Be super careful with debt consolidation. These have almost doubled.
Always thank you for reporting scams websites.

So President Clinton’s team had negotiated bad leases, and now our friends are saying that those bad leases must be stopped. We simply need to stop them. We don’t need to unravel them. We don’t need to go through the thorny process of making it right for both sides as we unravel. We simply are going to punish you by not allowing you to derive any economic benefit from this type of installation. I will tell you, that undermines the full faith and credit of the United States. If we cannot depend on the word of the United States, then what do we have? I would draw parallels to things that other countries have done. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez in 2001 raised the royalty rates from 1 percent to 16 percent just like that. Now, I will tell you as a business guy, if you know that a cost is going to be 1 percent or 16 percent, it is sort of irrelevant, but you must know that the cost is steady. When he raised those rates just at a single point with no ability to redesign these types of infrastructures, then he severely limited the interest of people to invest in that country, and certainly

[Page:
H782] GPO’s PDFthat is exactly what is happening. Foreign firms are already curtailing their investments in that country.
So in Venezuela we see that there is an attempt to change existing contracts, very similar to the way that we changed yesterday on the floor of this House of Representatives, and it has affected the desire of people to invest in Venezuela.

In Bolivia we have the same thing. The Bolivian government threatened to expel oil companies from that country in 2006 if they did not agree to new government terms on existing contracts. What has happened? I think you could forecast what has happened. What is done is that foreign investors are now beginning to reconsider whether or not they will actually be a part of the Bolivian economy or not. This is the thing that all shareholders, they will live with any certainty in life, but they will not live with uncertainty. And when we begin to change the contracts, they begin to pull their investments out and go to places where certainty is more of a potential.

In Russia we have seen the same thing. Companies such as Shell, Exxon, BP have had valid oil and gas leases in Russia for years. President Putin had a number of government agencies threaten to pull these leases for a number of suspect reasons. By threatening to pull these leases, Shell was forced to give up assets that were worth billions of dollars. So we see in Russia this attempt to maneuver contracts, to manipulate contracts much as what we did yesterday, and the effects are very bad. Long term, Russia will not have people who are willing to come and invest in that country.

In 2001, I had the opportunity to go as a company; my wife and I had a small company that dealt in oil and gas, repairs of oil wells. Russia was looking for such capability. So in 2001, I went with a team of people who did various different projects. We were the ones who did down hole repairs on oil wells. They took me, they showed me files of maybe 6,000 or 8,000 wells that were simple to correct, yet they in their technology in 2001 did not have access to even the basics that my father had seen here in the United States in the early 1950s when he was working in the same industry. My father retired from Exxon; his whole life was work.

So when I went back, I showed him the videos of the equipment that was in Russia in 2001. He said, “Son, in 1950 we were more advanced than what we are seeing here.”

When countries are unwilling to allow people to have stable returns, it doesn’t have to be high returns, low returns, but there must be stability and there must be predictability. When countries do not allow that, there will be no investments. And so here Russia was with over 6,000 wells asking me in 2001 to come and fix because they did not have anyone that was capable of fixing them.

I determined that the environment was very, very unsettling in Russia, so we actually opted not to become a part of the team that went there. There was a company that was about 10 times our size located in Abilene, Texas. They did go. That was about maybe a $ 50 million company, maybe a $ 100 million company. Within 2 years, they were selling everything at bankruptcy because the Russians, as you can predict, said, “No. These assets are going to belong to us.”

So this contracting problem that was attempted to be cured yesterday in legislation I think is going to be, instead of a fix, is going to cause prices to be higher at the pump, investments to be less, and at the end of the day we are going to wonder if maybe we did not empower a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs to go around and make commitments on behalf of the Federal Government. We shall see. I wish my friends well.

I would say that I am not the only one who wonder about the contracts. Just day before yesterday the Washington Post had an editorial which declared that these elements that are included in the bill, the ones that begin to undo the contracts that we voted on yesterday and pushed by the majority in this House, the Washington Post declared those solutions to be ones that Russia and Bolivia would be proud of.

GOP California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger now wants an investigation. But neither the Terminator nor any other California public official raised a peep when the very same San Diego ACORN office publicly announced a partnership with Citibank to secure home loans for illegal aliens.

In 2005, Citibank and ACORN Housing Corporation — which received tens of millions of tax dollars under the Bush administration alone — began recruiting Mexican illegal aliens for a lucrative program offering loans with below-market interest rates, down-payment assistance and no mortgage insurance requirements. Instead of the Social Security numbers required of law-abiding citizens, the program allows illegal alien applicants to supply loosely monitored tax identification numbers issued by the IRS.

The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that “undocumented residents” make up a vast market representing a potential sum of “$ 44 billion in mortgages.” Citibank enlarged its portfolio of subprime and other risky loans. ACORN enlarged its membership rolls. The program now operates in Miami; New York City; Jersey City, N.J.; Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Bridgeport, Conn.; and at all of ACORN Housing’s 12 California offices.

San Diego ACORN officials advised illegal alien recruits that their bank partners would take applicants who had little or no credit, or even “nontraditional records of credit, such as utility payments and documentation of private loan payments.”
The risk the banks bear is the price they pay to keep ACORN protesters and Hispanic lobbyists from the National Council of La Raza screaming about “predatory lending” off their backs. These professional grievance-mongers have turned the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act — which forced lenders to sacrifice underwriting standards for “diversity” — into lucrative “business” opportunities. Or rather, politically correct blackmail.
more much more to read http://www.noozhawk.com/local_news/article/092009_michelle_malkin_acorns_illegal_alien_home-loan_racket/

Six regional banks in Illinois and one in Texas closed their doors, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Twelve banks in Illinois have failed this year. Thursday’s failure in Texas was the first for the state in 2009.

Local banks have been hard hit as plummeting home values devalued mortgage-backed assets and rising unemployment rates caused an increasing number of consumers to default on their loans.

Larger financial institutions have been helped with government bailouts, but smaller regional banks continue to struggle.

FDIC fund: The total cost of Thursday’s bank failures to the FDIC is $ 314.3 million, bringing the FDIC fund’s total cost for failed banks to $ 12.3 billion this year. That compares with $ 17.6 billion in all of 2008.

Only 25 banks failed last year

So i ask to to every thinking person out their who uses logic and facts instead of kool-aid and words like “change” and “obama” to see the truth, Why is Fox News not covering the fact that Obamas stimulus package is nothing but hyper-inflation for the poor/middle class and pay off’s for the rich?

(and please dont call me a bush supporter or republican at the risk of making yourselves sound liketotal idiots)

WASHINGTON – Americans’ wealth rose this spring for the first time in nearly two years, with stocks and home values gaining as the recession faded.

Still, household net worth remains about 19 percent below its peak in the third quarter of 2007, before the recession began.

The Federal Reserve said net worth grew by $ 2 trillion to $ 53.1 trillion in the April-to-June quarter. Net worth, or the value of assets such as homes, checking accounts and investments minus debts like mortgages and credit cards, rose nearly 4 percent from the first quarter, the Fed said.
Even with the gain, Americans’ net worth stands well below the $ 65.3 trillion it reached two years ago.

The second quarter increase in net worth was the first since wealth peaked. According to the Fed report, the pickup was led by gains in stock portfolios. The value of Americans’ stock holdings rose 21.6 percent from the first quarter, marking the first increase in two years.

Net worth in the second quarter also was boosted by higher home prices. The value of real-estate holdings rose 1.8 percent, according to the Fed report. That was the first gain since the final quarter of 2006.

This week, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said the worst recession since the 1930s probably is over. Most analysts say the U.S. economy is growing in the current quarter, which ends Sept. 30, at an annual rate of 3 to 4 percent. The economy shrank at a 1 percent pace in the second quarter, much slower than in previous quarters.

Bernanke warned that the pace of recovery probably won’t be brisk enough to generate solid job growth and keep the unemployment rate — now at a 26-year high of 9.7 percent — from rising.

Collectively, homeowners had 43.1 percent equity in their homes in the second quarter, according to the Fed report. That was up only slightly from a record low of 41.9 percent in the first quarter.

The report also showed that total household debt — including mortgages, credit cards, autos and other consumer loans — stood at $ 13.7 trillion in the second quarter.

That’s down slightly from $ 13.8 trillion in the first three months of this year, and suggests that households are trimming debt, but are doing so slowly. Debt peaked at $ 13.9 trillion in the spring of last year.