Workaround: Facebook "promote" $$ shake down to show own posts

Page administrators and fans: 

These posts started showing up in FB in the past few days. Guess this means everyone has to go to every page they have ever liked and make sure posts are checked "show in news feed." Silly and a shake down on the part of FB to blatantly charge money for posts. Terrible idea. Many non-profits use FB to gain visibility. The idea that I would pay $5 each time as an administrator to get my non-profit's fans to look at our posts is just nuts. Roll back the clock, please.

 

Game Show Legend: His Top 10 Budget Cuts

Oldie, but goodie. Worth watching during the current 2012 presidential race season.

Game show legend Chuck Woolery discusses his thoughts on how to cut government spending. [Cute punch line at the end.]

Great Park's Shameless PR Contract Halfed: FINALLY!

Kudos to Frank who has been on a crusade against the blatant spending for the OC Great Park. Agree, even cutting this wasteful contract in half doesn't cut it. As an Irvine resident, I get mad at the expense of the slick and expensive newsletters that come in my mailbox promoting the glories of the future Great Park. Yes, we had a recession that impacted getting it built because much of the funding comes from Lennar constructing homes on the former MCAS property and recycling money back into our community....... but there has been an abundance of wasteful spending and cozy contracting going on all along. Not to mention the DANG UGLY master design that Ken Smith prepared and the board approved. ~ Linda

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By FRANK MICKADEIT COLUMNIST / THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

 

If there's one upside to the Great Park board frittering away of the bulk of $200 million on plans that will never get off the drawing board and the specter of losing $1.4 billion in redevelopment funds, it is this: It has been forced to ratchet back its shameless $1.2 million-a-year PR contract with Forde & Mollrich.

As of July 1, it will be only half as shameless, $600,000 a year, plus up to $300,000 a year in reimbursable expenses. That's still quite shameless, though, especially when the Great Park already has an in-house PR staff plus the city of Irvine's PR people at its disposal.

I've been harping on the sweetheart F&M deal for years as the most obvious and wasteful example of Larry Agran's doling out of park funds.

Councilman Jeff Lalloway has also picked up on this, and during this week's council meeting he closely questioned park CEO Mike Ellzey about the F&M contract. The wiggle room in the new deal is the $300,000 a year for expenses, a figure based on printing and mailing costs F&M has racked up in the past. But if F&M is only going to be doing half the work next year, why budget the same amount of expenses?

"That's an awful lot," Lalloway told Ellzey, and then asked when F&M last sent out a park newsletter. Ellzey wasn't sure but it wasn't this year. Lalloway also got clarification that the total revenue earned by the park is $8 million a year.

"It disturbs me that the Great Park spends over 10 percent of our revenue on public relations for this early phase of a construction project," Lalloway told me later.

As to the plans by architect Ken Smith getting off the drawing board, some certainly are, but it's clear that certain grandiose ideas are never going to happen. The biggest that's fallen by the wayside is the fake canyon he and Agran wanted to dig. It has been backfilled into a not-so-grand canyon, and could go away entirely.

Finally, we had Agran asserting that the $1.4 billion in redevelopment funds the state is taking is not yet lost, and that media reports about a court decision that went against the city has created confusion on this point.

True, as a city attorney pointed out, the court only refused to issue an order immediately blocking the state from taking the money. The court didn't rule on the merits of the city's argument, which is that it has obligated itself to spend that money to build the Great Park. In theory, if the court ultimately rules for the city, the $1.4 billion is there to build the park.

But the contract language committing the $1.4 billion specifically to build the park is ambiguous at best. The state attorney general says it doesn't even exist. No commitment in writing, no $1.4 billion. F&M will have to live with only $600,000 a year.

Yelp Now Feeding Restaurant Reviews to Microsoft's Bing

(Source: Associated Press) — Yelp is feeding its online reviews of restaurants and other local merchants to Microsoft's Bing search engine in a move to compete against Zagat ratings on Google.

Beginning Thursday, people using Bing to search for information about neighborhood businesses will be able to see excerpts from Yelp reviews.

The deal between Microsoft Corp. and Yelp Inc. comes two weeks after Google unveiled a new feature that serves up restaurant ratings from Zagat. Google Inc. bought Zagat's popular rating service for $151 million last year.

Google's decision to highlight Zagat in its influential search results threatens to divert traffic from Yelp. Joining forces with Bing makes sense for Yelp because both online services are locked in battle against Google to attract more advertising from local merchants.

Bing ranks a distant second behind Google in Internet search.

Harvard's State of Housing Report Says Home Construction Now Adding to GDP

(Source: Mortgage News Daily)

Steadier job growth and improving consumer confidence are now boosting home sales and home prices may finally find a bottom this year according to the latest State of the Nation's Housing report released this morning.  The report, produced by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, says further that stronger home sales should pave the way for a pick-up in single-family construction over the rest of 2012.

Conditions, however, will keep this recovery "subdued."  The backlog of nearly 2 million loans in foreclosure means that distressed sales will remain elevated and will keep a downward pressure on prices and another 11.1 million homeowners are underwater on their mortgages, dampening both sales of new homes and investment in existing units.  While vacancies have been declining the report notes, they still remain well above normal, holding down demand for new construction in many markets.

What the for-sale market needs most, the authors say is a sustained increase in employment.  This might in turn bring household formation back to normal levels.  The depressed pace of homebuilding has been a major factor in hiring and pulled down growth in the gross domestic product (GDP) from 2006 to 2010.  Since the beginning of 2011, however, both home construction and home improvement spending have made a positive contribution to GDP in four out of five quarters.

Read full article>>

Investors Increase Commercial, Multifamily Mortgage Holdings

(Source: Mortgage News Daily) 

Three of the groups that most heavily invest in commercial and multifamily mortgages increased their outstanding balance of such debt in the first quarter of 2012 according to data released this morning by the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA).  The level of all commercial/multifamily debt increased by $8.1 billion or 0.3 percent to $2.373 trillion compared to a total in the fourth quarter of 2011 of $2.365 trillion.  The multifamily portion of that debt now totals $818 billion, up $6.9 billion or 0.8 percent from the previous quarter total of $811.4 billion. Read more >>

Market news on rollercoaster

The past week has been a rollercoaster ride as a myriad of factors hit the U.S. market. Jubilation over historic lows for 30-year mortgage rates and 10-year treasury bonds was tempered by a dismal employment growth report for May and more bad news from European markets. Nervous investors sent the Dow plunging 275 points for its biggest loss of the year. Fast-forward a few days and the Dow saw a surge to 286 points turning the market positive for 2012.

Two key central-bank related events last week (a European Central Bank officials meeting on Wednesday and the U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman’s Congressional hearing on Thursday) focused on resolving the lingering European debt crisis and revealing any planned easing of U.S. monetary policies. The prospect that both central banks were preparing to do more to resolve problems triggered global rallies.

European officials are mired in the struggle to find ways to ease the region’s debt crisis and considering a plan to lend money from the European bailout fund to rescue banks in Greece and Spain. The Commission's plan proposes to force losses onto bondholders of a bank. Further, ECB officials decided not to lower rates this summer despite increased downside risks.


European Central Bank

The Fed’s chief, Ben Bernanke, was grilled by the Joint Economic committee on the state of the American economy. His highly anticipated testimony was closely watched for any hint of quantitative easing to support growth. Nothing unexpected came out of his testimony. In response, the bond markets that underpin the secondary mortgage market fell into a sideways drift.


Federal Reserve

Both the ECB and Fed pushed back on elected politicians to do more to bolster growth, reduce risks and eliminate uncertainty. With the 2012 political primaries in the U.S. now in the rearview mirror the weak economy will be the driving issue for the duration of the campaign season. Party nominees will be in high gear to offer solutions that will promote growth and gain the voters trust to lead the country into the long awaited recovery.