Odds ‘n Sods:

Thanks to our friend L.C. who alerted us to this news story: Manteca homes up for auction. Manteca (which fittingly means “lard” in Spanish) is a small town at the far eastern fringe of commuting distance to the San Francisco Bay Area–a full two hour drive from San Francisco when there is no traffic. Similar auctions have taken place recently in Los Banos and Tracy, California. Most of the homeowners in these neighborhoods have eaten their slice of Humble Pie quietly, but others have protested. L.C.’s comment: “One recent auction raised howls of protest from some of the owners that had bought houses in this same development at the peak of the market for close to $600,000 each. The most vocal protestor was a homeowner who said that he had spent $90,000 putting in a swimming pool and landscaping his yard. At one of the auctions, a fully-furnished and landscaped model home that would have sold for somewhere in the vicinity of $600,000 this time last year sold for around $320,000.” JWR’s Comment: And the scary thought is that we are not even close to the bottom in the developing bi-coastal bear market for residential real estate. If you live in any of the overbought and overbuilt coastal markets, watch for similar headlines in your local newspaper, soon.

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Something struck a chord! More than two dozen SurvivalBlog readers all sent us links to news articles about two recent government raids and precious metals confiscation at NORFED. Here are a couple of the articles Liberty Dollar office raided, and this one. Here is a statement from Liberty Dollar’s President. In the raids (one was at Sunshine Minting), the Federales reportedly confiscated over $20 million worth of silver, gold and platinum. Most notably, they seized almost 4,000 pounds of 1 ounce copper medallions specially made to promote the Ron Paul 2008 presidential election campaign. Of course politics had nothing to do with it…

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RBS suggested this piece from the Dr. Housing Bubble Blog: Heart of Foreclosure Darkness–Every County in Southern California is now Negative Year over Year.

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Reader CDR recommended an Internet auction site where he said that has had great success in finding pre-1965 “junk” US silver coins at below the current spot price of silver: PropertyRoom.com.