The Housing Bubble

I want to be Patrick Swayze when I grow up.

http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0087985/

Ask Janet.

Not to worry — the South will rise again!

CO governor is pushing a bill to give Secret Service vast new powers in the state.

Ostensibly, this is to allow the SS (no pun intended) to arrest Sheriffs who have already stated they won’t enforce unconstitutional gun laws, particularly the recent ban passed in CO.

Want to know when “Go Time” is? When the Fed’s get into a shoot-out with local LEO for defending the rights of the people. You’ll see 2A supporters and veterans from all over the country quit jobs, pack up guns, ammo, and gear, kiss wives and children goodbye, and head out to CO to fight tyranny and support freedom.

As long as it’s constitutional I don’t mind states catering to their local tastes. You can always move somewhere else if you don’t like it. There is some danger of Balkanization on our horizon as we separate from each other based on philosophy, but that would seem more dangerous for the places that choose to be disarmed…

Wiki-up “Drudge Report” and you’ll get an interesting read.

Saul Alinsky

What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be.

Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.

Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

Stupid liberals need their version of Fox. It’s only fair.

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/does-the-white-house-dread-drudge-the-five-crew-takes-on-the-power-of-the-conservative-site/

Yes.

We didn’t see facebook realtor last night. Think he was stuck in line waiting hours for a table at Applebee’s and couldn’t make it.

Good afternoon, my squoogly moo!!

Too bad the Fed’s QE-fueled stock market rally mainly benefits only about the top five percent of the wealth distribution, and drives up the already huge gap between rich and poor.

What Happened In Cyprus Will Happen Everywhere: Marc Faber
Published: Tuesday, 2 Apr 2013 | 11:33 AM ET
By: Paul Toscano
Faber’s Doom Scenario

Marc Faber, Gloom Boom & Doom Report, explains why he believes the rally could end badly this year.

Growing wealth inequality means that the wealthy have nowhere to hide and that events like those in Cyprus will happen in more countries around the world, including developed nations, said Marc Faber, the contrarian investor and publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report.

“It will happen everywhere in the world, in Western democracies,” Faber said “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday. “You have more people that vote for a living than work for a living. I think you have to be prepared to lose 20 to 30 percent. I think you’re lucky if you don’t lose your life.”

“If you look at what happened in Cyprus, basically people with money will lose part of their wealth, either through expropriation or higher taxation,” he added.

“The problem is that 92 percent of financial wealth is owned by 5 percent of the population. The majority of people don’t own meaningful stock positions and they don’t benefit from a rise in the stock market. They are being hurt by a rising cost of living and we all know that the real incomes of median households has been going down for the last few years,” he said.
…

you’re 4 days late for april fools day.

Are the 0.1% at risk of having their wealth taken away from them?

I haven’t seen any signs of it…have you?

on track.

if you consider an endless loop of a slow-motion train wreck to be on track, then yes.

Only 88,000 new jobs added, versus nearly 500,000 dropping out of the labor force; sounds like the unemployment rate went down considerably, as nearly 500,000 fewer “workers” are now considered unemployed!

Silver lining for stock market bulls: QE-to-infinity-and-beyond is intact, for now at least.

Disappointment as only 88,000 new jobs in March
Worst jobs growth in 10 months and labor participation at lowest level since 1979. Yuck.

April 5, 2013, 9:35 a.m. EDT
U.S. jobs gain in March lowest in 10 months
New hires fall to 88,000, more people drop out of labor force

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The United States created the fewest number of jobs in March in 10 months, adding to a string of reports suggesting companies have cut back on new hires and that the economy is slowing again.

The U.S. added a seasonally adjusted 88,000 jobs last month — the smallest increase since last June — and nearly half-a-million people stopped looking for work last month, according to data issued by the Labor Department Friday.

The March jobs report fell well below Wall Street expectations. Economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast a 190,000 increase in jobs. U.S. stock futures (SPM3 -1.16%) slumped after the report.

“What we have in today’s employment report is what the ISM data and the auto (not truck) sales indicated, the economy is expanding but not accelerating. And with that, we can probably put to rest recent FOMC chatter about things starting to get good enough to begin strategizing on how to pare back monthly purchases of Treasurys and agency mortgage-backed securities,” said Steve Blitz, chief economist of ITG Investment Research, in a note to clients.
…

What a difference a day makes! The gold bugs are already pricing in an upward revision to the time until when the Fed takes away the punch bowl.

Got paradigm shift? (”Brother, could you paradigm?”)

Gold - Electronic (COMEX) Jun 2013
Market open $1,564.70
Change +12.30 +0.79%
Volume 108,643
Apr 5, 2013 9:58 a.m.

Previous close $1,552.40
Day low $1,549
Day high $1,576

Bulletin Dow industrials slide reaches 170 as jobs report shocks Wall Street

I like the current direction of oil prices. My wife urged me last night to take advantage of falling local gasoline prices, but I told her that I plan to delay my next purchase until the “empty” warning light goes on, as the near-term trend is my friend.

Just because the stock market drops 20% or so is no reason to sell all your holdings!

April 5, 2013, 8:31 a.m. EDT
How to survive the next market correction
Commentary: Advice from legendary Peter Lynch resonates today
By Michael Sincere

MIAMI (MarketWatch) — When I interviewed famed mutual fund manager Peter Lynch a few years ago, he told me his winning stock-picking strategy: Go to the mall and observe what people are buying.

Then, he added, do basic research on companies before you buy, closely monitor the company, and understand the reason why you originally bought the stock.

“You have to keep checking the story and the fundamentals,” Lynch said. “It’s called doing research. This doesn’t mean checking the stock price each day. You can sit in a room and look at a stock all day and it won’t help you out one bit.”

Forget about trying to predict the future. As Lynch told me: “I’d love to know what will happen in the future. In fact, I’ve been trying to get next year’s Wall Street Journal for 40 years. I’d even pay an extra dollar for it.”

Bear markets and corrections are a normal part of the stock market cycle. Lynch told me that if you plan to sell your stock in a panic because the market falls by 10% or 20 %, maybe you shouldn’t be in stocks at all.
…

Grundlach, Gross sitting pretty as the ‘great rotation’ falters
April 5, 2013, 3:06 PM

Stocks faltered after Friday’s lousy jobs report and treasury’s jumped, pushing yields (10_YEAR -3.17%) to fresh lows for the year.

As John Spence at ETF Trends noted, PIMCO’s Total Return (ETF BOND +0.25%), which is managed by Bill Gross, hit its highest level since launching a little over a year ago.

Doubleline Capital’s Jeffrey Gundlach said last month he’d been buying treasurys heavily, Spence noted, even as U.S. equity markets were surging to records.

As money has poured into equities this year, many have speculated that the long-running rally in bonds — aggressively goosed along by the Fed’s buying — was finally coming to an end.
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The Grand Illusion
The Obama administration is more inclined to public relations than hard-headed pragmatism in dealing with unemployment
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman
April 4, 2013

Which way are we going? The stock market has revived, though it still is off a high in real terms. There’s suddenly good news about housing demand, which is showing signs of life after six years of stagnation. Yet Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warns that the package of fiscal cutbacks – the fiscal cliff, sequester, and other cuts – is set to reduce growth by 1.5 percentage points. He calls that “very significant” and adds that “job creation is slower than it would be otherwise.” This is the key to where we are. New research from the Brookings Institution concludes that rising inequality in the United States is not something that will vanish with a real recovery. It is here to stay, a reflection of an increasingly calcified society and a whole crisis in itself.

The present phase of our Great Recession might be called the Grand Illusion, because all the happy talk and statistics that go with it, especially on the key indicator of jobs, give a rosier picture than the facts justify. We are not really advancing. We are, by comparison with earlier recessions, going backward. We have a $1.3 trillion budget deficit. And despite the most stimulative fiscal policy in our history and the most stimulative monetary policy, with a trillion-dollar expansion to our money supply, our economy over the last three years has been declining or stagnant. From growth in annual GDP of 2.4 percent 2010, we bumped down to only 1.8 percent in 2011 and were still down at 2.2 percent in 2012. The cumulative growth for the last 12 quarters was just 6.2 percent, less than half the 15.2 percent average after previous recessions over a similar period of time. It is the slowest growth rate of all the 11 post-World War II recessions.

What has gone wrong? There seems to be a weakness in the investment of private capital. Today, corporate spending on investments is the weakest it has been in six decades. The billions invested in the Internet, spreading its application and comingling the technology with labor, boosted multifactor productivity but, as David Rosenberg of wealth-management firm Gluskin Sheff points out, most of that occurred several years ago. As he has written, a capex-led business recovery that breeds sustained productivity growth and decent job creation is what underscores the best and longest economic expansions since the end of WWII.

Anemic growth looks likely to continue because of various downers implicit in Bernanke’s caution. Sequestration will take $600 billion of government expenditures out of the economy over the next 10 years. Payroll taxes up 2 percent hit about 160 million workers and will drain $110 billion in aggregate demand. The Obama health care tax will be a $30 billion-plus drag. The surge in gasoline prices by some 50 cents recently may be temporary, as Bernanke suggests, but meanwhile represents another $65 billion of consumer cash flow. Conservatively, these nasties add up to roughly a 2 percent hit to baseline GDP growth when we are barely able to muster 2 percent growth.
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8,853,614: Americans on Disability Hits Another Record; Exceeds 3x Population of Chicago
April 4, 2013
By Terence P. Jeffrey

(CNSNews.com) - The number of American workers collecting federal disability payments climbed to yet another record of 8,853,614 in March, up from 8,840,427 in February, according to newly released data from the Social Security Administration.

That means there are more than 3 times as many Americans taking disability payments as there are people living in the city of Chicago, which according to the Census Bureau has a population of 2,707,120.

March was the 194th straight month that the number of American workers collecting federal disability payments increased. The last time the number of Americans collecting disability decreased was in January 1997. That month the number of workers taking disability dropped by 249 people—from 4,385,623 in December 1996 to 4,385,374 in January 1997.

As the overall number of Americans collecting disability has increased, the ratio of full-time workers to disability beneficiaries has decreased.

In December 1968, 1,295,428 Americans collected disability and, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 65,630,000 worked full-time. Thus, there were about 51 Americans working full-time for each person collecting disability at that time. In January 1997, the last time the number of disability beneficiaries declined, 4,385,374 Americans collected disability and 104,900,000 worked full-time. Thus, there were then about 24 Americans working full-time for each person collecting disability.

In March 2013, with a record 8,853,614 Americans collecting disability and 115,841,000 working fulltime, there were only 13 Americans working full-time for each person collecting disability.
…

SubPrime lending on autos can be the only answer for the auto sales volume numbers released this week. For over a year, I have distrusted the reported numbers. They make no sense. In light of SubPrime lending? It makes all the sense in the world.

Take a look at a 20 year chart of auto sales volume and you’ll understand my skepticism 100%.

[People/things/entities/stuff/whatever] are still looking at it as a font of money from which to drink as long as you get in at the right time. That’s the American Dream.

“How long does it really take for the bubble mentality to go away?”

I’d guess with unprecedented levels of hair-of-the-dog bubble reflation stimulus, it will take a lot longer than it would otherwise.

“So, evidently, 7 years or even more depending on how you measure it, wasn’t enough to change the attitude about real estate. [People/things/entities/stuff/whatever] are still looking at it as a font of money from which to drink as long as you get in at the right time.”

I wonder why?

Dear Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member,
…

“What does it take to pop the bubble in people’s minds?”

It’s not complicate. One word. LOSS.

And the losses are coming. And this round is going to be breathtaking as prices will finally roll back to the pre-bubble levels of the mid 1990’s.

The the window of time to exit housing is narrowing quickly.

What does it take to pop the bubble in people’s minds?

The end of “get rich without actually doing any work” mentality.

What does it take to pop the bubble in people’s minds?

It would seem it takes a real depression where losses are actually acknowledged and important people who used to have money no longer do…which we are doing everything in our power to avoid. Long live the bubble.

What does it take to pop the bubble in people’s minds?

The government to get out of it and quit pushing it like a drug?

“Get Rich Quick” has always held some appeal to people and driven bubble mentalities.

Various gold rushes, tulip bulb mania, stock market bubbles, Florida housing bubble in the early 1920s, recent housing bubble, etc.

It is tempting to say that the government leaving the lending industry would stop bubble mentality, but I think that’s false. There were housing bubbles all around the world in countries where there was no government loan guarantees.

Now, if you abolish the Fed, that might have an impact, since there would be no one to “lean against the wind” with ultra-low interest rates in tough times.

“What does it take to pop the bubble in people’s minds?”

I don’t think the average American thinks that the housing bubble has popped like we do here at the hbb. In my opinion most people view that home prices have gone down and may be they can buy now cheaper as the escalating prices and equity withdrawals would be a safety net. They also believe that owning a home is a path to prosperity. This thinking never ever went away. It is ingrained in their brains. So they are hoping for or almost assured about equity withdrawals in their future all by their own magical thinking.

Another reason is that most people do not have anything going for them in their jobs economically speaking. So owning a home is all they have left of an American dream.
Being in debt paying for a car or a house they cannot afford is all they can aspire. Without these items they will feel like a big looser.

A home to them is a future magical money tree. Just my 2 cents

Polly, I think you supplied the answer a long time ago: by requiring banks to hold part of a risky tranche. In the same vein:

The only thing that will kill the bubble mentality is actual skin in the game. And it has to be skin which is immediately accountable — no pushing it off to the next quarter or the next year or until you retire to Tahiti with a pile and leave the pending losses to your successor. Nope. NOW. Examples:

1. No more mark-to-fantasy accounting where you don’t see a loss until you sell, which allows you to hold of inventory as long as you feel like it.
2. No more deferred interest, like when WaMu would receive a mortgage payment less than interest and book it as fully amortized. Nope, banks should have to treat their checkbooks like any schmo: what you have is only what you have now, not what you think you’ll get later.
3. No more 0% down, you want a house you need real cash now.
4. And NO MORE selling up the food chain scot free for the fees. If you want to sell a mortgage to Fannie, you have to hold a risky tranche for yourself. And yes, that tranche bites into your reserves, so you can only make mortgages until you run out of reserves. No more infinite deals.

In other words, if you want to make money on a mortgage, you’ll have to do it the old fashioned way: by waiting 30 years for someone to work it off. That will kill a bubble, and fast. It will also kill the country.

Is this related to housing? If yes, then you can count on fraud.

Is it commutable to DC area? That could explain the inflated prices.

[/sarc]

Maybe some comps sold that reflected the new price.

My wife neither knows nor cares what a Bitcoin is.

Felix Salmon
Felix Salmon is the finance blogger at Reuters
Published April 3, 2013
Money & Banking
The Bitcoin Bubble and the Future of Currency

A few days ago, the value of all the bitcoins in the world blew past $1 billion for the first time ever. That’s an impressive achievement, for a purely virtual currency backed by no central bank or other authority. It’s also temporary: we’re in the middle of a bitcoin bubble right now, and it’s only a matter of time before the bubble bursts.

There are a couple of reasons why the bubble is sure to burst. The first is just that it’s a bubble, and any chart which looks like the one at the top of this post is bound to end in tears at some point. But there’s a deeper reason, too — which is that bitcoins are an uncomfortable combination of commodity and currency. The commodity value of bitcoins is rooted in their currency value, but the more of a commodity they become, the less useful they are as a currency.

Still, it’s worth taking a look behind the bitcoin bubble, because there are fascinating implications for anybody who cares about payments, or currencies, or trust.

First, though, let’s go back to the night of Sunday June 12, 2011. That was the date of the first big bitcoin heist: a theft of such simplicity and audacity that it might well be considered the perfect crime. A man — we know him only as “All In Vain” — went to bed that night with his Windows computer turned on and connected to the internet. On that computer was a wallet containing 25,000 electronic coins. When he woke up on Monday morning, the wallet was still there. But the money was gone.

Those 25,000 coins were, at the time, worth some $500,000; today, they are worth about $3.5 million. If All in Vain had noticed the theft within a couple of minutes of it happening, it’s conceivable that he could have got his money back. But he was asleep — and ten minutes after the theft occurred, it was utterly permanent and irrevocable. The only way All in Vain could get his money back would be if the thief were to simply transfer it back into his wallet.

No one will ever find the person who stole All in Vain’s coins. That’s because the coins were designed, by another pseudonymous internet denizen known only as Satoshi Nakamoto, to be the perfectly anonymous payment mechanism for a digital world. That’s one of the things about bitcoins: once you send them, they’re sent. Similarly, if someone sends you bitcoins, you know for sure that you own them. You don’t need to know or trust the sender — all you need to know is that the coins have arrived in your virtual wallet, ready for saving or spending.

Bitcoins were designed to be – and, in many ways, are – the perfect digital currency: they’re frictionless, anonymous, and cryptographically astonishingly secure. For anybody who’s ever suffered the incompetence of a bank, or bristled at the fees involved in just spending money, either domestically or abroad – that is to say, for all of us – the promise of bitcoin is the holy grail of payments. Especially since, to all intents and purposes, bitcoins are invisible to law enforcement and the taxman.

Those strengths are also weaknesses. No one wants to risk losing millions of dollars worth of currency overnight, just because they were outsmarted by some computer hacker.

Still, for the time being, bitcoin is in many ways the best and cleanest payments mechanism the world has ever seen. So if we’re ever going to create something better, we’re going to have to learn from what bitcoin does right – as well as what it does wrong.
…

Current Account
The Economics blog
Bitcoin is in hyperdeflation
Bubble or not, the underpinnings of Bitcoin pose problems to its use as a popular currency.
By Alex Hern Published 02 April 2013 13:01

Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal covers the still-soaring price of Bitcoin – which has now broken $100 – and puts an interesting spin on the situation: the Bitcoin economy is now suffering hyperdeflation. He writes:

So a few weeks ago, a pizza might have cost you one Bitcoin. Today it might only cost you a fifth of a Bitcoin, which sounds great, but then if you’re looking at the above chart, why would you spend anything?

Why would you buy a pizza (or pot or anything else) when tomorrow your Bitcoin will be worth more? With this kind of chart, you’d be insane to do anything but hoard your coins.

So yes, all the hype is great for some folks in the ecosystem, but ultimately there’s a reason that over time, government prefer to see their currency slowly depreciate. A surging currency leads to hoarding which kills real transactions.

I’ve written repeatedly that I think the current price of Bitcoin is the result of a volatile bubble – though I’m no more certain than anyone else as to when that bubble will burst – and that explanation is part of the reason why. The faster the Bitcoin price rises, the fewer actual transactions you’ll see being made with it. Insofar as there is a “real” price of the currency, as opposed to the inflated price it’s showing now, that must be based on people actually using Bitcoin, rather than hoarding it. While the currency is in hyperdeflation, that won’t happen (outside of a few crazy people doing things like selling their houses in it).
…

Who’s Forfeiting Pay Alongside Furloughed Employees?
By Eric Katz
12:56 PM ET
April 3, 2013
Defense Secretary to Take Pay Cut in Solidarity With Furloughed Feds

DHS’ Janet Napolitano will donate 5 percent of her salary to foundations that benefit DHS employees DHS’ Janet Napolitano will donate 5 percent of her salary to foundations that benefit DHS employees AP

A handful of lawmakers and federal executives who are exempt from taking forced unpaid leave due to sequestration have pledged to stand with the downtrodden and the furloughed. The following is a list of people in government whose pay is unaffected by the automatic, across-the-board cuts, but who have said they will dock their pay as federal employees are furloughed. We will update it as more officials join the movement.

EXECUTIVE BRANCH

President Obama: Obama said he will give 5 percent of his salary back to the Treasury to “share in the sacrifice being made by public servants across the federal government that are affected by the sequester,” according to a White House official.

Chuck Hagel, Defense secretary: Hagel will return 5 percent of his salary to the Treasury, his spokesman said.

John Kerry, secretary of State: Kerry will donate 5 percent of his salary to charities benefiting State Department employees.

Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security secretary: The former Arizona governor will donate 5 percent of her salary to foundations that benefit DHS employees, Politico reported.

Shaun Donovan, Housing and Urban Development Department secretary: Donovan will donate 5 percent of his salary to charities in the affordable housing industry. Several additional sequestration-exempt HUD workers will forfeit some pay, The Washington Post reported.

Bob Perciasepe, Environmental Protection Agency acting administrator: Perciasepe has donated four days’ worth of pay to the Federal Employee Education and Assistance Fund.

Eric Holder, attorney general: Holder has said giving back part of his pay is “certainly something that I would consider,” according to Politico.

Arne Duncan, Education secretary: Duncan will consider docking his pay, “but nothing’s been decided,” a spokesman said.

Ashton Carter, deputy secretary of Defense: Carter told a Senate committee he would cut his own salary by 20 percent if his employees face an equivalent pay reduction through furloughs. Pentagon furloughs have since been reduced, however.

LEGISLATIVE BRANCH

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.: After Carter volunteered to take a salary cut, Graham said, “We should follow your model. We should have our pay docked and the president should have his pay docked.” Graham later introduced a nonbinding budget amendment as part of “vote-a-rama” that would require senators to give 20 percent of their salary to the Treasury or to charity.

Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Bill Nelson, D-Fla.: The two senators have introduced legislation to make congressional salaries vulnerable to sequestration cuts. “The federal workforce is looking at furloughs that would result in a sizeable pay cut — and there’s absolutely no reason members of Congress should exempt themselves.”

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md.: Mikulski took to the Senate floor to call for congressional pay cuts to match federal employee furloughs.

Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska: Begich announced in a statement he would give the same number of days’ pay as his most furloughed staffers back to the Treasury.

Rep. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill.: Duckworth said in a statement she will take an 8.4 percent pay cut to match the reduction in most discretionary programs.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C.: The nonvoting representative from Washington, said she will donate a day’s pay for each day federal employees are furloughed — matching the highest number of furlough days at any agency — to the Federal Employee Education and Assistance Fund.

Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Fla.: “Sequestration’s indiscriminate cuts are causing furloughs and job losses as well as cutting funding to many important programs in our communities, yet the salaries of members of Congress have not been affected,” Murphy said in statement. “That is why I am going to take a portion of my salary each month to support local charities who continue to go above and beyond to provide vital services to those in our community.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.: The ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform told Government Executive in light of sequestration he will donate a portion of his salary to scholarship funds at Howard University and Morgan State University.

Rep. Ami Bera, D-Calif.: Bera will give 8.2 percent of his monthly pay to organizations in his home district being impacted by sequestration budget cuts.
…

In Focus: Where the Federal Workforce Counts
By Susan Fourney and Kelly Martin
April 2, 2013

As agencies scramble to determine which employees might be subject to furlough and for how long, states are bracing for the economic fallout from sequestration. Government’s budget crunch sometimes is viewed as solely a Washington problem, but its impact also will be felt disproportionately in other parts of the country where the federal workforce is omnipresent.

Among a federal civilian workforce of than 2 million, Washington, D.C., ranks No. 4 with about 165,000 employees, trailing California (242,000), Texas (187,000) and Virginia (171,000), according to data compiled by Janet Kopenhaver, the Washington representative for Federally Employed Women. States with the fewest feds include Delaware (5,300), Vermont (6,500) and New Hampshire (8,000).

Drawing on data from the Office of Personnel Management and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, FEW breaks down the population of federal civilians (where they work) and retirees (where they live) by congressional district and provides the information to lawmakers each year. “These statistics are very important to legislators and their staffs on Capitol Hill so that they will know how many federal workers and retirees are employed and live in their state and district,” Kopenhaver said in a news release. “So the next time lawmakers say that federal workers are overpaid, wasteful and not productive, and that furloughs and/or layoffs should be implemented, let them remember that they are referring to their own constituents and their livelihoods.”

At a 2012 news conference releasing projections that sequestration would cost the nation’s economy 2.14 million jobs, two big city mayors sounded the alarm. Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton said the cuts “would likely put Arizona in a recession.”

Especially in states with a significant military presence, furloughs and spending cuts loom large. In March, Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter sent letters to the governors of Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington, warning that spending cuts at military installations could have a ripple effect on local economies.

Don’t believe media: Sequester already causing real pain
4:54 p.m. EDT, April 5, 2013

Regular readers of this column have heard me say it before, but I’ll say it again: I’m often embarrassed by the questions my colleagues ask at White House briefings. This week was no exception.

Among reporters inside the Beltway, the latest narrative, repeated without qualification, is that the Obama administration is guilty of exaggerating the impact of the sequester. After all, those $1 trillion across-the-board cuts, $85 billion of which will happen this fiscal year, kicked in on March 1. They’ve been in place for more than a month now. And the sky hasn’t fallen. Trains are still running on time, Major League Baseball opened the season on schedule, and the lights still come on when you flip the switch. Only White House tours have been canceled. So what’s the big deal?

God forbid reporters pause long enough to do a little independent research before repeating that nonsense. If they did, they wouldn’t join the chorus. That narrative is dead wrong. For two reasons. First, nobody ever said the sequester axe would fall immediately, or all at one time. It takes a long time to bring a battleship to a dead stop. It takes a long time to shut down, or even slow down a government agency.
…

When you pump seven trillion fake dollars into the markets, the markets will go up. Allegedly.

But a cruddy 3/2 house is still a cruddy 3/2 house no matter how you price it. And an ounce of gold is still an ounce of gold. It’s really just a matter of how those seven trillion fake dollars get distributed.