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...family's got an entire entertainment and leisure budget," says Michael Pachter, an analyst who tracks video games at the securities firm Wedbush Morgan. "You're going to see a shift from high-cost forms of entertainment to low." Parents may cancel a Christmas ski trip that would cost about $40 per hour, the logic goes, and instead spring for Nintendo's Wii Fit so the family can do some virtual skiing through the long, cold winter at a cost of $1 per hour...
RealtyTrac has about 150 contractors on the ground, collecting data in 2,200 counties, which cover some 90% of households, and the process is just as labor-intensive on the back end. Around 10% of records get tossed each month because the firm's data crunchers can't confirm the addresses. "I chuckle every time I see a new company pop up to provide the definitive answer to how many foreclosures there are," says senior vice president Rick Sharga. "There's as much art to this as science...
When the housing market started to unravel, RealtyTrac was in the right place at the right time. In 2005 the firm began issuing press releases on foreclosure trends to get media attention. It succeeded, and soon people were calling. Among them: New York banking superintendent Richard Neiman, who chairs the state's foreclosure-prevention task force. "If you're going to motivate legislators to change laws and apportion money, you've got to convince them there's a problem," he says. "You've got to start with the data." Collecting and analyzing data from the state's 62 counties would...
...ridiculous and irresponsible." "It was devastating Colorado in terms of consumer confidence and mortgage lending into the state," she says. The Mortgage Bankers Association, which releases well-watched loan-default data of its own, came out swinging as well, with the trade group's chief economist complaining that the firm was "damaging the industry...
...economic slump has meant good news for someone who hasn’t gotten much since the October Revolution: Karl Marx. Apparently, now that capitalism is teetering on wobbly legs, the polemical rhetoric of Das Kapital is looking more and more appealing. Jorn Schutrompf, who manages the German publishing firm Karl-Deitz, claims that “Marx is in fashion again,” and bookstores peddling Marx’s works have reported sales increases of over 300 percent. Even Germany’s Finance Minister Peer Steinbruck recently conceded in the news magazine Der Spiegel that...