Yes, you can ask your bank to produce the title. They may not get back to you (especially if they do not have it), so it's hard to know where the green light is. Certainly, if the show you a clear chain of title, then you need to pay. However, just because they can't produce it now doesn't mean they wont find it when you default.

Overall it has been gutted, offshore outsourced. It's last way down to 9-12% of the total U.S. economy. That said, what we need is a new manufacturing policy which promotes, projects, increases the U.S. manufacturing base and this report, buried under the total numbers at least shows signs of life.

PCE, which I didn't get to, also increased 0.2%, which will increase Q3 GDP.

The laws on mortgage default vary by state. My neighbors just went through this, w/o the help of an attorney. NOT a good idea. They're in worse shape financially now than they were before they walked away from their home and mortgage.

So who's buying these capital goods? Given all the other statistics on the economy, it seems reasonable to conclude they are being exported. Also, where are the goods being manufactured? a large percentage of computer and communication equipment are manufactured in China. Does Apple's China made i-pads, pods, etc. show up in this report because Apple is a domestic company? If not, what companies are manufacturing computers at such a prodigious rate?
Intuitively, these numbers don't seem to correlate with jobs, consumption, etc. numbers.

Can someone answer this question -

Is it possible to know in advance whether you'd be free and clear if you defaulted? Can you ask your bank if they can produce the title, and if they cannot, is this a green light to go ahead and default?

The US Government offshore outsources jobs all the time. Consider a highly specialized, highly technical and rapidly evolving area like Next Generation DNA sequencing. One of the more recent sequencing contracts posted on Fed Biz Ops was given to BGI (Beijing Genomics Institute). I'm sure there was an explanation somewhere as to why they were the only qualified company, but you've got to be suspicious. There are several qualified businesses offering those services in the US, but local wage and benefit cost structures are not competitive with China. So the US Gov contracts the job to China. I can't help but believe this is a "monkey see, monkey do" tragedy, where the line between government and corporations has largely evaporated and they are now both engaged in the very same game of labor arbitrage. So what's the purpose of advocating a government program to invest in high technology jobs that the government will turn right around and offshore? That's a snake eating its tail issue and until the cycle is broken, it's not going to happen. The people giving out these contracts just see it as getting the best value for their money.

In a case of supreme irony, a foreign scientist who had been working for the NIH on an H1 visa (as a "contractor"), lost his job when they outsourced it to Germany. It's a bizarre world we live in.

That is one hell of a point and I wonder how many STEM/I.T. people have a similar downward income projection. Seems to me, as a general rule, tech people got slammed in the 2000/2002 "recession", aka offshore outsource their jobs agenda and have never recovered. Add this latest recession and it's being kicked to the curb while down.

The problem with gov. stats (of many) is the minute someone isn't working in their career position, regardless of education, training and job history, they are then counted in the new occupation. So, instead of showing the dramatic displacement and income decline of extremely educated professionals, the BLS data shows that person working at home depot in sales. In other words the the displacement and lose income statistics are buried by the way the BLS tabulates occupational employment data.

They count temporary foreign guest workers in their occupational stats too.

The stimulus contained about $55 billion for funding for state governments to keep teachers on the payroll and other educational expenses. I'm expecting the Republicans to win the House and thus there will be no more extensions of any parts of the stimulus, so how many layoffs do you think there will be on the state level if the the stimulus funds start to run out by the end of this year?

- Slon

Our country is an experiment in cultural globalization that is not capable of providing jobs for its own people. The past 20 year period is not about some grand plan to pull the world up by the economic help of a global economy interacting for the common good. It is about looking the other way, on environmental destruction, compromising our core values to finance agendas, create personal prestige, and direction of revenue to political origins, all while portraying globalization as a noble vision for the common good. Economic globalization by a free market society that all people can benefit from can not be achieved by interlacing our countries economy with a communist country that controls the size of their middle class workers to benefit their currency valuation, while controlling the distribution of wealth to the privileged few. In other words they control the amount of have and have not's in their population, so the crooks can get rich. Our country has become dependent on imports for our largest employers. We can not even act, with legislation to keep our water and air clean from foreign ships bringing in foreign manufactured goods, all at the expense of American jobs, because we are not economically free. Ballast water laws affecting mostly foreign ships and the price of foreign manufactured goods would rise according to a 2009 report for congress,-- but this would hurt the plan for economic globalization which will carry our country on the coat tails of a communist country until the next global crisis. Nobel winners call for tariffs to help create jobs,-- report for congress says national ballast legislation to cause cost of imports to rise. It just might have same effect as tariffs without a trade war, what dose this administration do??? It offers incentives to foreign ships bringing foreign goods into our country, if they decide to volunteer to install technology to protect our water. Sadly the time has come for our country to face this piper.