Ayuda municipal para salvar las propiedades hipotecadas al precio fiscal

Why Wall Street Is Very, Very Angry at Richmond, California, Right Now

• EMILY BADGER - THE ATLANTIC

Very early Wednesday morning, the city council in Richmond, California, narrowly voted to move forward with a plan to aid underwater homeowners. It's a plan so controversial that everyone from Wall Street investment banks, to the National Association of Realtors, to U.S. congressmen, to state politicians, to the Federal Housing Finance Agency has weighed in.

Five years into the housing crisis, the city of about 105,000 and its Green Party mayor figure they've run out of better options – and out of patience with federal solutions that never came – to ease the local foreclosure glut. The median price of homes in town has dropped to less than half of what it was at the height of the housing boom. And the city has estimated that about 51 percent of its homeowners are underwater. Richmond is in worse shape than most towns sacked by the housing bubble: Its home values are low, its unemployment and poverty rates are high, and its residents in danger of foreclosure are unlikely to have the principal on their mortgages reduced any time soon.

In this position, Richmond has now become the only municipality in the country to seriously consider using eminent domain to seize underwater mortgages from the investors who currently hold them. The city would not seize the properties themselves – as more typically happens in eminent domain cases – but would use the power to essentially purchase the mortgages at their current market value (against the wishes of the banks that hold them).

A company called Mortgage Resolution Partners would help the city fund and manage the purchases, ultimately selling the restructured mortgages to new investors at rates that would keep the current residents in their homes.

The scheme, Mother Jones wrote earlier this year, "is almost as complicated as the derivatives and collateralized debt obligations that caused this mess to begin with."

But the idea at its core is relatively simple: Richmond sent letters to the banks and investors currently holding 624 mortgage notes on homes in the city, asking to buy them at current market value. The banks said no. Now the city hopes to purchase them anyway, citing a government power more commonly wielded to take private property for constructing public infrastructure like highways.

Mortgage Resolution Partners has been pitching the proposal to distressed cities for more than a year. But, so far, every other local government that's been tempted by the idea has ultimately abandoned it in the face of growing pressure from the banking industry, realtor groups and even the federal government.

Both Mother Jones and Wonkblog have good summaries of where this fight stood on the eve of Tuesday night's city council meeting (which dragged into the early hours of this morning). In short: Banks and the securities industry have threatened that no one will give credit to cities that show they're willing to seize property like this. And the Federal Housing Finance Agency has said it may take legal action against cities that try the tactic and stop lending to would-be homeowners who live there.

The whole proposal is a little hard to wrap your head around because some of the actors appear to be playing for the wrong team. Mortgage Resolution Partners is not a non-profit community group. It's a business run by people who've worked in the banking and real estate worlds. This housing story is not quite David vs. Goliath. It's David and some savvy investors formerly associated with Goliath vs. Goliath.

The angry industries involved have leveraged that plot line to their benefit, casting the eminent domain proposal as something that sounds like a Wall Street (or government, depending on your point of view) land grab, not an attempt to rescue homeowners. A flier distributed in Richmond by a local realtor's association opposed to the idea warns residents "Don't let Wall Street take another bite out of Richmond homes." Legislation proposed last year in Congress that would have stymied the idea was called the Defending American Taxpayers from Abusive Government Takings Act.

As with the housing boom itself, it's easy to see how the local homeowners here might have a hard time sorting out their own best interests. Seemingly everyone has lined up against a plan the mayor believes is best for Richmond's residents. And that plan also passed the city council by a vote of just 4-3.

Then again, just because everyone else has refused to try this doesn't mean it's not a good idea.

Top image: Flickr user BasicGov.

Buitres compran bonos municipales de Detroit

Hedge Funds Are Buying Up Detroit Bonds So Fast There's A Waiting List

STEVEN PERLBERG

When Detroit filed for bankruptcy two weeks ago, Wall Street asked the obvious question — how can we make money off this?

That didn't take long to answer.

CNNMoney is reporting that the Detroit municipal bond has become "the hottest trade on Wall Street."

Though it may seem hard to believe, many hedge funds are betting that Detroit's bonds — which are backed by insurance firms that could continue to pay bondholders for now — will be quite lucrative in the long run.

There aren't even enough bonds to go around, with hedge funds are sitting on a long waiting list.

From CNNMoney:

Shortly after Detroit filed for bankruptcy, several hedge funds managed to buy $5 million of pension bonds for 41 cents on the dollar. Those were some of the only pension obligation bonds available.

Hedge funds are also eyeing about $1 billion in general obligation bonds backed by Detroit. More of these have changed hands, but also in small increments. One hedge fund manager said he was able to procure $30,000 of general obligation bonds at 75 cents on the dollar from a dentist in Milwaukee. The fund was hoping to buy several millions of dollars' worth, but so far, that's all they can get their hands on.

It's a risky bet, but one expert told CNNMoney that bondholders tend to recover more in municipal bankruptcies than corporate ones.

Business Insider 

¿Qué provocó la bancarrota de Detroit: China o los robots?

What Bankrupted Detroit: China? Or Robots?

The Motor City's population collapsed as manufacturing jobs disappeared.

TIM FERNHOLZ

We know that, unlike most defeats, Detroit's bankruptcy has a thousand fathers -- everything from mismanaged pension funds to interest rate swaps gone the wrong way to years of racial animus that hollowed out the core of an already too-sprawling metropolis.

But the fundamental problem of late has been the city's depleted population: More than a quarter of its residents leaving town between 2000 and 2010. That's a function of bad city services and urban blight, but it's also because it's hard to make a living there. You can see that reflected in the chart above. Jobs in the Detroit metropolitan area, which held fairly steady through the nineties, plunged after 2000, as the unemployment rate rose. Between 2001 and the end of 2012, Detroit's Wayne County lost more than 60,000 manufacturing jobs alone.

What changed in 2000? After all, Detroit had weathered other economic challenges. The auto factories that once defined Detroit have been moving out since the fifties, when big auto-makers sent them to the American sunbelt in the hopes of avoiding pesky unions, and as pressure from Japan's auto industry began building in the 1980s.

Besides the popping of the tech bubble, it's easy to point to trade normalization with China. GM (which sells more cars in China than in the US) and other automakers invested in factories in China, and many parts suppliers did the same.

And as you might expect, if you look at Detroit's manufacturing GDP in the same time period, it decreases:

And in the last decade, the US's global imports of both cars and auto parts have increased. But though their rise has been slower than that of imports, US exports of cars and auto parts have climbed as well. In fact, the US continues to make more stuff than ever -- even Detroit. Its metropolitan area exported $55 billion in goods last year, according to the US Department of Commerce. That's more than it produced seven years ago, and good enough to make it the fourth-largest exporting city in the country.

​So why did exports rise even as the city shed manufacturing jobs and output fell?

Detroit factories rely more than ever on parts from other places -- and that's where some of those jobs went. Some did indeed go to China, leading to a US complaint at the World Trade Organization that the country subsidizes its parts industry. However, some of those jobs went to factories within the US: Detroit's share of total US production fell from 3.1% in 2001 to just 1.7% in 2011.

That still doesn't explain why, between 2005 and 2011, Detroit's manufacturing jobs fell by 30%, while its manufacturing production fell by only 16%. Where did those job go?

In the end, you can blame robots--or increased productivity in these factories. As manufacturing requires fewer and fewer people to make more goods, there is less work to go around. Detroit, heavily dependent on manufacturing, suffers the most today. But the problem of adapting social and economic institutions to a world where mechanization enhances productivity but costs jobs is one that all wealthy countries face, regardless of trade competition.

The Atlantic

1 peso para la birra

En La Plata cobran un peso de impuesto por cada compra en supermercados

En cada compra que realicen, los vecinos deberán pagan $ 1 de recargo a partir de una resolución municipal firmada por el titular de la Agencia Platense de Recaudación. La Nación

 

Inédito impuesto en La Plata. Foto: Archivo 

La Municipalidad de La Plata dispuso el cobro adicional de un peso por cada compra que se realice en hipermercados de la ciudad, para "disminuir la evasión fiscal", y el monto abonado podrá ser descontado a la hora de cancelar otros impuestos comunales.

En cada compra que se realicen en hipermercados minoristas y mayoristas de La Plata, los vecinos deberán pagan $1 de recargo a partir de una resolución municipal firmada por el titular de la Agencia Platense de Recaudación, Alejandro Barbieri.

Según expresa la misma disposición, la finalidad del nuevo tributo es "disminuir el grado de evasión fiscal y asegurar así el ingreso de los fondos asegurando el aumento de la recaudación y facilitando el correcto cumplimiento de las obligaciones". Barbieri dijo que "es una retención de los gravámenes (que se pagan con los servicios), para lo cual el Municipio está facultado".

De acuerdo con lo informado por el municipio, este cobro adicional podrá ser descontado del pago de la tasa de Servicio Urbano Municipal, Seguridad e Higiene, Uso de Espacio Público y Publicidad y Propaganda, que se cobra en la ciudad.

"Se trata de un anticipo que pagan los consumidores finales de las tasas que ellos luego definirán cuando realicen el trámite en la Agencia para que se impute el cargo en la contribución que deseen", aclaró.

La presentación deberá realizarse en las oficinas de la Agencia de Recaudación de la Torre Administrativa de calle 12 y 51, junto con el DNI del contribuyente.-