in a certain way because that's the way 50% plus one want them to act. They persuade 50% plus one of the people that theirs is the correct course of action. Arlen Specter is not a leader. He simply pretended to be something he wasn't for as long as it was an advantage, until it become politically untenable. He's neither a centrist nor a moderate - what he is is a political whore (and I feel like I'm insulting whores with that remark). Quite frankly, a committed leftist would be better for the country and for Pennsylvania - and I say this as someone who doesn't like leftists very much. Here's hoping Specter gets beaten badly next year - either by a Democrat in the primaries, or by a Republican in the general.

The growing opacity of the Obama administration

Darn right they were because, you know, they were catching corrupt union officials. Can't have that. So "unfair and burdensome" - something that tax payers are never able to plead about the gigantic and undecipherable tax code - now takes priority over transparent and accountable.

Political payoff, plain and simple.

Steve Forbes: The Looming Fight for 17% of the U.S. Economy

Rationing. Bureaucracy. Driving doctors and other health care providers out of business. How we're supposed to get more, better, and cheaper health care out of the government running it is something nobody rational can figure out, and Mr. Forbes shows the insanity.

He's got good ideas too.

The Truth About Cars and Trucks . And the UAW

Chrysler was bailed out directly with government loan guarantees; the Big Three all benefited from Reagan era "voluntary" quotas on Japanese imports to prop up domestic car prices. But these were temporary fixes. For more than 40 years, a 25% tariff has kept out foreign-built pickup trucks even as a studied loophole was created in fuel-economy regulations to let the Big Three develop a lucrative, protected niche in the "passenger truck" business.

This became the long-running unwritten deal. This was Washington's real auto policy.

For three decades, the Big Three were able to survive precisely because they skimped on quality and features in the money-losing sedans they were required under Congress's fuel economy rules to build in high-cost UAW factories. In return, Washington compensated them with the hothouse, politically protected opportunity to profit from pickups and SUVs.