One possible obstacle to the restoration of General Motors, apart from its lack of solid product lines, its myopic upper management, and its beyond-myopic upper-upper management in Washington, is its name: it’s just too twentieth-century, maybe even nineteenth-century, and doesn’t speak to contemporary buyers.

So how about GenMo?

A shortening of the current name, tailored for today’s shorter attention spans. Preserves the equity of decades’ worth of branding, while making it that much easier for disgruntled customers / employees / creditors to spit out as a curse.

Hey, it worked for FedEx.

I note that Japan’s most successful automakers, Toyota and Honda, are named after their founders. (Toyota messed with the spelling a little bit, but no one complained, nor did anyone gripe at Mazda either.) Perhaps GM should be renamed for Billy Durant. And given its current state, it should be Durant’s middle name.

As I’ve noted several times, I am not interested in selling the palatial estate at Surlywood. However, I do try to pay attention to the real-estate market, which perhaps excludes me from this list of the clue-adverse:

This is perhaps the most frightening news of all, that so many people still haven’t adjusted their expectations to economic reality. Maybe they’re under the influence of Kudlowism or, more likely, they’re liberals who think that the Department of Unicorns and Rainbows has already fixed the economy.

People who haven’t actually tried to sell their homes, and who haven’t paid attention to the real-estate market, seem to imagine that the crash that hit last September was just a blip signaling a short-term recession and now we’re in blue-sky territory. When the sheriff’s auction becomes the primary venue for home sales, maybe people will start paying attention.

Foreclosures are indeed up in Oklahoma, but the situation here is decidedly less dire than in other places where the bubbles were bigger. For the last couple of months, I’ve been watching four houses nearby to see if I could detect any trend. Two have sold; one was turned over on a lease-purchase deal; one remains on the market. This is not necessarily representative of the whole state, or even of the northwest quadrant of Oklahoma City, but I have to assume that folks here aren’t entirely discouraged yet, especially since another one in the zone being monitored went on sale this month.

And the arrival this past week of the chairman of the National Association of Home Builders failed to regloomify the local market:

Nationally, home building is reeling, in some places it’s on the ropes — and in a few particularly hard-hit markets, it’s knocked cold.

“Normal” production used to be 1.8 million new units a year; now the pace is about 380,000 units, [Joe Robson] said. Being an Oklahoman of some experience makes his burden a lot lighter, especially now.

Things could be a lot worse here. Home sales are off and construction has been cut way back, but home values on average have remained firm, even ticking up at times.

That’s a 79-percent drop nationwide. Local builder Jeff Click has been tracking building permits in metro Oklahoma City, which are off by about half as much. Maybe we can say that it’s only half as bad here.

Well, looky here: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has ordered a stay of the Chrysler absorption by Fiat, pending a review of the whole shebang by the Supremes.

If this doesn’t wrap up in a week, the whole deal could be scotched:

Chrysler has until June 15 to emerge free and clear, else Fiat can walk away. And if that happens, Chrysler might owe Fiat $35 million — which is just $7 million short of what the three Indiana funds [who filed the suit] together have invested in the Pentastar.

All of a sudden the fait looks a hell of a lot less accompli.

Update: SCOTUSblog:

The wording of Ginsburg’s order — “stayed pending further order” — is the conventional way by which a Justice or the Court carries out an action that is expected to be short in duration, and not controlling — or even hinting at — the ultimate outcome. Any speculation that her order meant the Court was leaning toward a further postponement would be unfounded.

I’d bet on the Blue Oval.

It’s official: Roger Penske’s Automotive Group will acquire the Saturn brand from Government General Motors for a price believed to be somewhere north of three dollars and a sackful of kittens.

Saturn’s five-vehicle line is being pared to three — the Sky roadster and the compact Astra sedan will be put to sleep — and GM will continue to build the remaining vehicles (the Vue SUV, the Outlook crossover, and the mid-sized Aura sedan) for two years. All of these, I note, are bigger than the models being deep-sixed.

The deal is expected to be completed in October.

The German automaker, owned since 1929 by General Motors, is apparently not going to be thrown to the hounds of bankruptcy: a last-minute deal this weekend will reduce GM’s holdings to 35 percent, with 35 percent to be owned by Sberbank in Russia, 20 percent by Canadian parts supplier Magna, and 10 percent by Opel employees. Magna and Sberbank will kick in 500 to 700 million euros to finance the deal, and will seek loan guarantees from the German government. GM will not receive any cash: their compensation will come from continued access to Opel technology. All four German plants will be kept open, though job cuts are likely.

Still unclear: the future of Vauxhall, the GM outpost in Britain, and its two assembly plants, and of the Opel plant in Antwerp, Belgium.

Telesto Ventures, the group backed by Oklahoma City-based Black Oak Partners LLC and several Saturn dealers, is considered one of the finalists in the competition (and who expected competition?) to acquire the Saturn brand from fading General Motors.

When I first mentioned the group, I said something to this effect:

Unlike this earlier proposal, the Black Oak group would not hook up with one existing manufacturer as sole source: Saturn 2.0 would maintain a design team, which would then work with outside automakers to tailor appropriate models accordingly.

Said design team has now been revealed to include one certified heavy hitter: Tom Gale, once nominated for Car Designer of the Century for his Dodge Viper, the force behind both Chrysler’s famed LH “cab-forward” sedans in the 1990s and the rear-drive LX platform (300C) that replaced them.

Telesto, in fact, seems to have become the place for Chrysler exiles:

The Telesto Ventures team also includes Ted Cunningham, Chrysler’s former sales chief, who also worked for DaimlerChrysler AG after the 1998 tie-up with DaimlerChrysler, and Susan Unger, another past Chrysler executive, who worked as DaimlerChrysler’s chief information officer and as a senior vice president.

[Steve] Torok, who was in charge of [Mitsubishi's] business outside Japan, including its unprofitable U.S. unit, resigned in early 2004. He previously served as vice-president of sales and marketing integration and strategic planning for DaimlerChrysler.

Inasmuch as none of these folks had any particular responsibility for the Chrysler Chrysis that led the company into a heavily-rewritten Chapter 11, there’s at least a reasonable chance that sanity might prevail at Saturn 2.0, should this deal come to fruition.

If you have $300 million to spare, Hugh Hefner would like to hear from you:

Playboy Enterprises, the far-flung empire founded by Hugh Hefner in 1953, is quietly being shopped around for $300 million, sources tell Media Ink.

But so far, well-heeled suitors that have been approached, like Apollo Capital Partners and Providence Equity Partners, haven’t stepped up.

The battered company’s market capitalization is now around $100 million and nobody has been willing to pay the substantial premium that it would take to persuade Hef to sell.

Sources said the sellers are looking for far more than the company’s market capitalization because that would ensure Hef has enough on hand to maintain his lavish lifestyle.

The magazine has already cut back to 11 issues a year, but the product quality has been suffering for some time:

Playboy Interview, April through June 1965: Art Buchwald, Jean-Paul Sartre, Melvin Belli.

Playboy Interview, April through June 2005: Les Moonves, James Spader, Lance Armstrong.

Personally, I think Adobe should buy it: if there’s any common component to be found in contemporary commercial erotica, it’s Photoshop.

But the funniest possible acquisition, I submit, would be by Virgin.

Note to the President’s Task Force on Autos: You might want to study this case in detail before the berserkers are set free:

Workers at Honda’s Swindon plant have voted in favour of taking a 3% pay cut for 10 months in an attempt to safeguard 490 jobs.

In return, the workers will receive a bonus of six additional days’ leave, Unite the union said.

And this helps:

Managers’ pay will be cut by 5%.

The plant, shuttered for four months, will reopen in June, and everyone hopes that the British car-buying public will respond to the government’s scrappage scheme.

(Via Autoblog.)

Chrysler, as noted here before, is firing 789 dealers. And while they can — the dissolution of the dealer franchises is scheduled for the 9th of June — the soon-to-be ex-dealers are dealing:

Dale Horn, owner of a Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep dealership in Malvern, Ark., whose franchise was cut, isn’t counting on any help from the company to unload his inventory of 34 vehicles.

“Right now, I don’t have much confidence that they will do what they say. Nobody’s called me yet saying they’re going to try to help me,” Horn said.

Still, he’s determined to sell the cars and trucks before June 9, and he’s not ruling out selling at a loss.

“It’s not a matter of ‘if.’ We will sell them all,” Horn said.

Of course, if you subsequently need warranty work, you’ll have to apply to the Federal Bureau of Auto Service and wait, but hey, there are only 44,000 stranded Mopars out there. How long can the line be?

In semi-socialist America, Dodge gets the hell out of you.

Chrysler is cutting loose 789 dealerships, including the following Oklahoma stores:

• Ballard’s of Clinton
• Eddie Cordes, Lawton
• Fenton Motors, Stillwater
• Janzen Jeep, Enid
• Jensen’s Inc., Fairview
• John Thomas, Cordell
• Crossroads Superstore, Atoka
• Milo Gordon Chrysler, Lawton
• Oakley Jeep, Bartlesville
• Reynolds Auto Group, Durant
• Williams Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep, Stigler
• Wilson Jeep, Stillwater

Here’s where it gets interesting:

Chrysler, because it is under Bankruptcy Court protection, will not be required to buy back vehicles, tools or parts from rejected dealers.

However:

Chrysler will match rejected dealers with accepted dealers, who will buy back parts, tools and vehicles.

Assuming, of course, the surviving dealers actually want all that stuff.

This does not reassure me about the stability of the New Government-Approved Chrysler:

When I purchased my ‘09 300C I traded in an ‘05 that had a Chrysler extended service contract with time and mileage remaining. I called Chrysler and they gave me all of the information for obtaining a pro-rata refund as per the contract. I faxed it over and got very quick service. I had a check from Chrysler in the amount of $363.62 in under two weeks. I cashed it at my bank and today my bank mailed it back to me: Insufficient Funds! The check was drawn on a JP Morgan Chase account. I guess the bankruptcy is going to strike close to home.

The next step, of course, is to send the bill to Barack Obama.

Crossroads Mall, which was sold at the beginning of 2007, is now in the possession of the lender, and its future is unclear.

Or maybe it isn’t. This is what’s left of Kansas City’s Bannister Mall. The pattern was similar: the anchors (JCPenney, Dillard’s, The Jones Store, Sears) bailed out one by one, and eventually the bulldozers came. They haven’t come for Crossroads yet, but it’s just a matter of time, and when they do, nobody’s going to build something like this in its place — unless someone figures out a way to relocate both the landfill and the town of Valley Brook, neither of which are the slightest bit conducive to redevelopment.

Adrienne goes to the local WaMu Chase branch, and things are really hopping:

“Wow, what’s going on?”, says I to the nubile and not very bright little gal behind the brand spanking new counter. “This was a great looking place and it was practically brand new.”

“Oh, I think Chase wants all the banks and branches to look alike”, she says with a lovely smile on her face.

“But didn’t we just give a pack of money to bail out these banks? I’m not so sure this is a good use of their money.”

She looked at me with some confusion as she sifted through this piece of information and her best explanation was, “but it’s given jobs to a lot of nice men.”

This is the bank that says they can only pay me .01% interest on my savings account and is asking for more taxpayer bailout money but somehow still has money for major and unnecessary renovations.

I’m not so sure that burying every last trace of Washington Mutual is “unnecessary,” but I’ll add that to the ongoing “Banks Are Not Your Friends” file, along with this.

This actually dates to January, but I only just now happened across it, so you get it today. A guest post at ClubOrlov, credited to Frank, this is called “Credo in $”, and if there’s a prayer breakfast in Washington, almost certainly this is what they proclaim:

I believe in worldwide Ponzi schemes and universal gullibility. I believe that reckless lending can be cured by reckless borrowing and that fraudulent borrowing can be healed by fraudulent lending. I believe that a housing bubble fueled by loose credit can be corrected by easing credit. I believe that each trillion of hallucinated dollars that disappears in a puff of Wall Street smoke then always reappears magically from behind a Treasury Department mirror.

I believe in America’s almighty financial geniuses and monetary officials, who destroy wealth indiscriminately and indefinitely, and whose kingdom shall have no end. It is divine justice that those who cause financial catastrophes are rewarded with public money, while innocent bystanders are punished in their stead. I believe that central banks can print all the money anyone will ever need. I believe that if one stimulus package does not work, the next one surely will.

I believe in the redeeming power of financial complexity. I believe that hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds are righteous to enter into incomprehensible contracts having convoluted ownership and no inherent value. And I believe that opaque, secretive companies which pretend to insure those investments are offering a valuable service, even if this requires the use of public money.

I believe that economic stability and confidence will return when every failing business is bailed out, with no failure too small to be left behind. I believe that all dying institutions shall be consolidated, merging the smaller basket cases with the larger ones. The lion and the lamb shall lie down together in a new spirit of national competitiveness.

I believe that the end of days shall come when there is only one institution left, comprehensively unified, far too big to fail, owning everything and controlling nothing. All shall come and supplicate before its holy ATM machines, for they are subtle and quick to anger. It is in this one true financial institution that I put my faith, truly gigantic, truly bankrupt, amen.

(Found at Tasty Infidelicacies.)

Yet another bid to save Saturn, this one with Oklahoma City roots:

An Oklahoma City private equity firm has teamed with a group of Saturn dealers in an effort to buy the money-losing brand from General Motors Corp.

The proposal from a group led by Black Oak Partners LLC is among several that GM has received for the brand, said GM spokesman Mike Morrissey.

“We are working with all those groups,” Morrissey said. “It’s too early to speculate as to what the ultimate outcome is going to be.”

Jennifer Threet, a spokeswoman for the Black Oak group, said it delivered a proposal to GM last week and is awaiting a formal meeting.

Unlike this earlier proposal, the Black Oak group would not hook up with one existing manufacturer as sole source: Saturn 2.0 would maintain a design team, which would then work with outside automakers to tailor appropriate models accordingly.

Well, not completely, but the Blue Oval boys have rid themselves of almost $10 billion worth of debt:

On March 4, 2009, Ford and Ford Credit announced the major components of a comprehensive debt restructuring: (1) a conversion offer in which Ford offered to pay a premium in cash to induce the holders of any and all of the $4.88 billion principal amount outstanding of its 4.25% Senior Convertible Notes due December 15, 2036 (the “Convertible Notes”) to convert the Convertible Notes into shares of Ford’s common stock (the “Conversion Offer”); (2) a $500 million cash tender offer by Ford Credit (the “Term Loan Offer”) for Ford’s senior secured term loan debt (the “Term Loan Debt”); and (3) a $1.3 billion cash tender offer (the “Notes Tender Offer”) by Ford Credit for certain of Ford’s unsecured, non-convertible debt securities (the “Notes”).

The second and third items are mostly bookkeeping items between Ford and Ford Credit, but the conversion offer paid off big: $4.3 billion worth of notes were redeemed, and at settlement Wednesday Ford will fork over 468 million shares of common stock (which went up by 16 percent Monday) plus about a third of a billion in cash.

The reduction of debt, $9.9 billion in all, will save the company about half a billion dollars in interest per year; at the end of 2008, Dearborn was $25.8 billion in the hole, so this is a decided improvement in their position.

And an attorney working on the project commented:

“It is refreshing to see a company doing something without the government, and not going to the government and waiting to be bailed out,” said Michael Kaplan, a Davis Polk & Wardwell lawyer who worked with Ford.

They’re not out of the woods yet, but it’s a start.

I’m in Mary Fallin’s House district (OK 5), so I got this 9 x 12 postcard from her with the following headline: What are “tax and spend” liberals in Washington doing with your money?”

Well, duh. They’re taxing and spending. That’s what they do.

As always, there’s the dubiously-worded Constituent Survey, where the questions are loaded and the answers are always what the officeholder wants to hear.

Fallin might have a tad more credibility on this issue had she not originally switched her vote on the initial bailout package.

And there are two words you won’t see anywhere on this card: “tea party.”

“When we try to pick out anything by itself,” wrote John Muir, “we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Florida doesn’t produce any substantial number of cars, but the collapse in the auto market is hurting Florida more than you’d think.

Think grapefruit:

Ever wondered what’s in those huge car carriers on their return voyage from delivering cars from Japan to the US? Exactly. Grapefruits. US shipping firm Great American Lines Inc.’s Sunbelt Spirit is one of the few vehicle carriers in the world that has refrigerated holds for carrying agricultural products. Because it can carry as many as ten times more grapefruits than conventional container ships, transport costs are lower. Result: This vessel alone delivers almost a fifth of all Florida grapefruits shipped to Japan.

Now the tart part: “The ship’s March voyage was its sole round trip scheduled for this season, which runs from last November to this June, compared with the three last season,” says the Nikkei. Its main business of carrying Toyota and other Japanese-made vehicles is, well, rotten. As a result, Japanese imports of Florida grapefruits are expected to fall by about 20% in volume terms.

Currently, grapefruits are sold for about a dollar each at supermarkets in Tokyo. Japanese grapefruit lovers are girding for higher prices because the juicy fruit will be in short supply. The next unintended consequence: Florida grapefruit growers want their bailout, too.

This is potentially a much greater hit to Florida grapefruit growers than, say, the use of statins for cholesterol control.

According to this writeup at Autoblog, Saab will be reporting to the district court in Vänersborg on Monday, which isn’t surprising — and that “[t]here are reported to be nearly 20 interested parties looking into what Saab has to offer after the company filed for [bankruptcy] protection in February,” which is.

Only once have I ever gotten seat time in a Saab, in a middle-1980s 900 hatch, and the experience was memorable, not just for the inevitable fumbling for the ignition switch (between the seats, as usual), but for the ease with which the little Swede slipped through traffic on I-40 westbound, and for the prodigious noise from under its beak.

“Um, you’re going a trifle fast,” came the voice from the passenger seat.

I looked at the dash again, and for some reason, I’d conflated speedo and tach; I was doing somewhere upwards of 80 — and still in third gear, yet.

The trick, of course, was to slow down without looking like I was slowing down. I’m better at that now than I used to be.

And the experience of one driver, for less than one hour, a quarter of a century ago, counts for nothing in this matter, but I still hope someone manages to save Saab.

Lost in the uproar over the Rickrolling of General Motors was this announcement regarding the supposedly-doomed Saturn marque:

“In the next three weeks, we will announce a long-term partnership that will provide Saturn with world-class cars,” said Todd Ingersoll, who owns Saturn of Danbury [CT] and Saturn of Watertown [also CT].

“This will ensure the brand not only survives but flourishes.”

Ingersoll has been leading a task force organized by Saturn’s Franchise Operations Team. It has been looking at ways to spin off the brand from General Motors.

The task force was established in December after GM officials said they would focus on the four core brands of Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC and Buick.

Still unannounced, of course, is the name of this proposed partner. I’m guessing, mostly by the process of elimination — who else is there? — that Saturn is trying to hook up with PSA Peugeot Citroën, the second-largest automaker in Europe, which has had no presence Stateside for many years, unless you count Lt. Columbo’s Peugeot 403.

In the meantime:

Ingersoll said Saturn will transition during the next two years from vehicles in the company’s current lineup produced by GM to vehicles that will be produced by the new long-term partner, which he declined to name.

He also declined to comment on whether the long-term partner would purchase the Saturn brand, provide vehicles for an independent Saturn, or whether the future organization would be some hybrid of both options.

Either way, it’s too late to save Saturn of Northwest Arkansas, which closed two weeks ago.

Sun-Times Media Group, owner of the Chicago Sun-Times and several suburban papers, has filed for bankruptcy. That in itself isn’t remarkable: lots of media companies, including Tribune Company, publisher of the crosstown rival Chicago Tribune, find themselves in similar straits these days. But the problem with STMG isn’t bank debt:

The company has one significant creditor — the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS has said Sun-Times Media Group owes up to $608 million in back taxes and penalties from past business practices by its former controlling owner, Conrad Black, now imprisoned for theft from corporate coffers.

Unlike other newspaper owners that have filed for bankruptcy amid steep dropoffs in advertising, including Chicago-based Tribune Co., Sun-Times Media Group has no bank debt. But its IRS debt thwarted efforts to raise new capital.

Sun-Times expects to be out of Chapter 11 by the end of this year, fairly quick by the standards of bankruptcy court these days.

Prediction by me, January 2006:

General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner will resign rather than file Chapter 11.

It didn’t happen in 2006, and it took the prodding of the President of the United States to make it happen in 2009, but The Rick is history, and bankruptcy is very much on the table:

The White House’s insistence that Wagoner step down represented an extraordinary intervention of the federal government into the management of a private company. A senior administration official said Wagoner’s resignation was required because the company needs a “clean sheet.”

Fritz Henderson, The Rick’s Mini-Me, isn’t likely to improve the level of brightness around there; they’re going to have to replace much of the board of directors before too awfully long, if only because the New Automotive Order will so utterly baffle such an insular bunch. (Okiedoke’s Mike is calling for exactly that, and then some.)

President Obama’s automotive plan includes Treasury backing for GM (and Chrysler) warranties, even in the event of bankruptcy, a move which perhaps will reassure at least some skittish potential customers.

I am not exactly enthralled with this package, especially since no one in Washington seems to be leaning very hard on UAW boss Ron Gettelfinger — like this is a shock with a Democratic administration — but at least we’ll see if what Mr Obama thinks an American auto industry should look like in any way resembles what we think he thinks it should look like, and whether his vision differs in any substantive degree from the desires of the pettifoggery specialists at the Capitol.

Addendum: E. M. Zanotti observes:

I almost wish Obama were angling to clean out the entire corporate headquarters of everyone who received a check full of cheese: clearly our standards for Captains of Private Industry are far too low.

Yea, verily.

My, oh my, what an infertile day:

Doctors around the United States are reporting a sharp increase in the number of vasectomies performed since the economy soured last year, with one noting that many of his clients are from the beleaguered financial industry.

Their best guess is that the trend is due both to a decreased desire to have children because of the expense involved, and an increased desire to get such medical procedures done before their jobs — and health insurance — disappear.

I note here for the record that I got mine just before the great Oklahoma oil bust of 1982.

(Seen at Hit & Run.)

Adam Gurri parses the Fed’s figures, and calculates the bad news:

The Fed’s data on M1, the narrowest measure of money, and M2, is a very valuable point of reference. Between January of 2008 and January of 2009, M1 grew by 15% and M2 by 10%. As a point of reference, between January of 1977 and January of 1978 M1 grew by 8.47% and M2 grew by 9.83%. This was during the era of double digit inflation.

Stretch this to 1979, and you have M1 up another 7.24 percent and M2 up another 7.18 percent. By 2011, those figures will probably look like marvels of restraint.

(You want more comparisons? Try January 2006 to January 2008. For the two-year period, M2 went up 11.12 percent, while M1 actually dropped. We’re using the seasonally-adjusted figures throughout.)

Tamara K. poses a question:

How come when I put my AmEx bill on my Visa, it’s stupid, but when the government does it, it’s stimulus?

Not that the two are mutually exclusive by any means.

Start here:

When I go to Vons to buy a steak, most of the time I get USDA Choice, but on occasion I’ll get USDA Prime. So literally, ‘choice’ is by definition, ’sub-prime’.

And yet it’s still Choice. Now consider this:

The facts in question were exactly how many subprime and other mortgagees were defaulting or likely to default. The alarming news was something on the order of 4 percent, which was double the usual amount. And now as we squawk comfortably like Santelli, we rather blithely accept that about 92% of mortgage holders are not going to default.

When I get a 92% on any test, I consider that an A-. An A- is subprime. And similarly, people are freaking out that we have unemployment of 10% here in California. That would be 90% employment. Also an A-, also subprime.

(Aside: The unemployment rate in the Oklahoma City metro is 4.6 percent.)

I suspect, though, that this is right at the threshold: were California unemployment to rise to 12 percent, leaving a presumed B-plus 88 percent, it would be decidedly more difficult to dismiss.

And besides, the issue isn’t so much the grade of, um, beef as it is the likelihood of nonbeef substances being found in various tranches.

Kinda hard to argue with this:

You know, in every movie I’ve seen about the end of the world, civilization collapses because of something wicked cool happening — an asteroid hits, nuclear war, a supervirus, an ape revolution, whatever. If civilization collapses over credit default swaps I am going to be pissed.

(Title reused from here. Via Outside the Beltway.)

Richard Mize reports in the Oklahoman this morning:

Almost four out of 10 homeowners in Oklahoma County have mortgages that could qualify for loan modification under President Barack Obama’s “Making Home Affordable” program, according to Zillow.com.

That’s based on amounts owed on houses compared with what they’re worth — the loan-to-value ratio — required by the program. People who owe from 80 percent to 105 percent of their home’s value, on a conforming loan, meet the parameters of the program.

Zillow estimated that 37.8 percent of mortgages in the metro area fall into that loan-to-value range.

Lets me out. I owe something like 69 percent.

And as always, take these numbers with a whole lick of salt:

Zillow’s estimate did not consider financial hardship, which is another requirement, or whether lenders would be likely to modify any loans.

So I’m not expecting three of every eight mortgages in town to be reworked, but surely some of them will.

Auto dealers in Washington state would like to be legally authorized to stick it to you further:

Auto dealers, who have seen their sales decline for more than a year, want the Legislature to let them triple the fee they charge customers to process paperwork.

The new “documentary service fee” would be as high as $150, up from $50 today. Such an increase could let auto dealers statewide pocket as much as $100 million to $150 million, money that would go straight to their bottom line. Those figures assume dealers will sell 1 million cars and trucks and that all dealers would charge the maximum fee allowed, as most do.

Sen. Tracey Eide, D-Federal Way, said she sponsored Senate Bill 5816 at the request of the Washington State Auto Dealers Association and its 328 dealerships, and one of her former constituents, Mary Byrne, former owner of Nissan of Fife. Byrne now is a partner in Advantage Nissan in Bremerton.

I suppose mandatory extended warranties that don’t actually cover anything were considered beyond the pale in Olympia.

And actually, the doc fee is a relatively recent arrival in Washington:

Until 2003, Washington auto dealers got nothing for processing vehicle registration forms and other documents related to the sale of new or used vehicles. But the Legislature that year approved a $35 “doc fee,” which one state lawmaker characterized at the time as “extortion.”

Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen, D-Camano Island, who was then and still is chairwoman of the Senate Transportation Committee, said auto dealers threatened to oppose the 5-cent increase in the state gas tax the Legislature approved that year if they didn’t get the authority to charge their customers the extra fee. Dealers were upset by the 0.3 percent sales tax on vehicles that also was part of what was then a $4 billion tax package for state highway, bridge and ferry projects.

Then-Gov. Gary Locke signed the fee into law in 2003. In 2007, the Legislature boosted the fee to $50 at the urging of Sen. Ed Murray, D-Seattle.

If $35 was extortion in 2003, what’s $150 today? Hope and change?

Incidentally, Oklahoma permits something called a “processing fee,” and I quote from an actual retail purchasing contract:

This Fee is not required by law. It is an optional fee charged by our Dealership to cover our costs for providing administrative and documentary services in connection with this transaction and in carrying out the requirements of all applicable laws including, but not limited to, costs associated with processing applications.

In other words, you can theoretically get out of it, if you know it’s there. And now you do.

(Seen at TTAC.)