All blog posts for October 2010

The next crisis on the way - the foreclosure crisis.

Author: daoosaigon. Published on Tuesday 19 October 2010 at 9:51 p.m. Categories: Economics. Tags: Foreclosure, crisis, housing, fraud.. Comments: 0.

This is a big, big, big problem for the United States. If you don't know what I'm talking about, start by reading One nation, under fraud.

So goes the unprecedented wave of foreclosures that has swept across the country [the US] since the housing bubble popped. Mortgages have been bought, sold, and repackaged so many times through such an opaque process that banks have no idea who owns what. When they foreclose, they simply guess, making up the documents and information necessary to do so.

Once you've got your head around that, try:

"Somehow in the last 10 or 15 years, everything that was good record-keeping isn't telling the truth anymore," says de Soto, reached by phone while traveling in Copenhagen. "My feeling is this: Your recession is going to last. And it's going to last, and it's going to last, because essentially the trust has broken down."

I don't really have much to add to that.

Confusion of events of the last two weeks.

Author: daoosaigon. Published on Monday 11 October 2010 at 10:04 p.m. Categories: Personal. Tags: TAA, TAE, English, Insolvency. Comments: 0.

All these things happened in the last two weeks. I wish to note them, because what else is a blog for? In no particular order:

  • I started classes for Certificate IV in Training and Assessment. Now accompanied with brand new Three Letter Acronym "TAE" instead of the "TAA" used by the old Certificate IV in Training and Assessment. I choose Chris Morton Powerful Seminars as the RTO as I could get the class time out of the way in five days, and it was cheaper than doing one at a TAFE.
  • On the same day I started the Cert IV, I discovered the administrators had been called in on one of my English teaching schools. Seems they owed the tax department a couple of years of money. So the school was declared insolvent in order to prevent the tax office closing it and taken all assets for itself. Now unpaid staff such as myself get first go of any funds remaining.
  • Not much later, being advised to check out the General Employee Entitlements and Redundancy Scheme, just in case.
  • Going to a wake for the school at the Story Bridge Hotel. Nice to catch up with people for the penulntimate time, but not so pleased at how yuppiefied the venue has become. But then it's been more than 10 years since I visited it. Not that I want my next workplace to go bust, but if there's a wake, it should be at the Joynt.
  • Myriad updates on blog's development environment, such as adding Tinymce javascript to forms. Then discover I can't upload to production server, because 100+ mm of rain has really screwed up the ADSL to my house.