The Guardian 6 February, 2008
Culture and Life
by Constantine Garibov
US mortgage crisis creates ghost town
CLEVELAND, Ohio: The streets are empty. Rubbish rustles down the road past rusted barbecues, abandoned furniture, sagging homes and gardens turned to weeds.
This is Mount Pleasant, a neighbourhood in south eastern Cleveland ravaged by the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
Faded "for sale" signs sit in front of deserted houses. The residents are gone, most after being evicted for missing their mortgage payments. A red, white and blue American flag flies over windows and doors which have been boarded up to keep the drug dealers away.
Thieves have stripped many homes of the plumbing, the doors, the windows, the aluminium siding.
At 9422 Union Avenue, a hand-scrawled sign attached to a window indicates someone lives there: "Please, Used".
After three rings of the bell, Sarah Evans, 60, opens the door with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.
She says she is one of the last people left on the street. And she is on the verge of losing this two-bedroom house in which she has lived for more than 30 years because she simply cannot afford her monthly payments.
She refinanced in 2003, but did not realise the document she signed included provisions to radically increase the interest rate. She stopped making payments in 2006 and shows her unpaid bills totalling US$24,000(AU$27,000). Her bank is in the midst of eviction procedures.
"When folks buy a home they expect to die in it, I guess", she said as she stood outside in the cold. "I had my American Dream but it became a nightmare."
Her words are echoed by the angry barks of the guard dogs pacing behind a chain link fence two houses away that was installed by the new owner — a bank.
The massive parking lot of the Eagle Kinsman Fresh Market is empty.
"Not many folks come anymore. We’re used to it", says a 24-year-old cashier, one of the few in the neighbourhood who managed to hold onto her job.
In the five hours since she started working today she has served just 10 customers. "Maybe you will buy something", she says with a smile.
Then comes customer number 12.
Laura Johnston, 50, says that her street — about 10 minutes away by car — was alive two years ago. Today, half the houses are abandoned.
"Folks could not afford their payments. They were asked to pay loans which doubled. They could not afford it, some lost their job. Lenders were greedy. They threw them out of their homes", she said.
"I’m very upset. I missed my friend Helen. She disappeared overnight. She did not even say goodbye."
For county treasurer Jim Rokakis, the greed of the banks is to blame for this man-made disaster. "All you needed was a pulse to buy a house. Some loans were written with no money down, no proof of buyer’s incomes. They did not even check what people were saying. Most of those folks were jobless", he said in an interview.
"The Mount Pleasant community was the perfect storm: poor folks, unemployed and a desire to get a piece of the American Dream."
Granma
Global financial crisis
ends uni-polar world era
Former Russian Prime Minister, now head of the country’s Trade and Industry Chamber, Yevgeny Primakov, believes that the world economy has bade goodbye to the uni-polar world system dominated by the US.
Speaking at an international forum in Moscow, he said that Russia, China, India and South Korea have helped to consign the hitherto unchallenged US hegemony to history.
The global economy no longer has a single, undisputed leader.
In 2007 China’s contribution to the increase in global gross product (GP) outstripped that of America by three times and in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) China, India, Russia and EU members left America trailing far behind.
In recent years Russia has gained a firmer foothold in the global economy and has joined the international economic mainstream. It is erroneous to say that Russia is just joining the global economic mainstream; however, it must fortify its acquired position, declared Primakov.
At least, two indices in 2007 buttress the claim that Russia is already a full-fledged member of the global economy: First, all investments in the Russian economy increased by 21 percent and foreign investments doubled.
These figures reflect how far Russia has entered the world economy, because Russia is developing on the basis of open business activities, contends Primakov.
The appearance of new and strong economic poles calls for a review of the existing mechanism of influencing world affairs and it is not by accident that at the Moscow forum devoted to finding ways of overcoming the current global financial crisis, Russian Deputy Prime Minister cum Finance Minister, Alexei Kudrin, called for enlarging the G8 to 13 or 14 countries, with the full participation of China, India, Brazil, Egypt, South Africa and several other nations in the work of the G8 which presently only comprises the US, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Russia and Japan.
In view of the increased contribution by developing countries to the global economy, Moscow is calling for quota redistribution of IMF Authorised Capital.
The enhanced role by emerging economies in the IMF will obviously lead to more accountability and predictability on global financial markets.
Voice of Russia