Wednesday, August 3, 2016

SOARING POVERTY UNDER OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS - US homeownership rate falls to lowest level in 51 years

OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS: 

THE RICH GET RICHER, BANKSTERS LOOT AND SUCK UP BAILOUTS, AND ILLEGALS GET OUR JOBS AND BILLIONS IN WELFARE!


"The decline in homeownership is one sign of 

the deep social crisis in the United States. As 

rents and housing costs have soared, spurred 

on by financial speculation that has enriched 

the ruling elites, incomes and jobs for most 

Americans have shriveled."



US homeownership rate falls to lowest level in 51 years

US homeownership rate falls to lowest level in 51 years

By Gabriel Black 
3 August 2016
The United States’ household home ownership rate fell to its lowest level in a half-century in the second quarter of 2016, according to statistics released by the US Census Bureau last week.
During the months of April, May and June, the percentage of American households that owned a home decreased by 0.6 percent, or about 750,000 households, down to 62.9 percent. This is the lowest percentage of home ownership since the Census Bureau began recording the home ownership rate in 1965. The 5l-year low comes despite record low interest rates for mortgages.
The home ownership rate in the US has been declining since June 2004, when it reached a peak of 69.2 percent. If Americans owned homes at the rate they did in 2004, then roughly 7.9 million American households who do not own homes would.
The decline in homeownership is one sign of 

the deep social crisis in the United States. As 

rents and housing costs have soared, spurred 

on by financial speculation that has enriched 

the ruling elites, incomes and jobs for most 

Americans have shriveled.
This national phenomenon is bound up with a broader global housing crisis facing large sections of the world’s population, particularly workers and youth.
Rent and housing costs in most major cities around the world have skyrocketed since the financial crash of 2008, cuttingly deeply into workers’ standard of living and prompting concerns about an unsustainable global housing bubble. Amid economic stagnation, workers are being laid off and their wages and benefits cut. High costs and low wages put large sections of the population, particularly urban workers, youth and sections of the middle class, in an impossible position.
In the United States, housing prices increased by 5.2 percent between May 2015 and May 2016, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Index. Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo, told National Mortgage News, “One of the biggest hurdles now is affordability. Home prices are rising so much faster than incomes, so it’s hard for buyers to save for a down payment.”
Between 2001 and 2014, median household income dropped by nine percent in the US. At the same time rental prices have increased, on average, by seven percent, according to a Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University study published this year.
Young adults have been particularly hurt. The rate of homeownership for Americans aged 18 to 34 fell 0.7 percent in the second quarter of 2016, dropping to 34.1 percent. This is the lowest rate recorded for this age group going back to 1992. For the first time in 130 years, Americans in this age group are more likely to live with their parents than another living situation, according to a May 2016 Pew Research Center report.
This is part of a global trend. In the United Kingdom, home ownership rates are at the lowest level in 30 years. A little less than 64 percent of households own homes, a rate not seen since 1986. In Australia, less than half of all adults are expected to own homes in a few years, according to University of Melbourne Professor Roger Wilkin’s research. Ownership rates declined by 3.5 percentage points between 2002 and 2014, he found.
The Swiss bank UBS estimated earlier this year that the majority of the world’s urban real estate markets are now “significantly overvalued.” In London, the average home price has doubled since 2009, from about £300,000 ($437,600 USD) to £600,000 ($875,100). Hong Kong’s average home price more than tripled between 2004 and today.
Meanwhile, incomes have declined or stagnated for about two-thirds of the population in the advanced economies, according to a McKinsey Global Institute report released last month. The study found that between 540 million and 580 million people either saw their incomes stagnate or decline in 25 of the most advanced countries.
This trend is unprecedented. Historically, rent and housing costs have risen and fallen in accordance with wages and the interest rate. A higher interest rate, or higher wages, would tend to push housing costs up. Today, this trend has reversed. Despite a decade-long decline in wages, and interest rates at near zero in many countries, housing prices are increasing substantially.
Financial speculation is the cause of this reversal. As UBS noted in its 2015 Global Real Estate Bubble Index, “Loose monetary policy has prevented a normalization of housing markets and encouraged local bubble risks to grow.” According to the report, much of the “overvaluation” in the global housing market comes from a “dependence on low interest rates.”
Due to low interest rates, banks and other 

financial institutions are receiving billions in 

virtually interest-free loans from the world’s 

central banks, only further encouraging them 

to invest in the stock market and real estate. It

is these purchases of real estate by financial 

speculators that drive up the cost of rent and 

housing when the large majority of the 

population is losing its income.



Sen. Tom Cotton: Obama’s $400m ‘Ransom to the Ayatollahs’

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Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) called the $400 million airlifted to the Iranian regime in hard foreign currency in January “ransom to the ayatollahs.”

Details of the transaction were reported Tuesday evening by the Wall Street Journal:
Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.
VIDEO: KERRY SOOTHES EU BANKS OVER IRAN TRADE
The money represented the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Cotton and other lawmakers, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, have long accused the administration of paying a “ransom” to the regime, contravening long-standing U.S. practice since the days of Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary Wars.
“This break with longstanding U.S. policy put a price on the head of Americans, and has led Iran to continue its illegal seizures,” said Cotton, according to the Journal.
In a March letter to Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, the State Department defended the $1.7 billion deal, including $400 million in principal and an agreed $1.3 billion in interest, as a means of settling claims that Iran had brought before an international tribunal at The Hague in the midst of the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. (That tribunal was established in 1981 as part of the original Carter administration deal to release U.S. hostages from Iran.)
The money, the State Department said, was the balance left in a Foreign Military Sales Trust Fund to resolve outstanding claims. The department argued that the deal was actually a “good settlement for the American taxpayer”: “If Iran’s claim for the Trust Fund balance and interest had gone to decision in the Tribunal, the United States could well have faced significant exposure in the billions of dollars … We were able to secure a favorable resolution on the interest owed to Iran … “.
However, given the timing of the settlement, which coincided both with the release of four captive Americans and the larger Iran deal, questions were immediately raised about whether the U.S. had, in fact, paid a ransom. The four Americans were traded for 7 Iranians who had been convicted in the U.S. of violating sanctions, as charges were dropped against 14 others. The flow of cash alongside that deal immediately raised suspicions.
The secretive manner in which the cash was transferred to Iran, avoiding U.S. dollars and traditional banks, in accordance with existing sanctions, has reinforced those suspicions.
Cotton was the lone member of the Senate to vote against the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, also known as the “Corker bill,” which theoretically insisted on the Senate’s constitutional authority to review the Iran deal, but in practice made it easier for the deal to pass simply through a presidential veto of a resolution of congressional disapproval.
Ultimately, Senate Democrats filibustered a vote on the Iran deal.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS: You were wondering how many jobs went to illegals and how well Obama’s crony banksters have done???


The sputtering economic recovering under President Obama, the last to follow a major recession, has fallen way short of the average recovery and ranks as the worst since the 1930s Great Depression, according to a new report.

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Had the recovery under Obama been the average of the 11 since the Depression, according to the report, family incomes would be $17,000 higher, six million fewer Americans would be in poverty, and there would be six million more jobs.



AMERICA'S ROAD TO REVOLUTION

…..will pass right through Hillary Clinton’s 

Mansion door!



"This dangerous power vacuum has fueled frustration and created an entirely new breed of disenfranchised voters who are fed up with the status quo. These are real people, their anger is palpable, and it’s not going away anytime soon."

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