Entries Tagged 'Silicon Valley' ↓

According to a report based on new Census data, last year the homeownership rate amongst Asians fell 1.24% to 59.4% last year. This is worse than the decline of homeownership amongst all the other major ethnic groups.  Some economists quoted in the article were surprised at this development since Asians households in America generally have high income and low debt.   So why has this group dropped out of homeownership the most?

The article suggested that the effect may be regional because most Asians in America live in California, which is one of the states hardest hit by declining prices and the recession.  This is definitely a solid theory.  Asians are not immune to job losses and for many families the loss of even one job means that the  next mortgage payment is no longer affordable.  As I wrote in this article about Chinese/Asian  immigrants and real estate, Asians often ignore the basic debt to income ratio guidelines to buy a home because they figure they will save money on everything else.  If two people were paying 58% of their income on a mortgage then one job loss definitely puts the nail on the coffin.  California currently has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, and since the Asian community is concentrated here in California we are affected as a whole.

Next I think the speculative mania during the housing bubble was much more intense amongst the Asian community.  This is just my anecdotal experience, but my whole family and Indian coworkers talked about real estate pretty much 24/7.  These people mostly had significant amounts of savings for a downpayment, great credit, and all they were seeing is that the real estate market went up 20%  a year while stocks were not exactly catching up.   This prompted a lot of people to buy real estate that they did not even need.  Some of them intended to flip the properties quickly, and some became landlords with the intention to flip a bit later.   Another thing that spread the fire is that Asians talk about personal finance amongst family and friends very often so more and more people jumped on the bandwagon.  There are also folks who used their homes as ATMs to buy more property because they figured that they were  making a sound  investment.  For the most part, the Asians I have encountered that did all of these real estate deals knew exactly what they were getting into, and they were all sure that they were being smart about their money.  The phrase I heard the most often were that “real estate prices in the Bay Area will never go down” and “real estate is the best investment”.  I know that many non-Asian people did the same thing, but I feel that the Asian community got into real estate much more because owning real property is high on their priority lists.

Now after the crash, I actually do not personally know any Asian families that lost their homes.  I do know several that are fairly underwater, but they are still faithfully paying their debt because they are still employed.  Believe it or not real estate is still a really hot topic for my parents and their friends.  Now they are all talking about scooping up cheap properties as rental properties.  Now what I hear from my mom is similar to the following, “this property sold for $400,000 in 2005!  Now it’s 70% off! Positive cashflow!!!”.   I responded to her, “mom, remember when I told you a few years ago that real estate could come down by 40% and you didn’t believe me?”  She then said, “It’s more than 40% down!!”   I guess the obsession will never end.      Anyway, I wish them luck, and I hope some of the decline in homeownership was voluntary and not due to foreclosures.

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Earlier this year California already raised income taxes by .25%, but now it seems that our income taxes will go up a little bit once again. This time it is due to deflation and it is not widely publicized.

This change will pretty much affect everyone who pays any income taxes because tax brackets are being pushed lower due to deflation.  In this chart from the LA Times you can see how the brackets are changing this year.    For us the increase will be around $150 on top of the extra 0.25% we are already going to pay.  It is not a huge deal, but it is interesting because this instance of lowering the tax bracket is very rare.

On the flip side, it is possible that deflation will lower the assessments of property taxes for Californian homeowners next year.    This depends on the California Consumer Price Index numbers in October.  If this happens then Californians may see their property taxes go down a little bit, but it is also not significant considering that the deflation number is around 0.7% right now.  So on a $300,000 assessment with a 1.1% property tax rate, the 0.7% deflation will save a homeowner around $23 for the entire year.

I don’t think most Californians will feel the tax changes due to deflation, but it is possible that deflation could affect federal tax brackets next year, too.  Additionally, the IRS uses annual CPI to figure out limits for things such as IRA and 401k contributions, so those limits may not increase.  Although the deflation rate is quite small now, it is definitely something to keep an eye on.

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So by now I think everyone knows that Microsoft made a “deal” with Yahoo to run search on Yahoo websites.  This is still waiting for regulatory approval, but chances are it will be fine since the two behemoths are not exactly merging and the combined search market of Yahoo and Microsoft is only around 35%. The word from inside Yahoo Search is that they will keep on developing their search engine for now while they wait for the final approval.  No one is fired as of now but most people in search are understandably dejected that their product is essentially being scrapped.  Personally, I think this is a perfect time for the codemonkeys in Yahoo to band together and use their search engine for one last hurrah.

I used to work for a leading shopping comparison engine that has  significantly less traffic than Yahoo, but that is where I learned about how much money a website could potentially make even if it has a miniature slice of the giant internet pie. (At that time the company I worked for had only 0.2% of all search traffic).   The Yahoo search engine supposedly has 20% of the search market, so the codemonkeys that control it really have some serious power.  Here are some of the ways they could “experiment” with the search engine in the next few months for their own profit:

• Change search results for products to websites that pay commissions and embed their own affiliate codes in the links.  By my estimate from my past experience in shopping comparison, these Yahoos only need to sign up as an affiliate for just a few major merchants and leave it running for one day to generate millions.
• Create websites with various content and manually rank them high on the Yahoo search engine.  Drive traffic to these personal websites and get advertising dollars.  This probably would not make money as quickly as tactic one, but it will build up a website very quickly and possibly generate revenue for years to come.

Are these tactics unethical?  I don’t think they are if the search engine still finds results that are relevant to the person making the query. In fact, both Microsoft and Google manually rank many search results for various reasons so it isn’t exactly a democratic process anyway.  The creators of the search engines can and do control what you see on top.  Is it an inappropriate use of company property?  Perhaps, but it may also be beneficial to Yahoo to see the results of the experiment and see if there is a business opportunity there. The worst thing that could happen is that the Yahoos will be fired.

The chances of this actually happening is fairly low since it would require  source and data changes, and releases of software the size  of the Yahoo search engine  would take the coordination of a good sized team of engineers.  When you have to involve so many people in such a project to subvert a giant corporation it is not likely to happen.   However, if they manage to actually do it correctly and let it last for a few months until the Yahoo search algorithms are taken offline then  they will probably all be rich enough to retire.    Anyway, if this happens and Yahoo search employees retire with millions in commissions or advertising money I would ask that they let me write the book on it.  It would be the ultimate Office Space sequel, and it would be hilarious.

Now my  serious comment on this whole deal is  that it is better for the internet as a whole that Yahoo is consolidating its search with Microsoft instead of Google.  If Google owned 85% to 90% of the search market then they will wield even more power than they do now.  With that much market share Google will not have any incentive to improve their product, and they will have way too much power over what internet publishers do.  Even now Google is able to bully website owners into drop certain types of advertising with the threat of banning from their search engine.  Competition is good, and  I was hoping that Yahoo would beat Google for a while since I have been using Yahoo since it was still hosted at akebono.stanford.edu.  Right now I sincerely hope that the Yahoo Search employees do well after this whole deal is over and perhaps start a few new companies here.

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The latest news is that the unemployment rate in the Silicon Valley is now at 11.2% and this is the highest unemployment rate on record for our area.  From a survey of my friends and family it seems that everyone is a bit unsettled about their jobs right now.  Here is what I found.

Many of the large tech companies around here already went through rounds of publicized and internally announced layoffs and a good majority has had pay freezes or paycuts starting as early as late last year.  These are all public companies that you probably have heard of.  Basically noone I know in a large company has had a raise this year with the exception of people at Lockheed Martin.  Lockheed is doing fine since is a defense contractor and we are in the midst of war.  The government cut some of their contracts and added others.    The largest organization in California is the state of California itself, and we all know how terrible the state coffers are right now.  Pretty much all public employees I know are  getting paycuts in the form of furloughs and some are being laid off.  Banking is another industry that got hit extremely hard for obvious reasons.  For example, we have a Downey Savings, WaMu, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America all on the same block.  Two of those banks are technically dead.

On the flip side the friends I know that work for smaller corporations still managed to get raises and bonuses this year.  This is not to say that smaller companies are doing better than larger corporations as a whole, but I think that in general smaller companies have less fat to trim than large corporations.  Most startups tend to pay less than large companies, and have a leaner team to operate everything.    For the most part raises are rare this year, and they are also much smaller than previous years.   Many small companies depend on the spending of large corporations so there is really a trickle down effect.   Personally I have no idea if my company is giving out raises, but I am not expecting anything.  I would seriously be happy with a 1% raise just to cover the increase in state taxes.  The hubby got a small 3.75% raise and I am pretty happy about that even though it is smaller than any previous raise.

Anyway, the greater economy is really out of our control, and I am pretty grateful that we still have jobs.  However, I think everyone should try to give themselves a bonus or raise through saving or earning more money.  I have done several things to essentially give ourselves a raise this year such as refinancing our mortgage, renegotiating our rent, and continuing to blog.  Reducing our mortgage and rent is basically saving us 3300 after tax money every year, and that is significant.  My blogging income is also much higher than last year as my articles age and I have a bigger collection of articles.  These changes make me a little less uneasy about the general doom and gloom atmosphere we are in, and I am hopeful that the American economy will recover eventually.

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The Golden States is not so glittery right now.  It seems that the special election yesterday went just as I expected, the propositions to extend taxes, borrow from the lottery, and divert funds were all rejected.  The only thing that passed was 1F, which restricts raises on state legislators, and this would not save much money at all.  So now what?  Many are saying that California will need a federal bailout since the state is facing a $21 billion deficit.  Here are some of my thoughts on the issue.

My feelings on a federal bailout is somewhat mixed.  First of all, I feel that Californians deserve some payback from the federal government because for years we have been paying more taxes than what we get back.  As I have written before, the Tax Foundation estimates that California gets 79 cents for every dollar we ship to the Feds.  This has been going on for many years, and California’s GDP is by far the largest in the Union, so perhaps California deserves to be bailed out due to its contributions to this nation.

Of course, if the bailout happens due to the reason I cited above, then other states like New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey may just line up for a bailout as well since they have also been getting a lot less federal money back than what they put in.  All the other states would of course be quite furious.  The bailout may also make California more dependent on the federal government, and that
is never a good thing.

One big reason why I would be against such a bailout is that California’s main problem comes down to the simple fact that the entire system is living beyond its means and throwing more money at it is not the solution.  The legislators do not seem to know how to budget for the future.  It seems that the budgets are based on an assumption that things are always going up, and as a result programs are established in the boom years and never cut in the lean years.  Californian voters also hate to cut any services they already have and also hate taxes so the balance between income and spending becomes out of whack.

Someone at the top has to look at the state programs right now line by line and
cut anything that looks redundant and useless. The state’s credit ratings are not exactly stellar so the only choice is to cut things as soon as possible.  I actually support Governor Schwartzenegger’s effort to cut services and state employees right now because there is really no other choice.  In lean times like these individual families live without luxuries such as eating out or even birthday presents, and the state needs to do the same.
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