A tax break for subprime lenders?

Morning housing-related links from here and there:

From Bloomberg News: "Existing U.S. home sales fell to a 10-year low in the second quarter and the median price for a single-family house dropped 7.6 percent as the real estate recession deepened. ... The biggest declines reported by the Realtors today were in Sacramento ... with a 36 percent drop."

From the L.A. Times: "One reason California still has no state budget is a closed-door dispute over a tax proposal that could be a multimillion-dollar boon to banks that engage in subprime lending."

Also from The Times: "Real estate developer Storm Properties Inc. of Torrance said Wednesday that it had sold more than 1.4 million square feet of industrial and office buildings to Thompson National Properties for about $110 million."

From MSNBC via Patrick.net: The collapse of the new-home market has left numerous "ghost towns" and "half towns" outside American cities.

-- Peter Viles

Use the comment function to suggest other links or websites, or e-mail link suggestions to peter.viles@latimes.com.

Comments

[MBWatcher]

Privatizing risk, socializing losses. The Gov. is just following the lead of the national gov't.

[sheila]

good ole schwarzie. no corporation is too much of a bottom-feeder to avoid getting a handout from him. this is a guy who wants to cut hard working people's paychecks and close our state parks so he can further reward the mercenaries who have destroyed our economy.

heck of a job, arnie.

[Nick]

Another reason California still has no state budget is that we have a legislature which is incapable of not overspending their revenue running up against a governor who is adamant about the state having some semblance of fiscal responsibility for the first time in recent memory. Couple that with large deficits papered-over in previous administrations, and decreasing revenue from the inevitable housing price correction, and you've get a budgetary brick wall.

California should have a new method of crafting a budget which avoids these stupid and costly deadlocks. The legislature should be required to pass a budget by the deadline, or the governor should be allowed to draft and enact one. Furthermore, if the legislature's budget is not balanced, the governor should have the right to like-item reduce spending until it is. All the discussion and compromises should have occurred before the budget was due, not after the state is spending millions a day borrowing to cover for the lack of a budget.

[jb]

Privatizing risk, socializing losses - we will not stand for it. These politicians should be drawn and quartered.