The Real Estate Weblog

According to a recent article in the USA Today online newspaper,
the DEA has been escalating it’s already somewhat intense attacks on marijuana sales that are legal under California law at this point in time and yet are at the same time
 not legal under federal law. Can anyone say ‘Cheech & Chong in Da house’? Essentially, the Drug Enforcement Agency  has been issuing search warrants on several marijuana dispensaries in Southern California.
Even as the agents were pushing in, the L.A. City Council voted unanimously to (tentatively at least) approve a 1 year moratorium on more medical marijuana stores, which have quickly grown in number over the past 2 years or so.
All in all, government officials have calculated that there are about four hundred or so office operations which are currently selling medical marijuana in L.A. County, which is up from about twenty just 2 years ago,
 DEA Special Agent Sarah Pullen stated. Officials have claimed that the sales have become a source for recreational pot users, nor just individuals with a medical condition that could require it, such as a loss of appetite, for instance.
According to the USA Today report, perhaps the most severe threat to the Golden State’s marijuana sales came in a letter recently from the DEA to one hundred and fifty property owners or managing landlords letting them know one of their tenants is operating a marijuana dispensary on the property.
This is obviously breaking federal law. By the way if you happen to reside in L.A. or Southern California generally you should consider the offices of Ehline Law at Orange County serious personal catastrophic injury attorneys
They come highly recommended.

A July 17 news article out of L.A. from the LAWFUEL (also known as the legal news wire) website reported that
Marshall Reddick Real Estate Network Corporation, or MRREN, which is a high profile California real estate investor club, as well as eleven additional person & businesses
in the real-estate and lending sectors based in the states of Florida & Ohio were named in a legal suit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court pertaining to a possibly
 fraudulent real-estate-investment involving the sales of houses in Florida.
In this suit filed by the Law Offices of Andrew M. Wyatt, an L.A. law firm, the Irvine, California-based MRREN as well as it’s head Marshall Reddick, plus others
  were cited with some eleven counts of illegal activities. These named activities included Fraud; Racketeering as well as Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act; Misleading Advertising and several others as well
According to the said suit, Reddick, who used to be an economics teacher, had built his name through varios seminars held at certain colleges and universities throughout the country. MRREN has about eighty thousand odd members, of which approximitely fifty percent
have actually bought property through its system of “armchair investing.” This organization claims to have a network of high end developers, builders as well as lenders who are experiences and reliable, reassuring the participating investors.
Because of the builder’s failure to begin construction, the plaintiffs were declared in default by the lenders. Besides negative credit reports, Mosner and Hidalgo are possibly also liable for extensive monetary damages.
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According to a news article on the Free Internet press website,
a federal judge issued an injunction which at least temporarily stopped the acquisition of assets. United States District Court Judge William B. Shubb stated that California was not giving “constitutionally adequate notice {prior to} accepting or taking title to property.”
Some have claimed that the state government does not attempt to locate individuals who have misplaced or otherwise  forgotten about their property.
All in all, California’s “unclaimed property” law produces some $400 million in yearly funds, not exactly pocket change,
even for this state, which is by itself the seventh largest economy in the world in terms of GDP.
The city of Los Angeles alone has an economy which is bigger than the whole country of Mexico after all. Incidentially, if you are in the greater Southern California are and you you need lega assistance by all means look at Where to find Los Angeles and Orange County injury lawyers
In any case, the story pointed out an interesting fact, that the state of California contracts out financial “bounty hunters” or auditors who are basically hired to comb through records at various banks, escrow firms and insurance firms (and other places as well) to locate dormant accounts. These firms are usually paid a commision or ‘bounty’ of between six and twelve percent of what they locate.
Pretty nice racket they have going on there. As the state recently came under pressure to balance its troubled budget, efforts to find property owners gradually diminished to the point where the
locator unit was completely disbanded around 1985 or so, and then through the 1990s and the early part of this century the Legislature gradually reduced the amount of funds the controller could spend.
Ultimately, notices to the public were actually restricted to generalized newspaper spots advising individuals to contact the controller if they thought they had unclaimed property.
In addition, state residents were also given less and less time to claim their property before it was taken.
“It became unrestrained looting,” stated state Senator Tom McClintock, a Republican out of Thousand Oaks.
Even when the state does make amends, however, Californians may end up being shortchanged, according to the Free Internet press report.

According to MoneyNews.com as reported by the New Max network,
The Federal Reserve left its target Fed funds rate unchanged at 5.25 percent for the 8th straight meeting. The latest meeting happens to mark a whole year since the Fed last adjusted rates.

This puzzling inaction over the last year has come even though inflation has been rising and the overall economy dipping a bit. And it’s looking increased assured that Bernanke & Co.’s inaction may very well lead to a bout of stagflation, which of course is a mixture of increased inflation and recession.
It is not a pretty mixture, unfortunately. On the whole, inflation has been consistently growing since October of 2006, unfortunately.
Furthermore, News Max reported, GDP has slowed down over the last year to a rate of only 0.7 percent in the first quarter of 2007. Ouch, that really hurts.
The Fed is holding out hopes that inflation will begin to slwo down and that economic growth will be “moderate” this year, picking up in the second half.
Is that a pipe dream? probably not, but even the Fed has said that the housing slump and it’s effect overall will be worse than previously expected. “The correction of the housing sector was likely to continue to weigh heavily on economic activity through most of this year - somewhat longer than previously expected”. This statement was taken from the Fed’s May 9 meeting.
MoneyNews.com believes that the Fed is basically ignoring the probable threat of stagflation. It would “rather watch as the 2 economic disasters duke it out with each other”, as they said. Obviously, there are no real winners when it comes to stagflation. It is truly the worst of both worlds.