DEAR DIVORCE
I’m calling this blog – “Dear Divorce”…because I have given up forever talking to the ex. I finally hired a lawyer, I took the plunge and I’m out $2,500. In fact I sold my car just to get on with my life. Confusion! Confusion on the subject of love and marriage? Is it real? Let’s see what happens. There was a formula somewhere on how to get out of confusion on the subject of love, sex and relationships but I forgot it in a past life.
Am I confused on the subject of sex, love and relationships? In some respects yes, and in others no. According to some researchers the lowest condition a human being can sink to on the subject of sex, love, marriage, children, family and relationships is a state of confusion. Being perverted on any of those subjects is not part of confusion – who is to judge what is or isn’t perverted?
Ok, well if you insist, I will judge for you. If anything on those subjects is perverted, I won’t go as far as stating my pronounced judgment that the American legal system is no longer perverted – but just a tad bit aberated.
Case in point. Before I filed for divorce I had a net worth of $70 million. That was two years before I filed for the divorce. What happened during those two years is the subject of another book.
Put it this way – the ex was a major contributing factor to my being charged with terrorist threats and my being picked up by Homeland Security because I “threatened to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank Building in downtown Portland”, a total falsehood, and later she participated as a false witness in a staged perjured felony charge which landed me in Men’s Central Jail in LA.
After three years of long suffering I am today a very happy and free man! I am joyous and grateful to be alive and having survived that ordeal knowing that the record is expunged, the case was dropped to a misdemeanor and dismissed all in one fell swoop!
Now I have my justice and I am moving into new realms of responsibility and exciting opportunities.
One of them is finding another relationship which for me has been very difficult, leaving me celibate for the past three years and counting. So I am going to try something which I have not done in over 20 years. I am going to research the subject of love, sex, marriage, women, children, families, and based on my experiences I may or may not write a book – lord knows there are plenty of intellectualized books and a sea of information on this subject but if I don’t check in with my take on it, I will forever be forgotten as the man who stayed confused all his life.
I once read somewhere that in a condition of confusion the being or area will be in a state of random motion. There will be no real production, only disorder or confusion. Well, that pretty much describes my current relationship. We haven’t seen each other in three years. I haven’t seen my darling sweet little children in over two years, and we are certainly not producing anything as a family, or as a couple.
I spent a good two hours sorting through all the legal papers I had filed just in my divorce case.
The great news is that the former judge and her clerk were both recently fired according to my attorney, and that was probably the biggest breakthrough on my year and a half old dissolution of marriage case in Santa Monica Superior Court.
In order to get out of confusion one has to find out where they are.
It will be seen that the progress upward would be, in Confusion, find out where you are; in Treason, find out that you are; and for Enemy, find out who you are.
CONFUSION FORMULA:
The formula for Confusion is:
FINT OUT WHERE YOU ARE.
Note: It is important that the person who is in Confusion be cleared up on the definition of confusion: (This is done before the formula itself is started.)
Definitions:
1. Any set of factors or circumstances which do not seem to have any immediate solution.
More broadly, confusion in this universe is random motion. If you were to stand in heavy traffic you would be likely to feel confused by all the motion whizzing around you. If you were to stand in a heavy storm, with leaves and papers flying by, you would be likely to be confused. Confusion could be called an uncontrolled randomness.
Only those who can exert some control over that randomness can handle confusions. Those who cannot exert control actually breed confusions.
Confusion is only a confusion so long as all particles are in motion.
Confusion is only a confusion so long as no factor is clearly defined or understood.
Confusion is the basic cause of stupidity.
2. All confusion is unpatterned flow. The particles collide, bounce off each other and stay IN the area. Thus there is no product as to have a product something must flow OUT.
The additional formula for the condition of Confusion is:
1. Locational* on the area in which one is.
2. Comparing where one is to other areas where one was.
3. Repeat step 1.
*A Locational is done by walking around with the person, both indoors and out-of-doors, using the commands, "Look at that (indicated object.) Thank you," using objects such as a chair, a tree, a car, the floor, the ceiling, a house, etc.
The person running the Locational would point at the object each time. It is simply run until the person visibly brightens up and has cognition.
Now that I am a free man my ex is freaking out. She suffers from a severe disease known as Borderline Personality Disorder among other things and is on psychotropic medication and on welfare.
Her lawyer just sent my lawyer a letter stating that she wanted me to be responsible for all the income taxes on all the unreported income she earned while she was a prostitute in Fort Worth, Texas and Washington D.C. That is over a quarter million dollars.
She is terrified of abandonment yet she does things which insure that no man can live with her. She knows I could now leave LA and go anywhere in the world and never hear from me again but that is not my plan but even thus, she would not believe it in her own mind.
It is an impossible situation. She has had two surgeries since our breakup and she is on welfare with two children who she cannot take care of by herself, thus she is supported now by the State and her evil wicked mother.
She does not work because she has become co-dependent on her mother who pays for her rent and the two minor children who I have not visited with or seen for more than 2 years...closer to three.
I have had to find a second lawyer in Oregon to deal with the child custody, child support and child visitation issues which is costing me another $2,500 retainer. But I am in for the long haul and the battle of my life to separate myself from 13 years of hell and counting with a woman who near caused my death and undoing.
She has had me falsely arrested on at least five occasions, she has lied to police officers about me, she was even involved in providing tainted and misleading "evidence" on the case which I just had dismissed after three years of legal wrangling. She has even gone as far as reporting to the FBI that I was planning on blowing up the Federal Reserve Bank Building in Portland, Oregon four years ago when she knew I would never return to her.
Now I am in the middle of a divorce with this woman with whom I have been accused of abusing physically but I can assure you that I have never laid a violent hand on the woman...but the woman is insane and extremely dangerous to my survival and she knows that I in the past have been extremely afraid of her and her viscous actions behind the scenes which somehow I always seem to discover and uncover.
Our last go around in court involved a skirmish wherein I filed a motion for a permanent restraining order against her in Divorce Court. As soon as she was served she filed an Anti Stalking Order in Child Custody Court in Oregon.
In an attempt to bring about peace, I withdrew my motion for a restraining order in hopes that she would drop the one in Oregon but she didn't. Instead I had to face trial on a whole bunch of false and totally absurd allegations - she once told the FBI that I was a financial terrorist planning to blow up the Federal Reserve Building in Portland Oregon and I was arrested, questioned and released.
The Stalking Case was dismissed by the judge for lack of evidence and she advised us to get divorce counseling. The FBI case was laughed off by both the special agent and the homeland security officer.
I cannot tell you how much money I have spent on relationship counseling over a thirteen year period only to let you know - nothing except leaving her has helped me straighten out my own personal life and find stability and happiness. I am no longer in a state of confusion about my marriage, my children, and my sexual energy.
After sorting out all of these hundreds of incidents I have experienced at the hands of this woman who claims to be a Christian but suffers from serious character defects, I know who I am, I know where I am, I know what I am and I know there is no doubt in my mind that we will never be together again, ever, for as long as I live.
She has filed bankruptcy twice in ten years getting away with fraudulently borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash and credit taken from American corporations and never having to repay the money. She has paid no taxes on all these ill gotten gains and probably never will even if the IRS catches up with her.
Unfortunately those debts are now mine because of community property laws and I intend to fully settle with all her creditors but if I don't take care of my own welfare, I will not be in a position to take care of the welfare of my own children and I cannot allow this woman to continue her attacks and covert operations designed to destroy my rights as a father and my freedom as a human being.
What I really seriously need help with quickly is finding a good private investigator who has enough muscle, teeth and legal connections in Lane County and/or the City of Eugene to dig up all her fraudulent dirt and forever shut this woman down and get her out of my life once and for all without causing my children further pain and suffering at her hands.
This is a difficult assignment because she has vowed to even ensure that I never see the children again and without a court order, she is liable to call the police and make up some more false allegations in an attempt to “protect” the children.
I will not go into her parenting skills, suffice it to say that I would not want to have her as my mother, but she unfortunately is the mother of my two minor children and I must now finally deal with and confront her through the legal system and terminatedly handle this ongoing situation.
This may cost me more than the $2,500 I bargained for, but I am hoping and praying that she will cease and desist from expecting any sort of alimony from me. I would not care if this woman was on her dying deathbed, I would not even weep a single tear for her. I don’t think I have ever hated any human being more than this woman in my entire life. I thought I hated my mother once. This woman is worse than ten of my mothers.
She continues to invade my life and privacy so that my emails received at various email addresses are not secure. She has broken into my email accounts once again (this has happened on dozens of occasions) and has been calling my friends to find out where I am living, where I am working, and whatever.
The way I know she is into my emails is when I am online at a certain time of the day, usually when the children are down for the evening, I can see which emails have been read already and which have not.
All too often during the past three years I have seen emails which I have never read marked as having been “read”.
This indicates to me that someone if not her, has read one or more of my emails and while she is in the middle of reading an email she cannot change the read back to “unread”.
Thus I have caught her red handed doing this on least over a dozen occasions.
I recently got hired at a mortgage loan company that pays me a guaranteed base salary of $1,500 a month. Within 3 days of starting work, which I only shared with a few friends via email and telephone conversations, someone "allegedly" from the State of Oregon called the CFO of my new employer to ask if "Gabe" worked there.
Now the state of Oregon doesn't know me as Gabe. They know me as Alex S. Gabor. Only my friends and my ex know me as Gabe...anyway the point is my ex is a rabid hound and is not above pretexting, something which is now against the law in California but which she has successfully gotten away with many times in the past.
She still accesses my voicemails and my cell phone records through the internet simply by entering my phone number, my email address, my birthday and my social security number.
Lately she hasn’t sent any nasty emails to my friends pretending to be someone only her and I could possibly have known about because the email address she used was named after I fictitious character I used to imitate who was known as Felicia, a gay cross-dressing moron that acts like the three stooges in one personality.
She wants me to pay her $1,500 a month for child support and $1,000 a month for alimony and has threatened in prior correspondence with having me arrested again if I don't pay it.
Now her lawyer has advised my lawyer that she is going to seek my tax returns for the past three years and base her calculations on how much she should get based on that.
Based on my calculations this woman owes me about $2 million for every little piece of dirt that I have on her. Unfortunately, I must wait to see what she does in these last days of our divorce…if it requires us going to trial- then the whole world will probably hear about it because after all, I am a famous writer now!
I consider this a form of extortion. I have filed a lawsuit against her and the state of Oregon on this issue of child support, child custody and child visitation, and the taking away of my civil rights, however the case is now being rewritten and refiled in a different jurisdiction and I must focus on paying an attorney in Oregon who can do the following:
1. Obtain a lawyer pro bono to represent the interests of my two minor children separate from my own interests. This can be done by a motion made by my attorney in Lane County Circuit Court.
2. File whatever legal papers are necessary to accomplish the following:
a) Get her to cease and desist from contacting any of my employers, my agents, my representatives, or my friends and associates without my written permission.
b) Get the State to reduce the back child support amount by giving me a credit for the six years I was homeless and couldn't pay child support because of my former addictions.
c) Establish a fair and just child support amount and arrearage balance coupled with my children’s rights to have them visit their father in California at least two weeks out of the year at his own expense without supervision and to visit his children in Eugene, Oregon or wherever they live every weekend away from their residence and without any contact with the Ex.
Now that I have found a lawyer in Oregon who is studying the case in detail, after having shelled out more than $200 in legal fees already on this issue, leaving me down to the last $500 in my checking account, I must be patient and wait to see if she will take the case. I sent her four inches of documents on the child custody issues alone.
If I could accomplish those three goals within the next 90 to 120 days I would be the happiest man to be able to see my children again and allow them to have fun here in Southern California. If you can within your vast network of contacts and friends help connect me with the right legal counsel in Oregon who has the privilege of practicing law in Lane County Circuit Court...I will be grateful forever.
I am not ashamed to share this information...I've already cleaned up so much wreckage but sometimes our piles are so deep we need the help of friends to steer clear of the next one. So your assistance is well appreciated.
Unfortunately as things have progressed, I am now more inclined than ever to leave America and return to Canada where I haven’t lived since I was a preteen.
I have posted my resume on BC jobs and will actively pursue a career in the banking industry in Canada. After one year, if I have not had contact with her, Canadian law will allow me to divorce her by publication at no cost to me.
It will then be up to the State of Oregon to find me and while they are looking for me, the United States economy, particularly Oregon’s, will be devastated by the truth coming out about the legal, financial and economic systems which crumble as I write.
It pains me to think it may mean I will not see my children for another year at least, but be that as it may, there will be alternatives to legal courtroom battles that cost a fortune and drain me of my energies.
I am rejuvenated in the knowledge that whatever is going on with me legally it is all just temporary and it too will soon pass.
POST SCRIPT
Looking back on all this now after the divorce was final; I realize that a lot of my troubles stem from my own stinkin thinking.
The divorce was final on August 8th, 2007 and everything negative I have ever written about my ex was wrong because she let me see the children after three years in Eugene, Oregon two months after the divorce was final.
The look of joy in my son Connor’s eyes when I snuck up on him and surprised him was enough to blow away any further resentments I may have had toward my ex, forever. Now I am in regular contact with my youngest son, Connor whose birthday party I will attend next month, and I am still working on getting my 12 year old, Christian, to overcome his resentments toward me for having "abondoned" him in Reno, Nevada (more on this later).
As far as the ex mother in law goes, whom I also spotted while visiting last month, she is something I cannot control or change and thanks to God, I have finally recognized that with the wisdom to know the difference of then and now.
Friday, November 23, 2007
JUSTICE
JUSTICE
By: Alex S. Gabor
Recently in January of 2005, I filed a petition for dissolution of marriage from a woman I have married twice and who has bore me two children who I have not seen now for over a year and a half. I filed for divorce because of resentments I had over various issues that arose during our relationship, which I thought, were irreconcilable.
The main reason I filed the suit against my wife was because she had over the course of several years refused to return certain property (mostly intellectual), which belonged to me and was dear to my heart. Poems I had written when I was young, short stories, and data on a computer hard drive which related to former business deals gone sour. Countless items of irreplaceable memorabilia of my personal life, which have no value to her, but which may some day be of historic significance to others who touched my life.
In the process of seeking justice, I saw no other way than to proceed through the courts by filing a motion for a temporary restraining order preventing her from hanging on to the property. I had tried to file it ex-parte, meaning without her knowledge before it was filed, however the court ordered that she be served with the papers and the motions and that she respond to them.
The filing was a motion to obtain a restraining order, and no order existed restraining my wife from talking to me. Less than two weeks after she was served with the motion to obtain a restraining order she filed an ex-parte automatic order to prevent stalking, which despite my attempts to have it dismissed, the court in Lane County Oregon continued the order pending trial. We live a thousand miles apart.
I had filed another motion to set aside her response to the divorce filing because she had not disclosed her assets or answered an interrogatory. However, in her response to that motion, and the motion for the restraining order, she brought to light the numerous false police reports she filed against me during the course of our on again-off again ten year relationship, another key element of my reasons for obtaining a restraining order against her. She has caused me to be falsely arrested at least half a dozen times in the past decade. I could not be nor was I ever arrested for taking drugs or drinking, but I could be arrested based on the false testimony of my own wife.
The process of recovery does not happen over night. In my own recovery I have learned that one has to be brutally honest with oneself in order to stay clean and sober. I am proud to say that with the grace of the almighty higher power that has guided my spiritual path I have maintained my sobriety for twenty-five months and five days today.
It is said that one should seek the truth and the truth shall set us free. During the course of my recovery over the past 25 months I have discovered a corollary to that little bit of wisdom. One should seek to discover the lies, which cover up and mask the truth, for in knowing the lies, therein the truth becomes self-evident.
In the process of seeking to recover the property that I had left in the possession of my wife when I left her over two years ago in Reno Nevada because of all the lies we both foisted upon each other, and the seemingly endless mutual verbal and physical abuse we had caused each other as a result of our codependent relationship, and for the sake of the sanity of our children, I realized that whatever wrongs, real or imaginary, that I may have committed were because of my own illness.
My higher power, which I still prefer to call the “infinite infinitor of infinities”, has seen fit to bless me with two things that matter to me more than anything else.
The first is my consciousness of the existence of my higher power and my direct minute-to-minute contact with it.
The second is the peace and serenity that comes with overcoming all odds in the face of hatred, lies and injustice and being able to continue to love my fellow human beings despite all the infinite reasons I might find to do otherwise. This ability is one among many which only my higher power could teach me.
My higher power has blessed me further with daily guidance away from my own illness and onto a spiritual path that leads to immortality. Neither my wife, or the criminal justice system, or the civil courts could or would have ever cured me of my illness, despite their vain attempts to do so for a quarter century. Therein lies my justice.
After nine months of serious daily prayer, meditation and contemplation following the initial filing for divorce, I realized that if it was god’s will that I have my property back, I would already have it. As a result of this epiphany, this morning I asked the judge to dismiss my motion for a permanent restraining order against my wife, and the motion to strike her responses, and to dismiss the entire divorce proceedings.
Graciously the judge granted the withdrawal of my motions without prejudice, however in order to dismiss the divorce, it requires an agreement on the part of both my wife and myself. When we took our vows, we agreed that what the infinite has created let no man (or woman) put asunder, and till death do us part, through thick and thin, through sickness and health, through richer or poorer, and so the oaths persist.
I had wanted to communicate all of the above to the judge and to my wife, but time would not permit it, and life being as short as it is, I wanted my readers to know that I am well, and life moves on, despite all rumors of my suicide to the contrary.
In the end, the only power in the universe that can mete out justice is the infinite infinitor of infinities. In the hands of man, it is an unlimited weapon of mass destruction.
By: Alex S. Gabor
Recently in January of 2005, I filed a petition for dissolution of marriage from a woman I have married twice and who has bore me two children who I have not seen now for over a year and a half. I filed for divorce because of resentments I had over various issues that arose during our relationship, which I thought, were irreconcilable.
The main reason I filed the suit against my wife was because she had over the course of several years refused to return certain property (mostly intellectual), which belonged to me and was dear to my heart. Poems I had written when I was young, short stories, and data on a computer hard drive which related to former business deals gone sour. Countless items of irreplaceable memorabilia of my personal life, which have no value to her, but which may some day be of historic significance to others who touched my life.
In the process of seeking justice, I saw no other way than to proceed through the courts by filing a motion for a temporary restraining order preventing her from hanging on to the property. I had tried to file it ex-parte, meaning without her knowledge before it was filed, however the court ordered that she be served with the papers and the motions and that she respond to them.
The filing was a motion to obtain a restraining order, and no order existed restraining my wife from talking to me. Less than two weeks after she was served with the motion to obtain a restraining order she filed an ex-parte automatic order to prevent stalking, which despite my attempts to have it dismissed, the court in Lane County Oregon continued the order pending trial. We live a thousand miles apart.
I had filed another motion to set aside her response to the divorce filing because she had not disclosed her assets or answered an interrogatory. However, in her response to that motion, and the motion for the restraining order, she brought to light the numerous false police reports she filed against me during the course of our on again-off again ten year relationship, another key element of my reasons for obtaining a restraining order against her. She has caused me to be falsely arrested at least half a dozen times in the past decade. I could not be nor was I ever arrested for taking drugs or drinking, but I could be arrested based on the false testimony of my own wife.
The process of recovery does not happen over night. In my own recovery I have learned that one has to be brutally honest with oneself in order to stay clean and sober. I am proud to say that with the grace of the almighty higher power that has guided my spiritual path I have maintained my sobriety for twenty-five months and five days today.
It is said that one should seek the truth and the truth shall set us free. During the course of my recovery over the past 25 months I have discovered a corollary to that little bit of wisdom. One should seek to discover the lies, which cover up and mask the truth, for in knowing the lies, therein the truth becomes self-evident.
In the process of seeking to recover the property that I had left in the possession of my wife when I left her over two years ago in Reno Nevada because of all the lies we both foisted upon each other, and the seemingly endless mutual verbal and physical abuse we had caused each other as a result of our codependent relationship, and for the sake of the sanity of our children, I realized that whatever wrongs, real or imaginary, that I may have committed were because of my own illness.
My higher power, which I still prefer to call the “infinite infinitor of infinities”, has seen fit to bless me with two things that matter to me more than anything else.
The first is my consciousness of the existence of my higher power and my direct minute-to-minute contact with it.
The second is the peace and serenity that comes with overcoming all odds in the face of hatred, lies and injustice and being able to continue to love my fellow human beings despite all the infinite reasons I might find to do otherwise. This ability is one among many which only my higher power could teach me.
My higher power has blessed me further with daily guidance away from my own illness and onto a spiritual path that leads to immortality. Neither my wife, or the criminal justice system, or the civil courts could or would have ever cured me of my illness, despite their vain attempts to do so for a quarter century. Therein lies my justice.
After nine months of serious daily prayer, meditation and contemplation following the initial filing for divorce, I realized that if it was god’s will that I have my property back, I would already have it. As a result of this epiphany, this morning I asked the judge to dismiss my motion for a permanent restraining order against my wife, and the motion to strike her responses, and to dismiss the entire divorce proceedings.
Graciously the judge granted the withdrawal of my motions without prejudice, however in order to dismiss the divorce, it requires an agreement on the part of both my wife and myself. When we took our vows, we agreed that what the infinite has created let no man (or woman) put asunder, and till death do us part, through thick and thin, through sickness and health, through richer or poorer, and so the oaths persist.
I had wanted to communicate all of the above to the judge and to my wife, but time would not permit it, and life being as short as it is, I wanted my readers to know that I am well, and life moves on, despite all rumors of my suicide to the contrary.
In the end, the only power in the universe that can mete out justice is the infinite infinitor of infinities. In the hands of man, it is an unlimited weapon of mass destruction.
THE REAL ESTATE DEPRESSION OF 2007
The Real Estate Depression of 2007
By Alex S. Gabor
In economics, recessions are sometimes defined as periods of economic contraction marked by an extended decline in general business activity, typically two consecutive quarters of falling real gross national product.
During a recession the state of the national economy falters causing a widespread decline in the gross domestic product and employment and trade lasting from six months to a year according to some economists.
It can safely be said that at the beginning of 2006 America entered into a real estate recession and despite all rhetorical pumping and dumping of real estate inventory by mortgage bankers, brokers, Realtors, agents, builders and developers, the statistics show that we are now at the beginning of a long and protracted real estate depression.
Anyone capable of doing math and adding two plus two could see that a real estate recession was coming back at the tail end of 2005 when numerous savvy writers began to publish statistics stating their concerns about the oft repeated concept of a “real estate bubble”. Unfortunately if your job, your income, your net worth, your assets and your life are totally dependent upon the real estate market two things may happen to you.
First you can go into a severe state of denial if someone tells you anything contrary to what you believe to be an endless run up in asset prices thus ensuring your future profits from leveraged real estate, and second, by the time reality sinks in and overrides your false belief system it is already too late. Depression sets it. And yes there is a double meaning to that word in the context of this article.
In a typical national economic recession, if gross domestic product, asset prices, stock prices, or other assets and growth decline in value or quantity anywhere between five to ten per cent, over a six month period, it can be safely argued that a recession has occurred.
When real estate prices begin to drop at rates between twenty five and fifty percent, and inventories of used homes listed for sale double in one year and then double again in the second year, we can be very certain that a real estate depression is well under way as it is now.
But does a real estate depression mean that a national or global economic depression will necessarily follow? This author doesn’t see that happening.
In the process of battling inflationary pressures, the Fed will be forced to raise interest rates again in 2007 as the volume of leveraged buyouts by private equity firms doubles the 2006 record $4 trillion in transactions.
If any investor or researcher is interested in following this developing national interest story one simply needs to look at the statistics of where money that was flowing into the residential real estate boom has shifted to understand why a real estate depression does not portend a national or international general economic depression.
A depression is generally defined in economics as a period of drastic decline in a national or international economy, characterized by decreasing business activity, falling prices, and unemployment. Any student of the current real estate market does not need to look far or wide to find those characteristics to define the current real estate depression.
In the past two months alone over 50,000 jobs have been lost in the mortgage, real estate, housing construction and other industry related businesses, however the official unemployment rate (usually skewed by the fact that people on commissions or self employed do not qualify for unemployment) remains at 4.5% and 167,000 new jobs were added in December of 2006.
Professors of economic theory would argue that a period during which business, employment, and stock-market values decline severely or remain at a very low level of activity marks a depression. Because the global real estate market has grown to a level that has reached $70 trillion in dollar terms, it can be severely impacted while other business sectors continue to boom.
Thus we can watch a rising stock market in general, even though Real Estate Investment Trusts, mortgage bankers and brokers, and other industry related stocks plummet in value, while the real value of real estate assets also tubes to more practical levels after the bubble has finally let out all of its’ hot air.
Typically those who believe in devils advocacy economics will tell you that because real estate prices went up by almost 500% between 1990 and 2005 that a correction of 25 to 50% still leaves smart investors ahead by 250%.
Such hucksters usually fail to mention that almost 80% of all real estate purchased in the past decade has been leveraged with mortgages which have been sold off as securitized assets to a global market that was developed by Wall Street to keep their money machines pumping bonuses and cash into their own coffers – damn the general public.
If you put 20% down on a million dollar property and values drop by 25% you are upside down on your mortgage. You should be so lucky during a real estate depression if you bought within the past five years.
Almost 60% of all new home purchases in the past decade were made using more than 80% financing and at least 40% of the ten trillion in outstanding mortgage debt involved stated income-stated asset loans or 100% financing using option ARM loans – loans that don’t amortize but carry negative amortization clauses in the note.
Default rates doubled in 2005 from 2004 and again in 2006 from 2005. This trend will continue well into 2008 as foreclosures double and triple during the same period. A foreclosure in any neighborhood hurts the entire neighborhood and further depresses prices.
During the run up to the real estate bubble pop in 2006 there were very few foreclosures for two reasons: borrowers could lie on their loan applications and pull equity out before they ran into serious trouble, many who lost jobs and still had homes would borrow hundreds of thousands, get any old tax accountant to sign off on their self employed status, and refinance two or three times all while really not producing any valuable product that contributed to real gross domestic product growth.
Second, anyone who still had property equity during the run up, no matter how poor their credit, could either refinance or sell and still pull money off the closing table.
So why are we having a real estate depression in 2007? Here are just some of the factors that have contributed and will continue to contribute to just that state of economic affairs, factors which the individual homeowner has no control over.
Money that was being invested in mortgage backed securities is drying up – European, Asian and Middle Eastern investors are shifting their reserves and liquid cash into the Euro and Euro denominated bonds, while globalized hedge funds are taking advantage of a falling dollar and the rapid decline in real estate asset values.
Securities that are backed by mortgages are suffering from fraudulent loan packages within their portfolios and it will take another two years to sort out the good from the bad and ugly.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, although previously lax in its enforcement of securities laws in the mortgage backed securities market, is stepping up its investigations of companies who have sold mortgage backed securities which contain portfolios of false and misleading loan applications, particularly those containing option ARMs, stated income-stated asset loans, and interest only provisions in their loan documentation.
Congress has forced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, through the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight to limit their assets and to slow down the raising of loan limits for conventional loans thus bringing a temporary halt to the monopolization of house pricing by fixing the maximum loan amounts for conventional borrowers.
Both of these federally guaranteed institutions have annually raised loan limits to ensure that their monopoly on conventional loan purchases was maintained over the past three decades, something which the Anti-Trust Division of the Justice Department is yet to crack down on.
The FBI has stepped up and is increasing its’ national investigation of mortgage loan fraud which could bring the U.S Justice Department to prosecute as many as 2000 new criminal white collar fraud cases in 2007 where as much as $5 billion in losses will not be recovered by investors and hedge funds.
Private equity funds which now manage over a trillion dollars in liquid investable cash are staying away from riskier investments in the mortgage industry and focusing on buy outs of publicly traded companies such as Harrah’s Entertainment, Equity Office Properties Trust, VaxGen, MGM Mirage, Kinder Morgan, Alliance Atlantis Communications, and thousands of other announced deals.
These funds are the best customers of the ten largest banks in the nation which have over $5 trillion in assets and are also shying away from investing in mortgage related business lending and investments.
Private Equity Funds will borrow more than $8 trillion in 2007 for mergers, acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, and consolidations while mortgage originations will fall below $1 trillion for the first time in five years. Clearly this shift of money flows out of residential real estate will add to the dwindling price spirals currently being experienced in many markets, the worst of which include San Diego, Boston, Sacramento, Denver, Las Vegas and Phoenix.
Several bank failures or major mergers to prevent public disclosure of bank insolvency such as those rumored for the past few years between Countrywide Funding and Washington Mutual and a few others.
The largest Hedge Funds are avoiding investments in residential real estate related mortgages and their industry related stocks but are shorting them where timing is good, and putting more money into prospective merger special situations where the returns on average are greater than longer term investing strategies such as NDAQ/LSE, NWACQ/MAIR, Thales/Alcatel/Lucent, NYSE/ARCA/Euronext and others.
Global Central Bankers and multi-national corporate financial controllers are investing more money into the bonds of the 27 member European Union and buying Euros while selling or shorting the US dollar.
This is forcing US Treasury yields up and their prices down, making it more costly to run the $8 trillion national debt refunding operations of the United States Treasury Department, which for all intents and purposes has become a global ponzi scheme exempt from the national securities laws which govern almost every public corporation traded on Wall Street.
If the Government Accounting Office were forced to publish an audited financial statement of the United States Government and the Federal Reserve Banking System, the dollar, the treasury market, and the stock markets would all collapse from true revelations, triggering a global depression – and no politician wants that to happen on their watch.
Foreign investors are all too wise to this and are shifting their risk based investments out of dollar denominated assets. Many can only hope they get out enough of their money in time to prevent their own economies from collapsing if ever there really is another global depression like the one that began in 1929 and lasted over six years.
Congress is less than a year away from forcing up the national debt ceiling, adding further inflation concerns to the Feds policy making open market committee, which will add more pressure to raise rates to prevent inflation from getting out of hand. The Fed can no longer control the value of the dollar just by raising rates alone as long as confidence in the mortgage markets remains unstable.
There are many regional factors that will create pockets of greater price deflation in certain sectors of the real estate market in the United States and abroad, but in general, the overall decline in residential real estate asset prices will continue well into 2008.
A recent article attributing the bust in the real estate bubble to greedy consumers falsely skews the reality. Saying that economists are blaming the buyers is a complete farce. 90% of what economists say and write is wrong anyway. They are paid by vested interests to argue points in favor of their clients, who usually profit from their “expert opinion”.
If lenders weren't set up to be corrupted in the first place, the programs getting the buyers into the deals would not exist. One loan officer who gets paid $25,000 a month for her overages - none of which are disclosed to the borrowers gets a bonus for ripping people off. She works for a federally chartered institution which encourages all 300 of their loan officers to get as much as they can for their bottom line.
While she makes the 25K each month the institution makes $75K a month from her originations. Blaming consumers for the housing bubble is like kicking the cat for having stubbed your own toe. It’s the wrong source and wrong target.
If you offer consumers 100% financing with bad credit to buy over inflated homes, and they are not educated about the risks, your going to have a new sucker every time. Buying a home in today’s market is more akin to buying a car. The minute you drive it off the lot it is worth 40% less than what you agreed to pay for it. Only the savvy don’t get burned again.
Economists blame the consumers, lenders blame the regulators and the politicians blame the economic experts. In the end everyone loses everything because no one can take responsibility to fix a broken system of finance. The Band-Aid will no longer stop the bleeding.
Alex S. Gabor is the author of "Bonanza – Profiting During a Real Estate Depression – How to Make a Killing During a Real Estate Bust", an electronic book being readied for release in 2007. He is a freelance writer living in Hollywood. He spent 25 years investigating and working in the mortgage banking industry and is an inventor of zero interest mortgages. He is a major proponent of changing the current tax laws to eliminate mortgage interest deductions and replace them with principal reduction credits to encourage debt free home ownership and affordable housing.
Copyright © 2007 by Alex S. Gabor. All World Rights Reserved.
By Alex S. Gabor
In economics, recessions are sometimes defined as periods of economic contraction marked by an extended decline in general business activity, typically two consecutive quarters of falling real gross national product.
During a recession the state of the national economy falters causing a widespread decline in the gross domestic product and employment and trade lasting from six months to a year according to some economists.
It can safely be said that at the beginning of 2006 America entered into a real estate recession and despite all rhetorical pumping and dumping of real estate inventory by mortgage bankers, brokers, Realtors, agents, builders and developers, the statistics show that we are now at the beginning of a long and protracted real estate depression.
Anyone capable of doing math and adding two plus two could see that a real estate recession was coming back at the tail end of 2005 when numerous savvy writers began to publish statistics stating their concerns about the oft repeated concept of a “real estate bubble”. Unfortunately if your job, your income, your net worth, your assets and your life are totally dependent upon the real estate market two things may happen to you.
First you can go into a severe state of denial if someone tells you anything contrary to what you believe to be an endless run up in asset prices thus ensuring your future profits from leveraged real estate, and second, by the time reality sinks in and overrides your false belief system it is already too late. Depression sets it. And yes there is a double meaning to that word in the context of this article.
In a typical national economic recession, if gross domestic product, asset prices, stock prices, or other assets and growth decline in value or quantity anywhere between five to ten per cent, over a six month period, it can be safely argued that a recession has occurred.
When real estate prices begin to drop at rates between twenty five and fifty percent, and inventories of used homes listed for sale double in one year and then double again in the second year, we can be very certain that a real estate depression is well under way as it is now.
But does a real estate depression mean that a national or global economic depression will necessarily follow? This author doesn’t see that happening.
In the process of battling inflationary pressures, the Fed will be forced to raise interest rates again in 2007 as the volume of leveraged buyouts by private equity firms doubles the 2006 record $4 trillion in transactions.
If any investor or researcher is interested in following this developing national interest story one simply needs to look at the statistics of where money that was flowing into the residential real estate boom has shifted to understand why a real estate depression does not portend a national or international general economic depression.
A depression is generally defined in economics as a period of drastic decline in a national or international economy, characterized by decreasing business activity, falling prices, and unemployment. Any student of the current real estate market does not need to look far or wide to find those characteristics to define the current real estate depression.
In the past two months alone over 50,000 jobs have been lost in the mortgage, real estate, housing construction and other industry related businesses, however the official unemployment rate (usually skewed by the fact that people on commissions or self employed do not qualify for unemployment) remains at 4.5% and 167,000 new jobs were added in December of 2006.
Professors of economic theory would argue that a period during which business, employment, and stock-market values decline severely or remain at a very low level of activity marks a depression. Because the global real estate market has grown to a level that has reached $70 trillion in dollar terms, it can be severely impacted while other business sectors continue to boom.
Thus we can watch a rising stock market in general, even though Real Estate Investment Trusts, mortgage bankers and brokers, and other industry related stocks plummet in value, while the real value of real estate assets also tubes to more practical levels after the bubble has finally let out all of its’ hot air.
Typically those who believe in devils advocacy economics will tell you that because real estate prices went up by almost 500% between 1990 and 2005 that a correction of 25 to 50% still leaves smart investors ahead by 250%.
Such hucksters usually fail to mention that almost 80% of all real estate purchased in the past decade has been leveraged with mortgages which have been sold off as securitized assets to a global market that was developed by Wall Street to keep their money machines pumping bonuses and cash into their own coffers – damn the general public.
If you put 20% down on a million dollar property and values drop by 25% you are upside down on your mortgage. You should be so lucky during a real estate depression if you bought within the past five years.
Almost 60% of all new home purchases in the past decade were made using more than 80% financing and at least 40% of the ten trillion in outstanding mortgage debt involved stated income-stated asset loans or 100% financing using option ARM loans – loans that don’t amortize but carry negative amortization clauses in the note.
Default rates doubled in 2005 from 2004 and again in 2006 from 2005. This trend will continue well into 2008 as foreclosures double and triple during the same period. A foreclosure in any neighborhood hurts the entire neighborhood and further depresses prices.
During the run up to the real estate bubble pop in 2006 there were very few foreclosures for two reasons: borrowers could lie on their loan applications and pull equity out before they ran into serious trouble, many who lost jobs and still had homes would borrow hundreds of thousands, get any old tax accountant to sign off on their self employed status, and refinance two or three times all while really not producing any valuable product that contributed to real gross domestic product growth.
Second, anyone who still had property equity during the run up, no matter how poor their credit, could either refinance or sell and still pull money off the closing table.
So why are we having a real estate depression in 2007? Here are just some of the factors that have contributed and will continue to contribute to just that state of economic affairs, factors which the individual homeowner has no control over.
Money that was being invested in mortgage backed securities is drying up – European, Asian and Middle Eastern investors are shifting their reserves and liquid cash into the Euro and Euro denominated bonds, while globalized hedge funds are taking advantage of a falling dollar and the rapid decline in real estate asset values.
Securities that are backed by mortgages are suffering from fraudulent loan packages within their portfolios and it will take another two years to sort out the good from the bad and ugly.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, although previously lax in its enforcement of securities laws in the mortgage backed securities market, is stepping up its investigations of companies who have sold mortgage backed securities which contain portfolios of false and misleading loan applications, particularly those containing option ARMs, stated income-stated asset loans, and interest only provisions in their loan documentation.
Congress has forced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, through the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight to limit their assets and to slow down the raising of loan limits for conventional loans thus bringing a temporary halt to the monopolization of house pricing by fixing the maximum loan amounts for conventional borrowers.
Both of these federally guaranteed institutions have annually raised loan limits to ensure that their monopoly on conventional loan purchases was maintained over the past three decades, something which the Anti-Trust Division of the Justice Department is yet to crack down on.
The FBI has stepped up and is increasing its’ national investigation of mortgage loan fraud which could bring the U.S Justice Department to prosecute as many as 2000 new criminal white collar fraud cases in 2007 where as much as $5 billion in losses will not be recovered by investors and hedge funds.
Private equity funds which now manage over a trillion dollars in liquid investable cash are staying away from riskier investments in the mortgage industry and focusing on buy outs of publicly traded companies such as Harrah’s Entertainment, Equity Office Properties Trust, VaxGen, MGM Mirage, Kinder Morgan, Alliance Atlantis Communications, and thousands of other announced deals.
These funds are the best customers of the ten largest banks in the nation which have over $5 trillion in assets and are also shying away from investing in mortgage related business lending and investments.
Private Equity Funds will borrow more than $8 trillion in 2007 for mergers, acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, and consolidations while mortgage originations will fall below $1 trillion for the first time in five years. Clearly this shift of money flows out of residential real estate will add to the dwindling price spirals currently being experienced in many markets, the worst of which include San Diego, Boston, Sacramento, Denver, Las Vegas and Phoenix.
Several bank failures or major mergers to prevent public disclosure of bank insolvency such as those rumored for the past few years between Countrywide Funding and Washington Mutual and a few others.
The largest Hedge Funds are avoiding investments in residential real estate related mortgages and their industry related stocks but are shorting them where timing is good, and putting more money into prospective merger special situations where the returns on average are greater than longer term investing strategies such as NDAQ/LSE, NWACQ/MAIR, Thales/Alcatel/Lucent, NYSE/ARCA/Euronext and others.
Global Central Bankers and multi-national corporate financial controllers are investing more money into the bonds of the 27 member European Union and buying Euros while selling or shorting the US dollar.
This is forcing US Treasury yields up and their prices down, making it more costly to run the $8 trillion national debt refunding operations of the United States Treasury Department, which for all intents and purposes has become a global ponzi scheme exempt from the national securities laws which govern almost every public corporation traded on Wall Street.
If the Government Accounting Office were forced to publish an audited financial statement of the United States Government and the Federal Reserve Banking System, the dollar, the treasury market, and the stock markets would all collapse from true revelations, triggering a global depression – and no politician wants that to happen on their watch.
Foreign investors are all too wise to this and are shifting their risk based investments out of dollar denominated assets. Many can only hope they get out enough of their money in time to prevent their own economies from collapsing if ever there really is another global depression like the one that began in 1929 and lasted over six years.
Congress is less than a year away from forcing up the national debt ceiling, adding further inflation concerns to the Feds policy making open market committee, which will add more pressure to raise rates to prevent inflation from getting out of hand. The Fed can no longer control the value of the dollar just by raising rates alone as long as confidence in the mortgage markets remains unstable.
There are many regional factors that will create pockets of greater price deflation in certain sectors of the real estate market in the United States and abroad, but in general, the overall decline in residential real estate asset prices will continue well into 2008.
A recent article attributing the bust in the real estate bubble to greedy consumers falsely skews the reality. Saying that economists are blaming the buyers is a complete farce. 90% of what economists say and write is wrong anyway. They are paid by vested interests to argue points in favor of their clients, who usually profit from their “expert opinion”.
If lenders weren't set up to be corrupted in the first place, the programs getting the buyers into the deals would not exist. One loan officer who gets paid $25,000 a month for her overages - none of which are disclosed to the borrowers gets a bonus for ripping people off. She works for a federally chartered institution which encourages all 300 of their loan officers to get as much as they can for their bottom line.
While she makes the 25K each month the institution makes $75K a month from her originations. Blaming consumers for the housing bubble is like kicking the cat for having stubbed your own toe. It’s the wrong source and wrong target.
If you offer consumers 100% financing with bad credit to buy over inflated homes, and they are not educated about the risks, your going to have a new sucker every time. Buying a home in today’s market is more akin to buying a car. The minute you drive it off the lot it is worth 40% less than what you agreed to pay for it. Only the savvy don’t get burned again.
Economists blame the consumers, lenders blame the regulators and the politicians blame the economic experts. In the end everyone loses everything because no one can take responsibility to fix a broken system of finance. The Band-Aid will no longer stop the bleeding.
Alex S. Gabor is the author of "Bonanza – Profiting During a Real Estate Depression – How to Make a Killing During a Real Estate Bust", an electronic book being readied for release in 2007. He is a freelance writer living in Hollywood. He spent 25 years investigating and working in the mortgage banking industry and is an inventor of zero interest mortgages. He is a major proponent of changing the current tax laws to eliminate mortgage interest deductions and replace them with principal reduction credits to encourage debt free home ownership and affordable housing.
Copyright © 2007 by Alex S. Gabor. All World Rights Reserved.
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