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Bakersfield Californian eliminates 12.5% of staff due to 'decline in real estate advertising revenue'
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2007 Jun 27, 10:30am 9,170 views 48 comments
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FYI: The 'ol Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter just hit 91. At this rate, we ought to break 100 by end of July.
Ahh... those 'gloomy-Gus' Brits. Always with the Doom-'n-Gloom and baseless hand-wringing. Why, these guys would probably see a cloud in every silver lining.
"The United States faces a severe credit crunch as mounting losses on risky forms of debt catch up with the banks and force them to curb lending and call in existing loans, according to a report by Lombard Street Research.
The group said the fast-moving crisis at two Bear Stearns hedge funds had exposed the underlying rot in the US sub-prime mortgage market, and the vast nexus of collateralised debt obligations known as CDOs.
"Excess liquidity in the global system will be slashed," it said. "Banks' capital is about to be decimated, which will require calling in a swathe of loans. This is going to aggravate the US hard landing."
"We don't know what the value of this debt is because the investment banks shut down the market in a cover-up so that nobody would know. There is $750bn of dubious paper out there in the form of CDOs held by banks that have a total capitalisation of $850bn."
US property writer Paul Muolo described the Bearn Stearns crisis as the “subprime Chernobylâ€, saying the bank had created a “cone of silenceâ€.
Don't these wild-eyed Limeys know that the damage is "limited" only to second-lien subprime loans (that no one owns) and that the Fed/banksters have declared the situation well "contained"?
Nothing to see here, folks, move along...
HARM: And what exactly do the British know about banking and finance? ;)
DennisN
2007 Jun 28, 1:57pm
Back in the 50's and early 60's my aunt and uncle owned a farm in Oakdale. When we would visit from Palo Alto or Campbell, it was almost a whole day's drive out there. Nowadays there are knuckleheads that commute from Oakdale to Silicon Valley.
W.C. Varones
2007 Jun 29, 12:08am
Bakersfield's David Crisp, a Casey Serin South, continues to implode:
http://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2007e.htm
BIS warns of Great Depression dangers from credit spree
The Bank for International Settlements, the world's most prestigious financial body, has warned that years of loose monetary policy has fuelled a dangerous credit bubble, leaving the global economy more vulnerable to another 1930s-style slump than generally understood.
...
In a thinly-veiled rebuke to the US Federal Reserve, the BIS said central banks were starting to doubt the wisdom of letting asset bubbles build up on the assumption that they could safely be "cleaned up" afterwards - which was more or less the strategy pursued by former Fed chief Alan Greenspan after the dotcom bust.
It said this approach had failed in the US in 1930 and in Japan in 1991 because excess debt and investment built up in the boom years had suffocating effects.
While cutting interest rates in such a crisis may help, it has the effect of transferring wealth from creditors to debtors and "sowing the seeds for more serious problems further ahead."
The world waits to see what Ben Bernanke will do to "clean up" after Alan Greenspan.
Patrick
2007 Jun 29, 7:59am
Mass delete of spam underway. Please let me know if there is an unusual amount of weirdness...
Patrick
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Source
Hmmm... let's see. The Bakersfield Californian just laid off 12.5% of it's staff due to lost RE ad revenue alone (though it is still running lots of RE ads, just not as many as before). So... basically, this means that during the bubble, an even larger % of their total payroll was directly tied to RE revenue --perhaps 25%, 35%, 50%?? Who knows?
Any possibility of that great a share of your revenue, uh, "influencing" your journalistic bias or editorial policy?
Naaah --that's just crazy conspiracy talk!
Discuss, enjoy...
HARM
#housing