The Housing Bubble

On the “Weekend Topics” thread I posted some of the new June 2006 market statistics from the D.C. region, found at http://www.mris.com/reports/stats/

Then for fun I went back through the statistics through the years to 1998 for Fairfax County, traditionally one of the largest suburban and middle class (used to be) suburbs of D.C. I wish I had more data from years to the early 90’s, but it appears as though there currently is no “housing shortage” and it isn’t all that “different here” because of “high-paying” government jobs.

Year — Total Units Sold — Number of Active Listings

2006 — 1,680 — 9,153
2005 — 2,737 — 3,181
2004 — 3,017 — 2,799
2003 — 2,482 — 3,265
2002 — 2,244 — 3,046
2001 — 2,483 — 3,245
2000 — 2,247 — 3,289
1999 — 2,248 — 4,704
1998 — 2,004 — Unavailable

Just something I’ve noticed in an echo-bubble area I follow. I’ve been noting the number of for sales in Boise as reflected in the Idaho Statesman’s BoiseHomeSites.com. It was at 2800 listings last month. After the holiday, its shot up over 10% to 3111. Will watch this closely to see if inventory keeps exploding or if it is just a blip.

I read an editorial from Jas Jain at financialsense.com during the week. He pointed out that by dollar value California RE is about 25% of the entire US total.

Add in other high-priced areas such as DC/NYC/Mass., and it seems to me that bubble areas may hold a considerably greater percentage of overall US housing assets than raw volumes would imply.

Does anyone know if the appropriate statistics are calculated anywhere?

How much will this increase the financial impact of any bust?

Just wanted others observations also about why people would endure torturous commutes to buy a house in some hellhole because that is all they can afford, and ASS u me that it will keep going up in value. What will these folks do when they realize that their dream is being shattered. This thought was prompted by the comments yesterday about people buying in Los Banos and Lake Los Angeles California. Two hellholes out in the middle of nowhere.

CA is a high percentage. Don’t know amount. But will definitely have a HUGE effect. Would love to hear about CA flippers flopping into the bellyup position, especially when they have gone to other cities and ruined their markets.

Here in the high desert of California we have a unique situation. We have countless miles of desert land and then a mountain range separating us from the true “Southern California”. A 40 mile commute through these mountains to the southland have kept the desert prices comparitively low but for the last 3 years the skyrocketing southland home prices have made the desert more appealing to first time home buyers and wannabe investors. This recently drove up the price of homes in the high desert to unbelievable levels. People moving from the southland up to the desert had “reverse sticker shock” because the prices of homes were so much lower in the desert (on average almost 1/3 less). Many people bought homes to rent out. What fools! Houses in the high desert rent for $700 per month while their mortgage payments are more than twice this. What fools! We currently have hundreds of homes for rent and our MLS has an inventory of over 4000 SFRs and condos! (We average around 1500 in the MLS.) Additionally there are very few jobs in the high desert and the commuters are being pummled by the rising costs of gasoline. What would happen if the People’s Republic of the Department of California inacted a mileage tax? Ouch!

it’s funny that when I read articles about this new oil boom, everyone is cautious about not getting burned again. yet in real estate, nobody remembers the last downturn. nobody. how can that be?

there was an article about a wyoming rancher the other day who was also involved in the oil biz. he was being very careful, buying used machinery, keeping out of crushing debt and not buying something for his oil biz that he can’t use for his ranch. where are these people in the housing boom?

Mid-East ‘learns oil-boom lesson’s

I should say though, the stock markets in the ME weren’t showing much restraint.

I don’t know if anyone posted on this last month, but Salon.com has an article on TheHousingBubbleBlog (this blog, silly!):

http://tinyurl.com/rr72a

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003110149_homesales07.html

Local homes: Investments that just keep getting hotter
By Elizabeth Rhodes, Seattle Times staff reporter

Forget your home being your castle. Thanks to surging local home prices, your home is now your portfolio.

How so?

After giving thanks that you bit the bullet and bought, consider this:

The median prices of King County’s detached homes and condominiums have climbed 16 percent since the first of this year — despite a growing number of homes listed for sale — leaving both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq in the dust.

The S&P has grown a paltry 0.1 percent since January, while the Nasdaq has declined 3 percent.

Price gains in nearby counties, where sales are overwhelmingly single-family houses, also have been double-digit impressive.

Snohomish County’s detached-home prices are up 17.8 percent since Jan. 1, while Pierce County’s prices have increased 16.6 percent, and Kitsap’s 14 percent, newly released numbers from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service reveal.

That puts Puget Sound-area sellers firmly in control — a situation that’s increasingly more memory than reality for sellers in other parts of the country, where the housing market is cooling.

Because the Puget Sound area’s economy is strong, we’re adding buyers who can absorb higher interest rates, said O.B. Jacobi, owner and broker of Windermere Real Estate’s Wedgwood office. Rates have climbed from an average 5.62 percent a year ago to 6.79 percent this week for 30-year fixed-rate loans, according to mortgage-money provider Freddie Mac.

“You would think with the interest rate climbing that people’s buying power would have gone down a little bit, but we still haven’t seen it,” Jacobi said. “There are still tons of buyers in the market, more than sellers, and we’re still seeing open houses with 50-60 people going through them. Well-priced, cute homes are selling quickly with multiple offers.”

(MORE…)

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

I’ve mentioned this $1M Santa Barbara property before, but I just received a humorous junk-mail flyer from their realtor, which he sent to the surrounding neighborhood.

The headline desperately reads “Do you know anyone who might be interested in this property?”.

I guess stuff like this is no surprise for most of you, but this is pretty rare for Santa Barbara. I’m using this place as my barometer for the local market, it’s been for sale since January (first as a FSBO), was bought in 6/2004 for $875,000. It’s just a frumpy, 40yo tract home with a small yard on a busy street. This neighborhood used to sell for around $200-300K throughout the 90s.

Bad Credit OK!

http://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/rfs/179259532.html

Finally someone minces no words — I would hate to be someone with decent credit who bought in this building. NYC went through a wave of co-op owners walking away during the last downturn (when no one dared make such statments in RE ads). Gee, what will happen this time?

Just some “in the trenches” stuff… Don’t know what it means yet, and there might be other causes, but the sportfishing business in San Diego seems to be slower than most years. This summer, there are openings on long-range boats (most of the time, they’re booked a year+ in advance with waiting lists). Some short-range boats are occasionally having to cancel trips because they aren’t filling up. Very unusual in the summer, regardless of fishing conditions.

Nothing in stone, but I think it could be an indication of the slowing “wealth effect”. These trips are NOT cheap.

From today’s online discussion at The Washington Post:

“Ashburn, Va.: I’m so mad at my neighbor. I bought my new home here in Ashburn last summer and plan to sell it next year (after holding two years to avoid taxes) to make a nice return on my investment. The problem is my neighbor is trying to sell his house (very similar to mine) right now and he keeps lowering his asking price. Each time he lowers his price, I see my potential profits next year getting squashed. Doesn’t he realize he’s hurting the comps for all of his neighbors by doing this? I don’t think he is acting very “neighborly” by doing this. I want to say something to him and tell him he should stop putting his interests ahead of his neighbors. Its people like him who are ruining the market for the rest of us. If he would just refuse to lower his price, we could maintain our comps and everyone would benefit. What can I do to stop him?”

Kirstin Downey: ……One word of advice: Don’t resort to violence.

I couldn’t resist sharing this since there’s always so much talk about Baby Boomers and their influence. Hey, what’s $6K for a toilet when you’ve pissed away (pun intended) hundreds of thousands on a house

http://tinyurl.com/nghyx
Baby boomers are helping to fuel the demand for luxury bathrooms.

Just thought I would share one measly listing in Lake Tahoe, NV, an area which I pay attention to and one which has seen astronomical price increases during this bubble. MLS# 50025347 in Glenbrook is asking $4,889,000. This was purchased in 2000 for $2,175,000. Seems like they are asking a bit much to me since Zillow puts it at $3,596,000 and, in my experience, Zillow is almost always on the high side. This is merely one listing amidst hundreds with huge price tags. Inventories continue to climb in the area, Reno/Sparks/Tahoe climbing over 8000 now. Bubblicious for sure. I have noticed more and more homes available in Reno/Sparks for

That guy in Ashburn has to be a troll/fake, don’t you think? Is anyone really that…..out there?

But wait, here’s another one (albeit more politely worded):
Germantown, Md.: “We live in a townhouse with a neighbor who is selling a “handiman’s special” almost 10 percent under what we just bought our place for, which also needed some work. Should I start kicking myself for buying too high, or talk to the neighbor about their low price. I don’t think their agent is very knowledgable since they’ve been on the market for over a month without an open house and are showing by appointment only.”

Wonder how that conversation would go, exactly???

To the idiot in Ashburn VA. Did you stop to think that your neighbor really wants to keep lowering his price? I assume that he would like to get the highest price he can. But he hasn’t been able to sell the home and is lowering it to attempt to attract a buyer. How can you ASS U ME that you will find a GF next year when you go to sell your ‘investment’. We at Ben’s Blog know which direction your investment is going, and I can assure you that it is NOT up. Thank you for further fueling this ridiculous housing boom, and hope you have fun counting phantom profits. I ASS U ME that it will be negative by the time you sell (if you even are able to sell it).

Today, I saw an ad at the highway for a lottery by Centex: Win your 50k downpayment (and we sell you a house overpriced by 100k). I wonder what the chances are for “winning”.

Upon searching with Google, I found:
Centex Homes THINKING ABOUT A MOVE? PLAY THE CENTEX HOMES INSTANT WIN GAME FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS THAT CAN BE USED TOWARD A DOWN PAYMENT. THAT’S 50 G’S! JUST ENTER KEYWORD CENTEX HOMES KS95.COM! CENTEX HOMES. BE MOVED!

Sales seem to slow in Minneapolis, too, - many offices are not longer needed: Two large buildings of the largest two realty companies here, Coldwell Banker Burnett and Edina Realty, are up for lease.

The NAR just released a report “Survey Finds Monthly Costs Outweigh Purchase Price of Home Ownership” available here: http://www.mortgagenewsdaily.com/772006_Home_Ownership.asp

just another observation in the nyc-area: last night while driving home from a nice evening in brooklyn’s prospect park, on the BQE i noticed 2 huge billboards with messages like “WE BUY HOUSES - CASH” and “SELL QUICKLY - FAST CLOSING”. nah, no trouble to report here..

WSJ’s “Cranky Consumer” reviews foreclosure sites:
http://biz.yahoo.com/weekend/fclose_1.html

This link is available through Yahoo for those who do not have WSJ Online subscriptions

another danger to So Cal residents - http://tinyurl.com/hjowt

“Asbestos laces many residential soils”
from Sciencenews.org

Janet Raloff

It was the mid-1980s, and Terry Trent and his wife, Carol Adams, had broken ground for their dream home. Atop a hill east of Sacramento, Calif., the remote, 10-acre site in the Sierra foothills offered plenty of privacy. As the couple eventually learned, it offered plenty of something else as well: a nasty type of asbestos known as tremolite. Respiratory exposure to this mineral has been linked with mesothelioma, a lung cancer that quickly turns fatal.
Trent vividly recalls his first encounter with the asbestos. He was working on what would become his front yard. “Operating a backhoe, I popped a roughly 12-inch diameter vein of tremolite out of the ground that was maybe 35 feet long. I thought it was some old, ancient tree root,” he told Science News.

Closer inspection revealed a fibrous mat resembling the asbestos that Trent had seen on insulation pads in his college chemistry class. Gently, he reburied the rope. His worries mounted after he turned up smaller ropes of the material throughout the rest of his property. Eventually, Trent found it poking through the surface in so many places that he decided to haul in 1,000 tons of clean-fill dirt to resurface his homestead.

This solution seemed adequate for 9 years—until construction began on the plot next to his. Thick dust regularly covered surfaces inside Trent and Adams’ home. The local newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, sent out samples of that dust for chemical analysis. It confirmed heavy contamination with asbestos. Pleas to the owner of the neighboring property and to local officials went for naught, and Trent and Adams’ insurance company refused to compensate them for the contamination.

Finally, the couple did the unthinkable. In 1998, they abandoned the house, then valued at $650,000.

Meanwhile, as other families moved into the area—the growing suburban county of El Dorado, where home values can now exceed $1 million—government officials tended to downplay any suggestion that the soil was toxic. That is, until last year, when the Environmental Protection Agency told local residents that its data showed worrisome concentrations of the carcinogenic fibers could be kicked up by normal activities.

What’s more, federal scientists now observe, El Dorado is hardly unique. Shallow, natural deposits of asbestos occur in 50 of 58 California counties and in 19 other states…”

wow. scary.

It’s earnings season!

Here is a list of the homebuilders in the $HGX index and when they announced their quarterly earnings in 2005.

BZH July 28, 2005
CTX July 26, 2005
DHI July 21, 2005
HOV September 7, 2005
KBH September 22, 2005
LEN September 26, 2005
MDC July 13, 2005
MTH July 27, 2005
PHM July 27, 2005
RYL July 20, 2005
SPF July 28, 2005
TOL August 4, 2005

Note that this doesn’t preclude warnings &c, a la HOV’s warning on May 1 of this year (which gapped-down the stock 2+ points) in advance of its June 4 earnings annoucement.

From the Yahoo WCI message board -

“Re: WCI Specifics (Not rated) 6-Jul-06 11:38 am Tuscany Reserve in North Naples/Bonita Springs-bought land to do lower end community- decided to go upscale and spent over $40 Million just to build and landscape large berm to try to block I-75 road noise-was told it doesn’t work (can still hear noise) and cannot sell the houses last two yrs and golf course is boring yet spent a fortune (trying to line the lakes at hugh costs)- have to maintain all that ($4-$5 M operating losses) with no members and no homeowners. No end in sight for losses.”

The post is very bearish on land holding costs and depreciation effects on WCI’s bottom line. Is this becoming common for all big HB’s? Personally see a lot of projects stalling in Pinal Co., AZ but hear little about costs to HB’s of doing such (yet.)

“The post is very bearish on land holding costs and depreciation effects on WCI’s bottom line. ”

Seems to me this case was just one of bad management. Perhaps its showing in bubble environments, all development is not finacially sound.

Simmsssays… Favorite Childhood Toys
http://www.americaninventorspot.com/favorite_retro_toys

I was just thinking of how expensive or cheap relatively speaking, Plasma TVs are to condos or homes in bubble areas.

So I calculated that a 42″ plasma TV has 5.24sqft of viewing area. You can get a 42″ HD plasma for about $2000. So that would be $382/sqft for a 42″ plasma.

You can buy a 50″ plasma for $2500. A 50″ plasma will cost you $337/sqft.

Compare that to san diego, san fransicko, or condos in bubble areas where people pay $1000/sqft for wood, plaster, concrete, and carpet.

So plasma TVs on a sqft basis are 3-4x cheaper than houses on a sqft basis.

Move along when the crowd is right
Stand alone when the crowd is wrong

~John Gorka
——–
“Chuck Norris has counted to infinity. Twice.”
“Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.”
——-

Hyperinflation: Wiemar, Germany January 1919 to November 1923
[Expressed in German Marks needed to by an oz. of ag. or au.]

Jan. 1919 Silver 12 Gold 170
May. 1919 Silver 17 Gold 267
Sept. 1919 Silver 31 Gold 499
Jan. 1920 Silver 84 Gold 1,340
May 1920 Silver 60 Gold 966
Sept. 1921 Silver 80 Gold 2,175
Jan. 1922 Silver 249 Gold 3,976
May. 1922 Silver 375 Gold 6,012
Sept. 1922 Silver 1899 Gold 30,381
Jan. 1923 Silver 23,277 Gold 372,447
May. 1923 Silver 44,397 Gold 710,355
June 5, 1923 Silver 80,953 Gold 1,295,256
July 3, 1923 Silver 207,239 Gold 3,315,831
Aug. 7, 1923 Silver 4,273,874 Gold 68,382,000
Sept. 4, 1923 Silver 16,839,937 Gold 269,429,000
Oct. 2, 1923 Silver 414,484,000 Gold 6,631,749,000
Oct. 9, 1923 Silver 1,554,309,000 Gold 24,868,950,000
Oct. 16, 1923 Silver 5,319,567,000 Gold 84,969,072,000
Oct. 23, 1923 Silver 7,253,460,000 Gold 1,160,552,662,000
Oct. 30, 1923 Silver 8,419,200,000 Gold 1,347,070,000,000
Nov. 5, 1923 Silver 54,375,000,000 Gold 8,700,000,000,000
Nov. 13, 1923 Silver 108,750,000,000 Gold 17,400,000,000,000
Nov. 30, 1923 Silver 543,750,000,000 Gold 87,000,000,000,000

========
Which country has these laws?
1. Only professionals or investors can immigrate to the country. No
Unskilled laborers will be allowed in.
Investors must be able to invest at least 40,000 times the daily average
Wage. If they can’t, they are not allowed in.
2. Immigrants may purchase property, but locations and availability will
Be limited. Ocean front property cannot be purchased by immigrants. It is
Exclusively for citizens born in the country.
3. Immigrants cannot vote nor can they be elected to any public office.
4. Immigrants cannot collect any type of government assistance.
5. Immigrants cannot protest the countries government, policies or
President.
6. Immigrants cannot display a flag of a foreign country.
7. Immigrants who have illegally entered the country will be found and
Imprisoned.
Well, these are laws that are currently part of the Immigration Laws of,
You guessed it, MEXICO!!!

“Prices slipping?” (in O.C.)

From Jon Lansner’s blog:

http://blogs.ocregister.com/lansner/archives/2006/07/prices_slipping_1.html#comments

For all those who support the “soft landing” theory……….

Judging from the fact that yoy decreases have just started to happen I would put it this way………..

We have just begun this decent and we are still 1,000 miles from the landing strip and running out of fuel real fast.

Major Tom to ground control………………

Stay tuned……….

PLEASE HELP ME WRITE A POWERFUL LETTER TO THE EDITOR!

Hi everyone,

A local realtor wrote a response to a well-written article about the local housing bubblet in the Springfield, MO newspaper. In his letter about the article the realtor talked up the housing market and encouraged people to buy. His letter is bad enough but then he didn’t even identify himself as a realtor (although the realtor-speak gave him away and an easy google search found him on the Murney Realty site!)

Anyway, I want to respond to his letter with my own letter-to-the-editor and I am asking you all for suggestions on what to say. I’d like to keep my letter short and factual, to counter his shrill BUY BUY BUY!

Here’s the original article:
Inflated real estate prices put home ownership out of reach
A snippet from the article:
Home prices are up 52 percent since 2000, to a record high of $130,800 as the median price for the first quarter of 2006, according to preliminary figures from the National Association of Realtors. The group does not compute an affordability index for Springfield, but housing prices have gone up twice as fast as family incomes, according to U.S. Census data. When prices go up faster than incomes, fewer local people can afford to buy without spending a larger percentage of their income for housing, particularly when interest rates rise as well, making the cost of buying more expensive.

Here’s the realtors’ misleading letter-to-the editor countering points made in the article:
Rising real estate values are good
Snippets from the letter:
Since when is the appreciating value of homes a bad thing? Granted, the odds of starting out with your dream home are slim, but with a little planning, that dream home is not as far away as some think. The best way to leverage yourself against rising values is to become a homeowner as soon as possible. Then you can relax and enjoy watching your investment grow in value. Not to mention, with all of the zero down and 100 percent-plus home loans now available, buying a home is easier than ever.

Saving your money is always a good thing, but your money will most certainly grow faster invested in real estate than it ever could sitting in some bank. If you’re currently making a monthly rent payment, you owe it to yourself to talk to a real estate professional.

Brian K. Jackson, Springfield

I easily found out why Mr. Jackson is such a cheerleader for real estate — he’s one of those helpful “real estate professionals” and he works at Murney Associates Realtors right in town (Springfield, MO). Incredibly, Mr. Jackson failed to identify himself as someone who would benefit if anyone took his letter seriously.
BRIAN JACKSON

So, please give me suggestions on my letter to the editor that I should write! I want to make a few key factual points (e.g. 1. high appreciation of homes can be very, very bad for a community example San Diego where only 4% of incomes can buy the median home help me here what is the real data? and 2. real estate values can and have and will go DOWN and 3. something about bankruptcy can be the result of these suicide loans.

Oh, and feel free to write your own letter to the editor or give Mr. Jackson a piece of your mind directly

There is a gaping disconnect between real estate industrial complex shills, who seem trapped in time circa August 2005, and the increasing anxiety which darkens the tone of mainstream press accounts of the real estate market. Case in point — the lead article in the Sunday SD Union Tribune Home section:
————————————————————————————————-
Market’s future is anybody’s guesswork

Experts differ on strength of prices

By Emmet Pierce
STAFF WRITER

July 9, 2006

As the housing market continues to cool, consumers are getting mixed signals from real estate analysts and economists about the ongoing strength of home prices.

Just weeks after Harvard University reassured San Diego County homeowners that their equity was safe and prices would not plummet, The PMI Group warned that the region is among U.S. markets facing the greatest risk of price declines.

UCLA’s Anderson Forecast recently reported that California’s economy has reached a “tipping point” because of the current housing sales slowdown. Steven Hornburg, a longtime housing policy analyst based in Arlington, Va., said all forecasts should be treated with skepticism.

“Read them like you read tea leaves,” he said. “You are predicting the future. Some people are going to be more right than others. Sometimes they will all be wrong. A lot of folks are credible, but you need to look at the track record of the people who are making the predictions.”

Some analysts tend to be doomsayers, knowing that they will be praised for their insights when things go badly, he added. “If they have a habit of being a Cassandra, always saying the world will end, sometimes the world will end.”

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060709/news_1h09mixed.html

“”In San Francisco, it’s not, ‘What is staging?’ it’s ‘Who’s your stager?’ It’s a given,” she said.” - from an interesting article in the Portland Press-Herald about professional stagers.

I would think the more stagers one can find in the phone directories, the wobblier a market’s home prices.

I’ve been enjoying this song for weeks and never really caught the lyrics until recently. Hauntingly appropriate. The text really doesn’t do it justice.

Calexico - Service and Repair

On the outskirts of expansion, looking out from Blueprint peak
The flow is flooding of urban setters panning through rivers running dry.
Numbers roll on in, smiling a lottery grin, a sadness blurs the eye…
It’s just a matter of time before they’re moving on
It’s just a matter of time before they’re moving on
Doesn’t take much time for plans to go wrong
and chase another ghost of a chance.
In the shadows of chain-store ghost towns
where no one walks the streets at night,
a silent nation hooked on medication,
stares into a blue flickering light.
the young drift off alone
and the old are whisked away
and prospects keep looking up,
but the line’s getting longer on the lost highway,
the line’s getting longer on the superstition highway
Doesn’t take much time for plans to go astray
and chase another ghost of a chance
They say deep down inside, lie properties of a healing
kind,

If so it’d better come around soon
and do a little bit of service and repair
do a little bit of service and repair
do a little more service and repair
Doesn’t take much time for plans to change
and offer up another chance
for a little bit more service and repair
do a little bit of service and repair
Doesn’t take much time for plans to change
and offer up another chance
at sewing the dream better suited for both soul and
soil.

Another million + Santa Barbara property. This place is a real dump. I’ve seen it. It’s about 900 square feet, if that.http://santabarbara.craigslist.org/rfs/179971697.html

latest update on the Dutch housing bubble:

- inventory for sale is booming and now by far the biggest in history; real estate brokers say this is caused by the ’strong confidence of the Dutch consumer in the economy’ (unfortunately, they don’t explain why this causes a surge in housing inventory and I doubt if there is real confidence anyway).
- salesprices still rising, especially for the more expensive homes.
More and more properties in my area are now for sale at over 10x their price from about years ago, before the bubble started.
- as in the previous year, again more problems with selling the cheaper homes, mostly because they have gotten out of reach for the kind of buyers that normally buy these properties. This is probably what keeps the average sales price rising.
- mortgage rates rising slowly but still extremely low historically; authorities now suspect that the Dutch banks made a silent agreement to keep mortgage rates artificially low (to save the bubble) and finance this by keeping interest rates on savings accounts/deposits artificially low as well (rates on savings accounts have gone nowhere despite higer ECB rates; despite declining savings, the Dutch have a lot of money in savings accounts).
- crazy lending still as healthy as ever and no sign that anyone is worried about rising foreclosures or the possibility of declining home values.
- probably some trouble brewing for later this year: there will be elections in three months and the new government will be forced to do something about the extremely favorable Dutch HMD (especially if interest rates keep rising).

Weekend notes on inflation and the theory of fictitious capital:

http://www.xanga.com/russwinter

With a logic reminiscent of a generation earlier, statists argued that the gold standard was largely to blame for the credit debacle which led to the Great Depression. If the gold standard had not existed, they argued, Britain’s abandonment of gold payments in 1931 would not have caused the failure of banks all over the world. (The irony was that since 1913, we had been, not on a gold standard, but on what may be termed “a mixed gold standard”; yet it is gold that took the blame.) But the opposition to the gold standard in any form-from a growing number of welfare-state advocates-was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale.

Alan Greenspan
[written in 1966]

Sales agent found dead in McKinney model home

11:37 PM CDT on Saturday, July 8, 2006

By MARGARITA MARTÍN-HIDALGO and KARIN SHAW ANDERSON / The Dallas Morning News

McKinney police are investigating the death of a 40-year-old woman found slain Saturday afternoon inside a model home in a new housing development.

Sarah Anne Walker died of injuries inflicted by an unknown weapon, McKinney police spokesman Randy Roland said in a written statement.

A couple visiting the show home found the D.R. Horton sales representative dead in the kitchen about 1:23 p.m., Capt. Roland said. The couple saw blood and then noticed the body facedown in the kitchen, said a neighbor, adding that she appeared to have been beaten.

Police were still at the home in the 5700 block of Conch Train Road late Saturday, and no other details were immediately available.

The Hemingway at Craig Ranch community, which is near Custer Road and State Highway 121 and is still under construction, is made up of high-end townhomes decorated with stone fronts and slate roofs.

“This is not an unsafe neighborhood,” said Pam Gossick, a real-estate agent who moved into the Hemingway several weeks ago.

“It’s odd, because you don’t expect this in McKinney,” she said.

Tony Vasquez is also a real estate agent and lives three buildings from the model home where Ms. Walker was found. He said she helped him buy his home and that they had stayed in touch since.

“She was always in a good mood and always happy,” Mr. Vasquez said. “She was sweet, very responsive and always returned my phone calls.”

Mr. Vasquez and others in the neighborhood said they believed that Ms. Walker was divorced and had a small child.

“She was excited because this community took off, and she was doing good.”

WFAA-TV (Channel contributed to this report.

NHZ,
Ditto - good to hear from you again.

Someone was looking for a site for forclosures. — ocwen has the va forclosures, just have to figure out by the numbers which one is a forclosure and which one is a regular listing.