“We don’t send lawyers to jail, because we run the country.” – From the 60 Minutes report: Anonymous, Inc. What follows is one of the most important videos I have ever shared. Watch it and then send it to everyone you know. The issue of criminal money laundering via real estate has been one of … Read more
American citizens already have a hard enough time affording a home. Squeezed out by financial oligarchs buying tens of thousands of properties for rental income, and faced with real wages that haven’t budged since the mid-1970s, the demographic of U.S. citizens that historically dominated the new home market has been forced to live in their parents’ basements. … Read more
Many of you will be intimately familiar with the massive real estate bubble still in the process of inflating in certain parts of Canada, particularly Vancouver. The insanity of it all recently received a great deal of public attention when the following home was listed for $2.4 million earlier this year (it has since sold). If … Read more
Two days ago, I published a post explaining how the super high end real estate bubble had popped, and how signs of this reality have emerged across America. Here’s an excerpt from that post, The Luxury Housing Bubble Pops – Overseas Investors Struggle to Sell Overpriced Mansions: The six-bedroom mansion in the shadow of Southern California’s Sierra Madre Mountains has … Read more
William Ackman is a wildly successful hedge fund manager. He oversees $17 billion of mostly other people’s money. Forbes estimates his personal net worth at $1.7 billion. These facts alone would make him a prime candidate to buy the penthouse condominium at One57, the new luxury tower on West 57th Street. And indeed, Mr. Ackman told … Read more
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) today issued Geographic Targeting Orders (GTO) that will temporarily require certain U.S. title insurance companies to identify the natural persons behind companies used to pay “all cash” for high-end residential real estate in the Borough of Manhattan in New York City, New York, and Miami-Dade County, Florida. FinCEN is … Read more
One of the key themes here at Liberty Blitzkrieg over the past couple of years, has been to highlight the fact that individuals or institutions with access to capital or cheap financing have been buying up properties across the U.S. in order to rent them to the same people foreclosed on during the financial crisis. This … Read more
Here, as in other roosting places of the superrich, the recent influx of foreign money has gone hand in hand with the rising use of shell companies — generally limited liability companies. Shell companies were used in three-quarters of purchases of over $5 million in Los Angeles over the last three years, a higher rate even … Read more
One of the most spectacular bubbles inflated as a direct result of the oligarch giveaway colloquially known as “central bank policy” in the years since the global economic meltdown, has been the London real estate market. There are many reasons for this, but the primary one is the fact that London was seen as one of the … Read more
In a nation in which 1 out of every 3 homes is unaffordable, you’d think the primary goal of public policy wouldn’t be to ensure real estate becomes even more out of reach for the average citizen. However, we live in a country in which policy isn’t being driven by logic and what’s in the best interest of “the people,” rather, we live … Read more