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Just Say No To Multiple Offers How to Have Your Cake And Eat It TOO Get What You Want From The Banks!..
Mainly they only need some cosmetic and minor structural
repair, otherwise these are perfectly good houses! For every 7 houses
there are only 1 or 2 houses that are worth buying. A solution to this could be potentionally lucrative for someone who is
willing to go the extra step. A Quick Success Story.
I recently was working with Nikki and Gregg, homebuyers who were looking for
a house. After several failed offer attempts they started getting a little
discouraged. The realtor was doing a everything she could to keep their
spirits up but the market was tough and they were running out of houses make
offers on.
I suggested a way
that would allow them to purchase and finance the repairs with one loan and
in one transaction. This program even allowed them to do allot of the work
themselves! |
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How Capitalism Will Save Us By Steve Forbes The Depression was actually triggered by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1929--30, which imposed massive taxes on countless imports. Other countries retaliated in kind. The global trading system collapsed. International capital flows dried up. The legislative history of Smoot-Hawley is instructive. When it first surfaced in Congress during the fall of 1929, the stock market cratered. When near the end of 1929 it appeared that Smoot-Hawley was being sidetracked, stocks rallied, ending the year almost where they had begun. But then in early 1930 Smoot-Hawley resurfaced, and stocks resumed their slide, which continued after Smoot-Hawley was signed into law that June. A devastating global contraction ensued. Compounding that error was the U.S.' giant tax increase in 1932. President Herbert Hoover thought a balanced budget would restore confidence. The top income tax rate was raised from 25% to 63%. Hoover even legislated an excise tax on checks--you had to pay Uncle Sam a fee every time you wrote a check. Not surprisingly, strapped consumers withdrew massive amounts of cash from banks in order to conduct their business, which put even more stress on troubled banks. This check tax was one of the factors leading to the bank closures of 1933. The huge tax increase deepened the U.S. economic slump. If not for the Depression, Hitler would never have come to power--the Nazis had carried only 2% of the vote in 1928. The 1970s were a decade of stagnation. The U.S. cut the dollar loose from gold, and other central banks gleefully followed suit. The results were three massive bouts of inflation, each more severe than the one before. The U.S. turned inward. Communism seemed ascendant. Nicaragua fell to a pro-Soviet dictatorship, and its neighbors looked likely to follow. Islamic fanatics seized power in Iran. By the time Ronald Reagan took office, our military was in a shambles, with the U.S. seen as fatally weak. Our economy was in dreadful shape, with short-term interest rates reaching nearly 21%. But Reagan pursued the right policies. The American economy came booming back, and the U.S. won the Cold War, signaled by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Okay, now that we are finally effectively dealing with the crisis, what should be done going forward? A formal strong-dollar policy is essential. Economists gag at the thought, but the best barometer of monetary disturbances is gold. The Fed should tie the dollar to a gold price range of, say, $500 to $550. Though the dollar is stronger today, markets rightly fear that monetary blunders will happen again. Which brings us to the Fed's enormous new powers, not to mention its current ones. Our central bank is now the U.S.' de facto commercial bank and our commercial paper market. It is bailing out private firms. The necessary change here is simple: After the crisis, the Fed must undergo a dramatic downsizing and be given a focused mission. Otherwise, it'll be a dinosaur-size beast that will severely hurt our country. The Fed is politically unaccountable. Yes, its chairman makes periodic appearances before Congress, but the Fed is not dependent on congressional appropriations. It literally prints its own budget. It pays for its operations out of the interest it receives on all the securities it holds and then remits the rest to Uncle Sam. Talk about the ATM that keeps on giving. In a democracy this is an intolerable situation for an agency that now has such enormous power over the American economy. The big change--the Federal Reserve should have only two missions. They are: keeping the dollar as good as gold and dealing with financial panics. If it does the dollar part right, a panic should be a once-in-a-century occurrence. Years ago Congress mandated that the Fed do its part to keep unemployment low and the economy growing. But it is truly preposterous to think this bureaucracy can direct a $13 trillion economy. Look at how impotent the Fed has been in resolving the financial troubles of the past 14 months. Regulating banks? Clearing checks for banks (which the Fed still does)? Leave those tasks to other agencies. The dollar must be a fixed measure of value. Changing its value is disruptive, similar to repeatedly changing the number of minutes in an hour or inches in a foot. Since the dollar was cut off from gold nearly 40 years ago, the U.S. and the world have had repeated monetary disruptions. Thanks to the ingenuity of free markets we've still achieved enormous progress. But the pernicious idea that manipulating money is a sound economic tool has repeatedly wrought havoc: the great inflation of the 1970s; the stock market crash of 1987 (which was triggered when the U.S. threatened to let the dollar go into a free fall); the 1994 Mexican peso crisis; the 1997 Asian "contagion," which gratuitously battered the entire Pacific Rim; and the 1998 Russian financial collapse. Cutting tax rates is also a necessity. Political cultures have a hard time understanding that taxes don't just raise revenue, they are also a price and a burden. The tax you pay on income is the price you pay for working, just as the tax on capital gains is the price you pay for taking risks that work out and the tax on profits is the price you pay for success. If you make it more worthwhile for people to work productively and take risks, they will do so. Rebates are useless--they don't change incentives the way lower tax rates do. Ideally, we should enact a simple flat tax. Twenty-five countries have adopted some form of a flat tax, all successfully. Economic growth will help prevent another financial time bomb--credit default swaps, a form of debt insurance--from exploding. The nominal amount peaked at $62 trillion and is now down to $55 trillion. Renewed prosperity will enable big companies to service their debts, thus nullifying the need to ever collect on the insurance. Most of these swaps will expire within five years. Sensible, not punitive, regulations in the financial sector are needed, such as standardization of new financial products so that there is more transparency. Fannie and Freddie should be broken up into a number of new, recapitalized companies that have no ties to Uncle Sam. If we have the kind of policies that marked the 1980s and not the kind that marked the 1930s and 1970s, we will be in for a dazzling era of innovation and economic advances. Free-market capitalism will save us--if we let it.
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