The Housing Bubble

Even with some material contributions and mostly free labor, I bet Habitat For Humanity can’t build a new house for the price of acquiring equivalent used ones.

Let’s see….shall I buy two Florida condos or one share of Berkshire Hathaway?

“At the peak of the real estate boom, Zalewski said he paid $25,000 for a parking space at his condominium …”

Twenty-five thousand dollars for a parking space? How big is a parking space, eight-feet by fifteen maybe?

Suppose it is, suppose it’s 8 X 15 feet: Then that means the parking space is priced at over $200 a square foot.

Lol.

But, one must remember, the are CONDOs.
They didn’t sell or were deserted for a reason. One very big reason is that with all of the defaults and walk-aways, there are usually back-taxes, and very large FEES that are past due. Then, there are the pending law-suits that the condo association will need to defend, the cost of repairs from deferred maintenance, and a holy host of other issues that don’t come into the “price” that you paid.

Trust me. These people are going to get a whole bunch of bills to add to the cost of ownership. And, being an absentee landlord is going to prove problematic.
As we used to say when i was in the real estate business, “you never really know someone until you marry them or rent to them”. Some people you will wish you never met.

That’s nothing. In Syracuse, we’ve got homes for $3000.

http://cnyhomes.com/Listing/Search/info.cgi?mlnum=S235203

It’s not the only one and if you go down the list, you’ll see $5k, $6k, etc. Most look like teardowns. The price is probably just the payment fo back taxes but there ya go.

Is that a tongue-in-cheek question or would you like to see an all-out race war in the U.S.?

Well, alternately, we could kill all the blacks while we still have the upper hand. A purge, perhaps.
I don’t have a problem with racism, whatsoever. I believe people who claim they are “color-blind” are liars. The only problem exists when people act out to physically harm others, for no other reason than they don’t really like the “others”. It seems to me it was the black guy doing all the acting, while claiming the others made him “feel bad”.

That’s what needs to be stopped. Criminal behavior. Hate is not, and should not ever be considered a crime, as it is an emotional state of being. It doesn’t harm anyone. Murder, for whatever reason, is a crime against another person. Along with……robbery, assault, battery, etc. etc.
There should be no “hate crime” laws, as the motive for the behavior is not relevant to the crime. The CRIME is what we should punish.
It is obvious, however, that you believe it is the job of government to monitor people’s “attitudes” and “speech” and try to rout out one’s you find unacceptable, particularly if they are of “white” race and take some form of action to harm them.
How about we just re-segregate America? Then we won’t have to worry about things like this. The black guy wouldn’t have had any white co-workers to upset him, so the crime would not have happened. And he couldn’t use racism as an excuse for Murder.

Typical bureaucratic logic: Depend on tobacco sales to meet budget needs and at the same time spend some of this budget money to fight tobacco sales.

Tobacco is one of those products for which economists typically assume demand is inelastic — i.e., people will keep consuming it regardless of price or incomes, due to their addictions. However, it appears that with little or no income, the income elasticity of tobacco demand goes up considerably.

do you recall the “whiskey rebellion” at the beginning of the country?
the government’s thought gouging people for what they considered a vice was a good tax policy. the gov. may eventually find that “we the people” have had enough of their do-gooder policies of massive taxes.

Once again I urge everyone to stop smoking just to screw the statists. Let’s see how the rest of America (the people that vote for these taxes and support the lawsuits and smoking bans) like picking up the bill. I love stories like these and I hope to see many many more.

Watch out high calorie food eaters, beer and wine drinkers…you are the next target.

extorsion maybe a good word.

Does the buyer of the park get to do what he wants with it? Can he, for example, stripmine it?

I wonder how he has the authority to try such a thing. National parks are federal land. The Tetons proper were part of the original park. Private land in the valley nearby was originally in private hands and was bought up by Rockerfeller to extend the park eastward. The Targhee, Teton, and Bridger-Teton National Forests surround Grand Teton Nat. Park on all sides except for the area around Jackson.

NPR has a more complete story.

The governor of Wyoming is threatening to sell off state-owned land in Grand Teton National Park to private developers. He wants to pressure the federal government to come up with a good deal for the land.

The land inside the park consists of two parcels of roughly a square-mile each. They’re known as state school trust lands — they’re supposed to generate funds for public schools, and are supposed to be “managed for maximum profit.” The problem is that the land is worth over $100 million, but the state is currently only getting about $3,000 a year from grazing leases to a cattle rancher.

Wyoming has apparently tried for years to get the Feds to swap out these parcels for other parcels capable of economic development elsewhere in Wyoming, but the Feds have stalled.

How is a state governor going to sell a national park?

It’s grandstanding. He nor his state, have ANY control over Federal lands.

Let’s sell Yosemite so they can build condos. The State can take the money and blow it on welfare, illegal aliens and money for prison guards. Good to go. Good idea Wyoming.

The Twin Cities now has a large Somali population. I am sure that all of them just love being Americans.

“San Diego”

Good thing we have such a solid border policy here in Caleeforneeyah, so we can keep out the terrorists.

The fact that these people even needed to be rounded up IN THE UNITED STATES is evidence of failure.

Really? You ought to enlighten yourself about who private CORPORATIONS are “importing” to work in their meat processing plants, it’ isn’t illegal non-citizens from old mexico…

The Somali young men were probably born here to parents who immigrated during the late 1980s, while civil strife raged in Somalia. At that time, the US (or more broadly, the Free World) and the USSR (or the Communist bloc) were engaged in proxy wars in the Horn of Africa. At the time, the proxy wars were part of a - THE - global ideological existential struggle.

Somalian tribes had long been skirmishing among themselves. In the traditional pastoral nomadic culture, tribes competed and fought for grazing territory. They raided each other and stole livestock from each other. Alliances and rivalries among tribes were fluid and shifting, as each group struggled to survive and thrive in a harsh environment.

The Colonial period solidified tribal rivalries. At times, tribal / ethnic power struggles were exacerbated by Colonial power financing and fomenting. Remember, some Somalians were British ‘protected’ and some were Italian ‘protected’ during the century of European competition over African territory. European competition in Africa was always strong - and think what it must have been like while Mussolini ruled. Colonial borders did not correspond well with Somalian tribal grazing territories, so tribal / ethnic territorial rivalries easily became “internationalized.”

During the Cold War, after the decolonization of Africa, the Free World and the Communist bloc competed in the Horn, as they did rather less bloodily across the Red Sea in Yemen (North Yemen was Free World and South Yemen was a People’s Democratic Republic which aided a rebellion across the border in Free World Oman).

Ethiopia and Somalia had continuous fighting going on, always ostensibly between Free World and Communist forces. In and around Somalia, macho fractious pastoral nomadic tribes received funds and weapons to fight supposedly for either the Free World or the Communist state or Free World or Communist rebel groups. Somalian traditional segmental social structure was suited to shifting alliances and they already had decades of Colonial-era experience fighting out their ethnic and territorial rivalries as part of ‘Great Power struggles.’ The large amounts of money and weapons poured into the Horn in the 70s and 80s led to rampant warlordism, a great deal of suffering, and an almost complete lack of economic, infrastructure, and human development.

AFAIK, the Somalians who emigrated to the Twin Cities include: 1) individuals who served US interests in Somalia or as third-country nationals during the Cold War; 2) members of Somalian tribes that were US ‘allies’ in the Cold War struggles; 3) probably some individuals who assisted the US in the US’s early 90s humanitarian intervention attempt or members of tribes that did.

A lot of people in contested Third World countries informed, translated, worked as office clerks, and in one way or another (slept with US-AID officers…) threw in their lot with the US and Free World. Some were able to immigrate and some weren’t. The cases of ‘allied’ tribe members, which got sorted out in refugee camps, probably got dealt with rather arbitrarily.

As to why some - who knows how many - of these US-born youth turned out bad, I don’t know. Anecdotal evidence suggests that young Somali guys “interpret” their traditional culture as refusing to listen to their parents’ (especially mothers’) counsel, avoiding education, forming gangs, and getting involved in drugs and crime. I suppose from their ranks come those losers vulnerable to recruitment in Al Shabaab.

Holder is a tool. He won’t prosecute the black panthers in Philly who interfered with voting.And, the reason he doesn’t use the term Islamic terrorists is because his law firm defended the terrorists in Gitmo. Didn’t know that did you ?

Gonad Sacks

Aren’t we already more than 10% u3? I mean take out the birth/death and discouraged workers, we might even be approaching 20%.

Stuccobearbomber, I think it bodes better for Eddie’s 12,000 DOW call than you might think. This, in a way, is great news for the stock market and the crooks on Wall Street. This means The Fed, a private bank accountable to nobody, can unleash even more helicopter drops centered on the streets of Broad and Wall. This money can then be used to, once again, push up the price of many asset classes, including stocks, bonds, oil and precious metals.

I remember a long time ago, when the boy was still a boy, I heard something on a business show that I did not quite understand. It was during the Clinton presidency. Unemployment was coming down, due to the tech boom. This was leading to a rise in the Fed Funds rate. Somebody on the program said they were talking to an investor and the investor said, “it is great that you are putting people back to work. But every time you do that I lose money on my stocks.” It seemed that the rising interest rates were pushing down the stock market.

This big bad investor equated higher employment with losses on his investments. In a sense he was rooting for higher unemployment. I didn’t fully understand the ramifications of that statement at the time but I have never forgotten it.

“As a result of this downgrade, we now expect the jobless rate to rise to 10% by early 2011 and remain there for the rest of the year,” Goldman wrote.

If this does come to happen then this would be really, really bad. Again, I reiterate that popular expectations were raised for a robust recovery in the spring/summer of 2010. Countless MSM articles bear this out. Additionally, those FBs around me have bet their last nickel on that expectation, and several of you have echoed those kinds of observations. Savings and reserves have been burned in anticipation of an entirely different scenario than Goldman now predicts.

Then again the could just be prepping the ground for another round of bailouts.

Soooo??? Where does this leave us?

Just another third world nation stuffed with worthless poor and a few overlords I reckon.

Is this REALLY what we want?

Nonsense, globalization allows each country to do what it does best and trade whatever it does best to other countries for whatever it is these other countries do best.

Right now what the U.S. does best is spend money. So other countries are doing what they do best by sending us money to spend.

The problem now is world trade is slowing down which means other countries have slowed down on sending us money to spend.

As soon as world trade picks up again this problem will be fixed and we will be able to party on.

Relax, it’s all good.

Right now, there isn’t a new bubble to woo the country into the illusion of prosperity for all.

“TrueOrganicAlthleticism ™”:

How does this bode for ticket prices at the $2.3 Billion dollar Yankee Stadium & Other Billionaire taxpayer sponsored sporting venues?

For 50 million people in this country, that standard of living is already “way down.”

What everyone is REALLY dancing around is that we no longer have the imagination, drive, or leadership to RAISE everyone’s standard of living in this country.

China has MAGLEV trains in service and is building thousands of miles of high speed rail and we have…?

Nice summation, it’s much appreciated.

“The problem we now face is the most extraordinary financial crisis that I have ever seen or read about.”

It’s amazing. Mr. Bubblehead. Time Magazine’s “maestro”. The cause of all the financial mania……….cheap credit, brought to us by the FED.
Created by Mr. Magoo himself.
Now………….he sees an extraordinary financial crisis.
A lot of us saw it about the time Ben started this site and we started logging on and discussing how this mania would pan out.

Well, here it is. Thanks, All-American genius. Please go away and get off the airwaves and media outlets. We’ve had enough of you.

“The problem we now face is the most extraordinary financial crisis that I have ever seen created.”

He exhibits the same kind of selective memory I have observed in my mother.

My question is what did this guy bury in his front yard to keep the grim reaper away?

Let’s see…According to Mr. Magoo, we must discontinue the Bush tax cuts because the government spurred intense borrowing and spending.

There. That is the correct translation. Blame the big spending on the tax cuts.

This is playing out just like the Great Depression. I read a book on it just a few years ago. One statistic stuck in my mind. Average workers earnings declined over the period to 60% of earnings before the bust.
Government workers earnings rose to 102%.
Governments keep taking from those working to support the government club members. They don’t take any “cuts”.

There is no reason to “lay off” a single fireman or police officer or teacher, anywhere. They simply need to look at revenue and divide that by the number of employees and adjust pay accordingly. Instead, senior level employees say on. Juniors are released.

Unfortunately, the UNIONS have a contract, that says they are “entitled” to pay increases, every year, even when everyone else in the country is cutting back. Therein, is the problem.

From the article:

“However, the present Obama Administration is a tool of the British Empire, the real enemy of the United States, and, instead of promoting the general welfare, it is imposing policies of dictatorship, to include the economic destruction of the U.S.A.”

A tool of the British Empire, the real enemy of the United States.

Lol.

Gotta keep the hope going so those FBs keep sending in the checks!

We spent 30 years digging ourselves in.

10 years sounds rather optimistic to me.

No, we will keep on digging for years to come until there’s nothing left to dig.