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Find Funding for Land Development in Utah

admin — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 01:00:00 +0000

For many dreams, like building a hospital, a resort or even a home, the first step to making the dream a reality is finding and buying the right piece of land. Unfortunately, this is no simple task because land is expensive and becoming increasingly scarce. In the famous movie “Gone with the Wind,” Gerald O’Hara tells his daughter Scarlet the value of land when he says, “Why, land is the only thing worth workin’ for, worth fightin’ for, worth dyin’ for, because it’s the only thing that lasts.” For the truthfulness of this statement all you have to do is look at the price of land today.

Instead of costing a couple cents per acre or nothing at all, as it did when the west was first being settled, a single acre can easily cost several hundred thousand dollars nowadays. With prices like that, it’s easy to see why many people turn to land development firms for additional funding. Getting a land development firm to consider your project can be tricky though, unless you know what you’re doing.

Even if you have never headed a project before, many land development firms will be willing to consider your proposals if they are well-presented and researched. The most important thing to establish when you apply for funding is the value of the land you want to purchase and the value of the project you want to create. After all, those two things function as the collateral and they need to compensate for the risk of lending out millions of dollars. An appraisal is probably the easiest way to establish this information.

Even though you will undoubtedly be trying to impress potential lenders, you need to be sure that they are worthy of your trust and your business before you approach them. To do this, check things like the timeliness of their service, their client history and other projects that they have financed. If they have proved themselves reliable, it’s time to do your homework and make their decision as easy as possible.

If you haven’t found the land you are looking for yet, you might want to consider areas with space available for development. For example, Utah is much less populous than New Jersey so land in Utah will probably be more affordable. Another benefit of choosing Utah for land development is the environment. The dry climate reduces your chances for water damage and bug problems and the nearby mountains and state parks attract outdoor enthusiasts from all over the world. Just make sure, there is a water source nearby.

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Insiders Get Billions And The Common Man Continues To Suffer

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The world’s financial system is as weak now as it has been in many decades. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke has a huge problem on his hands: a very wide-ranging credit freeze up surrounding financial institutions. This is a problem that mere cuts in interest rates cannot cure.

The exceptionally low interest rates of the early and mid-2000s and the continual bailing out by Alan Greenspan of any Wall Street player that got into trouble created enormous temptations to speculate with borrowed funds and throw caution to the wind, completely ignoring risk. Why worry about risk when it’s not your money and even if you get into trouble you can get bailed out? This problem is called moral hazard.

The derivatives speculated by Wall Street players do not have near the value they led us to believe they had. Now we are left in a frantic pursuit to de-leverage in spite of the cost. Unsurprisingly the buyers have thinned out and institutional investors do not want to add to the already puffed up package in their portfolio; particularly now that the real value is evident. So now we are finding ourselves in a liquidity emergency to the extent of which we have not experienced since pre World War II.

Commercial as well as investment banks are sitting on overvalued assets such as mortgages and private equity loans they cannot sell due to being packaged with derivatives of very questionable value. This is a nice way of saying that Wall Street lied about the value and has overpriced them by billions of dollars. Basically this means that they do not have the cash to make new loans and this is killing our credit based economy. For banks and brokers to make their balance sheets stronger by de-leveraging the banks would need to reduce the number of loans on their books. Doing this would overwhelm the economy and turn a bad recession into a long lasting depression.

Hence the bailout by the Fed, in the form of longer-term financing at the discount window. What else can they do? Let the entire financial structure of the world completely freeze up? The Federal Reserve is lending cash to financial institutions while taking as collateral the subprime mortgages and related securities of highly questionable value that cannot be sold in the open market. The Federal Reserve is becoming the buyer of last resort. This is highly inflationary. The financial middlemen are supposed to take the cash borrowed from the Fed and lend it back out again, this time to higher-quality borrowers, but this is not happening. In theory, the way this would work would be a trickle-down effect.

So why don’t we try a trickle-up effect? The bailout will cost at least $1,000,000,000,000. Not sure of that number? That would be one trillion dollars! Instead of giving one trillion dollars of newly created money to the Wall Street players to continue the financial problems we already are facing, why not give that money to the people of America? It will then trickle-up to the Wall Street by stimulating the economy. By giving around $3,200 to every individual in America we may be able to get the money flow back in the right direction. This would mean a family of five would receive $16,000.

Why can’t we do this to help all of America in this way instead of a few Wall Street fat cats? This would help all of America individually as well as the economy. First time home buyers would actually have enough for a down payment, thereby helping the real estate crisis at the same time. Why is it Wall Street should be given a trillion dollars of new money to throw around like they have in the past?

In 2009, Gas Prices Predicted $6.00 Per Gallon

admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:00:00 +0000

As of the day of this writing, the national average price for gasoline is $3.55 per gallon in the US. When gas was under $1.00 the prediction was made by this author it would go to $3.00 per gallon. Here we are with gasoline priced well over $3.00 per gallon, and I am now convinced that the cost of gasoline will reach $6.00 per gallon in the United States at some point during 2009.

There is not much that can be done to prevent that from happening. To understand why, we need to look at the factors that are the causes of the price rise. Basically there are three: supply, demand, and the value of the currency.

Supply is near or at 100% of capacity. There is only so much oil that can be pumped out of the ground. The amount of crude oil that can be pumped daily out of the giant Cantarell oil field in Mexico is declining rapidly. After peaking at 3.82 million barrels per day in 2004, Mexico’s total daily production is falling by as much as 8% per year. North Sea oil output peaked in 1999 at 2.91 million barrels per day. Daily production has since fallen to 1.81 million barrels per day. Similar reductions in daily output have occurred in the United States, Russia, Iran, Argentina, Peru, Columbia, Australia, Turkey, Libya, Egypt, South Africa, Spain, France, Algeria, Pakistan, Yemen, and a host of other countries.

However, not all countries have reached peak. Some analysts claim that Saudi Arabia will not reach peak production for a few more years, while others claim Saudi Arabia is at peak now. Regardless of which analyst is correct, Saudi Arabia is getting close to peak. Brazil, Venezuela, and Iraq have yet to reach peak oil output. However, the amount of spare capacity available in countries that have yet to reach peak oil production does not exceed the declines experienced in countries experiencing declining oil production.

While supply remains constant, demand continues to grow at a steady pace.

For decades, giant US corporations have been moving their manufacturing plants to foreign countries to take advantage of lower wage costs. Since the source of any country’s wealth is it’s natural resources and manufacturing ability, all those countries which have created manufacturing plants are now becoming wealthy. Citizens of those countries are moving from poverty to middle class. In the last 2 years alone Brazil has lifted 20 million citizens from poverty to middle class. China and India have done ten times that amount.

All these new middle class consumers want the lifestyle enhancements common to the middle class: more meat in their diets, better homes, and a means of personal transportation for more distant and frequent travel. All of those require energy.

If supply and demand figures were not enough to cause energy prices to rise significantly, there is another factor as well: the value of the US dollar.

The international value of the dollar has been declining for the past few years. The decline is accelerating due to the subprime mortgage crisis. While this is a topic that requires an entire article to itself, the short version is that the Federal Reserve is diluting the value of the US dollar by creating billions of dollars out of thin air in order to bail out the giant Wall Street firms which have created a financial quagmire.
While the subprime mortgage crisis is very serious, it pales in size compared to the real crisis, which is a result of artificial valuations of structured financial packages that include trillions of dollars of derivatives.

The worlds financial system is freezing up and crumbling as a result. The Federal Reserve has already stated in the recent Bear Stearns case that these firms are too big to fail and will be “rescued”. They are too big to fail because of the derivative contracts that they have issued. If one of these giant firms fails, all of their derivative contracts also fail. That would create a domino effect throughout the world, and the world’s financial system would instantly seize up. This is no small matter.

The Federal Reserve has no choice but to continue to bail out these firms. And the method of “rescue” is to create money out of nothing and loan it into existence to these firms. In the past several months alone, over a quarter of a trillion dollars have been created in bailout money in the United States. This will continue. The result is a constant diluting of the value of the dollar.

When currency is created out of nothing and injected into an economy, it takes a while for the dilution process to occur. The lag time is typically 5 to 8 months. Therefore, the money that has already been created in the spring of this year will cause the negative effects to be felt in the fall and winter of this year.

More bailouts are coming, but I cannot accurately predict the size and speed of those bailouts at this time. Therefore I do not know how high gasoline and energy prices will go. It is a matter of constant monitoring in order to view the current rate of dilution of the currency, and forecasting the results 6 to 9 months into the future.

Based upon what is happening right now, $6.00 gasoline in the US in 2009 is better than an even bet.

Do you know, Why Are Gas Prices So High?