Sunday Morning Reading

The Palm Beach Post has a great story today about foreclosures in Palm Beach County and along the Treasure Coast. It's an eye-opening account of life at Ground Zero of the bursting housing bubble. You can find it here: http://tinyurl.com/2o62ye

Here is the opening ...

You don't see the paperwork. You won't see the panic.

But behind doors in Palm Beach County and along the Treasure Coast, from the meanest fixer-upper to the glitziest gated community, thousands of homeowners are struggling to make the mortgage.

They are failing.

Between Jan. 1 and July 1, homeowners in Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties defaulted on 4,318 mortgages worth $1.05 billion. That's a 311 percent increase in defaults from the 1,051 recorded during the same period in 2006.

Loans in tony new communities crashed just as disastrously as homes in Counterpoint Estates, the aging middle-income subdivision just down the road from Versailles' golden gates. Condos that once generated traffic jams of eager buyers went dark.

Along some streets, next-door neighbors defaulted like dominoes: Waterway Cove in Wellington; Gazetta and Cresta Way in the Terracina subdivision in West Palm Beach; Strawberry Lakes Circle west of Lake Worth; Gull Road in Palm Beach Gardens.

Dry-as-dust court filings and bumper crops of rent-to-own yard signs merely hint at how deep the problems run. The $1.05 billion would buy the net assets of Florida Atlantic University — twice. And the number of soured mortgages adds up to one for every man, woman and child in Juno Beach.

Millions of dollars in mortgages collapsed before a single payment was made. Borrowers holding pre-construction loans defaulted on dirt before homes could come out of the ground.

The whole thing is worth reading. Point your browser to http://tinyurl.com/2o62ye

More good Sunday reading ...

1)A Universe Without Time? a paper by a group of astrophysicists in Spain has been making the rounds on the web since it suggests the Universe might be losing the dimension we call time. What we call existence, or as "Doc Brown" would call the Space-Time Continuum, is composed of 3 dimensions of space (X, Y and Z) and 1 dimension of time (T).

But what if the time dimension changed? What if the dimension of time became space-like?

2) If all this talk of Branes and alternate universes is over your head, you might want to check out the BBC's great introduction to string theory and parallel universes. What, you thought the universe ran on quantum mechanics? Dude, that is so 20th Century! Did you know, for example, that the latest (and highly regarded) theory posits that gravity does not originate in our universe, but "leaks in" from another universe? Freaky-deaky!

3) Paging Mad Max! Atlanta could run out of water in three months. Seriously, as little as three months to the Apocalypse in Atlanta, as Lake Lanier runs dry. If you think people freak out waiting in line to buy a Wii, just wait until they try and turn on the water tap in their kitchen sink and nothing comes out but air.

4) Treasury Debt Sales May Rise 50 Percent as Budget Deficit Suddenly Swells Sales of Treasuries may increase for the first time since 2004 as the U.S. federal budget deficit expands, jeopardizing the biggest bond rally in five years.

5) IMF Said to Cut 2008 Growth OutlookThe Washington-based group now expects global economic growth of 4.8% for next year ... The new global forecast was down by 0.4 percentage point from the 5.2% predicted in July, before global financial markets were shaken by the fallout from the subprime mortgage lending crisis in the United States. The crisis has sparked a credit squeeze, raising the cost of borrowing.The IMF will also cut its growth forecast for the U.S. to 1.9% from 2.8% previously, and for Canada to 2.3% from the earlier 2.8%

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