Crooked lawyers? Say it ain’t so!

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The post below is copied from my other blog, Restating the Obvious Maui, at The Maui News. For Kamaaina Loan blog, the key point to add, if you are a borrower, is that pawn loans are “non-recourse loas, which means that if you do not repay, the pawnbroker can keep your collateral, but he cannot go after any of your other goods or income. He cannot ask the courts to make you pay.

And he does not report your default to a credit reporting agency. Something to think about if you have ever had trouble repaying a loan in the past.

* * *

The NY Times has a story about the New York attorney general going after corrupt practices of buyers of bad consumer debt. If you have consumer debt, it’s worth your time (and one of your 10 monthly Times looks if you are not a subscriber) to read.

When I say “going after,” I mean candy-assed sweetheart settlements, amounting to mere hundreds of thousands in frauds that appear to total billions. And no hint of sanctions against the lawyers involved for their culpability in perpetrating frauds upon the courts.

Eric Schneiderman is no Eliot Spitzer.

But unlike mortgage foreclosure lawsuits, consumer debt collection cases often play out far from public view, consumer lawyers say, because borrowers seldom show up in court to contest the suits.
As a result, an estimated 95 percent of debt collection lawsuits result in default judgments against borrowers, an automatic victory for the debt buyers that enables them to garnishee consumers’ wages or freeze bank accounts.

That’s half true. I’ve never seen a debtor show up at Circuit Court to contest a credit card collection action. There are typically 3 to 6 in a morning session. (These are usually suits by the lender not by a buyer of bad debt.)

But I’ve seldom seen anybody show up to contest a real estate foreclosure action either, at least in the years since the Crash of ’08.

In either case, very often the borrower has left Maui long before the lender goes to court.

(Style points to the Times copy editor for getting the correct verb — to garnishee, not to garnish.)

#mauiloan #mauipawn #mauiborrow #borrow

Farewell to 2014, a ‘meh’ year for gold

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At Kamaaina Loan we look forward to 2015, because gold has got to have a better year than the one it just had.

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Of course, we make loans and buy gold whether it is up or down, but like most people (bears excepted) we like the price to be up. That allows us to lend our customers more, or pay them more for their gold. They like that and we like it.

Gold started the year around $1230 an ounce. (The charts are available from Kitco.com.) In March it made a run up to $1380, but on the last day of the year it swooned, finishing at a disappointing $1182.

Well, it’s a new year and a fresh start and we wish you well and hope to see you sometime. We will deal for gold, however you want, and as always offer the best deals on the island, with aloha.

Hauoli makahiki hou!

Cliff Slater was right

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Honolulu rail transit is going to be a disaster. It is no surprise that the cost overrun is already estimated at $500 million.

Still worse, Honolulu is thinking of plundering TheBus to cover TheRail. Honolulu once had a good bus service. No longer. And raiding the modernization fund will just destroy what’s left of it.

Extending the excise tax surcharge to forever for Oahu is also under consideration.

Expect someone in the Legislature to propose extending it to the Neighbor Islands.

Note to Joe Souki: Do not allow it.

#maui

New price: $500,000,200

New price: $500,000,200

Bad for Russia, good for gold

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When asked about the direction gold will take, Big Rich always says, “It will go up, or it will go down, or it will stay the same.” Seldom does it do both so enthusiastically during one 24-hour period than it did Monday and today, however. As Bloomberg News reports:

Gold rebounded from yesterday’s biggest drop this year as investors sought a haven amid turmoil in emerging market economies and falling commodities.

Russia’s ruble plunged to a record low after the country’s largest interest-rate increase in 16 years failed to revive confidence in the currency. The Turkish lira also tumbled to an all-time low.

Your Christmas (or Hanukkah) present is you don’t have many Turkish lira. Lucky you.

(Silver did not get the same kind of love. When nervous people with money look for comfort, they don’t look to silver — usually.)

The New York Times has much more about why gold did the big turnaround. It’s the ruble. It was less than 20 years ago that Russia defaulted, bringing down Long-term Capital Management and its two Nobel prize-winning advisers who didn’t understand that things can change on a dime — or 10 kopecks.

The economic news had another victim not mentioned in the news reports: Obama haters. Remember how they were sure that Obama’s “soft power” tactics were making the United States a pitiful has-been? Well, the five countries that are subject to US (and to some extent international) economic sanctions are all on the verge of economic collapse: Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba.

It might not be a great idea to collapse countries with nuclear weapons, but the sanctions were meant to have an effect and they are having it.

As always, Kamaaina Loan is ready to buy or sell gold for you at whatever the day’s price is. We don’t care about the ruble.

#mauipawn #mauiretail

 

 

 

 

The people’s bankers

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It has been 80 years since the Pecora hearings exposed how big banks work against the public interest. New Deal regulations limited some of the worst depredations and, most importantly, initiated the longest period in history without a financial panic.

Since 1980, the trend has been to regulate less and less, or not at all. In 2008 the country realized the benefits of that policy with a giant crash.

This week the Senate held a hearing on “regulatory capture,” which means the regulators get too cozy with the banks. The New York Times headlined:

New York Fed Chief Faces Withering Criticism at Senate Hearing

So that even what restraints on banks’ antisocial practices remain in law are nullified. One way that happens is through “revolving door” hiring of former regulators by banks they used to oversee, with expectable bad outcomes.

Pawn shops are regulated, too, but there is no revolving door between America’s 12,000 pawn shops and federal and state regulatory agencies.

Just sayin’.

Pawnbrokers are the people’s bankers.

#mauipawn #mauigold

‘Getting the chair,’ but in a good way

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From Norwich, Conn., we learn of a pawnbroker who took the old advice and made lemonade from his lemons.

According to WTNH television, it began 5 years ago when Phil Pavone of A-Z Pawn bought a couple of motorized wheelchairs, expecting to resell them. They didn’t move, so he had another thought.

Kamaaina Loan blog called Pavone to get the rest of the story, with more perspective from pawnbroking operations than WTNH’s story provided:

It turns out, there’s more to creating a mobility project than taking in chairs by one door and handing them out at another. Pavone started by running newspaper ads, asking anyone with a disability to write or email him about their problem and how a chair would help.

chair

He got 60 submissions.”I heard from people who had been homebound for years. . . .  You cannot believe how many flippin’ people fall between the cracks of eligibility. It’s a disaster.”

Pavone, a cancer survivor, says he understands what it means to be sick. He went out and bought four more chairs to give away.

From there, it grew, but not without a big push from him. “The most expensive part of the whole thing was getting the word out.” He advertised heavily in newspapers and on television for two years.

Now that he is established as “the go-to guy” in his area, the chairs come in to him as donations or inexpensive purchases. The program costs him around $10,000 a year.

A team of volunteers refurbishes the chairs, which usually amounts to no more than a new battery or a charger. A battery distributor provides batteries at cost.

Then he and his volunteers match the chair to the applicant: by weight (up to 250-300 pounds; or over 300); right or left-hand controls. Occasionally, a recipient will require a tilting chair to keep legs elevated.

“It’s not a tax writeoff,” says Pavone, who has two shops, one in Florida.”It’s about looking in the frickin’ mirror and liking what you see.”

He keeps his “Gift of Mobility” campaign going year-round. Sometimes he installs a chair in his shop with a placard, asking for donations of no-longer-needed chairs.

Then, about this time of year, he advertises for more stories. (He asks and gets special rates on this advertising.) His volunteers fix up the chairs and a few days before Christmas they lend pickup trucks to deliver chairs to recipients who cannot come to A-Z Pawn.

As of Veterans Day, he had “at least 40-45 chairs” to present, and another 11 or so being spruced up and probably to be ready by donation day (around Dec. 21).

You can learn more about Gift of Mobility, with links to Youtube videos of past campaigns, here.

#mauipawn #mauiretail

 

Crazy for love, maybe?

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Mooncalf

Mooncalf

I think this guy wanted to be caught:

Police found that the suspect (in a burglary of a Black River Falls, Wis, pawn shop) cut himself on the broken glass and left blood evidence inside the store. Police collected samples of the blood and processed them as evidence, along with the pipe the suspect used to break in.

During the investigation, Black River Falls police developed information about an individual who had been involved in a domestic abuse case who fled on a bicycle outside of the City. It was believed that the same suspect, Colvin, might be involved in both incidents.

Black River Falls police worked with the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office and found Colvin at the Black River Falls Gaming Casino. Police said Colvin “was wearing a cluster of decorative rings on his fingers and had a fresh cut to his hand.” Colvin was taken into custody and medically treated for his cut hand.

And speaking of burglary, I was looking over the Maui police reports of stolen items taken in burglaries in October. (They give us the list in case someone wants to sell one, which happens but not often.)

It was a short list, which is good. But the number of items that the owner had kept a serial number for was even shorter: One.

Not all burglars are love-stricken mooncalfs who want to be punished like Shane Colvin of Black River Falls. (And that’s Shane Colvin not the singer Shawn Colvin, who in any case is a girl.) Most want to get away with your stuff, and you make their work easier and the police work harder by not recording serial numbers, and taking photographs and putting secret marks on your stuff.

Pawnbrokers do take “reported stolen” lists seriously because in many jurisdictions they take the loss if a stolen item is found in their inventory. But “two old silver coins” — which was on the Maui watch list in September — isn’t helpful.

 

#maui #mauiloan #mauigold

Wow! Sure didn’t see that coming

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At the Kamaaina Loan blog we have been following with amusement and fascination the ups and downs of the gold price over the past few weeks. One minute the price jumps to $1250 and a day or two later it’s under $1200 and then back up again.

Sometimes the moves can be attributed to some pretty obvious doings in the world economy, sometimes the leaps and slides seem practically uncaused. But the price has gyrated around the $1225 that the gurus at Goldman Sachs last year were predicting for this period.

But who anticipated that late last week the Japanese central bank would decide to pump a lot of yen into the deflated Japanese economy, the latest in a series of failed attempts to bring that sector out of deflation? (Although the US Federal Reserve and many other wise heads have been worrying for years about inflation, deflation is the big problem. Economists know how to control inflation but — as the experience of Japan over the past 25 years and of the whole world economy in the ’30s demonstrated — deflation is the really intractable problem.)

The American stock market went crazy, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average spiking to a record high. Just why the transfer of ownership of a small fraction of Japanese equities from private (mostly Japanese) hands to Japan government hands should make American stocks so much more valuable is hard to figure.

But the effect on gold and its poor stepsister silver — once the stock market had reacted — was in line with conventional thinking: both fell off a cliff.

Gold got down to a four-year low and shortly before the market reopened today buyers were offering a mere $1172. Silver cratered. It has been a long while since it broke under $17. Today it is flirting with $15.

#mauipawn #mauigold #mauiretail

Gold gyrates

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The price of gold changes every day, sometimes by quite a lot — a $25-an-ounce move is not unusual. But it doesn’t usually vary so much within a day that Kamaaina Loan has to adjust the amount it offers on gold loans or purchases.

Today, as gold continues a strange series of gyrations, a midday adjustment began to look like a good idea. (In the end, we didn’t change, though it might have cost us a few bucks.)

As our day began, gold was selling at just under $1227 an ounce.So that’sd where we pegged our offers for this day. Within less than 2 hours, it was down to $1209. It got as low as $1207 before rallying to around $1211 just before the market closed in New York City (which happens just after 11 a.m.Hawaii time).

The folks at Kitco, who offer a daily smorgasbord of gold news and opinion, thought the move — the biggest in 3 weeks — was an unhappy reaction to the release of the minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee. Kitco thinks gold traders think higher interest rates will be bad for gold (although, amusingly, you can find every shade of opinion on their website), for reasons that are opaque to us in the pawnshop.

Still, it has been a more than usually exciting couple of weeks for people who watch gold prices. As Big Rich always says, “Gold will go up, or it will go down, or it will stay the same.”

 

So, what did gold do today?

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tropical-beach-wallpaper-1920x1200

Not much,.

Yesterday, Kamaaina Loan blog wondered if gold would track the stock market, which in theory it sort of does — gold up when stocks fall and vice versa.

Over the past couple years,. stocks have reached record highs and gold has taken a swan dive, off around 30%. But is the relationship real?

Recently, the stock market has been gyrating like a yo-yo, and gold prices have risen and fallen, but not so violently.

So, if we understood what is going on, we wouldn’t have to work so hard in the pawn business and could lie on the beach all day. But we don’t.

Tuesday,. stocks were way up: the Dow was up 1.12%, the S&P 500 1.19% and the Nasdaq 1.75%. Those are all big movements for a single trading day, especially the Nasdaq.

What did gold do? It went up, by 0.22%. Not down. And when the spot market reopened, after the stock exchanges were closed and the traders had had a chance to digest the mood, gold did go down, but by a mere 0.02% (only 30 cents on a quote of $1227.50, barely noticeable).

Well, to heck with it, we’re off to the beach anyway.

#Mauipawn #mauigold #mauiretail