It’s About Time: JP Morgan Enters the Housing Slumlord Trade

It was just a matter of time before the most powerful crony capitalist bank in America decided to join the housing trade.  Making money running the food stamp program just wasn’t enough for Your Crony Highness Jaime Dimon and company, it’s time to join his financial oligarch brothers in the bidding war to corner the housing market and become your overlord.  That way they can control how you eat (food stamps) and where you sleep.  It’s become very clear what the large financial interests in these United States are attempting.  Funnel all the low interest crony American money, with a dash of Chinese laundered money, into the “housing recovery.”  From Bloomberg:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) is giving its wealthiest clients the chance to invest in the single-family rental market after other investments linked to the U.S. housing recovery jumped in value.

The firm’s unit that caters to individuals and families with more than $5 million, put client money in a partnership that bought more than 5,000 single family homes to rent in Florida, Arizona, Nevada and California, said David Lyon, a managing director and investment specialist at J.P. Morgan Private Bank. Investors can expect returns of as much as 8 percent annually from rental income as well as part of the profits when the homes are sold, he said.

The bank’s wealthy clients are joining a growing number of private-equity firms and individuals buying rental homes in the regions hardest hit by the U.S. housing crash. Blackstone Group LP (BX) has spent $2.7 billion, and said last month it accelerated purchases as home prices rise faster than anticipated. Even after home values in November gained by the most in six years, investors are wagering on rental properties as an alternative to housing-related stocks and mortgage debt that’s already soared.

The strategy is similar to institutional buyers including Blackstone, the world’s largest buyout firm, Thomas Barrack’s Colony Capital LLC, and Oaktree Capital Group LLC. (OAK) They’re aiming to profit from low prices on distressed properties, often those in foreclosure and sold at auction — and the demand for rentals from people who don’t want to own a home or can’t qualify for a mortgage.

Now here’s where the article gets really interesting.

“It’s hard to find a private-equity firm on the planet that doesn’t have a strategy in this space,” Gary Beasley, chief executive officer at Waypoint Homes, said last week at the American Securitization Forum’s annual conference in Las Vegas. The Oakland, California-based company has bought homes in California, Arizona, Illinois and Georgia.

Sure seems like the right time to buy housing.  You know, after every single pool of aggressive private capital in the nation and abroad is already bidding.

Now take a look at how poor the returns are.  This is what happens when things get too crowded.

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It’s Coming: The Government Wants to “Help Manage” Retirement Accounts

Many people, including myself, have discussed this threat over the past several years.  The obvious concept is that when the government runs out of money, or they face a drying up in interest for its debt, they will come for the $19.4 trillion in American’s retirement accounts.  It seems that day may be finally drawing near.

I stopped contributing to my 401k back when I worked at Bernstein, and I will probably now have to give more serious consideration whether I want to take the penalty and move the funds out of my retirement account entirely.  I haven’t made any decisions, but will be watching closely.

I’m sure the government is just trying to protect your retirement account from terrorists.

From Bloomberg:

The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is weighing whether it should take on a role in helping Americans manage the $19.4 trillion they have put into retirement savings, a move that would be the agency’s first foray into consumer investments.

“That’s one of the things we’ve been exploring and are interested in in terms of whether and what authority we have,” bureau director Richard Cordray said in an interview. He didn’t provide additional details.

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America in 2013: For-Profit Prisons Get Favorable Tax Breaks

Here’s a great idea.  At a time when the debt of the country is exploding exponentially and we are running budget deficits that would be the envy of any banana republic, let’s give favorable tax treatment to for-profit prison companies.  This is a growth industry that we should all support, who cares that these United States has 5% of the World’s Population, yet 25% of its Prisoners.  May as well try to improve on that; just imagine how high we could get the prison population if we actually put a banker in jail?  From Forbes:

In early January 2013, both Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group – the nation’s two largest private prison companies that control a combined 75 percent of the for-profit prison market in the United States – announced that they had each completed preliminary plans to convert their corporate structure to a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT).

REITs are designed for companies that primarily invest in and generate revenue from real estate holdings, such as hotel chains; like other publicly-held corporations they trade on the stock market. There are special tax advantages for REITs, which generally pay no income tax. They also must distribute at least 90 percent of their income to shareholders in the form of dividends.

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Missouri High School to Collect Students’ Hair for Mandatory Drug Tests

One word: creepy.  This is a private school so they can do what they want, but to me it is representative of a very troubling trend in America where privacy rights are being eroded more and more.  Let’s not forget the recent case in which a federal judge affirmed that a Texas public school could force its students to wear RFID chips.  I covered that in my post Federal Judge: Texas School Can Force Teenager to Wear Locator Chip.

Now from CBS News in St. Louis:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (CBS St. Louis) — A Kansas City high school will begin collecting hair from students to conduct mandatory drug tests.

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Advice from the Department of Homeland Security: If Attacked by a Shooter, Grab Some Scissors

I first heard about this from a New York Post article on the topic.  Then I watched the video for myself.  It’ll make you want to defund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immediately.  While the whole “grab scissors” to defend oneself during a mass shooting is pretty amusing, the more disturbing part is that … Read more

New York Governor’s Approval Rating Plunges 15 Points After Gun Control Passed

I guess even New Yorkers don’t like it when a politician uses a tragedy to immediately jam through gun control legislation.  I wonder how many people will actually register their guns as that would be an interesting act of civil disobedience.  These political creatures are totally out of control.  From the Daily News: ALBANY — … Read more

The Stock Market: Food Stamps for the 1%

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
– Henry David Thoreau

Society is like a stew. If you don’t stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.
– Edward Abbey

When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.
– Jean-Paul Sartre

The Stock Market:  Food Stamps for the 1%
For most of the past four or five years, I have spent the majority of my time studying the dominant forces that fuel the power structure that exists in these United States today, and indeed throughout the world.  My education began quite suddenly and unexpectedly in the middle of the last decade when I started understanding fiat money, Central Banking and the global monetary system.  Since then, I have expanded my understanding to mainstream media brainwashing, the military-industrial complex, the role of the political oligarchs in Washington D.C., the corruption of the food industry under the complicity of the FDA itself and much more.  The more I peered under the curtain, no matter what the industry, the clearer it became that the system had no chance of survival under its current form.  What’s worse, it became obvious that the very small 0.01% of the population that I call oligarchs (financial and political), who are actively gaming the system for their own pleasure, are well aware of the system’s terminal nature.  That’s why they are rapidly putting in place the police state grid.

That said, this article is not about the implementation of the surveillance state.  I cover that pretty much daily these days.  This post is more of a philosophical stream of consciousness; a guilty pleasure that I have not engaged in as of late.

I have mentioned many times in the past that food stamps are just a payoff to the poor.  While I think a permanent and expanding welfare state is completely and utterly destructive to an economy and culture, I do not demonize these folks.  The vast majority of them would like to work and be productive.  They are victims and this is being done to them quite intentionally.  It creates dependency.  It keeps them off the streets.  It’s an unspoken bribe plain and simple.  The oligarchs do not want angry, roving, hungry masses on the streets while they strip mine what’s left of the economy.  Food stamps, disability and all sorts of other freebies take care of this segment of the population as the oligarchs continue on with their crimes and prepare for the day of reckoning (hence the surveillance grid).

However, the oligarchs have another problem to deal with.  This problem is the huge group of people that resides in between them and the poor.  Ideally, they would like to shove all of them into the poverty category and keep them barely alive and on dole of the government.  That way, the politically connected large corporations that do not pay taxes and receive bailouts can continue to pay them peasant wages while the government takes care of the rest.  It’s a win-win.  The situation I just described is exactly what is happening as we speak and has been occurring at an ever frequent pace since the coup of 2008.  This is exactly why people are buying guns, gold and are extremely negative on the economy and the future of the United States.  I recently discussed this in my post Gallup Poll: Americans Most Negative on the Nation and Economy in 30 Years.  If you read the Gallup data in detail you will see that this level of negative readings only occur during very bad economic times.  The average person can feel themselves getting poorer despite the nonsense spewed by the mainstream media.  Their standards of living don’t lie and no amount of false statistics can change that.  As John Adams famously said:  Facts are stubborn things.

Stubborn indeed; and this is where the stock market comes into play.  Banana Ben Bernanke has not made it a secret that he is directly targeting a higher stock market with his purchasing power destroying money printing.  He has made that clear from pretty much the beginning.  The idea is that a higher market will improve the balance sheets of pensions, individual retirement accounts and also create a psychological impact that will make people feel confident and thus boost the economy.  It is the last point that is of course most important. If the latter does not happen then the boost in stock prices is merely an unsustainable bubble that will burst and all the “good” that was done to balance sheets will be undone with a vengeance at some point in the future.  The latter did not happen.

As much as people like to talk about the 1% versus the 99%, the real winners since 2008 have been the oligarchs.  The 0.01% have benefited much more than any other class in terms of both money and power.  It’s the 0.01% versus everyone else and the quicker we recognize that, stop fighting amongst ourselves, and push them aside the better it will be for our species.

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Bitcoin is Booming…and it’s Scaring Central Bankers

Bitcoin.  Controversial.  Game changing.  Complicated yet simple.  While most of my non fiat money is in precious metals, there’s a lot I love about Bitcoin.  The dramatic rise and subsequent crash that Bitcoin experienced in 2011 occurred well before I possessed my first unit of this crypto-currency.  Since then, it has recovered dramatically and at $19.65 last check is up almost 4x since the end of 2011.

Bloomberg published an article on Bitcoin a few days ago titled: Bitcoin’s Gains May Fuel Central Bank Concerns: Chart of the Day.  Here are a few excerpts:

An increase in the value of bitcoin, the world’s largest online currency, may fuel concerns that virtual money could undermine the role of central banks.

The CHART OF THE DAY shows that bitcoin has more than doubled in the past 12 months, strengthening to $16.37 from $5.88, according to data from Mt. Gox, the world’s largest bitcoin exchange. The money, issued by a decentralized network of computers, has recovered after falling to $2.14 in November 2011 from a high of $29.58 five months earlier.

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French Central Bank Workers Go ON STRIKE

This might be the best economic stimulus that could ever come to France.  The only shame of it all is that they waited until after France went “totally bankrupt.”  All we need now is for all Central Bankers globally to go on a permanent strike so that the rest of us can rebuild the society … Read more

Interview #2 with Blacklisted News.com!

Earlier this evening, I sat down for the second time with Doug Owen of the excellent site blacklistednews.com and we had a nice long chat about the bankrupt world we live in.  We start off discussing the recent congregation of ponzi scheme artists in Davos, move on to resource wars in Africa, and finally finish … Read more