vineri, 28 octombrie 2011

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


The Mother of All Hot Wheels Tracks

Posted: 27 Oct 2011 11:30 PM PDT



The "Mother of All Hot Wheels Tracks" is a 2000 foot long Hot Wheels track which winds throughout a suburban home, down a sidewalk, and around a pool. A model car completed the course in three minutes. The track was built and filmed by YouTube user therealtexasaggie98.


Source: laughingsquid


Anime Expo 2011 Cosplay

Posted: 27 Oct 2011 10:43 PM PDT

This year's edition of Anime Expo 2011 was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center from July 1-4. Anime Expo is generally the celebration of all things Japanese, whether it be manga, anime, bad karaoke, or that awesome past time cosplay. The great thing about cosplay at AX is it's never limited to anime, so prepare yourself for comics, anime, video game, and movie costume goodness.












































































Sources: NightmareLuffy, PopCultureGeek


Zombie Head Cheese

Posted: 27 Oct 2011 10:14 PM PDT

As the festival of Halloween looms around the corner, deliciously creepy confections run rampant, and the 'Zombie Head Cheese' by Not Martha will creep your guests out while filling up their tummies. And while it looks rather gross, it's really just spreadable cheese on a plastic skull with some food coloring and, the best part, cocktail onions for eyeballs.












Celebrities Joins Occupy Wall Street Protests

Posted: 27 Oct 2011 02:17 PM PDT

At Occupy Wall Street, the celebrities just keep on coming to show their support. Earlier we saw a photo of Gossip Girl actor Penn Badgley participating in the Occupy Wall Street protest going on in NYC. Kanye West is the latest musician to join the protest at Occupy Wall Street. He was spotted at the protest in Zucotti Park. Russell Simmons, a familar face at Occupy Wall Street, guided Kanye through the protest.

Katy Perry


Naomi Wolf


Don King


Talib Kweli


Susan Sarandon


Mike Myers


Tim Robbins


Rachel McAdams


Kanye West


Al Sharpton


Justine Bateman


Michael Moore


Russell Simmons


Cornel West


Alec Baldwin


Mark Ruffalo


Jeffrey Ross


Penn Badgley


Russell Brand


Tom Morello


Lupe Fiasco


Rufus Wainwright


Sean Lennon


Danny Glover


Pete Seeger


Roseanne Barr


Banksy


Jeff Mangum


98 Degrees' Justin Jeffre


Deepak Chopra


Perry Farrell

Source: buzzfeed


How Big is Your Long Tail? - Whiteboard Friday

How Big is Your Long Tail? - Whiteboard Friday


How Big is Your Long Tail? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 27 Oct 2011 02:00 PM PDT

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

 Choosing keywords to optimize for is a tricky business, made all the more tricky as keyphrases grow longer than a couple of words. As Google has said, up to 20% of search queries in any given day are completely unique. Should you try to optimize your tauntaun sleeping bags product page for "tauntaun sleeping bag," for "childrens' tauntaun sleeping bag," or for "childrens' star wars tauntaun sleeping bag from hoth"? How can you research whether or not to optimize for such a long tail query?

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand is back to explain just how long of a tail you should be optimizing for. Have any suggestions on how you do this research? Give us your thoughts in the comments!

 

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're asking the question: How big is your long tail? No innuendo intended. This is a totally serious question for the search world, wink wink, nod nod, say no more.

Many of you are familiar with the fact that the world of search is really dominated by this concept of the long tail. Google talks about this incredible metric that 20% of any search that's performed every day is completely unique. Google has never seen that search before performed on their engine at all. No one in history has ever made that search. That happens on one out of every five queries every single day.

We are amazingly unique creatures, especially when we get in front of a search box. That's a great thing, but of course it means that doing keyword research can be tremendously tough. There are a lot of folks who ask the question: "I've heard of this tail concept, but I only do keyword targeting and keyword research really on the fat head, maybe the chunky middle." I'll talk about those in a sec. "I don't even know how to do keyword research on the long tail. I don't know how much of an opportunity it is."

This Whiteboard Friday is here to answer that last question: How big of an opportunity it is. Can we measure it? Can we look at the size? Can we understand? Because some industries are going to be very narrowly focused on a few head terms. That's what people search for. Those are the money terms. That's where people convert, that's where the value comes from. In other industries, the long tail is a huge, huge win, and you need to be able to understand that in order to do the right kinds of keyword targeting.

So let's begin. This is our classic long tail graph. We've got the quantity of visits that any particular keyword sends you on this axis, and then down here on this axis, the keywords themselves. This keyword sent a ton of visits. This keyword sends a ton of visits. This keyword sends a bunch of visits. Then there's this huge tail that comprises usually 70% of all of the quantity. If we were to take this area under the graph, do some calculus, figure out how big the whole opportunity is, oftentimes the tail is 60%, 70% of the full opportunity. It's because it extends for miles and miles and miles in that direction.

We kind of classify these into three chunks. So we have our fat head, our chunky middle, and our long tail. The fat head, in my view, tends to refer to the things that are very popular in your niche. I say in your niche, because depending on your niche, these may be very different in terms of quantity. I've given a rough estimate for SEOmoz. Usually the categories we like to bring them into are something that sends more than 100 visitors each month. If there's a keyword that's sending us more than 100 visits a month, we put that in the fat head. That's sort of a big term for us. If there's something sending between 10 and 99 visits a month, that's our chunky middle. If it's sending fewer than 10, it's our long tail.

Some SEOs like to have very, very different orders of magnitude on these. Some people might say, "This is only things that send over 1000. This is stuff between 20 and 500. This is stuff that's only less than 5." Whatever you want to do is fine. You can classify your traffic that way. That's a good way to go. You should just be aware that this classification system exists. I think this is a very healthy way to be able to look at things.

You tend to look at the chunky middle and the fat head and say, "I am going to manage these." Whatever I'm using, if I'm using the SEOmoz Pro Suite, I'm going to manage these in my rankings. If I'm using Raven or Authority Labs or any of these other services, these are the keywords that I want to care about tracking their rankings, tracking their visits, keeping good tabs on how they're doing.

It's harder in the long tail. I might have a subset of these that I'm monitoring as well just to get a sample, but I'm generally not paying attention one-on-one to them. The problem can be when as SEOs we naturally, since we're paying attention to these keywords we manage and rank track, we get obsessed with them. We stop thinking and worrying about the long tail and the opportunity we're missing here. Meanwhile, one of our competitors is going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead and let him win the number two, number one rankings for those keywords. I'm winning over here where there's no competition, and where there's generally higher conversions, and where there's tons more volume." We're kicking ourselves when we find that out.

Instead of losing out, let's figure out how much opportunity exists there. Before we answer that, we should know: Well, how much am I currently capturing of these? This is pretty easy. What you can do is you can create advanced segments inside Google Analytics, or you can create segmentation inside Google Analytics for each of these buckets. You decide how big these buckets are. You can say, "I only want keywords that sent me fewer than 10 visits." That works great. Those segments can then be classified and you can say, "All right. This sent me 13,510 visits last month. That is up from the month before, so I'm sort of doing better in my long tail." Or long tail demand's getting better, whichever. From that, measure the quantity of keywords and visits in each bucket.

You can also measure the quality. Measure quality with one of two things. If you have goals set up, hopefully you have goals and conversion rates set up in your Analytics, that's a great way to look.

The other way, if you don't, if you're just trying to say, "How much is this traffic worth to me from a branding perspective, from a usefulness perspective, from a reaching new audience perspective?" The metric I really like for that is browse rate. The reason I like it so much is because browse rate says on average how many pages did a visitor visit in a single session when they came via this keyword.

Browse rate is great way to say usually, when you have a higher browse rate, that means more engagement. It means someone's surfing around your site more. They're spending more time on the site. They are more likely to convert or come back and convert. Browse rate is a good sort of substitute metric. It's not great, not perfect, not nearly as good as goals and conversions, but if you don't have that, browse rate is a great way to judge qualitatively: How's this traffic performing?

You take that and you sort of go, "All right. This is how well I'm doing. This is my trend over time. Am I improving? Am I not improving?" For some people they want to know, "Yeah, but what's the opportunity? Am I really missing out here, or am I doing a good job?" Just measuring your own progress won't tell you that. You need broader industry statistics. There's a number of ways to do that.

The most obvious one, of course, is to go to Google AdWords and try and figure out what the fat head and chunky middle distribution looks like. But because there's no real keyword research available for the long tail, Google through their AdWords tool or their AdWords API, or Bing through AdCenter, are not generally showing you keywords that send fewer than 10 searches, that have a very small search quantity, but there are tons of those keywords. That's a really challenging thing to search. Of course, no search engine's going to be able to tell you what those 20% of queries that they've never seen before every day are. So that's frustrating too. Solution to this . . . it's not that ingenious, you probably know how to do it, you can probably guess, but let me walk you through it anyway. I think it's super exciting.

This is asking how much opportunity do you have. Oftentimes it's a lot. One of the best ways to figure this out - this won't answer it perfectly, but it does a nice decent job - is to say, "I'm going to go to AdWords or AdCenter and I'm going to create a paid search campaign." This is one of the times when paid search and organic search overlap very, very well. It's just because the research is so handy.

For my major fat head terms, I'm going to create campaigns around those and target groups in both the exact and broad matches for those keywords: Exact match, of course, the example would be like "chess tournaments." "Chess tournaments" is an exact match. I only want that precise phrase. Google do not show my ad and don't tell me about that. I want to know only the clicks that I get for "chess tournaments" exactly.

Then I'm going to create another group that contains phrase based matching. Show me phrases that contain "chess tournaments" but not this exact phrase. Meaning things like, if somebody searched for "playing chess in a tournament in Miami." That would show up in . . . well, yeah, it contains the phrase, but it's not that exact phrase. Or I'm sorry, "Miami chess tournaments" would be in there. "Minneapolis chess tournaments" would be in there. "Pro chess tournaments" would be in there. It's not the exact phrase "chess tournaments", but it contains that phrase.

Then you have that final bucket of contains the words but is not matching a high-volume phrase and does not necessarily need to be the exact phrase. This could be "tournament style chess games" or "tournament video game chess". All this type of stuff can add up to a bunch, and what will happen when you buy these keywords in AdWords is that they will show you something called impression count.

The impression count can actually be drilled into and you can see all of the terms that send those. From that impression count, you can then take them and segment them into these buckets. You can say, "Oh, okay. We had 500 keywords that had 10 or fewer impressions, so we're going to put those 500 keywords in here. Then we had another 110 keywords that fit into our chunky middle stats. We had another 42 that fit into the head."

This kind of distribution is incredibly valuable because it gives you a sense for a phrase or a bunch of phrases, if you're doing this work consistently, how big is the opportunity in the tail? It really does vary. Some things are hyper-geographic, so geographic modifiers get in there. Some things are very tuned to customization and specialization and weird sorts of searches. This happens a lot in the programming world. You'll see "mySQL calls" have a bunch of volume and then you might say "PHP mySQL calls", and then there's a ton of long tail weird stuff. Being able to see that versus something that's much more narrow is really, really handy and where the volume is constrained or confined to the fat head, chunky middle.

Now that you've got this process, if you've got some budget for AdWords, you can start testing, grouping these things into buckets. You can measure your buckets over time and how you're performing and you can see: Am I capturing the long tail? Or am I losing out on an opportunity to capture the long tail and maybe I need to be spending a little less time and attention with the fat head and chunky middle?

All right gang, thank you very much for joining me. I hope we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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Behind-the-Scenes Video of the President's Week

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, October 28, 2011
 

Behind-the-Scenes Video of the President's Week

This week, the President announced he'd keep his promise to bring our troops home from Iraq, honored the nation's top scientists and inventors, embarked on a three day Western swing to urge Congress to pass the American Jobs Act, and announced major new executive actions that will help middle class families in this difficult economy.

Check out the behind the scenes video:

West Wing Week

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog.

Mapping Out the American Jobs Act
We've put together a new tool to help show the impact of the American Jobs Act.

American Jobs Act By the Numbers: 9
The economy grew for the ninth consecutive quarter, but we need the American Jobs Act to accelerate our economic growth.

The European Debt Crisis
President Obama sat down with Czech Prime Minister Peter Necas in the wake of an announcement that European leaders reached an agreement to cut Greek debt and solve the Eurozone crisis.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

10:45 AM: The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing

12:00 PM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney WhiteHouse.gov/live

4:00 PM: The President meets with Secretary of State Clinton

4:30 PM: The Vice President and Dr. Biden deliver remarks at the Florida Education Association’s 2011 Delegate Assembly meeting

5:10 PM: The President attends a Diwali reception

7:45 PM: The Vice President and Dr. Biden deliver remarks at the Florida Democratic Party Convention

Indicates events that will be live streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/Live

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8 Best Ways to Find Negative PPC Keywords

Posted: 27 Oct 2011 04:28 AM PDT

If your ads display on irrelevant searches, then either you get clicks and waste money (as the searchers are very unlikely to convert), or you don't get clicks and CTR drops (which affects Quality Score and therefore your CPC).

So how do you stop this? Part of the answer is choosing keywords carefully – be careful with general terms and use modified broad-match where appropriate – but for the best performance possible you need negative keywords to target your traffic properly.

1. Search Query Reports
The most obvious way, but also the most important. Look at your search query report and see what terms your ad is actually displaying for.

Look for patterns. See if there are repeated words or themes that are irrelevant. For example, say you sell red shoes, and as such have 'buy red shoes' as a keyword on broad match. If phrases like 'buy blue shoes' and 'blue shoes for sale' appear in your search query report then adding 'blue' on broad-match negative rather than excluding the searches individually with exact match is preferable:  not only will it exclude the searches you've noticed, but it also excludes long tail searches you haven't seen.

This may be a simplistic example, but you might spot a trend in your search queries that leads to other new negative keywords. Seeing 'blue' may make you think to exclude other colours. Seeing 'jobs' may make you think to exclude 'recruitment'.

Also try to think about what the searcher is looking for with their query. Is the search term actually the name of a book or film? You may want to search for stranger terms on Google yourself to make sense of them.

2. Use Someone Else's List
Some negatives come up all the time, so it can help to look at something like KoMarketing Associates's list of negative keywords for inspiration. Don't add terms to your account without thinking – some might be relevant for you! – but it is a good starting point.

3. Use Keyword Research Tools
Google's Keyword Tool shows you what Google thinks is relevant to your keywords, so if someone searches for a term it suggests it's likely to display your ad. So see if you think the highest traffic suggestions are actually relevant, and if they aren't then exclude them.

Something that scrapes Google Instant suggestions (like Über Suggest) can also give you ideas of popular searches that start with your keywords, to include or exclude as you see fit.

4. Your Positive Keywords
You’ve worked hard to structure your account, sort keywords into the best possible ad groups, and write adverts specially tailored to those groups. You don’t want to lose this work by having searches display the wrong ads.

If you've got a general ad group for 'red shoes' and a more specific ad group for 'shiny red shoes' you'll want to exclude 'shiny' from the former so that it doesn't steal the latter's traffic. Making sure searches go to the most specific ad group possible means that they see the most specific ad possible. Also, it's easier to track performance – you can't as easily tell how well 'shiny red shoes' searches perform if they are split over multiple ad groups and mixed up with other terms.

5. Competitor Research
Whether you should bid on competitor terms is beyond the scope of this post, but even if you do then you should keep them separated from your other keywords (as searches with a brand attached will behave differently to searches with no brand at all), and so competitor terms should be used as negative keywords. Don't just think of the brand name:  think of their product names as well.

If you know of brands who have a similar but different market you could exclude them as their audience will be uninterested in your product:  for instance if you sell women's clothing you could use as negative keywords brands who specialise in men's clothing.

6. Analytics
Looking at Analytics gives you behavioural information on searchers for some keywords, although this is limited to keywords you already rank for organically and people who found your site relevant enough to visit (and soon it will exclude people who search Google while logged in). If there is a keyword with high traffic and no conversions, then it could be a good negative keyword.

7. Monitor the Media
Using social media monitoring or Google alerts can show if your brand terms have uses unrelated to you which you didn't previously know about.

Another thing to bear in mind is that you never know when there will be news or a trend that's related to your keywords but not your business – and that could be expensive if there's a sudden explosion of searches that your advert appears on. If you advertise in the travel vertical, for example, then you may need to react to disasters and current events in destination countries, either by adding negative keywords or (in extreme cases) pausing ad groups.

8. Misspelings adn Typiong Mistaakes
People don't have to type carefully into search engines or use precise spellings – they may even be searching to find the right spelling! So you should expect there to be searches with misspellings and typos. If you have 'cheap' as a negative keyword, even on broad-match, you can still find your ads appearing on searches for things that are 'chep' or 'ceap' or 'chap'. So when you've found an important negative keyword you may want to think of its misspellings too. Typo generators can help.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 8 Best Ways to Find Negative PPC Keywords

Related posts:

  1. 9 Ways to Sharpen Up Your Paid Search
  2. High Risk SEO: 33 Ways to Get Penalised by Google
  3. 30 Ways to Use Blekko for Search & SEO

Seth's Blog : Arguing with success

Arguing with success

"You can't argue with success."

Of course you can.

Conventional wisdom says you shouldn't bother. But arguing with failure is dumb. Failure doesn't need to be argued with, it's already failed.

It takes guts to argue with success, guts and insight. And it's the best way to make things better.

 

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joi, 27 octombrie 2011

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Credit Default Swaps Useless as Hedge Against Default; CDS on Greece a Purposeful Sham; Derivatives King Always Wins

Posted: 27 Oct 2011 10:36 AM PDT

As a result of labeling 50% haircuts "voluntary", Credit Default Swap contracts have proven to be useless when it comes to protecting against sovereign default. The serious implication is investors will need to find another way to hedge.

Bloomberg reports Greece Default Swaps Failure to Trigger Casts Doubt on Contracts as Hedge
The European Union's ability to write down 50 percent of banks' Greek bond holdings without triggering $3.7 billion in debt-insurance contracts threatens to undermine confidence in credit-default swaps as a hedge and force up borrowing costs.

As part of today's accord aimed at resolving the euro region's sovereign debt crisis, politicians and central bankers said they "invite Greece, private investors and all parties concerned to develop a voluntary bond exchange" into new securities. If the International Swaps & Derivatives Association agrees the exchange isn't compulsory, credit-default swaps tied to the nation's debt shouldn't pay out.

"It will raise some very serious question marks over the value of CDS contracts," said Harpreet Parhar, a strategist at Credit Agricole SA in London. "For euro sovereigns in particular, the CDS market is likely to remain wary."

This approach may undermine confidence in credit-default swaps as a hedge and force banks to look at other ways of laying off risk, according to Pilar Gomez-Bravo, the senior adviser at Negentropy Capital in London, which oversees about 200 million euros ($277 million).

"If they find a way to avoid a trigger event in the CDS, then people will doubt the value of credit-default swaps in general, leading to more dislocations in the market," she said.

"It is symptomatic of the regulatory and legal goalposts being constantly shifted either randomly or to suit political interests," said Marc Ostwald, a fixed-income strategist at Monument Securities Ltd. in London. "For genuine long-term investors, either financial or non-financial, it's a major liability."
CDS on Greece a Purposeful Sham

Janet Tavakoli writes "Standard" Credit Default Swaps on Greece Are a Sham and It's Not a Surprise
"Customers" that accepted ISDA documentation when buying credit default protection on Greece are now discovering that ISDA defends the position that a 50% discount on Greek debt is "voluntary" and therefore not a credit event for credit default swap payment purposes according to its documents.

First Step in a CDS: Protect Yourself from the ISDA Cartel

As previous sovereign problems have illustrated, the only way to buy protection is to rewrite the flawed ISDA "standard" document and agree to new more sensible terms, before concluding the initial trade. One has to first protect oneself from the ISDA cartel "standard" documentation before one can buy sovereign default protection, or any other protection for that matter.

This isn't the first time investors have been burned in the sovereign credit default swap market. Hedge funds Eternity Global Master Fund Ltd. and HBK Master Fund LP thought they purchased protection against an Argentina default and sued when J.P. Morgan refused to pay off on Argentina credit protection contracts they had purchased.

At issue was the definition of restructuring. Did Argentina's "voluntary debt exchange" in November of 2001 meet the definition of a restructuring? The Republic of Argentina gave bondholders the option to turn in their bonds in exchange for secured loans backed by certain Argentine federal tax revenues. J.P. Morgan claimed this didn't meet the definition of restructuring, at least for the protection it sold to Eternity.

J.P. Morgan's story was different when it wanted to collect on the protection it bought from Daehon, a South Korean Bank. J.P. Morgan claimed its slightly different contract language met the definition of restructuring under the credit default protection contract it had with the South Korean Bank.

In other words, J.P. Morgan made sure its contract language would allow it to get paid when it bought protection and would make it harder for its counterparty to get paid when it sold protection.

Language Arbitrage: You're Not a Sucker, You're a Customer

Banks that play this game call it "language arbitrage." Anyone that bought sovereign credit protection on Greece after accepting ISDA "standard" documentation without modifying the language now finds that they are on the wrong side of an "arbitrage." An arbitrage is a riskless money pump. In this case, it means that money has been pumped out of credit default protection buyers with no risk to their counterparties, the financial institutions that ostensibly sold them credit default protection on Greece.
Derivatives King Always Wins

Note how the "Derivatives King" JP Morgan wins on its contracts, even on both sides of essentially the same bet.

By the way, I have a couple of questions:

  1. What the hell are banks doing in all these derivatives markets in the first place?

  2. Isn't it time banks act like banks instead of arbitrage hedge funds?

Addendum:

Reader Scott writes ...
One look at the ISDA membership should disabuse anyone of the notion that this is some kind of neutral judge. The big banks that write most of the derivative contract also compose the group that defines a credit event. This is not much different than have a baseball pitcher call the balls and strikes. How this is legal is beyond me.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List


Massachusetts Supreme Court Foreclosure "Bombshell" Ruling Nothing But Hot Air

Posted: 27 Oct 2011 09:40 AM PDT

Many people sent links regarding a bombshell ruling in Massachusetts by the Daily Bail that allegedly "made foreclosure sales in the commonwealth over the last five years wholly void."
On Oct. 18th, 2011 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court handed down their decision in the FRANCIS J. BEVILACQUA, THIRD vs. PABLO RODRIGUEZ – and in a moment, essentially made foreclosure sales in the commonwealth over the last five years wholly void. However, some of the more polite headlines, undoubtedly in the interest of not causing wide spread panic simply put it "SJC puts foreclosure sales in doubt" or "Buyer Can't Sue After Bad Foreclosure Sale."

In essence, the ruling upheld that those who had purchased foreclosure properties that had been illegally foreclosed upon (which is virtually all foreclosure sales in the last five years), did not in fact have title to those properties. Given the fact that more than two-thirds of all real estate transactions in the last five years have also been foreclosed properties, this creates a small problem.

The Massachusetts SJC is one of the most respected high courts in the country, other supreme courts look to these decisions for guidance, and would find it difficult to rule any other way in their own states. It is a precedent. It's an important precedent.
Clueless Hype

Let's first dispose of the nonsense that the "Massachusetts SJC is one of the most respected high courts in the country, other supreme courts look to these decisions for guidance, and would find it difficult to rule any other way in their own states."

The more important issue is the way sites trump up these cases with preposterous statements such as "In essence, the ruling upheld that those who had purchased foreclosure properties that had been illegally foreclosed upon (which is virtually all foreclosure sales in the last five years) ..."

The essence of the matter is the Daily Bail preaching clueless hype.

I asked Patrick Pulatie at LFI Analytics to chime in on the significance of the case. Pulatie writes ...
US Bank foreclosed upon the property, but no assignment to US Bank occurred until after the foreclosure. B then bought the property.

The court ruled that the foreclosure was unlawful, like in Ibanez. Therefore, B could not own the property. That said, the court ruled that if the Chain of Title could be corrected, then the foreclosure can be redone.

The author completely misrepresents the ruling like so many do. They claim that gold exists, where there is only lead. Unfortunately, this will only give homeowners more false hope.

What tells you how little the authors know is their claim the MA court is so well respected that other states will use the ruling as guidance.

That is laughable hogwash.
Third Opinion

We have heard from the Daily Bail and from Pulatie. Let's find a neutral party for a third opinion. I just happen to have one.

The Massachusetts Real Estate Law Blog asks What Now? Bevilacqua v. Rodriguez Leaves Toxic Foreclosure Titles Unclear
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issued its opinion today in the much anticipated Bevilacqua v. Rodriguez case considering property owners' rights when they are saddled with defective titles ...

Contrary to some sensationalist headlines [linking to the Daily Bail], the sky is not falling down as the majority of foreclosures performed in the last several years were legal and conveyed good title. Bevilacqua affects those small percentage of foreclosures where mortgage assignments were not recorded in a timely fashion and were otherwise conducted unlawfully. Bevilacqua does not address the robo-signing controversy.

The Bad News

First the bad news. The Court held that owners cannot bring a court action to clear their titles under the "try title" procedure in the Massachusetts Land Court. This is the headline that the major news outlets have been running with, but it was not a surprise to anyone who has been following the case. Sorry Daily Kos, but the court did not take away a property from a foreclosure sale buyer. The buyer never owned it in the first place. If you don't own a piece of property (say the Brooklyn Bridge), you cannot come into court and ask a judge to proclaim you the owner of that property, even if the true owner doesn't show up to defend himself. It's Property Law 101.

The Good News

Next the good news. The court left open whether owners could attempt to put their chains of title back together (like Humpty-Dumpty) and conduct new foreclosure sales to clear their titles. Unfortunately, the SJC did not provide the real estate community with any further guidance as to how best to resolve these complicated title defects.
It should be pretty clear now as to what is hype and what is not.

As far as precedent setting cases from respected courts, please consider 9th Circuit Court Ruling Legitimizes MERS.

As a followup post including an analysis of Assignment of the Deed of Trust in the California case Calvo v HSBC, please consider More on the Coming Wave of Foreclosures.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List


Good News for Bears: Torture by Rumor Ends

Posted: 26 Oct 2011 11:22 PM PDT

A deal has been reached. While many decisions are yet to be made the agreed upon deal looks something like this:

  • A "voluntary" haircut of 50% on Greek debt
  • Bank recapitalization set at 106 billion euros
  • EFSF will use leverage to get to at least 1 trillion Euros
  • Leverage will be via a combination SIV plus Insurance plan
  • Banks get an additional 21 billion Euros in "official aid"
  • The ECB is going to continue to buy Italian bonds come hell or high water

A group of 70 European banks will need to raise 106 billion euros in the next eight months.

Recapitalization Breakdown


  • Greek banks need 30 billion euros
  • Spanish banks need 26.2 billion euros
  • French banks need 8.8 billion euros
  • Italian banks need 14.8 billion euros
  • Remaining countries 26.6


Banks that fail to raise enough capital on the markets will first tap national governments, falling back on the EFSF rescue fund only as a last resort.

The above details pieced together from EU Sets 50% Greek Writedown, $1.4T in Fund and Impasse on Greek Debt Relief Threatens EU Crisis Summit Deal

The fuzziest point in the deal is in regards to what banks get the additional 21 billion Euros in "official aid", with what strings, and where the money comes from.

Good News for Bears

Although many details are yet to be resolved, the bulls got everything they wanted except endless printing by the ECB. However, the sad fundamental situation remains unchanged

  1. No structural problems have been solved
  2. Banks most assuredly need more than 106 billion in recapitalization efforts. The idea that French banks only need to raise 8.8 billion is preposterous.
  3. No investors in their right mind will fund Greek and Spanish banks to the tune of 56.2 billion euros
  4. The haircuts were not voluntary

Instead of the rumor mill of potential actions working to lift the market 24 hours a day for three straight weeks, it will be up to the EU to make the plan work. However, the plan won't work because of point number one above: not a single structural problem has been solved.

Although this rally may run for a while longer on fumes of past rumors and blind hope, it will eventually wear itself out.

Bear market rallies tend to end on good news. What more good news is coming?

The bulls got nearly everything they wanted, putting an end to torture by rumor. What could possibly be better news for the bears?

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List


Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


Halloween Trends 2011 [Infographic]

Posted: 27 Oct 2011 01:22 PM PDT



Halloween is the most favored holiday by AgencyNetters. Every year we have a pretty epic Halloween party full of creative costumes, candy and of course plenty of palatable potions. This year, it's sure to be better than ever. Halloween Trends for 2011. Enjoy!


Source: anidea