Sherman’s News and Editorials

According to statistics from BLS.gov,
non agriculatural payroll employment increased by about one hundred and fifty thousand in May, while the unemployment
rate was unchanged at around 4.5 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the United States
Department of Labor reported today.  The health care & food service industries both managed to adde jobs,
while employment declined in the manufacturing sector, unfortunately.  Meanwhile, the average hourly earning rate amanged to rise by
6 cents, or 0.3 percent, in May.
In the same month, employment in general was unchanged at some 145.9 million, and the em-
ployment-population ratio held firm at around 63%.  The civilian labor force also
was the same, at 152,000,000, while the labor force participation rate
stayed at 66%.  Both the employment-population ratio and labor force
participation rate were down by 0.4% since the end of 2006.
Earning rates are important, but to get a wider perspective you should of course also
take a look at the inflation numbers, since inflation dicates spending power of that earned income.
According to Newsmax online, the MoneyNews publication as well as the Financial Intelligence Report, the dollar has been inflated recently - despite claims that the official CPI is “low”
I do not know if this claim is actually tru, but that was the report.
But whether these reports are true or not, I tend to view inflation a big threat to America’s global strength, and most importantly our wealth as American citizens.
I mean, if you get a 5% raise, but inflation jumps 10%, who really benefits from this. I also find that fact that our manaufacturing base shrunk (yet again)
to be truly troubling, especially in light of the recent reports that so many manufacturing jobs have gone to China and India in recent years.
While this may save some corporations some money and add a few nickels to investor’s dividends, it seems to me that this is bad for the long term economic health of the country.

An uproar seems to be brewing about the huge commisions that real estate agents and brokers appear to be making, despite apparently doing little work  to justify it…..

In an RISMedia news report on May14, 2007 (no writer was credited), it was stated that The real estate piece featuring Redfin that aired Sunday on the popular television program “60 Minutes” prompted broad reaction throughout the whole industry, and in particularly on real estate related weblogs.

The 60 minute piece in question had zeroed in on how the world wide web has been changing the real estate community by essentially spotlighting the Puget Sound are discount broker Redfin and it’s founder, Glen Kelman…………………Kelman has stated that the real estate industry “is the most screwed up industry in America, and we feel like things that Amazon or eBay or Yahoo have done of other industries, we can do for the real estate industry.”{perhaps like how they affected the stock broking industry?}

In anay case The RISmedia publisher responded to the piec by saying that the television segment “……..misleads consumers into thinking that all their Realtor does is list their property-or only does ‘four hours worth of work’ as the former traditional agent in the piece noted-and they walk away with thousands of dollars for doing nothing. This is a gross misrepresentation of the work Realtors do for their clients to increase the value of their homes and justify their commissions.”

I can only say that, where I live, a friend of my father, who happens to be a real estate agent himself, bragged about how he just made a $90,000 commision for doing a few hours work on a particular real estate deal. Of course, I live in the state of Hawaii where the real estate prices are unusually high in many area’s…..million dollar homes are quite common here in fact…

According to an April 17 article by Marcy Gordon of the Associated Press, which was also reported on the blog at The Real Estate Portal Federal bank regulators have called upon lenders generally to work with the many troubled borrowers who are having a difficult time with their mortgage payments. As everyone know knows all too well, delinquencies & foreclosures have been sharply increasing recently, particularly for those many individuals who took out the risky subprime loans. This distress has roiled financial markets and increased worries that it could spill over into the larger national economy. The various proposals for subprime loans of government-sponsored Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, the largest single buyers of mortgages in the nation, were disclosed by their top executives at a hearing by the House Financial Services Committee. 

Sorry to have to bring you more bad news, but In a St.Petersburg Times editorial entitled ‘The Real estate slowdown is coming home across area’,
journalist CHUIN-WEI YAP stated in his April 16, 2007 article that, sadly, sales are still down and the glut of unsold homes is way up, which is contradicting the optimists who predicted that the market would turn around by the spring 2007.

Only 2 years ago, 1 in 2 homes sold in any particular month. But today, the same period would see 1 in 20 sell.
He also reports that a new vocabulary is emerging in the real estate market, referring to terms such as “short sale,” which means a seller getting less from his home sale than what he owes
 in loans; and “home staging,” which means the art of dressing up a home to look model-pretty just so a buyer might take another look at it.
….”Foreclosures have more than doubled,” states one Linda Pichler, vice president of business development for Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Central Florida.
Let us hope that this recent trend of negative news does not continue for very much longer.

Have any of you ever suffered from Blogging burnout? If you run several weblogs, as I do, you likely have experienced this occurance at one time or another, It is very disconcerting when this happens, and at least with me, it is normally triggered when some error happens with Wordpress or if I somehow manage to accidentally lose all of my work, It really sucks when that happens, it is demoralizing as hell. This phenomenom happened to me recently when I tried to achive a very ambitious self imposed deadline for writing fresh cont3ent for all of my blogs….but I went to the gym and got out of the house for a while and now I feel a lot better. In fact I am fairly fresh now…..so it is back to work for me, writing, writing and more writing!