Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
RealtyTrac reported Thursday foreclosure and home-sale information for September and the third quarter of the year, showing an extraordinarily weak housing market.
Here are just a few data points:
Banks are repossessing more homes. That is, of course, difficult for families, but ultimately important for the housing market, as banks take the houses back, resell them and clear their books. But the foreclosure fraud crisis is stymieing and slowing that process, in a way that might cause home prices to slide six months or a year from now.
Why? Rather than selling repossessed homes, banks are holding them — and as foreclosures work through the system, that pool of houses will grow. Eventually, though, when the fraud crisis is worked out, banks will start pushing that backlog of houses onto the market. That will flood the housing market with properties, leading to, analysts fear, another nationwide decline in housing prices. (This is, in part, why the White House is resisting a national moratorium on foreclosure: Nobody wants to seize the entire housing market, one-third of which is comprised of foreclosed properties.)
Nobody quite knows how the foreclosure fraud crisis will shake out. But housing analysts and Wall Street are worried that while prices might go up in the short term (with fewer houses on the market), they will drop in the long term.
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