About Me 0013: About Making Money

It's as if the Fed was functioning in a complete vacuum and has never heard of foreclosure fraud.

WASHINGTON — As Americans continue to lose their homes in record numbers, the Federal Reserve is considering making it much harder for homeowners to stop foreclosures and escape predatory home loans with onerous terms....

Since 1968, the Truth in Lending Act has given homeowners the right to cancel, or rescind illegal loans for up to three years after the transaction was completed if the buyer wasn't provided with proper disclosures at the time of closing.

Attorneys at AARP have used the rescission clause for decades to protect older homeowners stuck in predatory loans with costly terms. The provision is also helping struggling homeowners to fight a wave of foreclosure cases in which faulty and sometimes-fraudulent disclosures were used....

Critics say the proposed change by the Fed would render the rescission clause useless. The Fed proposal would require homeowners who seek a loan rescission through the courts, to pay off the entire loan balance before the lender cancels the lien.

"This, of course, would be almost impossible for most consumers to do because they can't come up with the money until they get out of the loan. And they can't get out of the loan until the lien is released," said Barry Zigas, director of housing and credit policy at the Consumer Federation of America. "None of us are quite sure what purpose is being served by this proposal or what prompted it."

According to the New York Times which ran an editorial against the proposal earlier in the week, the Fed wants to eliminate this protection for homeowners because of their “concern over banks’ compliance costs." Since the Fed certainly can't be concerned about banks fraudulently taking people's homes from them.

What Zach Carter says:

It’s hard to imagine a way for the Fed to disgrace itself any further than it did by failing to rein in the mortgage mess over the past decade. But if it proceeds with this effort to protect banks that engaged in predatory lending, it will not only be guilty of falling down on the job and looking the other way, but of actively encouraging illegal mortgage lending.

Andy Rubin, the VP of engineering at Google responsible for mobile, has revealed that the company’s rapidly expanding Android operating system would be profitable if it was broken out as its own business.

Asked by The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco if the division is making money for the search giant, Rubin responded affirmatively with a “yes.”

Mossberg pressed on the issue, noting that class='blippr-nobr'>Google’sclass="blippr-nobr">Google mobile revenue still primarily comes via ads from Google mobile search — searches that occur both on class='blippr-nobr'>Androidclass="blippr-nobr">Android devices and iPhone and other platforms (i.e., Google would be making that money with or without Android).

Rubin conceded that “there’s no way would’ve ever been profitable as a startup company,” (Rubin sold Android to Google in 2005) but says that the resources provided by Google’s enormous advertising revenue streams and the ability to offer Android open source have allowed Android to pursue a business model that’s become profitable.

Although Rubin wouldn’t break out exactly how Android makes money, he did reveal that there are now 172 phones on the market running Android, the latest of which, the Nexus S, was revealed earlier today. That’s a lot more smartphones that drive a lot more mobile searches, and presumably, that’s how Rubin’s math adds up.

Rubin credited Android’s success to its open source model, making it easy for any manufacturer or carrier to offer devices, saying “It’s … frictionless for OEMs no matter where they’re doing the manufacturing … without a contractual relationship or having money change hands.”

He did concede, however, that the Nexus One business model — offering unlocked phones direct to consumers via the web — was not a good business one for Google to pursue and that the provisioning and activation of mobile phones is best left to the carriers. “We thought it would be better to spend our resources on things like Gingerbread,” (the latest Android OS) he said.

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Wednesday, December 8, 2010

About Making Money

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