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Open Letter to Senator McCain: I Am Elated You Did Not Win

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:58:00 +0000

Dear Senator McCain:

As one of the so-called independent voters your campaign seemed so concerned to persuade, I would like to let you know how elated I am that you did not win the presidential election. I did not vote for you because I believe you are a phony and because the decisions you made during your campaign demonstrated that you would have been a horrible president.

First, I believe you are a phony. I do not believe your claim that you are a “maverick” and I do not believe you, as president, would have changed the status quo that paralyzes the federal government from the meaningful changes that are needed if the United States is to remain strong economically and as a world leader. I do not believe you ever truly worked a day in your life. I do not believe you have any real idea of how the majority of your countrymen struggle every day to meet their basic needs for shelter, food, health care, security, etc. You cheated on and unceremoniously dumped your first wife so you could marry that tarted-up, makeup-slathering termagant you call a wife in order to gain access to her enormous wealth, which, by the way, she did not produce either. Because of your wife, you are now so wealthy that you do not even know how many houses you own: was it seven or eight? I can assure you the average citizen of the United States has no trouble recalling how many houses he or she owns, if any. You are nothing like the average American citizen. I do not believe you can relate to average American citizens, and you possess no insight into how to improve their lives. In fact, the prescriptions you proposed during your campaign, in my opinion, were actually designed to enrich large corporations at the expense of individuals.

Second, the decisions you made during your campaign were disastrous and demonstrate that you lack sound judgment, which leads me to conclude you would have made a horrible president. The people you chose to run your campaign, such as Schmidt, Salter, and Rick Davis, were awful. They were so uncreative, all they could do is run the tired playbook of Karl Rove. Rick Davis came across on television as a belligerent, condescending, arrogant prick. Your spokespeople, such as Tucker Bounds and Nicolle Wallace, were whiny, unctuous prevaricators who could not give a straight answer to a question if their lives depended on it. For example, Tucker Bounds, when asked by CNN’s Campbell Brown to explain Gov. Palin’s foreign policy experience, could only defiantly assert she was in charge of the Alaska National Guard, and acted all offended when the sufficiency of that ridiculous answer was questioned. Then your campaign whined like little babies about how “unfair” the interview was. How absurd!

Your choice of Gov. Palin for your running mate was the worst decision you could have made. It appeared you made a snap decision; you shot from the hip, knowing very little about Gov. Palin. This was an enormously important test of your decision-making ability and your judgment, and you blew it big time! Her interview with Katie Couric showed Gov. Palin is empty-headed and grossly unprepared to run a convenience store, let alone the United States. Her selection, and your expectation that the American people should believe she would be capable of becoming president in the event of your death, was an insult to the American people's intelligence. Her explanation of her foreign policy experience, that Alaska is next to Russia and President Putin flies over Alaskan airspace when he comes to the United States, literally made me laugh out loud. My wife thought she was watching a parody and was shocked to learn it was really Gov. Palin speaking. Several prominent Republicans in my community told me they would not vote for you because Gov. Palin is not qualified for the one job you nominated her for: to replace the president in the event of his death.

Your campaign was tawdry, mean-spirited, and stupid. Accusing Obama of “palling around with terrorists” was blatantly untrue. The notion your campaign tried to sell, that this U.S. Senator from Illinois, former state senator, and former law professor, was somehow hiding his true identity and agenda and would suddenly, if elected president, transform into some kind of “un-American” or “terrorist” president was absurd on its face. Your campaign was just more of the same old negative bullshit that was not indicative of a new style of politics. The dramatic suspension of your campaign to go to the capital to lead the nation in dealing with the economic crisis was a transparently cheap stunt. You did not lead. You accomplished exactly nothing. Your decisions were terrible, and judging from those decisions, I can only conclude you would have selected idiots to run your administration and you would have made terrible decisions as president.

In sum, I think you are just a phony old grump who thought he was entitled to be president because of being a war hero when in fact you are just a lowlife political scumbag who helped Charlie Keating steal and who cares about nothing and no one but himself and being a lackey for wealthy individuals and corporate interests. Thank you for your consideration.

Goodbye Dick!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 04:59:00 +0000

I am so happy Dick Cheney's reign of vice-presidential tyranny is soon coming to an end. Cheney is an arrogant, power-hungry miscreant who operates in secrecy, like a spider, and a bloodthirsty orderer of torture with no respect for the rule of law and no respect for anyone who dares to disagree with him.

Dick Cheney has done nothing good for the United States or its people. I hope when he skulks out of office, he goes far away and just dies a slow, horrible, painful death.

Wall Street Crisis Timeline

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 20:39:00 +0000

TIMELINE: How the Wall Street Crisis unfolded (as of October 1, 2008)

Reuters 02 October 2008 06:45

(Reuters) - The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression nearly 80 years ago has hit the world this year. Here are some key dates:

January 11 - Bank of America pays $4 billion for Countrywide Financial after the mortgage lender goes bust when risky loans to shaky borrowers fail.

February 17 - Britain's Northern Rock is nationalised after funding crisis.

March 16/17 - Bear Stearns sold to U.S. investment bank JP Morgan Chase for about $2 a share.

July 13 - U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve effectively nationalizes mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in a bid to support U.S. housing market.

Sept 14/15 - Investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc files for bankruptcy protection; rival Merrill Lynch & Co Inc agrees to be taken over by Bank of America Corp

September 16 - Fed announces plan for $85 billion loan to American International Group Inc in return for 80 percent stake in the insurer; Britain's Barclays buys parts of Lehman's North American assets for $1.75 billion.

September 17 - British bank Lloyds TSB Group Plc agrees to rescue rival HBOS Plc, scooping up Britain's biggest home loan lender in an all-share deal.

September 18 - The UK Financial Services Authority imposes a temporary ban on short-selling financial stocks, a move echoed in other centers.

September 19 - U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson calls for the government to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to take toxic mortgage assets off the books of financial companies to restore financial stability. News of the bailout plan helps world stock markets soar.

September 20 - Details emerge of a $700 billion plan to bail out firms burdened with bad mortgage debt.

-- A U.S. bankruptcy judge approves a revised version of Barclays purchase of the core U.S. business of Lehman.

September 21 - Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Morgan Stanley become bank holding companies regulated by the Fed.

September 22 - Nomura Holdings Inc says it will buy Lehman's franchise in Asia Pacific and acquires Lehman's business in Europe. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial agrees to buy up to 20 percent of Morgan Stanley for $8.5 billion.

September 23 - AIG signs "definitive" agreement for up to $85 billion in borrowings from the Fed, the main part of a rescue plan that will see it take a 79.9 percent stake in the insurer.

September 24 - Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc says it will buy up to 9 percent of Goldman, which also announced plans to sell $2.5 billion in common stock.

-- CNN says the FBI is investigating Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and AIG and their senior executives for potential mortgage fraud.

September 25 - Washington Mutual is closed by the U.S. government in the largest failure of a U.S. bank. Its banking assets are sold to JPMorgan Chase & Co for $1.9 billion.

September 29 - Britain announces the nationalization of mortgage lender Bradford & Bingley Plc. Spain's Banco Santander SA will buy its retail deposits and branch network. Banking and insurance company Fortis NV is bailed out by Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourg governments to the tune of 11.2 billion euros ($16.4 billion). Wachovia Corp agrees to sell most of its assets to Citigroup Inc in a deal brokered by regulators.

-- U.S. House of Representatives rejects the $700 billion rescue plan for the financial industry. Dow Jones posts its largest point decline ever while the S&P 500 has its worst day since 1987 with an 8.8 percent drop.

September 30 - World stocks fall to near three-year lows but fears of a major meltdown ease as European losses are muted.

- EU regulators endorse a 6.4 billion euro public bailout of Belgian-French financial services group Dexia SA.

-- Ireland pledges more than double its GDP to guarantee all bank deposits.

October 1 - U.S. Senate passed a revamped U.S. financial rescue plan aimed at restoring global financial stability, sending the measure to the U.S. House of Representatives for a vote expected on Friday.

2008 Credit Crisis Update: Trouble Behind, Trouble Ahead

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 23:32:00 +0000

The July 19, 2008 edition of The Wall Street Journal reports that, although Wall Street seemed to be relatively pleased with Citigroup's recent announcement of a $2.5 billion quarterly loss (because it was less of a loss than expected), some forbidding clouds loom on the horizon:

Credit problems are spreading to a wider array of loans around the world. As a result loan losses are likely to swell for at least another year;
Loan problems are cascading from mortgages to credit cards to commercial loans;
Bankers are shifting more of their concern from subprime borrowers with blemished credit to solid customers who as a group are increasingly falling behind or defaulting on their loan payments;
Rising defaults in credit card loans and prime mortgages will further drain bank profits and capital at a time when many banks are already restraining lending;
Citigroup's delinquency rates for prime mortgages and credit card debt are rising;
Citigroup reported a rise in defaults on credit card loans worldwide: in Brazil, Mexico, India, and Japan.

Buying Time For Homeowners In Foreclosure

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 18:00:00 +0000

From the July 18, 2008 Miami Herald, an article about mortgage foreclosure defense, an area of the law in which my firm practices:

Foreclosure defense buys homeowners time

By MONICA HATCHER

As foreclosures continue to mount, borrowers who have run out of options are turning to attorneys to fight back -- and they're living mortgage-free for months in the process.

Although the chances of ultimately keeping a foreclosed home are slim, for $1,500 to $3,000 some lawyers are offering to defend borrowers in court, causing the wheels of justice to turn more slowly.

Duking it out can add months and sometimes years to a foreclosure process that in Florida already takes an average of seven months to complete. Homeowners can use the extra time to save for a move, sell the house or mull other options.

Investors can continue collecting rent from tenants, recouping at least some of their losses.

Foreclosure defense is proving popular enough that some South Florida bankruptcy and real estate lawyers said they were refocusing their practices to meet the growing demand.

As with many issues surrounding foreclosures, the practice is not without controversy. Delaying the inevitable is costly for lenders and for taxpayers who fund the court system, according to some lawyers who represent lenders. The process may also be unethical, they claim, and can put delinquent borrowers into a deeper financial hole.

Florida is a ''judicial foreclosure'' state, meaning a lender must sue to force the sale of a property. Yet the majority of cases are tried without the defendant -- the borrower -- even showing up in court, said Timothy Kingcade, a prominent bankruptcy attorney who also defends foreclosures.

'If you are accused of murder and you are guilty, you don't walk into court and say, `I did it!' You make the prosecuting attorney prove their case,'' Kingcade said.

While a foreclosure may seem straightforward -- a borrower doesn't pay and the bank takes back the home -- lawyers say there are numerous ways to fight.

THE PAPER CHASE

One way is forcing the lender to prove it owns the debt behind the mortgage by producing a promissory note. A mortgage is a security instrument pledging property as collateral for a loan if a borrower defaults, but it is not the promissory note itself.

As mortgages were bought, bundled and sold off to investors, notes got lost in the shuffle, landing in vaults or warehouses around the country. Physically retrieving them can be difficult and sometimes impossible.

About 80 percent of the time, lenders fail to attach a copy to the lawsuit, Kingcade and others said.

When lenders can't prove they own the loan, lawyers can get cases dismissed, said Peter Ticktin of the Ticktin Law Group in Deerfield Beach, whose firm has advertised foreclosure defense services on television.

He began taking foreclosure clients about eight months ago. So far, none of his cases have gone to trial. His clients are still in their homes.

Some lawyers also ask lenders to produce all the documents in a loan file, transcripts of phone conversations with the borrower and copies of written correspondence, which can take up to a year or more to compile. Several businesses are involved, and some may have gone out of business.

Kingcade said requesting and reviewing a complete file could turn up fraud or other inconsistencies leading to a successful defense, though ``the bank may be entitled to its money, and 99.9 percent of the time the bank is absolutely right.''

Neither Kingcade nor other attorneys interviewed said seeking out such documents was intended only to stall the process, which could be considered unethical.

''I hold the banks to their burden of proof in court,'' Kingcade said. ''Of course justice isn't doled out in a day. It takes sometimes six, eight to 12 months for that to happen,'' Kingcade said.

Ticktin said many borrowers were duped by dishonest brokers and took on loans they could never afford. They could have their cases successfully mediated. Some borrowers' payments were misdirected and not properly credited to their accounts.

''People think I am dealing with a bunch of con artists,'' Ticktin said.

``I'm talking about families, innocent kids, people who got led into deals that are causing them trouble.''

Angela Bellsanctious, of Lauderhill, is an example. She admits she is careless about opening her mail and said her mortgage was bought by a new servicer without her knowledge.

Because her payments were automatically withdrawn from her bank account, she didn't know her loan wasn't being paid until it was too late. On June 12, the home she had lived in since 1990 was sold. Last week she got notice from the Broward sheriff that she had 48 hours to move.

''I was freaking out. I was praying and praying, and this lawyer came on the TV and said something about foreclosures,'' Bellsanctious, 58, said.
It was Ticktin, who for $360 got a judge to waive the writ of possession while he tries to sort out the problem with the lender.

''I have no idea where I would have gone,'' Bellsanctious said.

ABUSING THE SYSTEM

Yet, for every legitimate miscommunication and misconduct by a mortgage lender, dozens of bogus defenses are filed, clogging up the courts, some lawyers said.

Iris Hernandez, a lawyer who files foreclosures on behalf of lenders, said some local attorneys were known for filing boilerplate defenses without supporting their positions, acting for borrowers seeking to take advantage of the system.

'Some people feel that ` If I don't pay for a year, I'm getting my down payment back,' '' Hernandez said.

Furthermore, not all clients deserve or need a foreclosure defense, Hernandez said. Some lawyers, she noted, appeared to be using it as a way to bilk clients for fees -- once with an unnecessary defense and again after persuading the client to file bankruptcy.

What's more, Hernandez said, a borrower can easily extend the sale date of a home by up to 90 days by showing up at the last hearing and explaining to the judge why more time is needed.

NO FREE RIDE

Marc Ben-Ezra, who also files foreclosures statewide for lenders, said the borrower who seeks to delay the inevitable can face consequences.

Interest rates and other costs continue to pile up as the process drags on. Borrowers could be liable for the difference between what the lender recoups from the eventual home sale and the amount owed on the loan. Plus, homeowner and condo fees aren't being paid, which places hardships on people who are paying their debts.

''With every single day that goes by, they could be helping their clients get into bigger and bigger debt, rather than if they face the problems head on and resolve them as quickly as possible,'' Ben-Ezra said.

Get Free eBooks from the World eBook Fair

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:29:00 +0000

At the World eBook Fair, which runs from July 4 through August 4, you can download for free more than 1 million books, which includes free sheet music. These are all works in the public domain, but you can find a lot of treasures there.

This year, the theme of the fair is Own Your Own Library and it promises 1 million-plus books free for the taking. The sheer number and the range and variety of titles make the World eBook Fair a veritable treasure trove for book lovers.

As of midnight CDT July 4, 2008, these were the approximate numbers:

100,000-plus from Project Gutenberg
500,000-plus from the World Public Library
450,000-plus from the Internet Archive
160,000-plus from eBooks About Everything
17,000-plus from International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP—sheet music)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1,227,000-plus Total

Does Your Mutual Fund Manager Eat His Own Cooking?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:00:00 +0000

Morningstar has released data, for the top 500 mutual funds it covers, on how much each fund manager invested in his or her fund. The data are here.

The data can be disheartening. In U.S.-stock funds, 47% report no manager ownership.

If the manager of a mutual fund does not feel strongly enough to invest his or her own money in the fund, why should anyone else?

Cold Stone Leaves Many Franchisees Feeling Stone Cold

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:35:00 +0000

The June 16, 2008 Wall Street Journal reports on problems faced by franchisees of Cold Stone Creamery.

The Inside Scoop
Cold Stone Creamery attracted a lot of franchisees thinking it was a sure thing. It wasn't.
By RICHARD GIBSON

Earlier in this decade, Cold Stone Creamery was one of the hottest franchises around. The super-premium ice-cream stores attracted scores of franchisees hungry for a piece of the "Ultimate Ice Cream Experience."

Now many franchisees are selling their stores, overwhelmed by soaring bills and shrinking profits. Some have lost their homes, broken their retirement nest eggs or filed for bankruptcy.

What happened?

A number of franchisees also contend the company misled them, giving them promises of profit potential that proved unrealistic or inaccurate revenue numbers from existing stores. And some say that they got little help from the company as their stores went under.

"They have a defective business model, there's no question about it," says Ken Gornall, a former franchisee who closed his Glendale, Ariz., store last October. He adds that the average revenue numbers he received before signing up "were quite misleading," exaggerating likely annual sales.

Cold Stone says more than 100 of its stores closed last year. That's up from 60 in 2006. One list on a Cold Stone Web site recently had 303 stores for sale -- more than 20% of the company's 1,384 as of last December.

This "combination of numbers is very, very high," says franchise attorney Eric Karp of Boston law firm Witmer, Karp, Warner & Ryan LLP. "I think it's a symptom of bad news and not good news." (Mr. Karp, who specializes in representing franchisee associations and individual franchisees, hasn't represented Cold Stone store owners.)

Cold Stone has been franchising only since 1995, and Mr. Karp concludes that 12 years or so would be an unusually short time for first-generation franchisees to be cashing out and retiring.

Chris Prasifka, Cold Stone's president, acknowledges that the "inventory of stores for sale now is higher than it has been." But a company spokeswoman terms the for-sale number "at par with industry expectations," given "the economically challenging times." She adds that about 230 of those listed for sale are stores in operation; the rest are "awards" to develop future stores.

The company also contests the franchisees' charges. Cold Stone insists it doesn't provide profit potential to prospective franchisees. It also says the revenue figures it gave for existing stores were based on franchisee reports.

Costs, meanwhile, "will depend on how well a store is operated," Mr. Prasifka says. Cold Stone says it uses a one-stop distributor to ensure efficiency, quality and economies of scale. It adds that franchisees can buy ingredients elsewhere at lower prices if the product is identical. Cold Stone says it won't distribute national two-for-one coupons this year, after franchisee complaints.

And the company says that it's selective about adding franchisees, typically approving about 2% of applicants. As for their chances of succeeding, Mr. Prasifka asserts that "it's no different from any other business. You've got to work it." He adds, "It does take a year or two to understand the business."

Overall, Mr. Prasifka says, "We want all franchisees to succeed. However, minimal restaurant experience, a lack of desire to do local-store marketing or the inability to be operationally excellent can all contribute to a franchisee's inability to succeed."

Cold Stone was a stand-alone brand for 19 years before being acquired by fast-food franchiser Kahala Corp. last year. Other Kahala brands include Blimpie sandwiches and TacoTime Mexican food. Kahala's plans call for slowing Cold Stone's expansion, reducing new-store construction costs and finding ways to grow average annual store sales to about $500,000 from about $360,000 now.

For many franchisees, the new ownership comes too late. Formerly an independent real-estate agent, Mr. Gornall signed up for a Cold Stone franchise in June 2004. "The stores seemed busy all the time. You assume that 'busy' equates to profitability," he says.

Before buying, Mr. Gornall called half a dozen franchisees. "No one said, 'This is a bad deal,' " he remembers. But it soon became clear that something was amiss. Mr. Gornall already faced high overhead such as a $3,700-a-month lease, he says. Then, he says, the company squeezed his margins further by mandating that he buy what he considered expensive ingredients, in larger quantities than he needed. Mr. Gornall adds that the company's promotional couponing shrank his profits.

Along the way, he says, he didn't get much help, either from Cold Stone or the area developer -- a company representative assigned to sell franchises in the area and monitor the franchisees. The area developer, Sean Brown, visited his store only once, Mr. Gornall recalls, and didn't have any good ideas for boosting sales.

Mr. Gornall and his wife borrowed on their personal credit cards to pay the store's bills. But after their losses exceeded $100,000 last fall, they gave up and closed their store. They lost their house and are filing for bankruptcy. "It's been pretty devastating," he says.

Still, "I share some responsibilities" for failing, Mr. Gornall adds. "Maybe I should have closed sooner, but I kept on thinking things would be better."

The company wouldn't comment directly on the Gornalls' case. But Mr. Prasifka says, "When a franchisee asks for support, we make it a priority to get someone from our team to visit them, discuss their situation and get to the root cause."

He says if franchisees aren't satisfied with the support they receive from their area developer, there are "multiple resources," including an ombudsman, available. But he acknowledges that "during tough times, we will have some franchisees who will struggle."

The company didn't comment on Mr. Gornall's complaints about Mr. Brown, which were echoed by several other ex-franchisees. Cold Stone terminated Mr. Brown in January 2007 after he "habitually failed to pay royalties, rent, advertising and other amounts" on Cold Stone stores he owned, according to a company document in a tax-levy dispute with the government in U.S. District Court in Houston. The dispute arose over who should pay income and employment taxes owed on Mr. Brown's stores. The government looked to Cold Stone, but the company argued that Cold Stone didn't have an interest in Mr. Brown's properties at the time the lien arose. Mr. Brown declined to comment.

Citing surveys of franchisees, Mr. Prasifka says that overall "they're very satisfied with their area developers," whom he calls "world class." He says three of the two dozen or so have left the system in the past two years.

Some franchisees argue that the chain expanded too rapidly in its early years. "They did overbuild across the country, no question about it," says Michael Goldman, a Northern California franchisee with seven stores and a seat on Cold Stone's National Advisory Board, a group of franchisees who meet to discuss the business and give franchisee feedback to management.

The rapid growth meant new stores were frequently close to old ones, cannibalizing sales, Mr. Goldman argues. "I'm sure there are sites that should never have been picked and franchisees that should never have been picked" because of their lack of experience, he says.

But while many failed Cold Stone franchisees were new to franchising, experienced franchisees also have lost money. "This was not our first rodeo," says Deborah Lickteig, whose family had operated KFC chicken outlets in Arizona and New Mexico.

"We worked it real hard for a year," she says. But she and her husband sold their store in June 2006 after weekly sales at the San Antonio outlet fell several thousand dollars short of what she calls "skewed" pro-forma figures from the company. A glut of Cold Stone stores in the area, high food costs and the buy-one, get-one-free coupons made things worse, she says. Cold Stone wouldn't comment directly on the Lickteigs.

Former Florida franchisee Cecil Rolle has become more nettlesome to Cold Stone than most. After the company terminated him last year, it alleged in a Florida circuit court action that he had been caught removing equipment from one of his three Florida stores in the middle of the night. The company also filed suit in federal district court in Tallahassee to recover what it said are substantial sums he owes.

Mr. Rolle acknowledges seeking to remove equipment and withholding payments. But he and his wife have countersued, contending among other things that they were misled when told they would make "right around a 20% profit" on a mall store they bought. Cold Stone wouldn't comment on Mr. Rolle's allegations, but in a recent email to franchisees, a Cold Stone attorney sought to counter what he termed "Mr. Rolle's inaccurate and misleading attacks against us."

Mr. Rolle is trying to organize other franchisees for a possible class-action suit seeking some remedy from Cold Stone and Kahala. He spends much of his days at his Gainesville, Fla., home emailing with disillusioned former and current franchisees. "I feel like I'm doing something good," he says. And last month, Mr. Rolle opened an ice-cream shop in Tallahassee -- on the site of a former Cold Stone store.

--Mr. Gibson is a special writer for Dow Jones Newswires in Des Moines, Iowa.

Write to Dick Gibson at dick.gibson@dowjones.com7.

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121321718319265569.html

Hyperlinks in this Article:
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(2) http://online.wsj.com/public/page/2_1584.html
(3) http://online.wsj.com/small-business/main
(4) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121321718319265569.html
(5) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121321718319265569.html
(6) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121321718319265569.html
(7) mailto:dick.gibson@dowjones.com

McCain Dropped the C Bomb on His Wife

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 20:05:00 +0000

New York Review of Books reports an account of John McCain's famous temper in a review that includes Cliff Schecter's book The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him - and Why Independents Shouldn't.

Schecter, a freelance liberal commentator who contributes frequently to The Huffington Post, recounts, for the first time, a tale—confirmed to him, he writes, by three Arizona reporters—that in 1992, after Cindy McCain teased her husband about his thinning hair, McCain snapped at her, in front of the reporters and two staffers: "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c—." One wonders if on such occasions she reminds her husband who it was that made his political career possible. She has recently called the idea that her husband has a temper "a concoction."

Given the apparent bias against McCain revealed by his book's title, it is, of course, fair to question whether Schecter's C bomb story is also a concoction. If the words were indeed spoken, perhaps John and Cindy simply like to joke around with each other in a crude manner. If John really said such a thing to his wife in anger, then Cindy must be a very forgiving person.

TransUnion to Provide Free Access to Credit Scores

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 30 May 2008 20:15:00 +0000

Under a class-action settlement, one of the big three credit reporting agencies, TransUnion Corp., will provide free access to credit scores to anyone who had any type of loan account between January 1987 and Wednesday, May 28, 2008, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Federal law entitles everyone to a free copy of his or her credit report once a year from each of the three major credit-reporting companies, but it doesn't provide access to credit scores.

Under the settlement, anyone who had any type of loan account between January 1987 and Wednesday would be able to select one of two options:

A basic service would provide free credit monitoring for six months. It normally retails for $59.75, according to the settlement. Those who select this service can also apply for a cash payment.

An enhanced service would provide nine months of free monitoring, plus use of a "mortgage simulator" that lets consumers see whether improving their credit score would affect their mortgage rates and how much they could save if it did. This option also includes access to one's insurance score, which is used by some insurers to set rates (though California bars their use).
The settlement values this option at $115.50.

Under the settlement, a credit card number would not be required to sign up for either service. After the free service ends, TransUnion could not charge for an extension unless it was requested by the consumer.

World Oil Shortfall Likely By 2015

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 24 May 2008 22:23:00 +0000

According to the May 22, 2008 Wall Street Journal, with crude oil prices rocketing to over $130 a barrel, double what they were a year ago, a growing number of people in the oil industry are endorsing a version of the "peak oil" theory: that oil production will plateau in coming years, as suppliers fail to replace depleted fields with enough fresh ones to boost overall output.

On May 22, 2008, the Wall Street Journal reported that the world's premier energy monitor, the International Energy Agency (IEA), is predicting that the world could face an oil shortfall by 2015 of as much as 12.5 million barrels a day, unless there is a sharp drop in expected demand.

The United States Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration has made preliminary findings that daily output of conventional crude oil alone, now about 73 million barrels, will plateau at 84 million barrels, and that it will take a significant uptick in production of nonconventional fuels such as ethanol to push global fuel supplies over 100 million barrels a day by 2030, when global oil demand is predicted by the IEA to be in excess of 116 million barrels a day.

On May 23, 2008, the WSJ reported how mounting concerns about the global energy supply and public outrage over high gasoline prices are increasing pressure on the United States government and Congress to end longstanding bans on domestic drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, such as off the coasts of California and Florida, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Oil company executives, such as Exxon's President Rex Tillerson, claim to have no doubt there are significant conventional oil resources in the off-limits areas.

However, WSJ admits that little data exist about how much oil and gas might be found under the waters now closed for exploration. I have heard people assert that there is enough oil in the closed areas to supply the U.S. with oil for the next fifty years. Apparently, there is no data to support such an assertion.

Therefore, it is not necessarily the case that increased drilling will lead to lower gasoline prices.

Another Sign of Foreclosure Crisis: Personal Property Auctioned for Unpaid Storage Fees

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 17 May 2008 16:15:00 +0000

The New York Times reports on another sign of the foreclosure crisis:

When homes go into foreclosure and the owners leave, many move their possessions, such as furniture, electronic equipment, exercise bikes, lamps, fish tanks, etc., into self-storage units. This is generally hoped to be a temporary situation.

One poignant quote from the report: “Storage has my hopes in it,” said Mr. Martin, who sleeps on a foldout bed in his mother’s guest room. “I don’t tell anyone this, but at least once a week I go over and look at my couch, my refrigerator, my TV stand, my mattress and realize I did have a life, and maybe there’s a way to go back to it.”

However, in some instances, the same economic and financial problems that resulted in defaulting on the mortgage cause people to fall behind on the storage fees. If the storage fees remain unpaid, the storage facility owner will change the lock on the unit and auction off the contents of the storage unit. People buy the contents at very low prices and then sell the items on E-Bay or at yard sales.

There are no statistics measuring this phenomenon. "It is impossible to put precise numbers on the phenomenon, partly because the industry is highly fragmented — the majority of facilities are locally owned — and also because the topic is not one the industry cares to dwell on. But auctioneers who dispose of units in default, as well as the bidders who try to buy their contents, say they see increasing signs of strain. They note that more auctions involve people who appear to have had their homes foreclosed."

The bright side is that times are good for storage companies. "U-Store-It’s stock is up 33 percent this year. Extra Space is up 18 percent. Public Storage is up 18 percent."

Foreclosure Sales in Broward County Up 500%

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:27:00 +0000

South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports: For the month of April 2008, scheduled mortgage foreclosure sales in Broward County hit 2,568, a more than 500% increase over the 426 in April 2007, according to Realestat.com, a Plantation-based research firm.

In Palm Beach County, there were 785 scheduled sales in April, a 370 percent increase over the 167 from a year ago.

In April, there were 3,150 delinquent property owners in Broward, up from 1,135 last April, according to Realestat.com. Palm Beach County had 1,984 people facing foreclosure, up from 814 a year ago.

Reasons given by report for this spike in foreclosures:

1. Home sales have slowed;
2. Refinancing is difficult in many cases because of falling home values;
3. Adjustable-rate mortgage resets; and,
4. Deteriorating economy leading to significant job losses across the region and hindering homeowners from paying their mortgages.

Prosecutorial and Judicial Shenanigans in Broward County?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 14 May 2008 21:11:00 +0000

Imagine the Assistant State Attorney prosecuting a capital murder case out partying at night and discussing the case with the presiding Judge during the pendency of the trial. Go here for the scoop.

Only in Broward County?

Dr. Peter Boxall's 1001 Books (Novels) You Must Read Before You Die

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:56:00 +0000

According to this book's editors, each work of literature listed here is a seminal work key to understanding and appreciating the written word. These works have been handpicked by a team of international critics and literary luminaries, including Derek Attridge (world expert on James Joyce), Cedric Watts (renowned authority on Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene), Laura Marcus (noted Virginia Woolf expert), and David Mariott (poet and expert on African-American literature), among some twenty others. (Description from Amazon.com)

Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
Saturday – Ian McEwan
On Beauty – Zadie Smith
Slow Man – J.M. Coetzee
Adjunct: An Undigest – Peter Manson
The Sea – John Banville
The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble
The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
The Master – Colm Tóibín
Vanishing Point – David Markson
The Lambs of London – Peter Ackroyd
Dining on Stones – Iain Sinclair
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Drop City – T. Coraghessan Boyle
The Colour – Rose Tremain
Thursbitch – Alan Garner
The Light of Day – Graham Swift
What I Loved – Siri Hustvedt
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time – Mark Haddon
Islands – Dan Sleigh
Elizabeth Costello – J.M. Coetzee
London Orbital – Iain Sinclair
Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry
Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
The Double – José Saramago
Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
Unless – Carol Shields
Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
The Story of Lucy Gault – William Trevor
That They May Face the Rising Sun – John McGahern
In the Forest – Edna O’Brien
Shroud – John Banville
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
Youth – J.M. Coetzee
Dead Air – Iain Banks
Nowhere Man – Aleksandar Hemon
The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
Gabriel’s Gift – Hanif Kureishi
Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
Platform – Michael Houellebecq
Schooling – Heather McGowan
Atonement – Ian McEwan
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
Don’t Move – Margaret Mazzantini
The Body Artist – Don DeLillo
Fury – Salman Rushdie
At Swim, Two Boys – Jamie O’Neill
Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
The Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargos Llosa
An Obedient Father – Akhil Sharma
The Devil and Miss Prym – Paulo Coelho
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost – Ismail Kadare
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
The Heart of Redness – Zakes Mda
Under the Skin – Michel Faber
Ignorance – Milan Kundera
Nineteen Seventy Seven – David Peace
Celestial Harmonies – Péter Esterházy
City of God – E.L. Doctorow
How the Dead Live – Will Self
The Human Stain – Philip Roth
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
Small Remedies – Shashi Deshpande
Super-Cannes – J.G. Ballard
House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates
Pastoralia – George Saunders
Timbuktu – Paul Auster
The Romantics – Pankaj Mishra
Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
As If I Am Not There – Slavenka Drakuli?
Everything You Need – A.L. Kennedy
Fear and Trembling – Amélie Nothomb
The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie
Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
Elementary Particles – Michel Houellebecq
Intimacy – Hanif Kureishi
Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks
All Souls Day – Cees Nooteboom
The Talk of the Town – Ardal O’Hanlon
Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
Another World – Pat Barker
The Hours – Michael Cunningham
Veronika Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho
Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Great Apes – Will Self
Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
Underworld – Don DeLillo
Jack Maggs – Peter Carey
The Life of Insects – Victor Pelevin
American Pastoral – Philip Roth
The Untouchable – John Banville
Silk – Alessandro Baricco
Cocaine Nights – J.G. Ballard
Hallucinating Foucault – Patricia Duncker
Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
The Ghost Road – Pat Barker
Forever a Stranger – Hella Haasse
Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
The Clay Machine-Gun – Victor Pelevin
Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro
Morvern Callar – Alan Warner
The Information – Martin Amis
The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
Sabbath’s Theater – Philip Roth
The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald
The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Love’s Work – Gillian Rose
The End of the Story – Lydia Davis
Mr. Vertigo – Paul Auster
The Folding Star – Alan Hollinghurst
Whatever – Michel Houellebecq
Land – Park Kyong-ni
The Master of Petersburg – J.M. Coetzee
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
Pereira Declares: A Testimony – Antonio Tabucchi
City Sister Silver – Jàchym Topol
How Late It Was, How Late – James Kelman
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
Felicia’s Journey – William Trevor
Disappearance – David Dabydeen
The Invention of Curried Sausage – Uwe Timm
The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
Looking for the Possible Dance – A.L. Kennedy
Operation Shylock – Philip Roth
Complicity – Iain Banks
On Love – Alain de Botton
What a Carve Up! – Jonathan Coe
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
The House of Doctor Dee – Peter Ackroyd
The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
The Emigrants – W.G. Sebald
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
Life is a Caravanserai – Emine Özdamar
The Discovery of Heaven – Harry Mulisch
A Heart So White – Javier Marias
Possessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker
Indigo – Marina Warner
The Crow Road – Iain Banks
Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
Jazz – Toni Morrison
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe
Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
The Heather Blazing – Colm Tóibín
Asphodel – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Black Dogs – Ian McEwan
Hideous Kinky – Esther Freud
Arcadia – Jim Crace
Wild Swans – Jung Chang
American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis
Mao II – Don DeLillo
Typical – Padgett Powell
Regeneration – Pat Barker
Downriver – Iain Sinclair
Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord – Louis de Bernieres
Wise Children – Angela Carter
Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
Amongst Women – John McGahern
Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
Vertigo – W.G. Sebald
Stone Junction – Jim Dodge
The Music of Chance – Paul Auster
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
A Home at the End of the World – Michael Cunningham
Like Life – Lorrie Moore
Possession – A.S. Byatt
The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
The Midnight Examiner – William Kotzwinkle
A Disaffection – James Kelman
Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson
Moon Palace – Paul Auster
Billy Bathgate – E.L. Doctorow
Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
The Melancholy of Resistance – László Krasznahorkai
The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
The Trick is to Keep Breathing – Janice Galloway
The History of the Siege of Lisbon – José Saramago
Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
London Fields – Martin Amis
The Book of Evidence – John Banville
Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
The Beautiful Room is Empty – Edmund White
Wittgenstein’s Mistress – David Markson
The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
The Swimming-Pool Library – Alan Hollinghurst
Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
Libra – Don DeLillo
The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks
Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
The Radiant Way – Margaret Drabble
The Afternoon of a Writer – Peter Handke
The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
The Pigeon – Patrick Süskind
The Child in Time – Ian McEwan
Cigarettes – Harry Mathews
The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
World’s End – T. Coraghessan Boyle
Enigma of Arrival – V.S. Naipaul
The Taebek Mountains – Jo Jung-rae
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Anagrams – Lorrie Moore
Matigari – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
Marya – Joyce Carol Oates
Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
The Old Devils – Kingsley Amis
Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt
An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
Extinction – Thomas Bernhard
Foe – J.M. Coetzee
The Drowned and the Saved – Primo Levi
Reasons to Live – Amy Hempel
The Parable of the Blind – Gert Hofmann
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
The Cider House Rules – John Irving
A Maggot – John Fowles
Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
Contact – Carl Sagan
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Perfume – Patrick Süskind
Old Masters – Thomas Bernhard
White Noise – Don DeLillo
Queer – William Burroughs
Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd
Legend – David Gemmell
Dictionary of the Khazars – Milorad Pavic
The Bus Conductor Hines – James Kelman
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago
The Lover – Marguerite Duras
Empire of the Sun – J.G. Ballard
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
Blood and Guts in High School – Kathy Acker
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes
Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis
Shame – Salman Rushdie
Worstward Ho – Samuel Beckett
Fools of Fortune – William Trevor
La Brava – Elmore Leonard
Waterland – Graham Swift
The Life and Times of Michael K – J.M. Coetzee
The Diary of Jane Somers – Doris Lessing
The Piano Teacher – Elfriede Jelinek
The Sorrow of Belgium – Hugo Claus
If Not Now, When? – Primo Levi
A Boy’s Own Story – Edmund White
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Wittgenstein’s Nephew – Thomas Bernhard
A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally
The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
The Newton Letter – John Banville
On the Black Hill – Bruce Chatwin
Concrete – Thomas Bernhard
The Names – Don DeLillo
Rabbit is Rich – John Updike
Lanark: A Life in Four Books – Alasdair Gray
The Comfort of Strangers – Ian McEwan
July’s People – Nadine Gordimer
Summer in Baden-Baden – Leonid Tsypkin
Broken April – Ismail Kadare
Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Rites of Passage – William Golding
Rituals – Cees Nooteboom
Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
City Primeval – Elmore Leonard
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
Smiley’s People – John Le Carré
Shikasta – Doris Lessing
A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
Burger’s Daughter - Nadine Gordimer
The Safety Net – Heinrich Böll
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
The World According to Garp – John Irving
Life: A User’s Manual – Georges Perec
The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch
The Singapore Grip – J.G. Farrell
Yes – Thomas Bernhard
The Virgin in the Garden – A.S. Byatt
In the Heart of the Country – J.M. Coetzee
The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter
Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
The Shining – Stephen King
Dispatches – Michael Herr
Petals of Blood – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
The Left-Handed Woman – Peter Handke
Ratner’s Star – Don DeLillo
The Public Burning – Robert Coover
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
Cutter and Bone – Newton Thornburg
Amateurs – Donald Barthelme
Patterns of Childhood – Christa Wolf
Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel García Márquez
W, or the Memory of childhood – Georges Perec
A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell
Grimus – Salman Rushdie
The Dead Father – Donald Barthelme
Fateless – Imre Kertész
Willard and His Bowling Trophies – Richard Brautigan
High Rise – J.G. Ballard
Humboldt’s Gift – Saul Bellow
Dead Babies – Martin Amis
Correction – Thomas Bernhard
Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
The Fan Man – William Kotzwinkle
Dusklands – J.M. Coetzee
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
A Question of Power – Bessie Head
The Siege of Krishnapur – J.G. Farrell
The Castle of Crossed Destinies – Italo Calvino
Crash – J.G. Ballard
The Honorary Consul – Graham Greene
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
The Black Prince – Iris Murdoch
Sula – Toni Morrison
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
The Breast – Philip Roth
The Summer Book – Tove Jansson
G – John Berger
Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
House Mother Normal – B.S. Johnson
In A Free State – V.S. Naipaul
The Book of Daniel – E.L. Doctorow
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
Group Portrait With Lady – Heinrich Böll
The Wild Boys – William Burroughs
Rabbit Redux – John Updike
The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima
The Driver’s Seat – Muriel Spark
The Ogre – Michael Tournier
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick – Peter Handke
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
Mercier et Camier – Samuel Beckett
Troubles – J.G. Farrell
Jahrestage – Uwe Johnson
The Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard
Tent of Miracles – Jorge Amado
Pricksongs and Descants – Robert Coover
Blind Man With a Pistol – Chester Hines
Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
The Green Man – Kingsley Amis
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
Ada – Vladimir Nabokov
Them – Joyce Carol Oates
A Void/Avoid – Georges Perec
Eva Trout – Elizabeth Bowen
Myra Breckinridge – Gore Vidal
The Nice and the Good – Iris Murdoch
Belle du Seigneur – Albert Cohen
Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
The First Circle – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid – Malcolm Lowry
The German Lesson – Siegfried Lenz
In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
A Kestrel for a Knave – Barry Hines
The Quest for Christa T. – Christa Wolf
Chocky – John Wyndham
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
The Cubs and Other Stories – Mario Vargas Llosa
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
Pilgrimage – Dorothy Richardson
The Joke – Milan Kundera
No Laughing Matter – Angus Wilson
The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
A Man Asleep – Georges Perec
The Birds Fall Down – Rebecca West
Trawl – B.S. Johnson
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
The Magus – John Fowles
The Vice-Consul – Marguerite Duras
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
Giles Goat-Boy – John Barth
The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
Things – Georges Perec
The River Between – Ngugi wa Thiong’o
August is a Wicked Month – Edna O’Brien
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
The Passion According to G.H. – Clarice Lispector
Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
Come Back, Dr. Caligari – Donald Bartholme
Albert Angelo – B.S. Johnson
Arrow of God – Chinua Achebe
The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein – Marguerite Duras
Herzog – Saul Bellow
V. – Thomas Pynchon
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
The Graduate – Charles Webb
Manon des Sources – Marcel Pagnol
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré
The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark
Inside Mr. Enderby – Anthony Burgess
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
The Collector – John Fowles
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
The Drowned World – J.G. Ballard
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
Girl With Green Eyes – Edna O’Brien
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – Giorgio Bassani
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
A Severed Head – Iris Murdoch
Faces in the Water – Janet Frame
Solaris – Stanislaw Lem
Cat and Mouse – Günter Grass
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor
How It Is – Samuel Beckett
Our Ancestors – Italo Calvino
The Country Girls – Edna O’Brien
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Rabbit, Run – John Updike
Promise at Dawn – Romain Gary
Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee
Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes
Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
Billiards at Half-Past Nine – Heinrich Böll
Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring – Kenzaburo Oe
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Bitter Glass – Eilís Dillon
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe
Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris – Paul Gallico
Borstal Boy – Brendan Behan
The End of the Road – John Barth
The Once and Future King – T.H. White
The Bell – Iris Murdoch
Jealousy – Alain Robbe-Grillet
Voss – Patrick White
The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
Blue Noon – Georges Bataille
Homo Faber – Max Frisch
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
The Wonderful “O” – James Thurber
Justine – Lawrence Durrell
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon
The Roots of Heaven – Romain Gary
Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
The Floating Opera – John Barth
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
A World of Love – Elizabeth Bowen
The Trusting and the Maimed – James Plunkett
The Quiet American – Graham Greene
The Last Temptation of Christ – Nikos Kazantzákis
The Recognitions – William Gaddis
The Ragazzi – Pier Paulo Pasolini
Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
I’m Not Stiller – Max Frisch
Self Condemned – Wyndham Lewis
The Story of O – Pauline Réage
A Ghost at Noon – Alberto Moravia
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley
The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler
The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
Watt – Samuel Beckett
Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
Junkie – William Burroughs
The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
The Judge and His Hangman – Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson
Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar
Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
Foundation – Isaac Asimov
The Opposing Shore – Julien Gracq
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Rebel – Albert Camus
Molloy – Samuel Beckett
The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
The Abbot C – Georges Bataille
The Labyrinth of Solitude – Octavio Paz
The Third Man – Graham Greene
The 13 Clocks – James Thurber
Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake
The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing
I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
The Moon and the Bonfires – Cesare Pavese
The Garden Where the Brass Band Played – Simon Vestdijk
Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
The Case of Comrade Tulayev – Victor Serge
The Heat of the Day – Elizabeth Bowen
Kingdom of This World – Alejo Carpentier
The Man With the Golden Arm – Nelson Algren
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
All About H. Hatterr – G.V. Desani
Disobedience – Alberto Moravia
Death Sentence – Maurice Blanchot
The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton
Doctor Faustus – Thomas Mann
The Victim – Saul Bellow
Exercises in Style – Raymond Queneau
If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
The Path to the Nest of Spiders – Italo Calvino
The Plague – Albert Camus
Back – Henry Green
Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
The Bridge on the Drina – Ivo Andri?
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
Loving – Henry Green
Arcanum 17 – André Breton
Christ Stopped at Eboli – Carlo Levi
The Razor’s Edge – William Somerset Maugham
Transit – Anna Seghers
Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
Dangling Man – Saul Bellow
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Caught – Henry Green
The Glass Bead Game – Herman Hesse
Embers – Sandor Marai
Go Down, Moses – William Faulkner
The Outsider – Albert Camus
In Sicily – Elio Vittorini
The Poor Mouth – Flann O’Brien
The Living and the Dead – Patrick White
Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
Between the Acts – Virginia Woolf
The Hamlet – William Faulkner
Farewell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
Native Son – Richard Wright
The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
Party Going – Henry Green
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien
Coming Up for Air – George Orwell
Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
Tropic of Capricorn – Henry Miller
Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
After the Death of Don Juan – Sylvie Townsend Warner
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson
Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
Cause for Alarm – Eric Ambler
Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
U.S.A. – John Dos Passos
Murphy – Samuel Beckett
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Years – Virginia Woolf
In Parenthesis – David Jones
The Revenge for Love – Wyndham Lewis
Out of Africa – Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)
To Have and Have Not – Ernest Hemingway
Summer Will Show – Sylvia Townsend Warner
Eyeless in Gaza – Aldous Huxley
The Thinking Reed – Rebecca West
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell
Wild Harbour – Ian MacPherson
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
Independent People – Halldór Laxness
Auto-da-Fé – Elias Canetti
The Last of Mr. Norris – Christopher Isherwood
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – Horace McCoy
The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
England Made Me – Graham Greene
Burmese Days – George Orwell
The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers
Threepenny Novel – Bertolt Brecht
Novel With Cocaine – M. Ageyev
The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
Call it Sleep – Henry Roth
Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein
Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
A Day Off – Storm Jameson
The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
A Scots Quair (Sunset Song) – Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
To the North – Elizabeth Bowen
The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett
The Radetzky March – Joseph Roth
The Waves – Virginia Woolf
The Glass Key – Dashiell Hammett
Cakes and Ale – W. Somerset Maugham
The Apes of God – Wyndham Lewis
Her Privates We – Frederic Manning
Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
Hebdomeros – Giorgio de Chirico
Passing – Nella Larsen
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
Living – Henry Green
The Time of Indifference – Alberto Moravia
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
The Last September – Elizabeth Bowen
Harriet Hume – Rebecca West
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Les Enfants Terribles – Jean Cocteau
Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe
Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille
Orlando – Virginia Woolf
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
The Childermass – Wyndham Lewis
Quartet – Jean Rhys
Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
Quicksand – Nella Larsen
Parade’s End – Ford Madox Ford
Nadja – André Breton
Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Tarka the Otter – Henry Williamson
Amerika – Franz Kafka
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
Blindness – Henry Green
The Castle – Franz Kafka
The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek
The Plumed Serpent – D.H. Lawrence
One, None and a Hundred Thousand – Luigi Pirandello
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
The Making of Americans – Gertrude Stein
Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Counterfeiters – André Gide
The Trial – Franz Kafka
The Artamonov Business – Maxim Gorky
The Professor’s House – Willa Cather
Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
The Green Hat – Michael Arlen
The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
The Devil in the Flesh – Raymond Radiguet
Zeno’s Conscience – Italo Svevo
Cane – Jean Toomer
Antic Hay – Aldous Huxley
Amok – Stefan Zweig
The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
The Enormous Room – E.E. Cummings
Jacob’s Room – Virginia Woolf
Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
The Glimpses of the Moon – Edith Wharton
Life and Death of Harriett Frean – May Sinclair
The Last Days of Humanity – Karl Kraus
Aaron’s Rod – D.H. Lawrence
Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Fox – D.H. Lawrence
Crome Yellow – Aldous Huxley
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
Night and Day – Virginia Woolf
Tarr – Wyndham Lewis
The Return of the Soldier – Rebecca West
The Shadow Line – Joseph Conrad
Summer – Edith Wharton
Growth of the Soil – Knut Hamsen
Bunner Sisters – Edith Wharton
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Under Fire – Henri Barbusse
Rashomon – Akutagawa Ryunosuke
The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf
Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham
The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
Kokoro – Natsume Soseki
Locus Solus – Raymond Roussel
Rosshalde – Herman Hesse
Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – Robert Tressell
Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
The Charwoman’s Daughter – James Stephens
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
Fantômas – Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
Howards End – E.M. Forster
Impressions of Africa – Raymond Roussel
Three Lives – Gertrude Stein
Martin Eden – Jack London
Strait is the Gate – André Gide
Tono-Bungay – H.G. Wells
The Inferno – Henri Barbusse
A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
The Iron Heel – Jack London
The Old Wives’ Tale – Arnold Bennett
The House on the Borderland – William Hope Hodgson
Mother – Maxim Gorky
The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
Young Törless – Robert Musil
The Forsyte Sage – John Galsworthy
The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
Professor Unrat – Heinrich Mann
Where Angels Fear to Tread – E.M. Forster
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
Hadrian the Seventh – Frederick Rolfe
The Golden Bowl – Henry James
The Ambassadors – Henry James
The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
The Immoralist – André Gide
The Wings of the Dove – Henry James
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
Kim – Rudyard Kipling
Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. – Somerville and Ross
The Stechlin – Theodore Fontane
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
What Maisie Knew – Henry James
Fruits of the Earth – André Gide
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz
The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
Effi Briest – Theodore Fontane
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
The Real Charlotte – Somerville and Ross
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Born in Exile – George Gissing
Diary of a Nobody – George & Weedon Grossmith
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
News from Nowhere – William Morris
New Grub Street – George Gissing
Gösta Berling’s Saga – Selma Lagerlöf
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Kreutzer Sonata – Leo Tolstoy
La Bête Humaine – Émile Zola
By the Open Sea – August Strindberg
Hunger – Knut Hamsun
The Master of Ballantrae – Robert Louis Stevenson
Pierre and Jean – Guy de Maupassant
Fortunata and Jacinta – Benito Pérez Galdés
The People of Hemsö – August Strindberg
The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy
She – H. Rider Haggard
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
Germinal – Émile Zola
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant
Marius the Epicurean – Walter Pater
Against the Grain – Joris-Karl Huysmans
The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
A Woman’s Life – Guy de Maupassant
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
The House by the Medlar Tree – Giovanni Verga
The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
Bouvard and Pécuchet – Gustave Flaubert
Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace
Nana – Émile Zola
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Red Room – August Strindberg
Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Drunkard – Émile Zola
Virgin Soil – Ivan Turgenev
Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
The Hand of Ethelberta – Thomas Hardy
The Temptation of Saint Anthony – Gustave Flaubert
Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Enchanted Wanderer – Nicolai Leskov
Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
In a Glass Darkly – Sheridan Le Fanu
The Devils – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Erewhon – Samuel Butler
Spring Torrents – Ivan Turgenev
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
King Lear of the Steppes – Ivan Turgenev
He Knew He Was Right – Anthony Trollope
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
Phineas Finn – Anthony Trollope
Maldoror – Comte de Lautréaumont
The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Thérèse Raquin – Émile Zola
The Last Chronicle of Barset – Anthony Trollope
Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
Uncle Silas – Sheridan Le Fanu
Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Water-Babies – Charles Kingsley
Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
Silas Marner – George Eliot
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
On the Eve – Ivan Turgenev
Castle Richmond – Anthony Trollope
The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
The Marble Faun – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Max Havelaar – Multatuli
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Oblomovka – Ivan Goncharov
Adam Bede – George Eliot
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell
Hard Times – Charles Dickens
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
Villette – Charlotte Brontë
Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Shirley – Charlotte Brontë
Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
La Reine Margot – Alexandre Dumas
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
Lost Illusions – Honoré de Balzac
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Dead Souls – Nikolay Gogol
The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
The Nose – Nikolay Gogol
Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
Eugénie Grandet – Honoré de Balzac
The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
The Red and the Black – Stendhal
The Betrothed – Alessandro Manzoni
Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg
The Albigenses – Charles Robert Maturin
Melmoth the Wanderer – Charles Robert Maturin
The Monastery – Sir Walter Scott
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
Ormond – Maria Edgeworth
Rob Roy – Sir Walter Scott
Emma – Jane Austen
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Absentee – Maria Edgeworth
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
Elective Affinities – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Castle Rackrent – Maria Edgeworth
Hyperion – Friedrich Hölderlin
The Nun – Denis Diderot
Camilla – Fanny Burney
The Monk – M.G. Lewis
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
The Interesting Narrative – Olaudah Equiano
The Adventures of Caleb Williams – William Godwin
Justine – Marquis de Sade
Vathek – William Beckford
The 120 Days of Sodom – Marquis de Sade
Cecilia – Fanny Burney
Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Reveries of a Solitary Walker – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Evelina – Fanny Burney
The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Humphrey Clinker – Tobias George Smollett
The Man of Feeling – Henry Mackenzie
A Sentimental Journey – Laurence Sterne
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith
The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
Émile; or, On Education – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rameau’s Nephew – Denis Diderot
Julie; or, the New Eloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rasselas – Samuel Johnson
Candide – Voltaire
The Female Quixote – Charlotte Lennox
Amelia – Henry Fielding
Peregrine Pickle – Tobias George Smollett
Fanny Hill – John Cleland
Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
Roderick Random – Tobias George Smollett
Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
Pamela – Samuel Richardson
Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot
Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus – J. Arbuthnot, J. Gay, T. Parnell, A. Pope, J. Swift
Joseph Andrews – Henry Fielding
A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Roxana – Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
Love in Excess – Eliza Haywood
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
A Tale of a Tub – Jonathan Swift
Oroonoko – Aphra Behn
The Princess of Clèves – Marie-Madelaine Pioche de Lavergne, Comtesse de La Fayette
The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The Unfortunate Traveller – Thomas Nashe
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit – John Lyly
Gargantua and Pantagruel – Françoise Rabelais
The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
The Golden Ass – Lucius Apuleius
Aithiopika – Heliodorus
Chaireas and Kallirhoe – Chariton
Metamorphoses – Ovid
Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

Florida State Prison Population Has Grown Twice As Fast As Florida Residential Population

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:29:00 +0000

From 1990 to 2007, Florida's residential population increased by approximately 44%.

According to the February 2008 Pew Center on the States report, between 1993 and 2007, Florida's inmate population has increased from 53,000 to over 97,000, an increase of more than 83%.

Thus, the population residing in Florida's state prisons has grown at double the rate of Florida's population of residents.

Crime in Florida has dropped substantially between 1993 and 2007, but crime has fallen as much or more in some states that have not grown their prison systems, or even shrunk them, such as New York.

Why has Florida's prison population grown at such a high rate compared to overall population growth? Analysts agree most of the growth has stemmed from a host of correctional policies and practices adopted by the state:

1. In 1995, the Florida legislature abolished "good time" credits and discretionary release by the parole board, and required that all prisoners - regardless of their crime, prior record, or risk to recidivate - serve 85% of their sentence;

2. A "zero tolerance" policy for parole violations and increasing prison time for even "technical violations."

In addition, some observers point to the incarceration of non-violent drug offenders. According to South Florida Sun Sentinel columnist Michael Mayo here, at 20.7 percent, drug offenders make up the biggest segment of the state prison population, according to the state. Of the 3,307 people sent to prison from Broward last year, 537 (16.2 percent) were for cocaine possession, according to the Broward State Attorney's Office.

If the same trend continues, Florida is expected to reach a peak of nearly 125,000 inmates by 2013. Based on that projection, the state will run out of prison capacity by early 2009 and will need to add another 16,500 beds to keep pace. According to Mayo, the upcoming Florida state budget includes $309 million to build three new prisons. That's in addition to the $2.5 billion the Department of Corrections gets for annual operating expenses.

Meanwhile, the May 15, 2008 Florida Bar News laments massive cuts to funding for Florida's judicial branch that could result in 299 full-time court employees (not judges) being laid off. The final court system budget for FY 2008-09 adopted by the legislature sliced an additional $18.4 million and impacts 182.5 positions on top of two previous reductions the court system suffered last year. Calculate the latest reduction to hefty previous cuts since July 1, 2007, and the bottom line for the judicial branch general revenue base budget totals $43,716,419, or a 9.8 percent decline from where the courts started a year ago.The net loss to the salary budget totals is 299 FTEs (full-time equivalent positions) or 6.8 percent of the court system workforce.

Is it possible the budget cuts to the judicial branch might slow the growth in Florida's prison population?

Interesting Mormon Beliefs About Polygamy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 May 2008 22:39:00 +0000

According to an article in the May 16, 2008 issue of The Week magazine:

1. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, said that, on July 17, 1831, God told him that only a man with at least three wives could enter heaven;

2. In Mormon theology, the individual human soul exists both before and after mortal life, and it was therefore considered the duty of all Mormon men to have as many children as possible in order to spare those souls the indignity of being born, as Mormon apostle Orson Pratt put it, "among the Hottentots, the African negroes, the idolatrous Hindoos, or any other fallen nations that dwell upon the face of the Earth;"

3. All Mormons are not polygamous because God changed his mind just in time for Utah to join the United States. In 1890, while Utah territory was applying to become a state, church president Wilford Woodruff received a revelation from God to the effect that Mormons were to submit themselves to U.S. law and to cease the practice of plural marriage. The "mainstream" Mormons followed Woodruff's revelation. The "fundamentalist" sects did not.

Thousands of Board of Patent Appeals Decisions Since 2000 May Be Questionable Due To Unconstitutional Appointment Process

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:17:00 +0000

John F. Duffy, a law professor at George Washington University, has recently released a controversial paper that calls into question thousands of decisions made by the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences since 2000. According to Duffy, the appointment process used to select judges for the panel has been unconstitutional since 1999, when a law was passed that gave the power of appointment, once enjoyed by the Secretary of Commerce, to the director of the Patent and Trademark Office. Duffy contends that the Constitution clearly delineates who can make what appointments, and that the undersecretary of a department does not meet these qualifications. Thus, the justices were appointed improperly, and judging from the amount at stake in many of their decisions, losing parties to their cases are now likely to challenge their decisions.

One such challenger is the company Translogic Technology, which lost its case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in January previous to the release of Duffy's article. Translogic has appealed to the Supreme Court, which has not yet agreed to hear the case.

Source: Fastcase Blog (who got it from New York Times)

U.S. Consumer Bankruptcy Filings Up 50%

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:30:00 +0000

U.S. consumer bankruptcy filings increased 47.7 percent nationwide in April 2008 from the same period a year ago, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI), relying on data from the National Bankruptcy Research Center (NBKRC). The overall April consumer filing total of 92,291 also represented a 7.1 percent increase from the 86,165 filings in March. Chapter 13 filings constituted 31.14 percent of all consumer cases in April, a slight decrease from March.

“The sharp spike in consumer bankruptcies reflects the growing financial stress faced by American families, saddled with household debt and mortgage woes,” said ABI Executive Director Samuel J. Gerdano. “We expect consumer bankruptcies to top 1 million new cases this year".

Separated At Birth? GEICO Caveman and Former American Idol Contestant Bo Bice

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:54:00 +0000

Thanks to my wife Linda for noticing this!

2008 Credit Crisis

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 23:05:00 +0000

From the Washington Post, here is a good explanation of the recent actions of the Federal Reserve in connection with the credit crisis:

Dreams End With Collapse of Tinker Bell Market

By Allan Sloan
Tuesday, April 1, 2008; D01

What in the world is going on here? Why is Washington spending billions to bail out Wall Street titans while leaving struggling homeowners to fend for themselves? Why are the Federal Reserve and the Treasury acting as if they're afraid the world may come to an end, while the stock market seems much less concerned? And finally, what does all this mean to those of us who aren't financial professionals?

Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson officially unveiled his new regulatory proposals; however, those have no bearing on today's problems. So, take a few breaths, pour yourself a beverage of your choice, and I'll tell you what's happening -- and what I think is going to happen. Although I expect our current mess will resolve itself without a catastrophic meltdown, I'll also tell you why I'm more nervous about the world financial system now than I've ever been in my 40 years of covering business and markets. Finally, I'll tell you why I fear that the Wall Street enablers of the biggest financial mess of my lifetime will escape with relatively light damage, leaving the rest of us, and our children and grandchildren, to pay for their misdeeds.

We're suffering the aftereffects of the collapse of a Tinker Bell financial market, one that depended heavily on borrowed money that has now vanished like pixie dust. Like Tink, the famous fairy from Peter Pan, this market could exist only as long as everyone agreed to believe in it. So because it was convenient -- and oh, so profitable! -- players embraced fantasies like U.S. house prices never falling and cheap short-term money always being available. They created, bought, and sold, for huge profits, securities that almost no one understood. And they goosed their returns by borrowing vast amounts of money.

The fantasies began to fade last June when Bear Stearns let two of its hedge funds collapse because of problems with mortgage-backed securities. Debt markets, here and abroad, went sour big-time. That, in turn, became a huge drag on the U.S. economy, bringing on the current economic slowdown.

Whether we're in a recession is academic. What matters is that we're in a dangerous and messy situation that has produced an economic slowdown unlike those we're used to seeing.

How is this slowdown different from other slowdowns? Normally the economy goes bad first, creating financial problems. In this slowdown the markets are dragging down the economy -- a crucial distinction, because markets are harder to fix than the economy.

The last time this happened was in 1929. And it touched off the Great Depression. The precedent is unsettling, to say the least. You can only imagine how unsettling it is to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a former economics professor who made his academic bones writing about the Great Depression.

Academics now feel that the 1929 slowdown morphed into a Great Depression in large part because the Fed tightened credit rather than loosening it. With that precedent in mind, you can see why Bernanke's Fed is cutting rates rapidly and throwing everything but the kitchen sink at today's problems. (Bernanke will probably throw that in too, if the Fed's plumbers can unbolt it.)

So why hasn't the cure worked? The problem is that vital markets that most people never see -- the constant borrowing and lending and trading among huge institutions -- have been paralyzed by losses, fear and uncertainty. And you can't get rid of losses, fear and uncertainty by cutting rates. Giant institutions are, to use the technical term, scared to death. They've had to come back time after time and report additional losses on their securities holdings after telling the market that they had cleaned everything up. It's whack-a-mole finance -- the problems keep appearing in unexpected places. We've had problems with mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, collateralized loan obligations, financial insurers, structured investment vehicles, asset-backed commercial paper, auction rate securities, liquidity puts.

To paraphrase what a top Fednik told me in a moment of candor last fall: You realize that you don't know what's in your own portfolio, so how can you know what's in the portfolio of people who want to borrow from you? Combine that with the fact that big firms are short of capital because of their losses (some of which have to do with accounting rules I won't inflict on you today) and that they're afraid of not being able to borrow enough short-term money to fund their obligations, and you can see why credit has dried up.

The fear -- a justifiable one -- is that if one big financial firm fails, it will lead to cascading failures throughout the world. Big firms are so linked with one another and with other market players that the failure of one large counterparty, as they're called, can drag down counterparties all over the globe. If the counterparties fail, it could drag down the counterparties' counterparties, and so on. Meltdown City. In 1998, the Fed orchestrated a bailout of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund because it had $1.25 trillion in transactions with other institutions. These days that's almost small beer.

Add to that the Wall Street ethos: If you take big, even reckless, bets and win, you have a great year and you get a great bonus -- or in the case of hedge funds, 20 percent of the profits. If you lose money the following year, you lose your investors' money rather than your own, and you don't have to give back last year's bonus. Heads, you win; tails, you lose someone else's money.

Bernanke and his point man on Wall Street, New York Fed president Tim Geithner, know everything I've said, of course. They know a lot more, too, such as which specific institutions are running out of the ability to borrow and have huge obligations they need to refinance day in and day out. Walk by Fed facilities in New York or Washington and you can feel the fear emanating from the buildings.

Because these aren't normal times, the Fed has tried to reassure the markets by inventing three new ways to inundate the financial system with staggering amounts of short-term money. This is in addition to the Fed's existing mechanisms, which are vast. The three newbies -- the term auction lending facility, the primary-dealer credit facility and the term securities lending facility -- total more than half a trillion dollars, with more if needed. Much of this money is available not only to commercial banks but also to investment banks, which normally aren't allowed to borrow from the Fed.

How can the Fed afford this largesse? Easy. Unlike a normal lender, the Fed can't run out of money -- at least, I don't think it can. It can manage monetary policy while in effect creating banking reserves out of thin air and lending them out at interest. That's how the Fed reported a $34 billion profit in 2006, the last available year, of which $29 billion was sent to the Treasury. The Fed can even add to its $800 billion stash of Treasury securities by borrowing more of them from other big players.

Then there's the Treasury. In March, the Treasury unleashed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks to buy hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities, supporting a troubled market that was seeing prices drop sharply because of large forced sales from the collapse of Carlyle Capital and from hedge funds desperate to pay off some of their borrowings.

Still with me? Good. Now let me show you how we taxpayers are picking up the tab for much of this rescue mission to the markets, even though Uncle Sam isn't sending checks to Wall Street. Here's the math: Say the Fed extends $500 billion of emergency loans to firms in need of short-term money. They're paying about 2.5 percent interest to Uncle Ben (or Uncle Sam, if you prefer). That rate is way below what they'd pay to borrow in the open market, if they could borrow. The difference between the open-market price and 2.5 percent is a gift from us, the taxpayers. I think that's better than letting the world financial system collapse, but it's a serious subsidy to outfits that made a lot of money on the way up and that are now whining about losses. You gotta love it -- private profits, socialized losses.

Now to the infamous Bear Stearns deal. Bear shareholders are set to get $10 a share -- about $1.2 billion -- from J.P. Morgan Chase. That's $1.2 billion more than they were likely to realize in a bankruptcy had the Fed and the Treasury dared let Bear go broke. More important, Bear's creditors, who were asleep at the switch and ought to be forced to pay for it, got out whole because J.P. Morgan agreed to take over Bear's obligations.

The only reason Morgan did that is its deal with the Fed, in which the Fed is taking over $30 billion of Bear's financial toxic waste. J.P. Morgan eats the first $1 billion of losses -- a concession it made to the Fed, which was embarrassed and enraged when Morgan raised the price it was paying for Bear to $10 a share from the $2 originally agreed to.

The securities that Bear is shedding aren't worth $29 billion in today's markets. If they were, Morgan wouldn't need the Fed's dough. The Fed -- which is to say the taxpayers -- is eating the difference between $29 billion and what that stuff is worth. It wouldn't surprise me to see the Fed end up with a $4 billion haircut, but we'll probably never know. (Once you take that haircut into account, you see why Bear shareholders should stop complaining about getting "only" $10, and why Bear debt-holders should erect a statue to Bernanke.)

Fedniks are furious about the Wall Street enablers of the mortgage mess and other financial excesses being able to escape the full cost of their folly, with the public picking up the cost. But as one of them asked, "Is it better to let Bear Stearns fail and risk setting off a market collapse that costs a million jobs?" The answer, of course, is no. Bear had about $13 trillion of derivatives deals with counterparties, according to its most recent financial filings. If Bear had croaked, large parts of the world could have croaked. And the economic damage could have been catastrophic.

Okay. Is there good news here? Indeed, there is. Sooner or later, all this money being thrown at the debt markets will stabilize things.

But the costs will be steep. Those of us who have been prudent, lived within our means, and didn't overborrow are paying a huge price for this. Income on our Treasury bills, money market funds, and CDs has dropped sharply, thanks to the Fed's rate cuts, and our wealth has eroded relative to foreign currencies and commodities. As an indirect result of the Fed cutting short-term rates, we've already seen a loss of faith in the dollar by our foreign creditors. That's helped run up the price of commodities that are priced in dollars and may well be stirring up inflation even as the Fed lowers retirees' incomes.

It's going to get harder and harder to finance our country's trade and federal budget deficits, with our seemingly ever-falling dollar carrying such low interest rates. The dollar has been the world's preeminent reserve currency, but I think those days are drawing to a close. Don't be surprised if in the not-too-distant future the United States is forced by its lenders to borrow in currencies other than its own. It could get really ugly.

It's going to take years to work out our country's excess borrowings, with lenders and borrowers -- and quite likely American taxpayers -- all bearing the cost.

So, after all this, we end up with the same old story. Whenever you see a financially driven boom and people tell you, "This time it's different," don't listen. It's never different. Sooner or later, the bubble pops, as it has now. And you and I end up paying for it.

Allan Sloan is Fortune magazine's senior editor at large. His e-mail address isasloan@fortunemail.com.

Trillion Dollar Meltdown? The 2008 Credit Crisis

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 22:11:00 +0000

Foreign Policy Magazine has a good summary of Charles Morris's new book Trillion Dollar Meltdown, which purports to explain how we got into the credit crisis that is currently beginning to wreak havoc in financial markets, the collapse of Bear Stearns being just the tip of the iceberg:

No, it’s not the Great Depression, but the United States is facing a nasty economy-wide retrenchment following the excesses of the 2000s, with no easy way to dance through it. Think 1979 to 1982, when then U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker exorcised consumer price inflation from the economy. The difference today is that the inflationary explosion has been absorbed by prices of assets—houses, stocks and bonds, office buildings—rather than by the prices of things you buy at the store. Here’s how it happened.

1. The Fed spikes the punch bowl. In the wake of the dot-com bust and 9/11, the Fed lowers interest rates to 1 percent, the lowest since 1958. For more than 2½ years, long after the economy has resumed growing, the Fed funds rate remains lower than the rate of inflation. For banks, in effect, money is free.

2. Leverage soars. Financial sector debt, household debt, and home prices all double. Big banks shift their business models away from executing transactions for customers to “principal trading”—or gambling from their own accounts with borrowed money. In 2007, the principal-trading accounts at Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Merrill Lynch balloon to $1.3 trillion.

3. Consumers throw a toga party. Soaring home prices convert houses into ATMs. In the 2000s, consumers extract more than $4 trillion from their homes in net free cash (excluding financing costs and housing investment). From 2004 through 2006, such extractions exceed 7 percent of disposable personal income. Personal consumption surges from its traditional 66 to 67 percent of GDP to 72 percent by 2007, the highest rate on record.

4. A dollar tsunami. The United States’ current-account deficits exceed $4.9 trillion from 2000 through 2007, almost all for oil or consumer goods. (The current account is the most complete measure of U.S. trade, as it encompasses goods, services, and capital and financial flows.) Economists, including one Ben S. Bernanke, argue that a “global savings glut” will force the world to absorb dollars for another 10 or 20 years. They’re wrong.

5. Yields plummet. The cash flood sweeps across all risky assets. With so many people taking advantage of cheap loans, the most risky mortgage-backed securities carry only slightly higher interest rates than ultra-safe government bonds. The leverage, or level of borrowing, on private-equity company buyout deals jumps by 50 percent. Takeover funds load even more debt onto their portfolio companies to finance big cash dividends for themselves.

6. Hedge funds peddle crystal meth. Aggressive investors pour money into hedge funds generating artificially high returns by betting with borrowed money. To maximize yields, hedge funds also gravitate to the riskiest mortgages, like subprime, and to the riskiest bonds, which absorb losses on complex pools of lower-quality mortgages known as collateralized debt obligations or CDOs. The profits from selling bonds based on very risky underlying securities override bankers’ traditional risk aversion. By 2006, high-risk lending becomes the norm in the home-mortgage industry.

7. A ratings antigravity machine. Pension funds cannot generally invest in very risky paper as a mainstream asset class. So, banks and investment banks, with the acquiescence of the ratings agencies, create “structured” bonds with an illusion of safety. Eighty million dollars of “senior” CDO bonds backed by a $100 million pool of subprime mortgages will not incur losses until the defaults in the pool exceed 20 percent. The ratings agencies confer triple-A ratings on such bonds; investors assume they are equivalent to default-proof U.S. Treasury bonds or blue-chip corporates. To their shock, investors around the world discover that as pool defaults start rising, their senior CDO bonds rapidly lose trading value long before they suffer actual defaults.

8. The Wile E. Coyote moment arrives. Suddenly last summer, all the pretenses start to come undone, and the market is caught frantically spinning its legs in vacant space. The federal government responds with more than $1 trillion in new mortgage lending and lending authorizations in multiple guises from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Housing Finance Board, and the Federal Reserve. Home prices still drop relentlessly; signs of recession proliferate; risky assets plummet.

What now?

The collapse of Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns may be a watershed moment. Participant reports suggest that JPMorgan Chase came into weekend negotiations last month prepared to do a deal without Fed support. But after examining Bear’s balance sheet, which looks completely conventional, except for $46 billion of hard-to-value mortgage assets, Morgan apparently said, “Hell no!” The $30 billion backup line of credit Morgan got from the Fed implies that they expect mortgage portfolio losses of some 70 cents on the dollar. Had Morgan recognized those losses, they could have forced comparable write-downs on a string of other banks. Bear’s default, in addition, could have triggered huge cash liabilities by thinly capitalized “bond insurers” and hedge funds that had guaranteed Bear’s debt. Many of the guarantors might have failed to have made good their guarantees. The Fed chose to pay up.

Analysts at Goldman Sachs recently estimated the total losses from this mess at $1.2 trillion, including nearly $500 billion at the banks. The cleanest solution would be for regulators to force banks to revalue their assets down to realistic levels in one fell swoop. (If the Fed and the Securities and Exchange Commission drive such a process, it might be accomplished within a single quarter.) The revaluations would almost certainly wipe out all or most equity capital at a number of the larger banks. Since it is unlikely that new private, nongovernmental capital could supply the entire shortfall, the federal government would have to act as the equity supplier of last resort.

But what about the homeowners who are stuck with mortgages they can no longer pay? Helping them will be simpler once their problems are untangled from the banks’ goal of protecting overpriced assets. A change in the bankruptcy laws, for example, could empower judges to convert excessive mortgages into market-rate rentals, which are usually much cheaper.

All current rescue proposals being floated in the U.S. Congress have the taxpayer buying up the loans the banks no longer want, absorbing the losses just as taxpayers did in the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s. As an equity investor, however, the U.S. government would get the same terms as other private investors, leaving the losses to fall on the shareholders and executives who either caused the debacle or allowed it to happen. Concerns about the government’s holding bank stock directly could be allayed by depositing the shares in the Social Security trust funds. As the banks return to normal operations, they would become quite valuable securities and probably greatly improve the system’s returns.

Bank shareholders and executives made extraordinary financial gains during the 2000s. Now that their Ponzi scheme has been exposed, they are demanding that the public absorb much of their losses, and the Federal government has been responding with huge showers of money. The Bear Stearns rescue demonstrates the need to draw a line. From now on, the banks, their shareholders, and their executives should eat their own losses. If that wipes out the capital of essential depositary institutions, the federal government should step in. Save the banks and help struggling homeowners, yes. But no more largesse for bank executives and shareholders.

Fort Lauderdale Law Firms Cashing In On Foreclosures in Hillsborough County

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:43:00 +0000

On April 1, 2008, the Tampa (Florida) Tribune published an article concerning the filing of mortgage foreclosure lawsuits in Hillsborough County, Florida during February 2008.

First, they found that foreclosure filings in Hillsborough County had more than doubled from the previous year. According to clerk records, there were 1,475 new mortgage foreclosure suits in Hillsborough County in February compared with 562 cases in February 2007 and 271 cases in February 2006.

Second, they determined which law firms were responsible for the most foreclosure filings in Hillsborough County during February 2008. Not surprisingly, a Tampa-based firm had filed the most. That firm was followed, however, by a number of "foreclosure mill" law firms based in the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area. The list follows:

1. Florida Default Law Group — Tampa.......415
2. David J. Stern — Plantation....................263
3. Marshall C. Watson — Fort Lauderdale.....182
4. Shapiro & Fishman — Tampa..................133
5. Smith, Hiatt & Diaz — Fort Lauderdale......75
6. Albertelli Law — Tampa...........................61
7. Daniel C. Consuegra — Tampa................47
8. Adorno & Yoss — Miami...........................41
9. Ben-Ezra & Katz — Fort Lauderdale..........33
10. Spear and Hoffman — Miami..................33

Fort Myers/Cape Coral Florida Has Highest Rate of Subprime Mortgage Foreclosures in the U.S.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:34:00 +0000

According to the April 6, 2008 New York Times here, the highest rate of subprime mortgage foreclosures in the United States is in the Fort Myers/Cape Coral area of Southwest Florida.

Florida Attorney General Issues Consumer Advisory on Mortgage Foreclosures

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:19:00 +0000

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum has recently issued a consumer advisory on mortgage fraud and foreclosure-related scams. Noting that Florida now ranks first in the nation for the number of home foreclosures, the Attorney General encouraged Floridians to educate themselves about the various types of mortgage fraud and learn about the foreclosure process to protect themselves from becoming potential victims.

A page dedicated to helping consumers educate themselves about mortgage foreclosures is available online here:

How to Protect Yourself: Tips for Avoiding Mortgage Foreclosures

Source: The Florida Attorney General

Contact your lender or loan servicer as soon as you realize you may have a problem and may have missed a payment. Studies show that at least 50 percent of all consumers that have defaulted on a mortgage or missed payments never contact their lender. This is a mistake. Lenders can discuss options with you to help you work through payments during difficult financial times. Lenders prefer to have you keep your home and most will work with you. Be honest with your lender about your financial circumstances. For more information about contacting your lender and what documents you should gather before speaking with your lender, refer to http://www.fha.gov/ or use this link http://portal.hud.gov/portal/page?_pageid=33,717348&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL.

Gather information. Learn all that you can about your mortgage rights and foreclosure laws in Florida. Review your loan documents to determine what your lender may do if you can’t make your payments. Review Florida laws, particularly Chapter 702, Florida Statutes and Section 45.031, Florida statutes to learn about foreclosure proceedings. Attend a foreclosure prevention information session. Information on local sessions may be available on http://www.fha.gov/ under “hot topics, foreclosure prevention events for homeowners.”

Contact a nonprofit housing counselor. Help and information is available to you free of cost. The HOPE NOW alliance provides a 24-hour hotline to provide mortgage counseling assistance in multiple languages. 1-888-995-HOPE. You may also obtain a list of HUD-approved counseling services in Florida at http://www.hud.gov/ or at this webpage:http://www.hud.gov/offices/hsg/sfh/hcc/hcs.cfm?webListAction=search&searchstate=FL .

Understand the relevant terms: If you are working with your lender or an approved housing counselor to keep your home, there are several options:

Reinstatement: Your lender may agree to let you pay the total amount you are behind, in a lump sum payment and by a specific date. This is often combined with forbearance when you can show that funds from a bonus, tax refund, or other source will become available at a specific time in the future. Be aware that there may be late fees and other costs associated with a reinstatement plan.

Forbearance: Your lender may offer a temporary reduction or suspension of your mortgage payments while you get back on your feet. Forbearance is often combined with a reinstatement or a repayment plan to pay off the missed or reduced mortgage payments.

Repayment Plan: This is an agreement that gives you a fixed amount of time to repay the amount you are behind by combining a portion of what is past due with your regular monthly payment. At the end of the repayment period you have gradually paid back the amount of your mortgage that was delinquent.

Loan modification: This is a written agreement between you and your mortgage company that permanently changes one or more of the original terms of your note to make the payments more affordable.

If you and your lender agree that you can not keep your home, there may still be options to avoid foreclosure:

Short Payoff: If you can sell your house but the sale proceeds are less than the total amount you owe on your mortgage, your mortgage company may agree to a short payoff and write off the portion of your mortgage that exceeds the net proceeds from the sale.

Deed-in-lieu of foreclosure: A deed-in-lieu of foreclosure is a cancellation of your mortgage if you voluntarily transfer title of your property to your mortgage company. Usually you must try to sell your home for its fair market value for at least 90 days before a mortgage company will consider this option. A deed-in-lieu of foreclosure may not be an option if there are other liens on the property, such as second mortgages, judgments from creditors, or tax liens.

Assumption: An assumption permits a qualified buyer to take over your mortgage debt and make the mortgage payments, even if the mortgage is non-assumable. As a result, you may be able to sell your property and avoid foreclosure.

Refinancing: While refinancing is not necessarily a good option when facing foreclosure and can sometimes even be a predatory practice, there are instances where it may help. Talk to your lender to see if refinancing is an option for you.

Avoid foreclosure prevention or loss mitigation companies. If you fall behind in your mortgage payments, many for-profit companies will contact you promising to help you avoid foreclosure. Some may even appear to be affiliated with your lender. Many also list their services on the internet and ask that you fill out a referral form online. It is best to avoid dealing with these companies. Most will charge you a hefty fee upfront for information that your lender or a HUD approved counselor will provide to you for free. You can obtain the same workout plan or a better plan for free by contacting your lender or a HUD approved counselor. Use your money to pay the mortgage instead.

Do not fall victim to a foreclosure recovery scam. If any business or individual offers to help you stop foreclosure immediately by signing a document authorizing them to act on your behalf or to set up financing for you, do not sign without consulting a professional (an attorney or HUD-approved counselor). This may be a trick to get you to sign over title to your home. You are then vulnerable to losing your home and all of your equity in your home to the so called “rescuer.”

Carefully examine your finances. Can you cut spending on optional expenses, delay payments on credit cards or other unsecured debt until you have paid your mortgage? Do you have assets that you could sell to help reinstate your loan? Can anyone in the household get a second job to help with income? These efforts to manage your finances may help you find income to apply to your outstanding payments and will demonstrate to your lender that you are willing to work on your finances and make sacrifices in order to keep your home.

For more information contact the AG consumer hotline at 1-866-966-7226 or visit http://www.hud.gov/ for these and other helpful tips.