Bits Bucket for April 17, 2013
Post off-topic ideas, links, and Craigslist finds here.
The Housing Bubble
Examining the home price boom and its effect on owners, lenders, regulators, realtors and the economy as a whole.
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Name:Ben Jones
Location:Northern Arizona, United States
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http://politics.heraldtribune.com/2013/04/15/foreclosure-bill-clears-hurdle/
Watch this space…if this law passes it will have a significant impact on the number of homes flooding the market in FL.
Wouldn’t that hurt responsible borrowers who stopped paying their mortgages through no fault of their own?
Should we stop all foreclosures everywhere then?
If you can’t make the payment (for whatever reason), you lose the house to the bank. Isn’t that how things should be? Risk of losing a job, etc. should be considered when taking on a loan.
Always good to have a cushion of savings to fall back on, too…like the one my wife and I had when I lost my job in the early 1990s recession. We were able to continue making payments through my spell of unemployment, in part due to having a cushion of savings.
http://www.oregonlive.com/front-porch/index.ssf/2013/04/in-court_foreclosure_filings_j.html
This is what it looks like when a state becomes quasi-judicial…a 90% fall in filing of NODs.
In CA, NODs have fallen approximately 30% from December to March, and are back on the rebound.
CA has NOT become quasi-judicial.
I’m not sure I understand your point. Doesn’t that just indicate “pent-up” foreclosures?
Doesn’t that just indicate “pent-up” foreclosures?
Precisely. I believe it was you that posted earlier today a link that shows approximately 19 MILLION excess empty houses. Our estimates put that amount up around 26 MILLION excess empty houses if the “pent up” defaults are included.
Iwog
No. The biggest change caused by the Homeowner Bill of Rights is that there can be no dual tracking. Previously, when a home was completed as a short sale, it was likely also under an NOD. Today, that cannot happen. Short sales cannot also be going through a foreclosure…and there are lots of short sales happening today.
The 30% reduction is easily explained by the “no dual tracking” change.
My point is the the new Homeowner Bill of Rights law in CA is NOT causing the state to go judicial, and distress is likely to be processed at the same pace as the past few years…which has moved the state from a 15% non-current loan rate in early 2010 to a ~7.5% non-current loan rate today.
Buy a house today and your losses will be incalculable.
There will be more craters than all of Jupiter’s moons combined.
I looked at a house with a lying real estate agent last night. This particular place is about 108$/sqft, I instructed her that I could have the place rebuilt for $60/sqft. Amazingly she accepted that and didn’t challenge me on it. She then said they had an offer on the property, my reply was that if it was good they would have accepted it.
this blog has been informative.
Beautiful. Makes me want to go out and troll realtors.
I’m actually a serious buyer, its about minimizing losses. Business Week had an expose on Zillow/Trulia/RedFin and I hope they destroy the agency model. I can’t believe how opaque and dishonest the process is. Plus with the perverse incentives, does anyone in the process have the buyers interests as a fiduciary?
Brother Jimmy, I get your point, but that’s a huge gap (between $108/sq ft and $60/sq ft). Obviously $60/sq ft is not going to happen in your area, what is your bottom line on $/sq ft and do you think you can get there?
And obviously you’re not in the contracting business. We bid, win,execute and earn profit at $55/sq ft in all 48 states.
I’m not in the building business so I’ll defer to the experts. I do know that costs are way out of line with the value of the inputs, whether I could get something built for $60/sqft I don’t know, but I found it amusing that I brought it up to an industry”professional” and wasn’t challenged. asking prices range from 49 to 104$.sqft around here.
Yes PW, I’m sure you do. I’m also sure that the home you build for that price is exactly what brother Jimmy wants and in the location he wants it, right? There, i just made a sale, brother Jimmy, please contact PW, he’s going to sell you a house right there where you want it for $55/sq ft. Problem solved, glad I could help. You can donate my commission to a good cause.
“Location” has nothing to do with it unless you’re going to invoke the worn out realtard lie of “location location location”.
Reader Beware-
Whenever you hear some jerk used house salesmen say “location”, know that you’re being fed a used up marketing lie to get you to pay far more than the house is worth.
Joe and I are still waiting for PW to build us houses for that amount in the Woodmont Triangle neighborhood of Bethesda. When we asked he claimed we were “cherry picking” but since the cherry trees only just bloomed I assume he was just fussing.
Of course, if we wanted to live 25 miles from Albany, NY (which for some reason is considered a reasonable commute from Washington DC) he could do it. The neighborhood would have none of the attributes we want, but he could do it.
RAL, I will pay $100/sq ft (nice big profit for you) if you build anything in the ballpark of 2-3 BR and 2000 sq ft in Bethesda. I don’t even care if it’s next to a trash dump. If you can do that, I’ll buy it from you. I also don’t care if it has a yard, you can get the tiniest lot possible, as long as you can get permits and build on it, I’ll buy it.
Joe, don’t even kid about living next to a trash dump. I lived next to the giant mountain dump in Coconut Creek, FL for a year and there were days where all the outside air smelled exactly like my 5-month old’s dirty diaper, except stronger. When we left, the 1st question I had on my next home was how close it was to the nearest dump. They still haven’t shut that thing down.
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2013-01-08/news/fl-landfill-violations-20130108_1_odor-landfill-mount-trashmore
What about Chevy Chase? A developer built a spec house (4000 square feet) on a microscopic lot in CC just south of the Bethesda border. Of course, I think the developer paid well in excess of half a million for the lot, and plans to sell the house for well in excess of a million, but maybe PW has a magic wand to get the other tiny lot on Wisconsin for his magic $5000 price point that he says he can get in any place in the US.
Months ago I told both of you to send me your drawings…. where are they? You’re still copping the same BS.
Jimmy, why don’t you hire pimp watch to build a house for you. He could use the exercise.
I think his experience is building metal warehouses but heck, space is space.
That’s interesting. Houses are far less costly to build than Butler buildings….. and Butler buildings are right around $60/sq foot.
Your foot-in-mouth disease symptoms appear with every one of your lying posts.
The losses aren’t going to be on the backs of those buying the “American Dream” today. They’re going to be dumped onto the backs of the ever shrinking number of taxpayers left in this joke of a Country when the next collapse occurs.
Here’s an example:
http://www.sunriver.com/2012/06/10/too-good-to-be-true/
The lady that cuts my hair was telling me about an inordinate number of new clients that she has who were bragging about buying into a local retirement development (SunRiver) here locally for about half of what the house was being priced at. I hadn’t heard anything about it so I checked it out and found the above “if you can’t afford the house the FHA will help you with this too good to be true reverse-mortgage” sales pitch. I talked to a realtor yesterday who told me that she was told by someone who represents that area that the number of individuals using this tactic to get into SunRiver was around 80%.
Nice to see that so much effort is being spent to keep the bubble, and higher median home prices, going, isn’t it?
In case anyone is interested the SoUtah house market is still dead. We had a short burst of sales in the under $250,000.00 bracket. Those cheaper homes are now gone, with the exception of $100,000.00 tear-downs, and what the local realtors are mostly left with are former $1.2 million, $1.5 and $2 million plus houses which nobody wants, or can afford, even at half off the original bubble pricing.
The available homes are $300-$400K. WTF does a senior need with a three-car garage???
Fill up two bays with a lifetime of crap? A place for one of the kids to live when they crash and burn in the new economy?
Bored on the train this morning, i might go on grindr and see if i can find Lindsay Graham or Mark Kirk’s profiles. I wonder if there’s a secret phrase or gesture the closeted “family values” guys use to identify each other so they don’t end up bare backing an equal rights activist type who could expose them to the press.
Why do you hate gays so much? They are also human.
Do you understand Obama’s sharia law gay marriage policy?
First, he takes away all our gunz (this part is happening now). Then, he takes all of the white women away and gives them to the coloreds under sharia law. Then, the white men are all forced into gay marriages together. Within a few generations, everyone will be black or brown or yellow, whitey will be extinct. And there won’t be any gunz.
This is what Obama really wants for USA. You’ll see…
From today’s Deal Book section of the ny times… The top 10 “job creator”/mitt romney/private equity loopholes.
Read and weep… And remember these are the guys who get to play with your 401k/IRA money while you have it locked up. And undertake elaborate schemes to avoid taxes on the profit$.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/the-top-10-private-equity-loopholes/
You have problem with Corporate Communist Capitalism?
welfare for the top .01% distorts our markets just as much, if not more than, welfare for the “47%”.
that said, if these tax loopholes aren’t changed, I see an S corp and IRA stuffing in my near term future (’13 or ‘14)
See my link to Reuters below.
IRA stuffing in my near term future (’13 or ‘14)
Doesn’t that require the ability to buy very undervalued shares (therefore privately traded) in a very successful business? Those are hard to come by if you’re not a .1%er.
I’m sick of those layabout 47%’ers.
Time to put those retirees back to work.
And kids, there isn’t any reason they shouldn’t be working by age 5.
I would stuff the IRA with shares of my parents’ and in-laws’ S corp.
Before I do this I need to get some other things in line and get other people on board. For right now they think giving us straight up cash is the way to go, since they can each give up to $14k/yr and it is excluded from taxes as a family gift. However, long term it would be much better (incalcuably) to go full-on Romney and value the S corp shares very low and then stuff them into IRAs.
The things that need to be tied up are that the rental props and restaurants are not titled appropriately and to be super aggressive I want to make sure we can take “key person” insurance on myself, my brothers, the parents, and all spouses. Probably going to need to change several sets of paperwork to make this kosher.
There is also the possibility that it would be better to divide things up better among siblings, so if someone wants out in the future things are more concrete. But once things are in place… IRA stuffing FTW, baby.
Joe:
Sorry, but your posts make it sound like you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth. If you do end up making a profit from your parents’ money, then you would not exactly be justified in holding yourself above those who do not have the same luxury.
It’s been well-established that Joe fancies himself as a rich but caring man who walks benevelently among the poors. See, with his family connections and law degree, conventional wisdom predicts that he should be a Romney-luvvin’ Young Republican conservative. But, he’s bucked the trend, resisted the devil, and generously decided to be center-left* instead!
And he wants a medal for it.
—————–
*so long as he doesn’t have to look like the center left. No aluminum siding for him, or six-year-old “beater” car for his wife. And 401K’s are for poors.
oxide, you know I’m not saying that 401ks are for poors. I’m just pointing out that all the people who say “fend for yourself, take advantage of 401k/IRA tax benefits” are selling you a pile of s***.
Sadly, our tax code/retirement system here in the US favors anyone who is willing to be aggressive and find ways to classify income as capital gains. It also favors people with a head start, such as a closely held business with extra cash sitting around. You can privately “value” your business at some low amount, then stuff your share of the business into an IRA. Voila, it grows tax free and it was massively undervalued when you stuffed it in. You basically just hid your business from the IRS in plain sight and it’s OK. It’s all well-known loophole and Congress doesn’t care because they essentially only care about a tiny sliver of the US population. Everything else they say is pandering to make it look like they care.
Are the 1%, the .1%, and the .01% three different groups, or just different ways folks use to refer to “the one percent”. Sincerely, The .47%(members of this group: among the top half of a percent or just poorer than the other 53?)
Man I hope you don’t teach math. If you did, the answer to that question would be self-evident.
There’s a big difference between 1% and 0.1%.
Specifically, 0.9%. But that is the difference between, say, someone worth $10 million and a billionaire Russian oligarch.
Those billionaires aren’t the .1%. They are the .0001%.
Los Angeles Housing Prices Headed Down
http://picpaste.com/pics/2b63c36dea94847f55a62ebba334e4d8.1366201830.png
Your resolution is too granular. Zoom out on the chart.
Your character is too corrupt. Zoom in on it.
THIS should be EXCELLENT….
I am sure glad obama keeps bailing out these fools…
———————————-
BofA Misses Estimates as Mortgage Banking Weighs on Results
By Hugh Son - Apr 17, 2013 - Bloomberg
Bank of America Corp. reported a jump in first-quarter profit that missed analysts’ estimates as lower mortgage banking income slowed the firm’s turnaround. The shares dropped 3.3 percent in early New York trading.
The net loss at consumer real estate services widened to $1.31 billion from $1.14 billion a year earlier. Adjusted revenue slipped at the unit while noninterest expenses climbed 4.5 percent to $4.06 billion and margins narrowed, the bank said.
Moynihan has spent his tenure as CEO cleaning up financial, legal and regulatory quagmires inherited when he was promoted to the top job in 2010. Slimming (BAC) the firm has meant letting Bank of America fall out of first place among its peers in terms of assets and workforce, and the asset sales put more pressure on revenue, which has been hurt by sluggish borrowing.
The most troubled assets include loans made by Countrywide Financial Corp., the mortgage company purchased in 2008, whose lax standards were blamed by lawmakers and regulators for fueling the housing bubble. The bank has been bombarded by legal claims tied to faulty mortgages and foreclosures, and some of the settlements negotiated by Moynihan’s team still face court challenges.
To improve revenue, which slid 11 percent to $84.2 billion last year, Moynihan is setting new targets for regional managers to boost sales and pushing them to get existing customers to take more products, people with knowledge of the effort have said. Moynihan summoned more than 100 of the leaders to Chicago this month to discuss the initiative, said the people.
TARP was created by George W Bush.
obama and mccain supported it.
So did many others in Congress, but ultimately, it was the Shrub who signed off on it.
he was wrong too.
Not just wrong, but ultimately responsible.
That’s what “signing off” means in real life.
<i.Not just wrong, but ultimately responsible.
Five years of obama in the White House
Filibuster proof democrat senate
Super majority of democrats in the house
obama (as a senator) voting for TARP
Yet NOTHING in obama’s fault…
The kool-aid goes deep.
Bush knew he had to bail out the Banksters in order to save capitalism.
I believe the PTB finally saw the gig was up, remember the line that inside a week (Sept 2008) police wouldn’t be able to be paid and civil society would break down. I don’t believe it for a second but they got their goldmine and the us taxpayer got the shaft.
Bush knew he had to bail out the Banksters in order to save
capitalismhis friends.I was gonna do same w/”the existing power structure” as replacement.
“Not just wrong, but ultimately responsible.”
do you know what a republic is? i know you are a libtard and naturally drawn towards monarchies and dictatorships…but get your head out of your arse.
with all due respect.
i thought about it and would like to apoligize for calling you a “libtard”…liberal leaning perhaps?
Is that his name on the bottom line or Obamas?
Rhetorical question: it’s Bush’s and Bush’s only.
And you wonder what’s wrong with this country? YOU are what’s wrong.
Is that his name on the bottom line or Obamas?
Because Presidents _always_ carry on the policies of their predecessors, and never change direction when they think the past direction was wrong—right?
Speaking of not my favorite president. He’ going Boston tomorrow for a memorial service. Gosh the police don’t have enough on their plate. They need the bother of a presidential photo opp.
hope and change.
Three people dead in Boston deserves endless round-the-clock hand-wringing on every quasi-news channel in America? And an “I care” photo opp?
Why isn’t Obama pursuing a photo opp in Chicago where hundreds are murdered annually in perhaps the most gun-restricted town in America?
Answer: because one photo opp. is politically advantageous. The other isn’t.
Gang murders = terrorist bombing in your mind?
Seriously? No… seriously?
i knew this guy once who called gang murders “misdemeanor murder”.
What color are the clouds in your world MacBeth?
You do know it would not decrease the murder rate at all if everyone in Chicago carried a gun, right? These are gangbangers we’re talking about. Killing other gangbangers. Or kids in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Black and ominous?
Correct, I suspect most of the killing goes on in a handful of well-known corridors in and out of the city. In Baltimore that means Orleans Street/Route 40 corridor. I’m sure every major city has areas where this sort of thing is (sadly) accepted and expected as a natural consequence of the war on drugs. Drugs will still be traded, lots of money will be involved, and the police just try to limit it to areas and times of day (around midnight) so that normal people aren’t much affected.
And of course, if Obama didn’t go, we’d hear that Obama didn’t care about the three brave Americans in our sacred City of the Original Tea Party.
Decided he’d rather go golfing! How’s that for Hope and blah, blah..
Not from me. I would think it was refreshing that he stayed in Washington attending business. Ceremonial duties can be important but this one could be handled via TV. Guess he already made a statement on Sunday.
he’s definately damned if he does and damned if he don’t.
I don’t know if it is as bad as it appears. If Americans were dumb enough to buy into the well-funded and clumsily-choreographed propaganda war against Obama, they wouldn’t have reelected him…
perhaps damned was too strong a work…some partisan hack will make issue whether he goes…or doesn’t go.
I think they would call him out for “failing to lead,” but that is just because that is the most current meme.
You would think by now that Megabank, Inc would have figured out that megabanking and mortgage banking don’t mix, wouldn’t you?
two from drudge, the article titles say it all
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/16/lets_hope_the_boston_marathon_bomber_is_a_white_american/
http://dailycaller.com/2013/04/16/actor-blames-boston-attack-on-gun-culture-2nd-amendment-must-go/
How does one blame a bomb attack on gun culture? If guns are the root of the problem, why wouldn’t the terrorist have just used a gun, instead of improvising an explosive device out of a pressure cooker? (Or perhaps the ‘actor-blames’ article is just a political straw man.)
If one wishes, one could blame our “violent gun cuture” on women who manipulate men emotionally.
I think that’s where the answer lies: Jail women who deliberately manipulate men emotionally. Men are being violated spiritually by women in numbers that apparently exceed men who physically manipulate women.
Our “violent gun culture” is the fault of women. All women!
See? It’s quite easy to play the PC game and come up with all sorts of twisted nonsense.
Perhaps one day women will be subjected to trial and imprisonment for emotional manipulation. Why not? It’s just more of the same twisted, retard-backed PC logic.
Violence and gun culture are separate things, to be sure. The violent crime here in the US is mostly linked to the war on drugs, the breakdown of families, and the highest income disparity of any modern western economy.
Gun culture? I can’t explain that, so I’ll have to defer to someone else.
But it’s foolish to think that either guns or violence can be clumsily lumped together, the same as it’s foolish to think that New York, Chicago, LA, Washington, Boston, Baltimore, etc. are violent/dangerous places. 90%+ of the violence occurs in 5% of the geographic areas during the hours of 9pm-5am.
Says who? You?
Who’s to say that the root of all violence isn’t emotional manipulation?
Really?
Prove it.
Hmmm….is MacBeth really our resident Pimptroll?
Testosterone is the problem. Sorry, guys.
There have been many studies linking high levels of testosterone to crimes of sex and violence.
It’s a known fact that un-neutered male dogs are far more aggressive than neutered dogs. Having worked with dogs for many years, I can personally attest that this is true.
It’s a known fact that un-neutered male dogs are far more aggressive than neutered dogs.
If I read between the lines, I will remember to live as far away as possible from you.
I think women are the problem.
Men do many many thing to impess women. Violence is one of them.
The problem is realtoRs. You guys have it all screwed up.
“Testosterone is the problem. Sorry, guys.”
Racist!
MacBeth:
If you had been reading this blog for a long time, then you would know that women HAVE been blamed for literally everything, mainly by the right-wingers who hate Obama.
Good to see you again, love. It’s been lonely out here for the distaff.
Weird thing is… the largest glamorization of “gun culture”, such as that is, is by… get this… not the NRA… but by… Hollywood.
Weird world.
‘titles say it all’
Yes, but here’s a question: why not try and catch who did it and punish them? It’s all too common now to use these things to attack entire groups. For instance, if it’s a Muslim, many will use it as an excuse to push an agenda against that group. If it’s a “domestic terrorist”, well, you get the idea.
The addition of ricin to the mix pretty much implicates an organized group. Although I do recall one extremist poster here who left in a huff after telling us he was going to be “working on a big project for a couple of months”….
May be USPS? Think about it….they need the money.
The left is hoping for a white tea billy type.
The right is hoping for a moosleem type.
I am hoping for a joint venture between DHS, Mossad & CIA.
“I am hoping for a joint venture between DHS, Mossad & CIA”
This would be disguised as one of the above. With the Mossad involved, it would probably be the “moosleem” type.
It will turn out to be realtoR.
7/10/2012
Larry Bell, Contributor
The U.N. Arms Trade Treaty: Are Our 2nd Amendment Rights Part Of The Deal?
One year ago I wrote an article titled “U.N. Agreement Should Have All Gun Owners Up In Arms”
The Obama administration is actively engaged in negotiations to finalize details for a new global agreement premised to fight “terrorism”, “insurgency” and “international crime syndicates”. As U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon describes its purpose, “Our goal is clear: a robust and legally binding Arms Trade Treaty that will have a real impact on the lives of those millions of people suffering from consequences of armed conflict, repression and armed violence…It is ambitious, but it is achievable.”
Foreign ministers of the U.K., France, Germany and Sweden want the treaty to cover all types of conventional weapons, notably including small arms and light weapons, all types of munitions, and related technologies. They also advocate that it include strong provisions governing human rights, international humanitarian law and sustainable development. (More about sustainable development later.)
But, like LOST, the Arms Trade Treaty can’t be enacted unless Congress ratifies it. Right? And, of course, they would never approve any global agreement that will infringe upon our constitutional Second Amendment protections. Right? Well, let’s assume for argument’s sake that they won’t. But now consider another possibility, something called a “soft law”.
Remember that sustainable development agenda mentioned earlier that the European foreign ministers want to incorporate into the treaty provisions? Originally intended to be implemented in connection with a U.N. treaty, an “Agenda 21” plan was enacted as a soft law in 1993 creating a nongovernmental organization, the “International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives” (ICLEI), by Executive Order after the Clinton administration was unsuccessful in getting Congress to ratify the program. They wouldn’t approve the treaty because it would transfer massive regulatory control over broad aspects of U.S. energy production and consumption. In 2003 the NGO’s name was changed to “ICLEI- Local Governments for Sustainability” to emphasize “local” and diminish concerns about “international” influence and associations with U.N. political and financial ties. ICLEI’s are now active in most of our counties On its web page, “ICLEI: Connecting Leaders”, the organization explains that their networking strategy connects cities and local governments to the United Nations and other international bodies.
Agenda 21 envisions a global scheme for healthcare, education, nutrition, agriculture, labor, production, and consumption. A summary version titled AGENDA 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet (Earthpress, 1993), calls for “…a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced—a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources.” The report emphasizes that “This shift will demand a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”
ICLEI’s web page states that its Local Agenda 21 [LA21] Model Communities Programme is “designed to aid local governments in implementing Chapter 28 of Agenda 21, the global action plan for sustainable development.” As Gary Lawrence, a planner for the city of Seattle and an advisor to the Clinton-Gore administration’s Council on Sustainable Development and to U.S. AID commented at a 1998 U.N. Environmental Development Forum in London titled “The Future of Local Agenda 21 in the New Millennium”, “In some cases, LA21 is seen as an attack on the power of the nation-state.” He went on to say, “Participating in a U.N. advocated planning process will very likely bring out many…who would work to defeat any elected official…undertaking Local Agenda 21 …So we will call our process something else, such as comprehensive planning, growth management or smart growth.”
And so they have. “Comprehensive planning”, “growth management” and “smart growth” (which is Agenda 21 with a new name). All mean pretty much the same thing… centralized control over virtually every aspect of urban life: energy and water use, housing stock and allocation, population levels, public health and dietary regimens, resources and recycling, “social justice” and education.
So this time the U.N.-sponsored ATT initiative, whether enacted by Congress or through a soft law Executive Order, can be expected to receive an appealing identity as well. Most likely it will purport to protect us from “terrorism”, “insurgency” and/or “international crime syndicates”. Perhaps, without saying so, it will be pitched to protect us even from ourselves.
Don’t forget that an Illinois senator named Barack Obama was an aggressive advocate for expanding gun control laws, and even voted against legislation giving gun owners an affirmative defense when they use firearms to defend themselves and their families against home invaders and burglars. That was after he served on a 10-member board of directors of the radically activist anti-gun Joyce Foundation in Chicago which contributed large grants to anti-Second Amendment organizations.
But then, as a former lecturer in constitutional law, wouldn’t he certainly realize that the U.N.’s gun- grab agenda violates our sovereign rights? Perhaps the answer to that question warrants some serious reflection!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/07/10/the-u-n-arms-trade-treaty-are-our-2nd-amendment-rights-part-of-the-deal/2/ - 83k -
“Larry Bell, Contributor ”
Aka Larry the Crackpot.
Comrade Worker asks: “Comrade Commisar, is it possible to build Socialism in America?”
Comrade Commisar answers: “It is possible. But then from where would we buy our wheat?”
——————————-
Old Soviet jokes become the new American reality
The People’s Cube | 1/11/2013, 3:45 pm | Red Square
At first the move to America from the former USSR made me feel as though I had made a jump in time, from the stagnant depraved past into a distant dynamic future.
Most importantly, there was honesty, dignity, and respect in relations among people.
Today I’m feeling like a time traveler again.
Only this time the productive, honest and self-reliant America is vanishing in the past, as we are quickly approaching the all too familiar future.
It is the future of equal poverty, one-party rule, media mooching, government looting, bureaucratic corruption, rigged elections, underground literature, half-whispered jokes, and the useful habit of looking over your shoulder.
It was nice living in America before it changed the course and followed Obama’s direction “Forward,” which, according to my compass, is pointing backward.
Deprived of free political speech, Soviets had developed a culture of underground political jokes. I used to remember thousands of them.
Here’s one of my favorites, dealing with the discrepancy between the official narrative and the everyday reality:
The six contradictions of socialism in the USSR
There is no unemployment - yet no one is working.
No one is working - yet the factory quotas are fulfilled.
The factory quotas are fulfilled - yet the stores have nothing to sell.
The stores have nothing to sell - yet people’s homes are full of stuff.
People’s homes are full of stuff - yet no one is happy.
No one is happy - yet the voting is always unanimous.
Let’s see how an old Soviet joke can be rewritten into a new American joke.
The six contradictions of socialism in the United States of America
America is capitalist and greedy - yet half of the population is subsidized.
Half of the population is subsidized - yet they think they are victims.
They think they are victims - yet their representatives run the government.
Their representatives run the government - yet the poor keep getting poorer.
The poor keep getting poorer - yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.
They have things that people in other countries only dream about - yet they want America to be more like those other countries.
“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” — Barack Hussein Obama, 3rd Inaugural Address, January 20, 2017
20 And turning His gaze toward His disciples, He began to say, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Whatever. This is a blog about the HOUSING BUBBLE. Not your perpetual and unaccountable hatred for President Obama, which contrasts starkly against your perpetual and unaccountable love for George W. Bush Jr.
Good article. Only flaw is that the slow degradation to third worldism began long before Obama. Obama isn’t helping but are people really surprised about that?
Actually we are heading towards a much worse society than a typical third world. At least the third worlders don’t have as many laws as we do.
As has been discussed here before, the post WW2 era of stable middle class employment and lifestyles was an anomaly. The future will be like the 19th century but with smartphones.
Thanks for providing a well-thought-out analysis. We should accept the lack of tariffs that has brought us to our knees as a “normal state of affairs”. We should discount the obvious solution of simply getting our tariffs back, since that would benefit the middle class instead of the global corporate elite.
i tell people it’s a lon- term process…maybe even a natural process.
obama is just another one of the symptoms…not the cause.
if you had to pin a cause to it i would simply suggest…human nature.
Wait until October when your packet of ObamaCare instructions (in many cases, 60 pages of it) hits your mailbox!
Government takeover of 1/7 more of the economy equates to lotsa bucks for young leagle eagles in D.C., and lotsa misery for hundreds of millions nationwide.
We should’ve gotten a single payer system, certainly.
However, the paperwork you mention plus the continued involvement of the insurance industry do make me feel good about my decision to be a “legal eagle” instead of going to medical school. Every doctor I talked to when I was deciding kept saying that the system we have is very bad and will change, avoid making a big investment of time and effort under these circumstances (medical school is much more hardcore and the process is longer). I got this same unsolicited rant from doctors in so many different specialties I lost track.
Another big complaint was that they never get paid to solve problems, only to fulfill a bunch of billing codes and schedule a follow up. The only exceptions I remember to that one were ortho surg and people in the dental field (maxillofacial surg & orthodontist).
This might change if we get single payer, maybe I’ll have my S corp set up and my IRA stuffed with the S corp’s stock, won’t need to work as a lawyer anymore so I can peace out and go to med school to do something honorable. Also won’t have to commute to DC anymore, I hate this place (apologies to people who actually like DC).
Certainly not.
We should not have a single-payer system. It would be a disaster.
Certainly, we should never have had company-backed insurance plans ever. That should have been outlawed.
I blame Detroit for starting the whole mess. Auto companies never should have offered paid medical coverage as part of a pay package.
Had individuals always had to pay for their own medical care, we’d be much better off now.
What about tort reform, Joe?
I dare say that if lawyers weren’t able to abscond with OPM at the rate that they do, we’d have a better operating and less costly health care system.
Can’t go there, though, can we?
I believe Kaiser is credited with being the first to offer medical care to his workers.
It allowed him to produce a Liberty ship per day during WWII.
“Had individuals always had to pay for their own medical care, we’d be much better off now.”
In what way would medical care be better now? And how would that have happened?
Is anyone aware of any country/province/whatever that has pay-as-you-go as their primary method of health care payment?
Guys:
Are you forgetting that state governments starting forcing employers to buy health insurance in the 1980s?
“Certainly, we should never have had company-backed insurance plans ever. That should have been outlawed.”
I love the consistency of the small government types.
At least 38 states have passed some sort of tort reform. California was the first — in 1974 IIRC — limiting painandsuffering awards to $250K.
Single payer need not include elective fee-for-service procedures; that is the true perview of “health” insurance. But a standardized public health service is sorely needed for the general populace I.E.; those whose group coverage is now being paid by their employer or union.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/08/12/us-usa-taxes-corporations-idUSN1249465620080812
“too many corporations are using tax trickery to send their profits overseas and avoid paying their fair share in the United States.”
u.s. transfer pricing rules are very sophisticated and have been around for years…typical arrogant american…thinking they should be allowed to erode a foreign nation’s tax base.
Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” which reduces taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands and then to the Caribbean
My company routes everything through Singapore
We paid a accountant millions to set this up and our stock still sucks.
Taxes and profits are not the problem. It’s the jobs.
Company sends $10M of job salary overseas so the company HQ can bank $1 M more in profit. What good does it do to tax that $1 M by 35% instead of 31% (or whatever)? I’d rather have that $10M of job salary back.
cactus,
Your stock may suck, but I guarentee your BoD’s distributions don’t.
US Co develops a process to make and sale libtard sandwiches in the United States. These things start selling like hotcakes. Stores can’t keep them on the shelves. Customers just gobble them up one after the other with no thought given to nutrition or expense. Beanie Babies have nothing on these things.
Anyhoo…USCo realizes they are paying a whole bunch in taxes and hire some sharp dressed slickster to help them move all of their profits overseas.
What the MSM wants you to think:
Slickster charges US Co millions of dollars and presto…the “double dutched dirty sanchez” deal lets US Co ship all its profits overseas with zero taxes paid in the United States. IRS agents are befuddled and say “oh well”.
What actually happens:
Slickter isn’t a slickster after all but a PHD in economics. He tells US Co that what they could do is sell the libtard sandwich making process to Irish NewCo and then the Irish NewCo can charge the US Co a royalty to use the process to make its libtard sandwiches. The PHD spends a lot of time calculating and determining the value of the process and the transaction occurs. US Co pays tax on the large gain in the US. The PHD then computes and arms length royalty fee that Irish NewCo could charge US Co for the use of its intellectual property. This process is time consuming/expensive and is based on what any reasonable third party would pay for the use of the libtard sandwich making process.
The initial buy-in amount as well as the royalty charge are reviewed and audited extensively by the IRS. What happens to those royalty fees (evil corporate profits) after they leave the US is Ireland’s problem.
The IRS, USA and Obama got theirs/yours at the buy-in.
Would it make everyone feel any better if I told you the PHD was from Harvard or Berkley?
“It is the future of equal poverty, one-party rule, media mooching, government looting, bureaucratic corruption, rigged elections, underground literature, half-whispered jokes, and the useful habit of looking over your shoulder.”
Equal poverty? We have greater income equality now than we had in the 1970s.
One-party rule? That sounds like Karl Rove’s permanent Republican majority.
Rigged elections? The Republicans sure hope to accomplish that.
“income equality ”
Correction “income inequality “.
Follow-ups from yesterday…
On the abortion topic the whole controversy could be eliminated by making women 100% responsible especially financially for their kids. Then if the a father wanted visitation or custody the two parties could strike a deal. Women can’t claim it’s their baby when they want to kill it but then all of sudden claim it’s their and the father’s baby when they want to shake down the fathers for money.
Yesterday Oxide used the term “undocumented immigrants.” Unless you mean some immigrants who have lost their green cards or other documents then have I guess you are really talking about illegal aliens - criminals in others words.
Political discussion would be much more productive if people (both sides of the aisle) used honest language instead of trying to candy coat things. Take abortion for example. The term fetus. Sounds much better than baby does n’t it? Abortion is killing either by poisoning with saline solution or using a scalpel to rip and shred the little arms and legs, etc and dislodge them from the walls of the uterus. It’s not a guppie or puppie it’s an unborn human baby. Don’t get me wrong I am “pro choice” There’s that candy coated language again. But I am also honest.Quite frankly I wish a lot more women would have abortions. Especially “undocumented immigrants” and those who sponge off the taxpayer.
A fetus *is* different tha a baby. A fetus has a precise definiton, quite a bit different from baby. Same for embryo, blastocyst, etc. Your post reads like the slobbering, ill-educated word soup of a hack.
A fetus is not viable, it is not a person, it is dependent on and physically attached to a woman. It is part of her biology.
God da*n I hate stupid people.
Gunz, socialism, etc weren’t enough? We need to discuss abortion here now too?
I’m pointing out that his post was pointless. He basically said “words mean things, let’s not use euphemisms” then suggested that fetus and baby are interchangeable. WTF? They are significantly different things.
He also advocated for abdicating men from the *responsibility* of their actions. Slack jawed teabillies can knock up a woman and then refuse to pay. Great idea, as if there isn’t already enough irresponsible trash out there, now we have to enable them, setting gender relations back to the 1800s.
‘as if there isn’t already enough irresponsible trash’
Humans aren’t trash.
Haha, well played Ben.
I’m not trying to “play” anything.
On a serious note, you know that I was not saying that humans literally = trash for purposes of assigning rights or making legal decisions.
On the other hand, 2Ban & Co. seem to want to equate babies and fetuses for legal purposes and discussion of abortion rights. Discussing babies and fetuses as the same thing is just not accurate. And, as said below, when a fetus becomes viable, it’s already acknowledged that there are compelling state interests in regulating abortion. Casey v. Pennsylvania established this and it’s been done in various parts of the country to various degrees ever since.
Lawyers can define things any way they want, and do so in a self serving way at times. Lawyers cannot define for us what is right or worng, only what is permitted and what is not.
I would imagine that a properly trained lawyer does not often use personal insult as a substitute for apologetics. It is a red flag.
Comment By Joe Smith:
RE: He also advocated for abdicating men from the *responsibility* of their actions. Slack jawed teabillies can knock up a woman and then refuse to pay
Women have babies not men. The point is since women have the babies let the decision to have the babies rest with the women. BUT if the women have the babies the women are completely including financially responsible for the babies. Women can then exchange visitation / custody with the fathers for financial input. My point is that women should not try to have it both ways in I get the decision to kill the baby or not but if I don’t kill it the father is responsible.
Because the man was part of the process? You do know that there are ways for a man to avoid becoming a father, right?
A jilted boyfriend beats the pregnant girlfried resulting in a miscarriage. In some states the boyfriend can be tried for killing the fetus or unborn baby or whatever, right?
Does anyone know?
http://www.ncsl.org/issues-research/health/fetal-homicide-state-laws.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_homicide
http://www.advocatesforpregnantwomen.org/issues/unborn_victims_of_violence_act/
http://www.advocatesforpregnantwomen.org/main/publications/articles_and_reports/
Links coming.
There are laws in many states and there is also a federal law. Some of the laws are being used to prosecute pregnant women for their actions that cause harm to the fetus - drug use, attempted suicide, refusal to have a C-section. In some cases, the drugs of abuse have been shown not to cause harm, but the mothers are still being prosecuted.
God da*n I hate stupid people.
Joe a fetus can be viable. This why the prohibition on state interference was limited to the first trimester in the Roe v. Wade. As an attorney you should understand where and why that line was drawn.
This is also why many abortion techniques can really be described as infanticide since many premature babies live at much younger ages than when abortions are performed. Also, people don’t have even have complete control over their own bodies. Seem to remember just reading about the police stopping someone cutting off their arms at what was it a HD. It was there body why could they not cut-off their arms?
No disagreement re: there is a point of viability and states are allowed to restrict abortion accordingly.
It becomes a strawman argument when one assumes that supporting a woman’s right to choose early in the process (before viability) means one supports all abortions, at any time and for any reason. Later in the 2nd trimester and certainly in the 3rd trimester, it makes great sense to have reasonable restrictions, partner notification, etc. On the other hand, there should be exceptions for rape, health of the mother, etc. I’m not sure exactly where the lines should be drawn and it seems that states should be able to do this anyway (as a power reserved to them).
I’m not sure exactly where the lines should be drawn
What about 4th trimester abortions?
Speaking of 4th trimester abortions, rankings by state for the years 2006-2008 of infant deaths for 1,000 live births are as follows:
DC - 12.0
Mississippi - 10.2
Alabama - 9.5
Louisiana - 9.4
Tennessee - 8.4
South Carolina - 8.3
North Carolina - 8.3
Need coffee. Post has too many errors to even document but they are not substantive errors.
In my experience, teenagers are generally not viable.
Have any of you discussing abortion ever carried a baby to term for 9 months? Gave birth? Recovered from childbirth?
My children were planned for and wanted, and even so, it ‘aint no picnic, physically or emotionally. I cannot imagine what it would be like if it were forced upon me (got pregnant by accident and then had to go through with it).
Being brought into the world and raised by parents who didn’t want you and were not prepared to be parents is a worse “sin” than abortion.
That said, WE KNOW HOW TO PREVENT PREGNANCY!
And yet, 9 times out of 10, the folks who are against abortion are also against easy access to and information about birth control.
And yet, 9 times out of 10, the folks who are against abortion are also against easy access to and information about birth control.
This is the part that makes me feel like my head is about to explode. The “Abstinence is easy! Just say no” crowd. These people have No. Freaking. Clue.
These people have No. Freaking. Clue.
Not so sure about that…a lot of them “had to get married” back in the day.
Ah, shotgun weddings, an interesting footnote in the history of American gun culture.
It’s one way of making men “take responsibility” as discussed elsewhere on the page. Would it have been different with axes or bow and arrows? Just trying to figure out why it’s part of “gun culture”…
In some very old religions a human being is born when the soul enters the body and dies when the soul leaves the body.
I find many a times idiots being the heads of born again churches with dumb followers tilting the republicans to their agendas all under the pretense of conservatism. Keep your laws away from women’s bodies.
It’s hard to know where to begin with this. You consider abortion to be the killing of babies. Yet you would like to see more illegal aliens having abortions. Would you also like the illegal immigrants to kill their toddlers so that you don’t have to pay for their education?
i would just be happy with closing he border…setting an immigration policy that set’s the number allowed per year…and have them sign the guest book on the way in.
that number can b 5 or 5,000,000…just get some fracking control over it like every other soverign nation on fracking planet.
I heard the new immigration bill being kicked around in Congress has provisions for more L-1Bs and H-1Bs to fill the positions Americans can’t fill. My husband is an EE, an ex-manager at Int*l, and this kind of rhetoric just drives him batty.
ex-manager=former manager
H1-b visas are an excuse to drive down wages of Americans. The only reason there exists a shortage of qualified local applicants is because kids are smart enough to see where the industry is going, and have heard the stories of laid off American workers training their foreign replacements. I work in high tech and couldn’t in good conscience recommend a high schooled get into the tech field unless it was a business analysis or requirements gathering role.
I don’t know if it’s as much kids being “smart enough” to avoid it as it is the potentially interested kids not being recruited and trained to do it.
we could essentially close the border without that much effort. it would be a drop in the bucket compard to our “Homeland Security” and DoD budgets.
but… we don’t close the border on purpose. the purpose is that corporations need and want cheap labor, which requires oversupply. and corporations are people, my friend. people who give alot [sic] of money and hold a lot of influence. it’s telling that Mitt Romney was the more “anti immigration” candidate in the fall, but he talked mostly about “self deportation” of people who are already here, rather than actually slamming the door shut, identifying who is already here, and coming up with a way to do something about the problem.
Joe
We know the flood the market and lower wages game, but all that money that buys influence has beat the hell out of Main St, and is Wall St’s wet dream. No solution in the foreseeable future, just more of the same. It’s amazing people still support the two headed snake (R&D).
OK, “I’m off”. As my husband tells me “that would be my diagnosis”.
Of course it’s killing. No I would like to see illegals not here and illegals here not having babies. There is such thing as self control and birth control.
You know nothing about abortion.
Most women do not willing go for abortions. An abortion is not the drive thru window at burger shack. It’s painful and mortally risky and the pain lasts for weeks.
Most women who get an abortion do so for medical reasons. Is that the woman’s fault that she has or contracted an illness serious enough to threaten her baby’s life and her own?
How about rape? Is that her fault as well?
Anon, just where do you get these ideas that abortions are handed out like free candy?
And they are nit easy to ibtain. There is only a single clinic in Mississippi.
Eco - you like the taste of kool-aid. You like drinking it. You like the way it makes you feel so you don’t have to look at the truth.
Well, let’s look at the truth. For the VAST majority of mothers aborting their baby it is for the the SOLE reason that a baby would be an inconvenience - so let’s kill it.
Hey - almost 50% of black mother abort their babies in certain states (like NYS). So 50% of all mother’s life or health is in grave danger if they have a baby? Really? Keep drinking that kook-aid. Never look at the truth.
obama even voted for making it legal for KILLING babies after a botched abortion. That is your savior.
You know nothing except what the democrat talking points tell you.
The law of the land RIGHT NOW in America is abortion at any time and for any reason. That ANY restriction must be blocked by all means possible. obama and democrats now want the state to pay for abortions.
And people wonder of the concept of the “Good German.”
Since 1973, roughly 50 million legal abortions have been performed in the United States.
————————————
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a handful of studies over the years have indicated consistently similar answers from women who identify why they’ve chosen to have an abortion. The top three reasons these women cite for not being able to continue their pregnancies and give birth are:
negative impact on the mother’s life
financial instability
relationship problems /unwillingness to be a single mother
http://womensissues.about.com/od/reproductiverights/a/AbortionReasons.htm
What it’s like living in your mom’s basement without a girlfriend, cabana boy, because once again, you have no clue what you are talking about and your ignorance of women is painfully obvious.
Does the truth make you feel icky-pooh?
Hard to look at the murder of babies for an inconvenience - isn’t it?
In the current trial of the abortion doctor in Philly - witnesses talked about the cutting babies throats after they were born alive, how some cried out in pain, how some were cut-up and body parts thrown on the floor while the babies were alive…
When the allies liberated the German death camps - they made the local Germans look at what was inside.
So they could never say they didn’t know again.
And so they would exactly know what the government they supported did.
“current trial of the abortion doctor “
What the doctor (allegedly) did was criminal. That is why he is being tried for it.
“When the allies liberated the German death camps - they made the local Germans look at what was inside.
So they could never say they didn’t know again.
And so they would exactly know what the government they supported did.”
Who says they supported the government? And realistically, what could they do about it? The ones that were brave enough to say something were killed during the Nazi rise to power. If you had young children, what would you have done?
Emigrating may not have been an option. Many Jews were refused entry into other countries before the war.
Who says they supported the government? And realistically, what could they do about it?
As individuals, nothing. But does that shield them from the responsibility that as a group they were the only ones who could have stopped it from the inside?
And what are the implications of that for us? Those who try to prepare to take group action if necessary are reviled by those who say “realistically, what can *you* do about it”?
“And what are the implications of that for us?”
You have to nip it in the bud. Before they come for the “trade unionists”. If you wait until violent action is necessary, it is already too late.
” For the VAST majority of mothers aborting their baby it is for the the SOLE reason that a baby would be an inconvenience “
Instead of looking to remove these reasons, you want to reduce the welfare state and make it more difficult for women to decide to carry unintended pregnancies to term.
And the small percentage of pregnancies that are due to rape, incest, or health reasons, would you say their problems are a small price to pay to ensure that we have 50 million more unwanted, poor children (and their offspring)?
a small price to pay to ensure that we have 50 million more unwanted, poor children (and their offspring)?
You are in with some great company.
The phrase “life unworthy of life” (in German: “Lebensunwertes Leben”) was a Nazi designation for the segments of populace which had no right to live and thus were to be “euthanized”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_unworthy_of_life
“You are in with some great company.”
You totally missed my point (or decided to ignore it in favor of your own). Are you willing to trade the lives of women for the lives of fetuses? Do the lives of 50 million that you say were aborted outweigh the lives of the small percentage of women that would die if abortion were not available?
And you also did not address my other point.
“Instead of looking to remove these reasons, you want to reduce the welfare state and make it more difficult for women to decide to carry unintended pregnancies to term. ”
The true fix for abortion is free birth control, free maternity health care, free child care, de-stigmatization of single motherhood. You support none of those.
Instead you are all about personal responsibility. Is it responsible to put a child up for adoption? Is it responsible to have a child you cannot provide for? Is a rape victim responsible for being raped?
“50 million more unwanted, poor children (and their offspring)?”
And are you willing to pay more in taxes to support children that are not aborted?
Neocons are more than willing to be good little Nazis.
i favor the abortion pill…take it the day afterwards and then it’s between you…and God.
get the State out of it.
Anon, just where do you get these ideas that abortions are handed out like free candy?
I never said such thing. Additionally as I wrote I am in favor of abortion. I just don’t kid myself that is not what it is. The unborn baby or fetus (choice whatever words you like) is poisoned with saline solution or sliced and diced with a scalpel.
This might be a duplicate post if so, sorry.
RE: Anon, just where do you get these ideas that abortions are handed out like free candy?
I said nothing about the cost or frequency of abortion. I have said I am for it. It not nice but at times necessary or rather desirable. But I don’t kid myself as to what it is. The unborn baby (or fetus or for the squeamish or intellectually dishonest) is poisoned with saline solution or sliced and diced with a scalpel. Repeat: I don’t kid myself about what biological process is.
Very well. Despite cabana’s boy’s post, which I do not have all day to refute, of most women I’ve met, some did it for financial reason and others for health, but NONE did it lightly and ONLY as a last resort.
On the abortion topic the whole controversy could be eliminated by making women 100% responsible especially financially for their kids.
Here’s my conservative streak:
Free, mandatory reversible vasectomies (clamped, not cut) for all boys and men, starting at age 14. If and when you want to and are ready to raise a human being, you can have the procedure undone.
No more abortions, no more unwanted children.
I have a few male friends who have had this done.
Pain for about week and then your done.
Fun for everyone after that.
If a man does not have a vasectomy it does not mean a baby will result.
I still maintain the controversy is that women want to assume 100% of parental rights when it comes to killing the baby but after it’s born SUDDENLY the kid has two parents and come on dad (or worse taxpayers) start coughing up the money for “our” child.
“I still maintain the controversy is that women want to assume 100% of parental rights when it comes to killing the baby but after it’s born SUDDENLY the kid has two parents”
I can guarantee that if women were given sole financial responsibility for babies, the controversy would not go away.
No one seems to have addressed directly my suggestion that women who have the right to decide to have (or not have) babies must be prepared take responsibility for the decision including financial responsibility for having babies.
Men who impregnate women must be prepared to take responsibility for the decision, including financial responsibility for potentiating babies.
If they don’t, then their kids will have a very difficult time surviving and thriving. Furthermore, men will become useless to society.
No one seems to have addressed directly my suggestion that women who have the right to decide to have (or not have) babies must be prepared take responsibility for the decision including financial responsibility for having babies.
Compelling women to take that reponsibility could lead to more abortions, don’t you think?
Anon:
This is a blog about the HOUSING BUBBLE. It is not a forum for you to espouse Republicanism (i.e., no paternal responsibility, only rich white men matter, Obama is the devil, etc).
right, and it is also not a history forum about what the Nazis did.
Why not let Ben who moderates this decide what are appropriate topics?
“Don’t get me wrong I am “pro choice” There’s that candy coated language again.”
Pro-choice is accurate. Pro-choice means not forcing women to have abortions and not making abortion illegal. It means leaving the power to decide with women and their doctors.
“The term fetus.”
http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/fetus
“fetus /fe·tus/ (fēt´us) [L.] the developing young in the uterus, specifically the unborn offspring in the postembryonic period, in humans from nine weeks after fertilization until birth.”
I generally use baby for fetuses that are close to full term. My personal view is that at that point, babies should be delivered and not aborted. There may be still be valid, medical reasons for late term abortions in extremely rare cases.
The fetus is not viable until it graduates from medical school.
hope and change
‘for the third year in a row, the nation’s economic recovery seems to be petering out just as temperatures start to go up. hiring has dropped off. shoppers are putting away their wallets. government spending cuts are looming.
that has fueled predictions of an abrupt slowdown over the next few months. economists are forecasting tepid growth of just over 1 percent during the second quarter of the year.’
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/economy-hits-spring-swoon/2013/04/16/34403a10-a6b1-11e2-8302-3c7e0ea97057_story.html
How hard is it for government to get the seasonal adjustment right. Look in early 2009, we had an unusual number of people laid off in January and February. Thus, we should not use those months to determine what is normal for layoffs or at least adjust for it. I think that this façade that we are recovering in the first quarter is just based on poor seasonal adjustment.
Thanks to decades of “less government” they really don’t the most up-to-date computers and networks.
Just out of curiosity, why isn’t Kermit Gosnell a bigger topic of debate?
After all, the entire election last year centered around the War on Women? This man has killed at least 8 women in botched abortions.
We are in the midst of a gun control debate, where it is our ‘moral obligation’ to do something, anything, if it could save even a single life? This man beheaded live-birth babies on what may turn out to be a shocking scale. To the point where the “people” who worked for him were emotionally disturbed.
This man is a mass murderer, who works in the reproductive rights field. Yet the media at large is silent? Something is gravely wrong here.
If he’s a criminal or guilty of medical malpractice, that is quite separate from the issue of Roe v. Wade or abortion rights generally.
From your brief description, he sounds like a scumbag whose medical license should be revoked and who should be unable to obtain med mal insurance.
Only to loony left.
A psycho on meds kills his mother, steals her guns and goes on to kill to kids in a “gun free zone” = we must pretty much ban the 2nd Amendment.
A state certified doctor IGNORED by the state for 20 years (despite numerous complaints) performs thousands of late term abortions, kills at least eight mothers and killed at least a dozen babies AFTER they were born alive in botched abortions. The doctor also keep the killed babies in various jars and freezers as trophies = just an anomaly and we really don’t need to tinker with the “have an abortion for any reason at any time” judicial fiat abortion culture in America
I would be OK with the loony left if they were at least consistent…
conservatives seek the death penalty for right wing extremist bombers.
liberals make left wing extremist bombers department heads at univeristies.
republican friend of mine made this point to me yesterday…thought it was funny.
That was the opening segment on Rush Limbaugh yesterday, we were listening while out driving to lunch.
I think it is important to understand that the argument here isn’t should there be abortion (at least my argument). The argument is that this is clearly someone showing very poor judgment for a very long time and there was apparently no oversight whatsoever.
Now taking the above in mind, everyone made such a huge issue of the war on women. Everyone has an ax to grind in the gun debate, we have a moral obligation to do something even if it means that just one life was saved. Yet, here we are with a perfect example of an area that needs to be investigated and discussed and nobody wants to have that discussion.
I think it is highly likely that this case against Gosnell is only the tip of the iceberg; if we were to look into some of the poorer neighborhoods around this nation. In fact, I think the findings would be appalling.
The fact that those who foist the War on Women topic and additional gun legislation upon us refuse to address THIS issue makes them look rather unseemly.
“….no oversight whatsoever…..”
Which means a Republican must have been doing the overseeing. You know, “too much regulation”
Thank you, Ryan. Again, men making moral judgments for the women who have to deal with the consequences. Gosnell was just doing what desperate women have done to themselves for millenia.
I find it curious that so many of the people decrying abortion are the first to support war-making and excuse its excesses.
I find it curious that so many of the people decrying abortion are the first to support war-making and excuse its excesses.
Likewise I find it curious that so many people against capital punishment are the first to support killing babies and excuse its excesses.
+1
Eric Holder’s wife owns the building where these abortions were done. But my platform is not dead babies! My platform is me!
“Just out of curiosity, why isn’t Kermit Gosnell a bigger topic of debate?”
47,000 search returns on Google News isn’t enough?
My guess is that because the doctor is African-American, everybody is afraid to offend the so-called “black community”. Also, the details may be too gruesome even for our sensationalist media.
Looking for a blog about the housing bubble? Just tune in to this channel, right here and right now, for a blog that is about the housing bubble, and is NOT about anyone’s Republicanism.
Is this Republicanism?
Does anyone have any examples of another time in history when the stock market was manipulated this obviously? What were the results? How long did it take to play out?
Is the Fed already starting to take away the punch bowl at this point? I’m trying to understand why stock prices are falling today on no major news (aside from news of Monday’s Boston terrorist incident, on which stocks rallied yesterday).
well once the public gets the news all the insiders will have dumped there stock on mom and pop and went short. the moves in aapl today make me feel somebody knows something. Could just be selling on the news?
The party is over when interest rates start to go up, or when insiders learn that it will happen.
Stocks
Bonds
Gold
Oil
Houses
Given that the Fed knows the truth of your statement, what makes you think they would ever allow interest rates to go up, EVER?!
Or do you assume they won’t be able to stop it when it happens?
Given the severity of the situation, I can’t see any situation where the PTB would allow interest rates to rise. Wallstreet relies on paper profits since there’s no real growth, and governments rely on low interest rates to be able to carry massive debt loads.
When they eventually lose control, it’ll be brutal.
I don’t believe they are omnicient. It’s an increasingly fragile global applecart.
ft dot com
Last updated: April 17, 2013 2:12 pm
IMF warns on risks of excessive easing
By Chris Giles in Washington
The IMF appears to endorse further monetary easing by central banks, such as the Bank of England
Extraordinarily loose monetary policy risks sparking credit bubbles that threaten to tip the world back into financial crisis, the International Monetary Fund warned on Wednesday.
In its global financial stability report, the fund cautioned that policy reforms were needed urgently to restore long-term health to the financial system before the long-term dangers of monetary stimulus materialised.
Without more progress, the IMF said “the global financial crisis could morph into a more chronic phase, marked by a deterioration of financial conditions and recurring bouts of financial instability”.
In the short term, however, the fund was more upbeat. José Viñals, IMF head of financial stability, said: “Spring has arrived to global financial markets where after very rainy days and threatening clouds, we are beginning to see some blue skies and more sunny days.”
The IMF believes unorthodox monetary policies to encourage growth are better than other options, but is concerned that the long-term consequences of such strategies represent a “new risk” to financial stability.
“When the patient is still under treatment, you should not suspend the medicine, but you should always be vigilant about the side-effects of this medicine,” Mr Viñals said, adding that central banks could not be the “only game in town” to support economic growth.
The report warned that when the time came to end extraordinarily loose monetary policy, the effects could expose vulnerabilities among companies and households facing higher long-term interest rates, destabilise credit markets and reverse capital inflows to emerging economies.
Given these risks and the continued need for stimulus, Mr Viñals advised central banks to maintain extremely low interest rates and money-printing operations. “Lifting interest rates and exiting from these policies now … would be extraordinarily detrimental, not only for the economy, but also for financial stability”.
…
The party of wealth redistribution will also be over when interest rates go up. They will knock off Social security because the interest on the debt will go up along with interest rates.
Because the bubble reached it’s popping point two days ago.
Ha! I understand your point here! Amazing how people pronounced the death of gold when the buying of it gets more and more lucrative!
Which would be worse for Wall Street investor confidence: News that China’s growth rate was revised down by 0.2%, or a major terrorist incident in a U.S. city?
I only ask because stocks (supposedly) sold off on Monday on the China story, and rallied on Tuesday based on the terror incident news.
I suppose it is a given that bulls are dumb herd animals, but can they possibly be this dumb?
thank god for harbor freight tools and the dollar store.
Harbor Freight is only good for throwaway crap like tarps, painting tape, paint pans/rollers, and cheap tools to use for 1 or 2 projects and then toss. Worst store ever.
no sir I happen to find value in some of their stuff. Certain things you dont buy. Usually items with electrical motors have a short life span.
The place is always packed.
I didn’t say I didn’t find value. Just that a lot of the value is in the disposable nature of their products. It actually makes sense to buy disposable things, saves me from having to store them myself.
Hammers and screwdrivers are all made in China.
Why pay US prices for them?
How about an administration that:
Enforced the laws.
Put them in jail.
Stopped bailing them out.
They made it legal, that’s “what about” the GOP of the 2000s.
No. You have to examine countries such as Zimbabwe to find a similar situation. It did not end well.
The Great Depression.
Black Thursday 1987
The Savings and Loan disaster
Was this a trick question?
Bulletin U.S. stocks open lower; investors disappointed by Yahoo and B. of A. earnings
April 16, 2013, 10:31 a.m. EDT
How low can gold and silver go?
By Nigam Arora
(Editor’s note: This column from April 15 has been updated in light of recent news events.)
After the terror in Boston, gold, silver and mining stocks took another leg down. Last night, gold futures fell to $1331. The medium term chart shows that RSI reached a level that I had previously indicated would lead to a very, very short-term reversal. Click here for the medium-term annotated chart.
As a result The Arora Report upgraded gold and silver to a mild buy in the very, very short-term.
On Monday, the plunge in gold and silver and massive outflows from popular ETFs like the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD +1.00%), the iShares Silver Trust (SLV +0.55%), as well as popular miner ETFs like the Market Vectors Gold Miners (GDX -0.17%) and Market Vectors Junior Gold Miners (ETF GDXJ -0.50%) had investors clamoring for the answer to a simple question, “How low can gold and silver go?”
There are four ways to look at it.
…
Why don’ t you update that quote dumb money?
BTW, here is the updated quote: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/17/precious-gold-idUSL3N0D492620130417
But the larger point that you just do not understand is the purpose of gold, it is insurance. And it is a very cheap form of insurance since over the long wrong it costs you nothing since it will track inflation. However, how does one protect themselves from a sharp increase in the price of oil due to a disruption in the Middle East? There are at least three things that could happen in the next year and I expect at least one to happen (1) pipeline blows up in Saudi Arabia (2) Attack on Iran (3) civil war in Iraq.
So you could buy 14 barrels of oil and store it in your garage or buy one Oz of gold to protect yourself from that risk.
so how of ones wealth do you think should be in gold?
Isnt gold suppose to go up when the economy is bad? Do you think the economy will get worse?
I dont get excited looking at gold bars in my hands. To me the only value it has it what I can trade for with it.
its value is tied to the things I want to trade for. Those things tend to inflate at different rates. Dont basically all commodities rise in price in response to printing? So in order for that gold I have to retain its value it has to rise in price comparable to the rise in commodity prices.
Do you think commodity prices have been artificially high due to the hot money gambling in those markets?
I have said no more than 20% of a person’s wealth should be in precious metals or miners. However, for certain people even that is too much. The younger you are the less need you have to preserve wealth and the greater need you have to create wealth. Sorry, I cannot give you a one side fits all answer.
“How much?”
Less than this guy parked in gold, for sure! Got waterfalls?
Paulson Gold Bet Loses Almost $1 Billion: Chart of Day
By Katherine Burton - Apr 15, 2013 5:36 PM PT
Hedge-fund manager John Paulson’s wager on gold wiped out almost $1 billion of his personal wealth in the past two trading days as the precious metal plummeted 13 percent.
The CHART OF THE DAY shows gold’s tumble since the start of the year has cut his riches by $1.52 billion on paper, including about $973 million in the rout that began on April 12 and continued with yesterday’s 9.3 percent drop. Paulson started the year with about $9.5 billion invested across his hedge funds, of which 85 percent was in gold share classes.
Paulson is sticking with his thesis that gold is the best hedge against inflation and currency debasement as countries pump money into their economies, according to the New York-based firm, which manages about $18 billion. The metal entered a bear market last week after falling more than 20 percent since August 2011, bringing more bad news for 57-year-old Paulson, who has struggled with poor returns for the past two years.
“Federal governments have been printing money at an unprecedented rate creating demand for gold as an alternative currency for individual and institutional savers and central banks alike,” John Reade, a partner and gold strategist at Paulson & Co., said yesterday in an e-mailed statement. “While gold can be volatile in the short term and is going through one of its periodic adjustments, we believe the long-term trend of increasing demand for gold in lieu of paper is intact.”
Gold futures for June delivery closed at $1,361.10 at 1:51 p.m. yesterday on the Comex in New York, the biggest drop for a most-active contract since March 17, 1980. After the settlement, the price touched $1,348.50, the lowest since Feb. 7, 2011.
…
As far as gold going up in bad times, not if they are bad enough. Gold will preserve your purchasing power on a world wide basis. If the entire world has deflation, then it is possible for it to drop. However, unlike many stocks it will never go to zero because the company has gone out of business. At the end of the depression, you will be able to use it to buy shares in the surviving companies and do quite well. But I do not see world wide deflation as long as countries can print money, countries cannot print prosperity but they can and will print inflation.
I’m glad to see you have worked through the denial phase of the gold bubble stages of grief, and wish you the best of luck working through the anger phase.
April 17, 2013, 1:19 p.m. EDT
Gold falls as dollar gains; copper drops 3%
Silver hits its lowest level in over 2 years
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By Myra P. Saefong and Carla Mozee, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Gold futures fell Wednesday, failing at their earlier attempt at gains, as investors looking for shelter from the steep declines in the U.S. stock market favored the dollar over the metal as a safe haven.
Copper and silver futures also declined, with copper sinking more than 3% and silver set for its lowest close since October 2010 as the slowdown in China’s growth continued to feed concerns over demand for the industrial metals.
Gold for June delivery (GCM3 -0.60%) dropped $9.60, or 0.7%, to trade at $1,377.80 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. It touched a low of $1,365 as well as a high of $1,395.20.
…
Countries Buying the World’s Gold
April 16, 2013 at 6:41 am
Gold prices may have just plummeted by double-digits — the biggest percent sell-off in four decades — but some of the world’s central banks are still buying up large amounts of the precious metal. Specifically, the central banks of six countries are adding gold to their official foreign reserves, according to The World Gold Council’s most recent report on global central bank holdings. These six nations have purchased large amounts of gold so far in 2013 or throughout 2012. And if their buying continues, their gold demand could offset some of selling pressure (which has driven gold price to below $1,400) in the future. Some nations may indeed continue buying because of central bank or currency issues.
Of course, a major market concern is that Cyprus is now likely a gold reserve seller. The World Gold Council shows that Cyprus’s 2013 gold reserve is only 13.9 tonnes, which is 61.9% of the small nation’s total foreign reserves. Concerns about selling from Cyprus are compounded by worries that larger troubled nations, including Italy, Portugal and Spain, may start selling gold to either raise capital or because of the existing Central Bank Gold Agreement sale programs. However, it does not appear that there is panic selling among most of these nations, so that effect can be discounted for the time being.
The six nations that could offset or at least mitigate gold sales by other central banks, institutions and individuals are Russia, Turkey, South Korea, Brazil, Kazakhstan and Iraq. In its analysis, 24/7 Wall St. has avoided specific speculation on why these nations may be acquiring gold because the reasons may differ from country to country.
…
Loosing money on your gold investments? Why not reallocate into some sure-thing real estate investments, as REAL ESTATE ALWAYS GOES UP!
As gold hits the dirt, real estate glitters for investors
April 17, 2013, 1:37 PM
Gold has been hit by a brick, but the polls saw it coming.
In August 2011, with gold at a peak, Gallup Inc. asked investors where they’d want to keep money long-term. Gold (GCM3 -0.72%) was the best investment for 34% of those queried.
The yellow metal gleamed brighter than stocks, bonds and real estate. A year ago, gold’s dominance had slipped, with 28% of those surveyed putting gold ahead of more traditional assets.
Nowadays, gold glitters for 24% of the respondents in a Gallup poll of 1,005 adults taken between April 4 and April 7 – before gold’s recent plunge.
Real estate essentially ties gold for the best investment currently, at 25% to 24%, respectively. In August 2011, 19% of those surveyed listed real estate as their top choice.
Stocks also are more popular, with about 22% saying the market is the best long-term place for their investment dollars. In August 2011, 17% had that view.
“Stocks have been booming and real estate has been recovering in recent months, likely contributing to the decline in gold’s perceived investment status,” Gallup researchers noted in a prepared statement released late Tuesday.
…
Try not to catch yourself a gilded-edged falling knife.
Everything that gold touches is turning to brass these days.
April 17, 2013, 8:18 a.m. EDT
Is there gold in your 401(k)?
5 mutual funds hammered by the yellow metal
By Ian Salisbury
It’s not just gold bugs getting hit by the yellow metal’s sharp decline.
Stocks of gold mining companies received a lot of attention from investors over the past several years, with high gold prices flowing directly to their bottom lines. Of course, with gold now near two-year lows — the metal posted its largest single-day drop in 30 years on Monday before recovering somewhat today — these stocks have more recently been taking it on the chin.
The $5.7 billion Market Vectors Gold Miner’s (ETF GDX +0.73%) declined 9.9% Monday and is down 38% for the year. Of course, investors that dabble in such narrowly focused funds know (we hope) they are in for big price swings.
Mark Hulbert advises investors not to expect gold prices to pop back anytime soon. He points out gold’s fair-market value may be no more than $800 an ounce.
But some mutual funds with much broader investment mandates are also big holders of gold-mining stocks. These have been stung too, with tumbling gold prices in some cases appearing to offset much or all of the gains investors might have realized from the stock market’s roughly 10% rally this year. “It cost us,” says Bill Nasgovitz, portfolio manager of the $1.2 billion Heartland Value fund, whose fund owns producers like Golden Star Resources and AuRico Gold. He’s sticking with the sector. “It’s a volatile world,” he says.
Heartland Value has lagged the market this year, returning just 0.7%. The fund’s long-term track record remains strong, however. Over the past decade, it’s beaten the broader market handily.
Here are five prominent mutual funds that had significant holdings in gold-mining stocks when they last reported their portfolios to fund researcher Morningstar. (Managers may have bought or sold since. Gold stocks’ declining values also mean they’re likely to be a smaller part of managers’ overall portfolios today than they were on the report date.)
…
How do country-specific circuit breakers on internationally traded commodities work?
My guess: Not very well.
April 16, 2013, 3:47 a.m. EDT
Gold losses trigger circuit breakers in Tokyo
By Clementine Wallop
Gold trading for the Tokyo Commodity Exchange’s February 2014 contract has been interrupted three times since 1700 local time Monday as heavy losses triggered circuit breakers, a Tocom spokesman said Tuesday.
The interruptions come as Tocom gold plunges alongside international prices for the precious metal, and also due to strong gains in the Japanese yen over the last few sessions.
In Monday’s trading, international gold prices dropped to their lowest level in two years as investors liquidated long positions in frenzied panic selling.
Tocom six-month gold is trading at 4,169 yen a gram, down 10.1% from its previous settlement and off 14.0% since the beginning of the month.
Dollar-priced gold is trading at $1,330.80 a troy ounce, down 1.7% from Monday’s settlement and more than 15% lower since the start of April.
Tocom’s gold circuit breakers are triggered when prices move 150 yen a gram, the spokesman said. Three interruptions over such a short period are very rare, he added.
Gold’s pullback on Tocom follows a rally since the start of the year that has resulted from depreciation of the yen as sweeping economic reforms take hold in the country.
Gold prices traded close to records earlier this month as yen weakness spurred buying interest, but prices have now erased 2013 gains.
…
Bulletin Apple shares down nearly 5% as tech stocks pace steepening market slide
April 16, 2013, 6:37 p.m. EDT
Gold’s wounds will take time to heal
By Myra P. Saefong, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Gold futures managed to score their first gain in three sessions on Tuesday, but wounds from the fierce selloff that dragged prices down by more than $200 an ounce in two days will take time to heal.
In the wake of such a huge move in gold prices, “there is always a ripple effect, from basic portfolio adjustments all the way to meeting margin calls,” said Vedant Mimani, lead portfolio manager of the Atyant Capital Global Opportunities Fund, who on referred to Tuesday’s bounce as “weak.”
Gold futures (GCM3 +0.11%) were hit by loss of more than $60 on Friday, and then suffered on Monday from their biggest one-day selloff since the 1980s — prompting the CME Group Inc. (CME -0.59%), the parent company of the main U.S. metals and energy exchanges, to raise the collateral requirements for trading in benchmark gold, silver and other precious-metals contracts.
Declines of this magnitude lead to large margin calls, some of which would be covered by asset sales, said Paul Herber, portfolio manager of the Forward Commodity Long/Short Strategy Fund (FCOMX -1.16%).
…
How often does $9.3 bn go POOF! overnight?
MARKETS
April 16, 2013, 11:43 p.m. ET
Gold’s Great Unraveling Had a Few Harbingers
By CHARLES FORELLE, TATYANA SHUMSKY And CHRISTIAN BERTHELSEN
The gold-price rout began taking shape in the early morning hours Monday, after a sharp Friday selloff in a market that had risen steadily for a decade left traders girding for a downdraft.
Some in London began arriving at work Sunday night ahead of the market’s Asia opening to prepare for the onslaught, while others arrived as early as 4 a.m. Monday, even though a paucity of traders at this time limits most trading options until about 8 a.m.
At trading desks at banks and hedge funds, some feared that a major capitulation was coming, one trader said, referring to the condition in which recent buyers sell rather than hold on to losing positions. Trading swings picked up following a plan last week for the financially stressed nation of Cyprus to sell gold, a recommendation by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. GS -3.84% to bet against the metal, and signs that Federal Reserve members were considering easing up on their support for financial markets.
Then the traders saw the latest deteriorating economic data, a softer-than-expected first-quarter growth number from China. Markets opened with furious trading and deeper declines, as some investors sought the safety of puts, options that protect the holder by conferring the right to sell at a prearranged price, which potentially added to selling pressure in the market.
The plunge left traders and investors nursing billions of dollars in losses, with the decline in the futures market alone amounting to $9.3 billion between Thursday and Monday.
“Every time you thought, ‘That has to be enough,’ it wasn’t,” said David Govett, manager of the precious-metals department at Marex Spectron, one of the London Metal Exchange’s biggest brokers.
Gold’s 13% decline over two days marks a potentially historic reversal for an investment that gained wide acceptance after gains of more than 500% over a dozen years. The metal, after being embraced by the masses as a way to generate outsize returns with less volatility, now joins the stock, bond and real-estate markets as being widely viewed as offering both potential rewards and significant risks. Gold recovered a bit on Tuesday, with the June contract rising $26.30, or 1.9%, to $1,387.40.
Some traders said institutional selling was concentrated on Friday, when prices dropped 4%, and selling by individual investors on Monday, with a 9.4% tumble. “Friday was more of a block liquidation,”said Seb Ridd, head of Delta 1 trading at Citigroup Inc., C -2.96% who noted the selling of large positions as well as selling triggered by stop-loss orders, in which shares are unloaded after falling through preset thresholds.ashed
With trading nearly all electronic, the atmosphere was quiet but intense. Vedant Mimani, 38 years old, lead portfolio manager at hedge fund Atyant Capital, started checking up on gold prices from his Miami home well before Asian markets opened on Sunday night. Mr. Mimani’s $80 million fund has been bearish on gold since the fourth quarter of 2011, he said.
“What I was concerned about over the weekend was that it was just going to be a slow bleed from $1,400 to $1,200, and that $200 drop would take over the course of a month,” he said.
Instead, when he checked the market on his iPhone at 7.30 a.m. on Monday, gold prices were down more than $100 a troy ounce.
The sheer swiftness of gold’s decline on Monday meant that investors were willing to pay a premium for put options on gold and silver-backed exchange-traded funds, a centerpiece of his strategy. His fund sold its holdings.
“We didn’t think it would unravel so quickly,” he said.
…
What’s really going on in California
California imposed a new law on banks innocuously called “Homeowners Bill of Rights” which forces banks to switch over to a judicial foreclosure process, which they can opt to do on their own, but takes a year or more to renegotiate contracts and compensation structures for the foreclosure law firms who do all the leg work for the banks. And while those changes are being made… it makes it appear that foreclosures have slowed down dramatically in the state.
The reality?
Defaults (undeclared) are spiraling upward that yet have to pass through the foreclosure pipeline.
The truth?
California is still the highest foreclosure state in sheer volume and percentage.
The low-down?
Resale housing is still massively overpriced as a result of unprecedented interference by individual states and the federal government. The market distortions will be removed and the down draft will continue allowing the market to correct.
With millions of excess empty houses and housing demand at 17 year lows, housing prices have a long way to fall. A very long way to fall.
Might as well repost.
http://www.oregonlive.com/front-porch/index.ssf/2013/04/in-court_foreclosure_filings_j.html
This is what it looks like when a state becomes quasi-judicial…a 90% fall in filing of NODs.
In CA, NODs have fallen approximately 30% from December to March, and are back on the rebound.
CA has NOT become quasi-judicial.
Call it what you want but it’s a long long way down for housing prices in CA when there are over 4 MILLION excess, empty, defaulted and delinquent properties.
Metro NYC Foreclosures Skyrocket
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/ny_ag_gets_as_foreclosures_rise_1EXgYlEH1LDIYe6CSVMADL
Good news if you want to live in Queens or S.I.
Not so good if you’re shooting for Manhattan or Brooklyn, where foreclosures are markedly down from a yr ago.
See this map:
http://www.nypost.com/r/nypost/2013/02/03/business/web_photos/web_forclosure–525×586.jpg
“If you buy a house today you’re going to lose alot of money. ALOT of money. Rent now as rental rates are half the monthly cost of buying at current inflated asking prices of resale housing. Buy later for 65% less.”
“18,700,000 vacant units across the country”
Given the rampant lies and deceptions endemic to the U.S. real estate industry, is it safe to assume that 18.7 million is an undercount? Especially given the new wave of construction underway in the wake of the Fed’s QE3-fueled housing market stimulus?
9 Worst Recession Ghost Towns in America
Ghost Towns, Demolition, Kittens
By BLAIRE BRIODY, The Fiscal Times
America has a new kind of ghost town, haunted by the spirits of the recession. Developers caught up in the runaway housing boom overbuilt and oversold lots, houses and condos, leaving neighborhoods barren with uninhabited model homes, eerily desolate luxury condos, and abandoned McMansions in the aftermath of the collapse.
Most of these recession ghost towns lie in heavily-hit regions of the housing crisis: South Florida, Arizona, California and Nevada. Some in metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Miami, have a better chance of surviving after the housing market recovers, but others are in remote desert developments where municipal services have long since left. “We saw a lot of overbuilding in areas where there isn’t going to be much buying activity,” says Rick Sharga of RealityTrac. “Those areas are going to take a long time to come back, if they ever do.”
There are currently 18,700,000 vacant units across the country, according to Census data, and vacancies rates in the homeowner market have grown 12 percent since the recession started. Vacancies are the highest in the southern and western regions of the country.
…
PHOTO GALLERY: 9 Worst Recession Ghost Towns in America
I believe it.
There are millions of excess, empty, defaulted, delinquent properties in CA alone.
You guys crack me up.
Your lies crack me up.
What is Alot? I can’t seem to find this term in the English dictionary yet I seem to see this word used a lot?
Is it a type of something?
Some new type of measure?
What?
It’s “a lot.” At the moment it’s fasnionable to misspell it as an internet joke. Not terribly exciting.
donut misspell things like that
Rent now
Do YOU rent or own?
You rent from your owners.
How far underwater are you? $150k?
So long as Canadian housing prices keep going up, who cares about the rest of their economy? Rising home prices are gonna make all Canadians RICH, RICH, RICH, just like it works here in the U.S.!
April 17, 2013, 10:10 a.m. EDT
Bank of Canada sees lower growth, rates on hold
By Polya Lesova
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The Bank of Canada on Wednesday maintained its target for the overnight rate at 1%, as expected. In a statement, the central bank said that Canada’s annual average growth is now projected to be 1.5% in 2013, lower than its previous forecast of 2% growth. The Bank of Canada said that “the considerable monetary policy stimulus currently in place will likely remain appropriate for a period of time, after which some modest withdrawal will likely be required, consistent with achieving the 2% inflation target.” Following the announcement, the U.S. dollar extended gains against the Canadian currency to trade up 0.6% at 1.0273 Canadian dollars.
“The Coming Housing Collapse: The Fed, Instead Of Lehman, Owns The Mortgage Market”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2013/03/05/peter-schiff-and-the-coming-housing-collapse-the-fed-instead-of-lehman-owns-the-mortgage-market/
There are many reasons NOT to buy a house right now.
1) Prices are massively inflated
2) Rental rates are half the cost of buying at current inflated prices
3) The cost of new housing is a fraction of resale housing in $/square foot.
4) $/square foot prices are falling
…. and most importantly… You’re going to lose alot of money if you buy a house now. ALOT of money.
California City, CA
Perhaps an example of what will happen to America’s recession ghost towns, California City is one of the first real estate boom developments to become one. In 1958, a developer sectioned off lots and paved culs-de-sacs for a dream city 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles. But the buyers and families never came. Today, the ghostly grid is used for skydivers and test flights by the nearby air force base and a prison lies to the north.
Dig up the desert and it takes a long time to recover
a very long time
I bolded the current stock price decline numbers to highlight how much larger current declines are than what MW originally reported.
Would now be a good time for dips to buy stocks?
April 16, 2013, 3:19 a.m. EDT
Europe stocks on track for third day of losses
By Sara Sjolin
LONDON (MarketWatch) — European stock markets were on track for a third straight day of losses on Tuesday, as concerns about global growth remained in the spotlight after recent weaker-than-expected data in both China and the U.S. Later in the day, attention turns to Germany’s ZEW economic sentiment indicator to gauge the economic development in Europe’s largest economy. The Stoxx Europe 600 index (XX:SXXP -1.12%) lost 0.2% to 289.80, adding to a 0.7% loss from Monday. Germany’s DAX 30 index (DX:DAX -1.78%) fell 0.1% to 7,702.21, while France’s CAC 40 index (FR:PX1 -1.56%) was slightly lower at 3,709.80. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 index (UK:UKX -0.57%) gave up 0.2% to 6,329.14. Shares of Danone (SA FR:BN -0.11%) gained 3.7% after the firm released upbeat first-quarter sales figures.
Has the European economy turned the corner by now?
The German downgrade rumor no one believes
April 17, 2013, 10:06 AM
German stocks are falling Wednesday, and a common explanation offered by analysts is a rumor that the euro zone’s biggest economy could lose its triple-A rating – a rumor that they pass along but say they don’t believe.
But while Germany, unlike many other euro-zone countries, doesn’t have a bloated budget deficit or a banking sector that is a mess, its economy isn’t growing much. The country’s four leading economic think tanks are calling for 0.8% growth this year, somewhat better than the 0.6% that the International Monetary Fund predicted on Tuesday.
A fresh worry on Wednesday is a slump in car sales across the 27-nation European Union. Registrations of new cars – a proxy for sales – plunged 10.2% in March from a year ago, after a 10.5% fall in February, an industry group said Wednesday. The numbers have been negative for 18 months now, and Germany is home to some of the world’s biggest car makers: Daimler (DE:DAI -1.69%), BMW and Volkswagen. The yen’s fall against the euro in the last few months could make it harder for those companies to clear their lots. Shares in BMW (DE:BMW -2.72%) and VW (DE:VOW -3.46%) are both down more than the broader market.
For investors, the quick fall in Germany’s DAX index (DX:DAX -1.80%) of more than 2% (followed by a partial recovery) could underscore how investors are becoming more sensitive to negative surprises, says Sebastien Galy, an analyst at Societe Generale.
…
Austerity doesn’t sell many Audis.
luckily they seem to be selling like hotcakes here in the bubbly cities of the U.S.
3:39p BREAKING
Egan-Jones downgrades Germany rating to A from A+
April 17, 2013, 6:31 a.m. EDT
Europe faces threat of full-fledged depression
Data taking turn for the worse, a likely black eye for earnings
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* IMF lowers world, U.S. growth forecasts
* Europe stocks on track for third day of losses
* Goldman sees more downside on gold selloff
By William L. Watts, MarketWatch
FRANKFURT (MarketWatch) — “Depression” isn’t the word usually used to describe the euro-zone economy, but it may become increasingly appropriate as hopes for a recovery give way to fears of an extended and destructive downturn that policy makers seem unable to halt.
“Unemployment is at a record high, credit is going down, banks are failing…what do you call an economy like that?” said Carl Weinberg, chief economist at Valhalla, N.Y.-based High Frequency Economics and an unabashed user of the ”D-word” to describe Europe’s economic situation.
There is no uniformly accepted definition of a depression, but economists generally agree that depressions last two or more years and are accompanied by a big jump in unemployment, falling credit, and a massive slump in economic output.
That’s certainly been the case for parts if not all of Europe. The Greek unemployment rate hit a once unfathomable 27.2% in January. In Spain, 26% of workers are jobless. Across the euro area as a whole, more than 19 million people are out of work while the unemployment rate stands at a record 12%.
Euro-zone GDP is widely expected to have contracted for a sixth consecutive quarter in the first three months of 2013, and forecasters are penciling in another year of modest contraction for the euro zone as a whole in 2013.
The euro-zone economy is “experiencing two shocks at once: a financial crisis and fiscal drag,” said Bill Adams, senior international economist at PNC Financial Services Group.
The 2008 financial crisis exposed fissures in the euro zone. Some countries, such as Greece, were victims of overspending. But many others, such as Ireland and Spain, saw a sound fiscal record undone by the collapse of massive property bubbles that endangered the banking system. Shackled to a shared currency, economies such as Greece have been forced to embark on painful internal devaluations in an effort to regain competitiveness.
Prolonged pain on the so-called periphery of the euro zone is now spilling into the core, with activity slowing in France and even Germany, the region’s No. 1 economy. Europe’s ugly economic picture is yet to put a significant dent in the markets, however.
…
no papering over problems is not fixing the fundamentals.It only buys time for a little bit.
It buys time for the big boyz on Wall Street to exit positions and leave mom and pop on Main Street holding the bag.
Oh my dear…. does this piss you off?
http://picpaste.com/pics/584c4c5690770525c55822c605e94ae0.1366208823.png
I did my own version of that Google search. Check out what came up as the top three search results:
The Housing Bubble Blog
thehousingbubbleblog.com/
9 hours ago – Author Ben Jones examines the home price boom and its effect on owners, lenders, regulators, realtors and the economy as a whole. Entries …
Predictions For The New Year - January» 8 - 13 - View the HBB Photo Gallery
United States housing bubble - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_housing_bubble
The United States housing bubble is an economic bubble affecting many parts of the United States housing market in over half of American states. Housing …
Timeline of the United States … - Causes of the United States
The Housing Bubble Is Back - Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/sites/…/2013/03/25/the-housing-bubble-is-back/
Mar 25, 2013 – Cullen Roche is worried that the trajectory of housing prices might deviate from what practical assumptions would predict Real estate returns …
Will the whole world be shocked when the Fed eventually takes away the punch bowl, interest rates rise, and U.S. housing prices drop?
“NOBODY COULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING!”
It ain’t rocket science, folks…
That’s why the incalculable losses of buyers in San Francisco, suburban Maryland, et cetera must be called out here every day, lest some innocent googler stumble in here and get snared in a trap of realtor lies.
Yes you’re correct GoonMan.
Wake me up when renting and buying in San Francisco decline by 65% (I’m sleeping under the freeway until then).
What are you losses so far? $100k?
My fridge stopped working last weekend. I called the building manager when the rental office opened Monday morning, and he switched out the dud fridge with a loaner fridge from a vacant unit in my building. Then yesterday evening, he put in a brand new fridge to replace the loaner fridge.
Renting is always better. Always.
Until your landlord tells you to move because he wants to live in the house. And this has now happened twice in the last 5 years.
from a vacant unit in my building
35 units in the building here. The “owner” likely won’t be moving into this apartment.
And as a reminder to the anti-apartment, pro-SFR koolaid drinkers, the squad resides in a top floor unit with no shared neighbor walls (kitchen wall is against elevator shaft) and there are no dogz and no kidz in the building. Heat is included in the rent, and the maintenance is prompt. And the rent has gone up a total of 1.7% in the three years we’ve lived here.
Renting is always better. Always.
Renting is always better. Always.</b
It’s certainly cheaper than buying. In fact renting is a mere half the cost of buying at current massively inflated asking prices of resale housing.
So far as I am concerned, Cramer has redeemed himself.
April 12, 2013, 10:46 a.m. EDT
It hurts when the shamer is Jim Cramer
Commentary: Media, government let rogue executives get off
By Al Lewis
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — One reason why rogue executives can commit heinous crimes and then hide behind their corporations is because too many of us in the financial media let them.
With so much of that “settle-without-admitting-nor-denying-guilt” stuff in the news, it’s about time somebody said this to our faces. So Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s “Mad Money,” shamed us Saturday night.
He was the keynote speaker at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers’ 50th Anniversary Gala at the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel, where we drank, dined, sampled musical entertainment and bid on pricey auction items.
“We have not covered the misdeeds of the individuals who run the big banks in such a way that they could be targeted by the government,” he complained. “Instead, [we] have coverage that tends to be critical of the institution.”
“That has led to the unfortunate situation where companies are pursued and not the individual wrongdoers, who get away scot-free. Where are the indictments? No one has gone to jail for what they did to the shareholders. For what they did to this country. That’s just outrageous.”
Cramer’s shrill voice pierced the night, and there was no way to turn down the volume like you can when he’s got his sleeves rolled up to his sweaty armpits and he’s screaming through your TV.
“The result is that the institutions defend themselves and the shareholders pay the price,” he continued. “I think that’s outrageous. The government should be putting these people in jail, which would then avoid the need for indicting the whole institution. That would obviate all the needless too-big-to-fail worries because the institutions can be preserved if the individuals are punished.”
…
Someone here asked if the North Korea crisis seemed made up to anyone else?
By Jack Kim
SEOUL
Thu Mar 21, 2013 6:29am EDT
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea said it would attack U.S. military bases on Japan and the Pacific island of Guam if provoked, a day after leader Kim Jong-un oversaw a mock drone strike on South Korea.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/21/us-korea-north-attack-idUSBRE92K02W20130321 - 102k
Kerry Commits U.S. To U.N. Arms Trade Treaty Gun Grab
Investor’s Business Daily ^ | March 20, 2013 | IBD EDITORIALS
Posted on Wednesday, March 20, 2013 5:59:44 PM by raptor22
U.S. Rights: As the world body meets this week to hammer out an agreement to restrict international arms trade, our Secretary of State commits us to pushing a treaty that may also restrict our Second Amendment rights.
Last Friday, the day of the week when unpopular or controversial announcements are traditionally made, Secretary of State John Kerry announced U.S. support for the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), a final version of which is being hammered out in New York beginning this week.
Certainly the ATT is controversial. Touted as a means of getting a handle on an international arms trade valued at $60 billion a year, its stated purpose is to keep illicit weapons out of the hands of terrorists, insurgent fighters and organized crime at an international level.
Its vague and suspicious wording led some 150 members of Congress last June to send a letter to President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warning that the treaty is “likely to pose significant threats to our national security, foreign policy and economic interests as well as our constitutional rights.”
We have noted that a paper by the U.N.’s Coordinating Action on Small Arms (CASA) says that arms have been “misused by lawful owners” and that the “arms trade therefore be regulated in ways that would . .. minimize the misuse of legally owned weapons.”
Would defending your home against intruders, or U.S. laws permitting concealed carry, be considered a “misuse?”
“We will not support any treaty that would be inconsistent with U.S. law and the rights of American citizens under our Constitution, including the Second Amendment,” Secretary of State Kerry tried to reassure us — even as he represents an administration that seeks to ban weapons on their scary appearance rather than their genuine lethality…
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2999050/posts - 33k -
“Realtor Charged With Theft By Deception, Altering Deeds, Conspiracy”
http://foreclosuregate.prosepoint.com/story/realtor-charged-theft-deception-altering-deeds-conspiracy
Anyone who is trying a FSBO listing might want to consider this tactic:
Pity Purchase
Another tactic? Make buyers feel sorry for you. This seller wrote his sob story on the home’s sale sign: “Must sell. Lost job. Can’t pay mortgage. Wife left. Took dog. House a gem…except for asbestos. Best offer.” At least it sounds like he’s being honest.
Sounds like a country song…
I wonder if FSBO sellers ever put their looser-listings to song?
Only line missing is: “Need money to post mom’s bail.”
LOL
Phoenix Rental Rates Heading Down Down Down
Why pay an inflated price for a depreciating house in Phoenix when you can rent it for increasingly less money?
http://picpaste.com/pics/d89f9a1b2d5b6b74e518b5c9b7516f98.1366210461.png
http://silverdoctors.com/force-majeur-was-the-end-game-all-along-comex-will-default-in-the-next-week/
The COMEX will default in the next week or several weeks and people will be “settled” with Dollars, no more metal will be delivered! So, knowing that “game over” has arrived, they are dumping a massive volume of paper contracts with impunity to push the metals prices as low as possible before the “default”. This way the “shorts” do not have to and will not be “covered” when “supply” cannot be obtained because of “an act of God”. They will be settled in cash (at a profit no less) because these “unforeseen” disruptions in supply. “Who could have seen it coming?” will be the mantra. I would suspect that banking stress and “bail ins” will also become prevalent globally. The pricing structure” will now push any and all physical sellers away from the markets and the “door” to safety is effectively being shut. Either you own metal or you don’t.
After the closure of the COMEX and LBMA doors there will be no availability and “price” will be meaningless. Your ability to protect yourself is right now for all intents and purposes being eliminated.
America Doesn’t Have a Gun Problem, It Has a Gang Problem
December 31, 2012 By Daniel Greenfield
Our national murder rate is not some incomprehensible mystery that can only be attributed to the inanimate tools, the steel, brass and wood that do the work. It is largely the work of adult males from age 18 to 39 with criminal records killing other males of that same age and criminal past.
As David Kennedy, the head of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control, put it, “The majority of homicide victims have extensive criminal histories. This is simply the way that the world of criminal homicide works. It’s a fact.”
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/america-doesnt-have-a-gun-problem-it-has-a-gang-problem/ - 105k -
Their slogans blared “gun crime” and “gun violence,” misdirecting attention away from the real problem of gang violence.
Taxpayer-funded gun control gets huge foundation boost
by Ron Arnold on June 1, 2012
Gun rights advocates recently discovered that the gun control group Mayors Against Illegal Guns has burrowed its “gun violence prevention coordinators” (read “anti-gun lobbyists”) into city payrolls from Augusta, Maine to Seattle, Washington, at taxpayer expense.
MAIG is the brainchild of New York City’s zealous anti-gun billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who formed the group at a 2006 gun control summit held in Gracie Mansion and co-hosted by Boston Mayor Thomas Menino. MAIG touts an agenda of “commonsense reforms” that gun rights advocates see as being somewhere on the far side of repealing the Second Amendment.
With a membership that started at 15 and now approaches 600 mayors, MAIG’s agenda has expanded from tracking “illegal” guns used in crimes to promoting outright gun bans in Congress. But the tactic of slipping anti-gun operatives into municipal governments looks like something new.
Florida blogger Sean Caranna stumbled upon these gun control termites about a month ago while researching another project. The Orlando city council’s website showed a contract renewal notice for a city employee with the job title, “Mayors Against Illegal Guns regional coordinator.”
Caranna was stunned by the job description: to “play an integral role in the coordination and planning of gun crime prevention and illegal gun-related initiatives, events and media opportunities in the city and in the region.” In the real world, that meant holding city-sponsored meetings to recruit anti-gun constituencies to undermine Second Amendment rights. Their slogans blared “gun crime” and “gun violence,” misdirecting attention away from the real problem of gang violence.
Orlando taxpayers footed $24,000 of the job’s $60,000 annual salary, prompting Caranna to look further. He turned up about a dozen other cities with a similar position and a similar burden on the city’s general fund — including Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Seattle.
Caranna called blogger Dave Workman in Seattle, who jumped on the story and found himself wondering about Orlando’s $24,000 payment toward the salary’s $60K total — where did the other $36,000 come from?
He contacted Thomas L. Taylor with the City of Seattle’s budget office, who confirmed that a now-discontinued position for a ‘gun violence prevention coordinator’ in the Office of Intergovernmental Relations had been “largely funded” by MAIG.
Workman found two grants for the position totaling $75,000, but the money was actually funneled through something called the United Against Illegal Guns Support Fund. Its president in 2010, when the grants were disbursed, was John Feinblatt, a close adviser to Mayor Bloomberg.
Where did UAIGSF get its money? The Foundation Center’s huge grant database showed that it got $2.4 million in foundation money from 2008 to 2010, with $1.3 million coming from Chicago’s rabidly anti-gun Joyce Foundation, where Barack Obama was once a board member.
Workman continued to shed light on the funding of MAIG, which was originally supported by Bloomberg ($3 million), insurance mogul Eli Broad ($750,000), and the Joyce Foundation ($1.1 million). When the Support Fund opened shop in 2008, Broad’s private foundation and the Joyce Foundation continued as anti-gun donors.
Joyce incubated the idea of joint government and foundation funding for gun control activists in 2008 with a grant of $375,000 “To support four diverse ‘mayors against illegal guns’ coalition members in hiring city coordinators to act as regional point persons for the coalition.”
Workman’s database-surfing found $32.2 million in tax-exempt money pouring into various gun control pockets during the past decade. George Soros’ Open Society Institute, for example, gave $600,000 to the Tides Foundation in 2002, “To support the donor advised fund for the Funders’ Collaborative for Gun Violence Prevention.”
Workman said, “Gun control has its donor advised funds and funders’ collaboratives and city-funded parasites, but I rarely see such coordination among gun rights donors.”
http://www.conservativeactionalerts.com/2012/06/taxpayer-funded-gun-control-gets-huge-foundation-boost/ - 80k -
Obama doesn’t care about poor black kidz wasting each other in the ghetto.
The grabbers’ agenda isn’t to disarm illiterate thugs who shoot their gunz holding them sideways, it’s to disarm whitey.
“it’s to disarm whitey.”
Well everybody in rural areas has to be disarmed so they can be nudged into “smart growth” urban areas set up by TPTB so they can control energy, water use, housing stock and allocation, population levels, public health and dietary regimens, resources, recycling and education.
You got a problem with that?
That U.N. Agenda 21 bug sure is deep up your butt lately.
On a related subject, Obama will only be 55 when he leaves the presidency . That leaves plenty of time for him to bounce around the IMF, World Bank, and ultimately into the U.N. where he will implement the New World Order that his current dismantling of U.S. Constitutional rights is laying the foundation for.
And I found it all starting with…..
Do you want me to read the card?
Will the Fed ever end its endless pattern of Housing Bubble denial?
- First they said there was no housing bubble.
- In 2007-2008 they said it was contained, just before the point of all-out housing panic.
- After publishing a white paper in 2012 on different strategies for reflating the housing bubble, they claim they didn’t cause the nonexistent echo bubble.
At what point will they end the PR charade and come clean on their complicity?
Obviously this paper was written before the news came out that the Fed’s bailout tab went into the trillions of dollars.
Just in case anyone wants to refute this paper’s findings, I would like to make a preemptive request to critique specific details, rather than resorting to the usual dismissive tactics for which professional economists are known to denigrate research they dislike.
Federal Reserve Policy and the Housing Bubble
Lawrence H. White
The U.S. housing bubble and the fallout from its bursting are not the results of a laissez-faire monetary and financial system. They happened in an unanchored government fiat monetary system with a restricted financial system.
What Happened and Why?
Our current financial turmoil began with unusual monetary policy moves by the Federal Reserve System and novel federal regulatory interventions. These poorly chosen public policies distorted interest rates and asset prices, diverted loanable funds into the wrong investments, and twisted normally robust financial institutions into unsustainable positions. There is no doubt that private miscalculation and imprudence have made matters worse for more than a few institutions. Such mistakes help to explain which particular firms have run into the most trouble. But to explain industry-wide errors we need to identify price and incentive distortions capable of having industry-wide effects.
Here I will make two main points. First, the Federal Reserve’s expansionary monetary policy supplied the means for unsustainable housing prices and unsustainable mortgage financing. Elsewhere (White 2008) I have discussed the growth in regulatory mandates and subsidies that exaggerated the demand for riskier mortgages, most importantly the implicit guarantees to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that combined with HUD’s imposition of “affordable housing” mandates on Fannie and Freddie to accelerate the creation of a market for securitized subprime mortgages.
Second, the Federal Reserve has undertaken self-initiated new lending roles that constitute a shadow bailout program more than twice the size of the Treasury’s $700 billion bailout program. There is unfortunately little evidence that the Fed’s new lending has helped to resolve our financial problems, rather than to delay their resolution.
…
“…white paper in 2012 on different strategies for reflating the housing bubble…”
Here’s something they’re sneaking in while the media endlessly tears it’s hair over Boston:
Congress Quickly And Quietly Rolls Back Insider Trading Rules For Itself
Well, that was brief. Time to start following congressional portfolios.
Obama signed it, obviously, but I could not find a list of who voted for it. I suspect the majority was overwhelming regardless of party affiliation. They all want the untraceable bribe money they can make off this info.
For those who want to spin this to score points for ‘your’ party, I offer this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5dBZDSSky0
Face it. None of us are represented by our government, and neither the democrats nor the republicans have any interest in changing that. Your descendants will fight a revolution against our government. It may be 5 generations from now, or it may be one, but it’s coming.
What is the legal rationale for exempting Congress from rules that could land private citizens in prison?
Some animals are more equal than others.
It became an extension of this:
Congressmen have a limited privelege against arrest. Except in cases of treason, felony and breach of peace, Congressmen may not be arrested during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses and in going to and returning from same. Article 1, Section 6 Clause 1 of the US Constitution.
Other than gold, is there any safe place to put your money today?
Bulletin Nasdaq Composite down nearly 2.2% as tech selling pressure intensifies
April 17, 2013, 10:41 a.m. EDT
Apple off nearly 5%, Intel down; tech stocks sink
Yahoo rises after upgrade, disappointing results
By Dan Gallagher, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Tech stocks took a hard hit on Wednesday, one of the worst sectors in a falling market, following lackluster results from Intel Corp. and Yahoo Inc. Apple Inc. shares lost almost 5%.
…
Well made guns, well made liquor, well made tobacco products…
That’s the F and the A and the T that spell ATF. It’s almost the 20 year anniverseray day of “we had to gas and burn the kidz alive to save them” in Waco. How will you be celebrating?
How will you be celebrating?
I will pray we never get another progressive in the white house again.
“We had to kill the children in order to save them.”
Funny how we didn’t ban democrats after Waco.
I hope you’re sitting down.
Stephen Higgins joined BATF in 1961 in Omaha, Nebraska. After serving as acting director, Higgins was appointed by Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan in 1983.[1] Higgins retired following a report faulting BATF for their handling of the Waco Siege.
Janet Reno: the other problem.
A neocon and a dem. Both, zealots.
BY RANDY KREHBIEL World Staff Writer
Sunday, April 07, 2013
“It’s a plan to inventory and control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all information, and all human beings in the world,” said Rosa Koire, the featured speaker at a weekend seminar attended by about 100 people at a south Tulsa hotel.
“For the last 20 years we have been in the inventory stage,” said Koire. “Now we’re moving into the control stage.”
Most people involved in urban planning and sustainable development seem baffled by such claims.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/site/printerfriendlystory.aspx?articleid=20130407_11_0_Depend67910 - 20k -
IT’S THE WATER
11/28/2012
FLOOD OF WATER RESTRICTIONS
Buried deep in the bottom of an article about Water Agency funding in a small town newspaper in California we find the wave of the future—Do-It-Yourself Cap and Trade.
Really, you must brace yourself for the full implications of this program. First, allow yourself to contemplate a system in which a government agency, Sonoma County Water Agency, providing 352,000 people with water, will accept a grant from a non-profit organization. The California Water Foundation which ’supports investment in sustainable management of the state’s water supply’ is in the process of finalizing a $255,000 grant, some of which would go towards this:
Launching a pilot program that would allow the sale of efficiency credits between customers who come in below their normal water usage and those who exceed their threshold.
Should we say that again? Customers who come in below their normal water usage will sell their ‘efficiency credits’ to those who exceed their ‘threshold.’
Did you get that? Those customers who exceed their allotment of water will have to buy credits from those who do not. Cap and trade for the average user of water. Will you buy water through an exchange. Will you bid on credits through a third party? Will you go to an auction where you struggle to acquire enough credits to water your garden, or take a shower every day? This is not an exaggeration. Just as Cap and Trade is being developed at the state-wide level in California to establish a market for carbon-based emissions, this program will establish a ‘local cap and trade for water.’ Penalties and credits for water usage. Yes, Sonoma County, known for 100% membership of cities and the county in ICLEI, known for having a County Supervisor (Valerie Brown) on the National Board of ICLEI, will now be known for creating a pilot program in individual cap and trade for a substance fundamental to sustaining life.
WATERSHED REGULATIONS
The Sonoma County Water Agency has put out a publication in which they say that every part of the county is in a watershed. This concept of expanding the idea of watersheds until it includes every property in the United States and beyond is catching hold.
Right now 40% of the United States is considered to be in a watershed, and that percentage is growing. Water run-off, drainage, in urban areas is being regulated and is giving Planning Departments the justification for denying building permits based on ’streamside thresholds.’ The translation for this term encompasses any property, fully developed in an urban area or not, that stands in the way of rainwater moving toward some collector stream or body of water.
In Marin County, CA, any property owner who might wish to, for instance, build a garage on her suburban hillside property, will find that the local planning department will not allow that until it has mapped the direction of run-off on that hill. These maps are created when the property owner applies for a building permit and are paid for by the property owner at that time. In other words the property owner has no way of knowing whether she’ll be able to build that garage until she pays for the study. The study establishes streams in fully developed urban areas where the ’stream’ is the way that the rainwater finds its way through your property. Because these rules only affect one property owner at a time and only when he or she tries to get a development permit most people are unaware that the rules have changed.
Whether you’re watering your yard, or taking a bath, or building a shed you will find UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development flooding into your life and drowning you in regulations, fees, and penalties. This is how you are driven out of rural and suburban areas. This is how you are priced out of your single family home. This is how you end up in Smart Growth. This is how you lose your business. This is Agenda 21.
http://www.santarosaneighborhoodcoalition.com/watch-sr-blog.html - 71k -
This is how you are priced out of your single family home. ‘
Yep easy to do if the government or its puppet Blackstone owns most of the SFH.
The future will be like an IKEA showroom
“…its puppet Blackstone…”
Evidence, please?
Posted: 10:00 p.m. Saturday, April 13, 2013
Wall Street moves onto main street, meet your new landlord
By Kimberly Miller
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
By April, the Blackstone Group was in the single-family landlord business, investing $3.8 billion nationwide. Blackstone created the new housing firm Invitation Homes to market and manage the rentals, buying heavily on Florida’s west coast with at least 700 homes in Hillsborough County, according to property appraiser records. Its South Florida purchases include about 150 homes in Palm Beach County, which cost a combined $37 million, according to the property appraiser’s office. Blackstone has another 500 homes in Broward and Miami-Dade counties.
Invitation Home executives said there is no target for the number of properties the company wants to buy, which are purchased at foreclosure auctions and through traditional sales. The company, based in Dallas, has about 900 employees nationwide.
“This is a growing market where people, more and more, are becoming renters either by choice or because of economic circumstances,” said Marcus Ridgway, chief operating officer for Invitation Homes.
It’s difficult to get an exact measure of the large firms’ stockpile of homes in Florida because they often buy under multiple spin-off corporations with different names. Blackstone, for example, has bought under THR Florida, LLC. Starwood Property Trust uses Srp Sub, LLC. California-based Waypoint Homes, which is buying in Broward County with an intention of moving north into Palm Beach, is using the name Adalwin, which regional director Andrew Ginsburg said is a German name that means “noble friend.”
I see nothing in that post that indicates Blackstone is a puppet of Uncle Sam.
Next.
“I see nothing in that post that indicates Blackstone is a puppet of Uncle Sam.”
Do you see anything in that post that says it is.
Yawn, chuckle.
There are about 10 million single family rentals in the US. At $150k average (adjust as you see fit), that’s a total value of the single-family rentals in the US of about $1.5 TRILLION.
Most owned in 1’s and 2’s by individuals.
It will be a LONG time (if ever) that any single company (or groups of big companies) owns a substantial portion of this market.
It will be a LONG time (if ever) that any single company (or groups of big companies) owns a substantial portion of this market.
This sounds true as long as one doesn’t consider the Fed to be a company.
Also true as long as you don’t consider a lender the same as an owner.
If we give it back to Mexico, will they screw it up?
GAAAA! The horror of having to take into consideration the effect that building your rec room will have on your surrounding neighbors’ property and shared aquifer. How commie!
“Right now 40% of the United States is considered to be in a watershed, and that percentage is growing.”
“These maps are created when the property owner applies for a building permit and are paid for by the property owner at that time. In other words the property owner has no way of knowing whether she’ll be able to build that garage until she pays for the study.”
From The Foundry (Heritage Foundation blog):
As adopted, Agenda 21 was described as “a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment.” That includes hundreds of specific goals and strategies that national and local governments are encouraged to adopt. And that translates into restrictive zoning policies that are aimed at deterring suburban growth. Ultimately, they suppress housing supply and drive up home prices, in turn imposing unnecessary costs, especially on middle- and lower-income households. These policies contributed to and aggravate the real estate bubble by putting inflationary pressures on housing prices.
You haven’t mentioned any of the other millions of agendas. Capitalizing Agenda and giving it a number just makes it look more sinister.
And Obama was born in Kenya.
“restrictive zoning policies that are aimed at deterring suburban growth.”
You have to stay out of the Kings Forest
“You have to stay out of the Kings Forest”
Wildlands Map of US - Discerning the Times Digest and NewsBytes
http://www.discerningtoday.org/wildlands_map_of_us.htm - 25k - Cached - Similar pages
The Wildlands Project would set up to one-half of America into core wilderness reserves and interconnecting corridors
You have to stay out of the Kings Forest
And we better not catch you shooting the King’s deer…whether you’re starving or not.
And you better not shoot the elk in Boulder, cus then they’ll have to raise money and build a memorial for it.
http://www.facebook.com/JusticeForTheMapletonElk
“Taking wild meat for that reason, for any reason I think is despicable in this circumstance,” said another Boulder resident.
Daffy says: You’re despicable!! - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq8F8PeDBOU - 241k -
“And we better not catch you shooting the King’s deer…whether you’re starving or not.”
Those aren’t your deer, you didn’t make those deer. What do ya gotta father with antlers? In fact your drinking that deer’s water! Now get the fuqe off a that deer’s land and into the ‘high density urban mixed use development’ where we can keep an eye on you.
I was referring to Robin Hood, but I suppose that works too :-).
With 25 MILLION excess houses and growing by the day, I don’t think we have to worry about “suppressing housing supply”.
“With 25 MILLION excess houses and growing by the day,”
Most of those houses are in the red and yellow anyway, so they really don’t count.
Wildlands Project
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Over the period of 2000-2006, Wildlands Network scientists and associated conservation organizations mapped six regional “Wildlands Network Designs”[3] (WNDs) within those corridors in the Rocky Mountain West and the Northern Appalachians. These conservation plans identified existing protected areas and proposed wildlife corridors that would connect them as pathways for wide-ranging (keystone) species in need of “room to roam.” The plans also described the various positive ecological impacts that these species had on other flora and fauna.[4]
In recent years, Wildlands Network moved from a focus on continued creation of WNDs to guiding implementation of the recommendations in the six existing plans. The organization developed a network of public and private individuals, groups, and agencies working in the regions covered by the WNDs to accomplish this goal. Initiatives currently focus on connecting habitat in the Western (Spine of Continent) and Eastern (Atlantic) Wildways.
————————————————————————
Wildlands Project
1/2/2012
Many of the areas shown on The Wildland Project maps in RED, as off limits to human use, already have significantly reduced public access and no management or resource harvesting through: Wilderness, Critical Habitat and Roadless Areas. YELLOW Areas are areas of Highly regulated Use where hiking may be allowed, but no homes. Only GREEN areas will allow housing.
Are any of the areas that you currently enjoy to recreate shown as RED, or off limits to human activity, on the Wildland map?
Is your home in a YELLOW Area, where housing will ultimately be prohibited through increased taxation and impossible regulations such as updating your home to current building code standards or being within a few miles of a fire/police station? Could your local rural fire or police station be closed due to lack of funding making all homes in your area nonconforming and uninsurable?
The community of Lake Isabella and the entire Kern River Valley are shown as YELLOW or RED which means you will not be allowed to live there.
http://stewardsofthesequoia.org/Wildlands_Project.html - 28k -
With a globe full of land a 95% that goes undeveloped, I don’t think we need to worry about finding land to build on.
You liars are really reach down to the bottom of the barrel and dredging up old realtard lies.
Housing Sales Collapsing In Bay Area</b.
http://picpaste.com/pics/868029f6be374f92a82d2dd9e14dd2fc.1366217815.png
This is what happens when prices are massively inflated. Now that housing prices resumed falling in the Bay Area, why buy a house now? Buy later after prices have fallen deeply.
No, it’s because there are so few properties to buy the numbers you show are relatively meaningless. All it does show is lack of inventory. Sorry to burst your little gloat fest.
Lying again are we Dumb Money?
There’s 5,400 houses for sale in SF alone.
http://picpaste.com/pics/fd8f15e75dc0793c57d0857c1301c6c3.1366242461.png
And I have a bulletin for you. There’s a reason there are so many houses for sale….. because nobody is buying them….. nor are they buying your BS.
MARKETS
April 16, 2013, 8:13 p.m. ET
Bitcoin Investors Hang On for the Ride
By ROBIN SIDEL
Norman Vialle, a 53-year-old car dealer in Kansas, invested in his share of winners and losers during the Internet bubble of the 1990s. Now he is clinging to a stash of Bitcoin, even though the fledgling virtual currency has lost about 70% of its value in the past week.
“It’s volatile because it’s new, but it’s still a lot higher than it was a month ago,” Mr. Vialle says.
In addition to investing in the currency, Mr. Vialle recently began accepting bitcoins for payment at Overland Park Jeep Dodge Ram Chrysler. One of his customers is planning to pay for a $40,000 Jeep with the currency next month.
It has been a volatile month for Bitcoin, the virtual currency that is based on a mathematic algorithm and can be used to buy everything from maple syrup to pornography.
A furious run-up in the value of Bitcoin earlier this month has been followed by an abrupt price drop that has rattled investors. The price of one Bitcoin unit continued its dive on Tuesday, falling 39% at one point to $50 before recovering somewhat to around $70.
The unpredictable trading has given fresh fuel to skeptics, who question the viability of a volatile currency that isn’t backed by a central bank.
“I think there are some businesses that offer legitimate goods that like the concept and like the cachet of it,” said Beth Robertson, a senior consultant with Javelin Strategy and Research, which focuses on the payments industry. “But I don’t think that you’re going to see any broad base of merchants accepting Bitcoin.”
Regulators, meanwhile, recently weighed in on virtual currencies for the first time, encouraging entities that exchange or sell them to follow the same money-laundering rules that apply to companies like Western Union Co. (WU -2.39%).
Despite the lack of wide acceptance and looming prospect for regulation, a cadre of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Web programmers and anti-Establishment thinkers are still revved up about Bitcoin’s prospects.
Unlike currencies that are backed by a central bank, Bitcoin users can essentially create the units themselves in a process called “mining” that involves solving a complicated mathematical problem with sophisticated computer servers.
The currency, which is stored in an online account, also can be traded on an exchange and swapped privately.
Bitcoin payments are becoming increasingly popular among Internet merchants, who want to reduce costs associated with accepting credit cards.
Bits and Pieces
The virtual currency also is starting to make inroads in the brick-and-mortar world, where customers can pay with bitcoins using their mobile phones.
But because the transactions are essentially anonymous, critics worry that the currency could be used for drug trafficking and money laundering.
…
Note to self:
Go to OP Dodge-Chrysler-Jeep this weekend, and buy a new Viper with the kids stash of Beanie Babies.
Silver lining to recent global financial market turmoil:
Despite recent massive losses to investors in gold and other commodities, Bitcoin, and stocks, U.S. real estate investors have no cause for concern. U.S. housing is working off an entirely new model. It is decoupled from asset markets and the rest of the global economy. Furthermore, all real estate is local and housing always goes up.
So go out today and by ten U.S. investment properties, put up your feet, relax, and soon you will be rich beyond your wildest dreams!
The gulf between Wall Street stock prices and fundamental economic reality has become so wide, even my wife, who generally ignores financial stories, commented to me about it this morning.
Got tulips?
April 17, 2013, 1:21 p.m. EDT
Five big bears growl
By John Nyaradi
As U.S. stock markets toy with record highs amidst high volatility, five big bears growl over the cloudy and even dangerous-looking future.
Big Bear #1: Charles Nenner: Founder of the Charles Nenner Research Center and known as the “Oracle of Amsterdam,” the former Goldman Sachs analyst forecasts that the Dow will plunge to 5,000 by 2017 or 2018. He points to his cycle research and the fact that during 2012, corporate “insiders” were buying shares in the companies where they worked. By late March of 2013 those same insiders had become sellers , unloading shares they purchased as stock prices were soaring.
Big Bear # 2: Marc Faber : The editor and publisher of The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report , says there’s nowhere to hide, not even gold, and that a 40% stock-market decline could be in the cards.
Big Bear #3: John Hussman: Founder of the Hussman Funds says the market is overvalued, overbought and overly bullish and sees bubbles in multiple asset classes. Corporate profits are well above historical norms, which he sees as unsustainable.
Big Bear #4: David A. Stockman : Director of the Office of Management and Budget for the Reagan Administration set off a firestorm with his recent op-ed in the New York Times in which he wrote that stock prices are in a bubble which will burst within a few years. He sees an austerity trap ahead, a stagnating economy, and concludes his article by saying, “When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.”
Big Bear #5: Chris Martenson : Scientist and investor, the publisher of PeakProsperity.com is predicting a significant market correction, with the S&P 500 falling as much as 40%-60% in the autumn of 2013. Dr. Martenson sees Europe’s economic recession as the leading edge of a global economic contraction. Martenson emphasizes that with corporate profits currently accounting for 11 percent of GDP (while the norm is 6 percent) it is not realistic to believe that this situation can continue.
…
a 40% stock-market decline could be in the cards.
I still say the 2009 lows should be tested at least once. That has not happened yet.
When the clock struck 4pm EST, the big losses on AAPL and BAC instantly switched to green on the MW site (I was a bit too late to capture the switch on AAPL, but posted the before-and-after BAC numbers).
What gives? Is this like when used home sellers relist at a lower price after taking a home off the market, and claim this is a “new listing”?
Bulletin Germany’s credit rating cut by Egan-Jones
April 17, 2013, 3:09 p.m. EDT
U.S. stocks resume sharp losses
Authorities dispute reports of captured suspect in Boston bombings
By Kate Gibson, MarketWatch
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — U.S. stocks resumed sharp losses on Wednesday afternoon as authorities disputed media reports that a suspect in the Boston marathon bombings had been captured.
Equities had come off session lows after the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book found the U.S. economy to be growing at a “moderate” pace and some media outlets reported that a suspect in the Boston marathon bombings was in custody. However, the Boston police department later said on its Twitter account that no arrest had been made.
“It appears as though there was a mild positive reaction to the Beige Book and the possible capture of the suspect in the Boston tragedy, as both events happened at the same time,” said Art Hogan, market strategist at Lazard Capital Markets.
Stocks started off in a steep decline as an Apple Inc. (AAPL +0.11%) supplier gave a weak forecast, Bank of America Corp.
(BAC -4.72%)(BAC +0.09%) posted disappointing results and speculation swirled that Germany could lose its triple-A rating.“In this environment you don’t want to miss, you want to beat and guide higher,” said Phil Orlando, equity strategist at Federated Investors, citing Intel Corp. and Bank of America’s quarterly earnings reports.
…
“…speculation swirled that Germany could lose its triple-A rating.”
Egan-Jones downgrades Germany to A from A+; Outlook negative
Wed, Apr 17 2013, 19:48 GMT | FXstreet.com
FXstreet.com (San Francisco) - Egan-Jones, the independent rating agency, has decided to cut German sovereign debt rating from A+ to A according to a recent press release.
The firm affirms that as “Angela Merkel continues to resists calls for EU bonds (shared liabs.) and money printing and is pushing for fiscal controls and the seniority of bailout funding, Germany is likely to be outvoted by other ECB members and therefore will have greater prospective exposure.”
The outlook is negative for the country. The agency used the “the IMF’s data for Germany’s debt which is greater than Eurostat’s data.” Egan-Jones will be watching closely the progress on the EU banking union.
Comment by Pimp Watch
2013-04-15 17:59:35
Not true.
And how would you know the “cost of construction”?
Answer: I asked a guy how much it would cost to build a new house on a lot, and then I compared that to the price of buying a comp.
And what was his price?
His price was about the same as buying a nearly-new house that would be twice as big.
What did he quote you?
My 3 yr old pressure cooker is worn out. Should I just go ahead and get new one right now?
Be sure to order some ball bearings with it and have it shipped to the local mosque…
Wha…….
hey fruit cake, why don’t you hand deliver it and stay over for some Baklava, you may learn a thing or two about the ‘others’.
The “evidence” collected by law enforcement will say that pressure cookers and black powder were used to construct the boston bombs. This will enable the grabbers to ban public sale of black powder, which means no more self-reloading of ammo, contributing to the current shortages and driving prices even higher, which is what the grabbers want, since they know they can’t ban ammunition (yet) but they can reduce its availability.
The only guys that use black powder are the muzzle loaders, and the “Western Shooters”
The problem isn’t the powder. It’s the primers.
Meant to say “smokeless powder” not black.
We’re not as ready for Go Time as some of the other wacko birds here, we still buy bullets in boxes from Wal-Mart (when they have any).
The only thing driving ammo prices up is kooks stockpiling it.
Surrounded by kooks here but abstaining from the feeding frenzy.
We’ve just stopped going target shooting for practice/recreation.
The only thing driving ammo prices up is kooks stockpiling it.
Including the government, apparently.
Foreclosed Borrowers Had Problems Cashing Settlement Checks
REUTERS
Published: Wednesday, 17 Apr 2013 | 11:18 AM ET
Borrowers compensated under settlements between top banks and regulators earlier this year were hit with problems when attempting to cash the checks they received, the Federal Reserve said Wednesday.
Some early recipients of the payments, the majority of which fell in the $300 to $600 range, were told their checks were rejected. The Fed said in a statement that “early problems with some checks have been corrected,” and that all funds are available for the settlement checks to be cashed.
An independent review of banks’ foreclosure files was ordered by regulators in April 2011 to determine the necessary compensation for borrowers impacted by foreclosure flaws and other processing mistakes.
More than 50,000 people have already cashed or deposited checks related to the agreement reached by federal bank regulatory agencies and 13 mortgage servicers, the Fed said. Some 4.2 million borrowers are eligible to receive payments.
“The Board will continue to monitor the payments closely and encourages borrowers who have concerns or experience difficulties cashing their checks,” the Fed statement said.
For a second I thought this article was going to discuss how banks seized these checks to help pay off their foreclosure/short sale costs…
Are you guys shorting the stock market?
We are in the middle of the Joseph Kennedy biography “The Patriarch” which details that he made most of the Kennedy fortune by shorting stocks in the early years of the Depression and through insider trading.
The book states that he was never involved in bootlegging during Prohibition, but that he did make alot of money from legal booze when Prohibition ended.
*snerk*
Sure he wasn’t.
Booze sellers have made a lot of money from Kennedy family members since Prohibition ended, too.
Is this Martin Wolf’s version of Bush’s victory speech on the bow of the ship? The jury is still out on the success of this policy until the Fed finishes unwinding its tightly-wound balance sheet, IMO.
“It is that inflation targeting has anchored expectations and so labour market behaviour.”
A record number of U.S. working aged adults either underemployed or entirely out of the workforce has nothing to do with it?
ft dot com
April 16, 2013 7:35 pm
How central banks beat deflation
By Martin Wolf
The success of inflation targeting gives policy makers room to risk expansionary measures
Why are the high-income countries not mired in deflation? This is the puzzle today, not the absence of the hyperinflation that hysterics have wrongly expected. It is weird that inflation has remained so stable, despite huge shortfalls in output, relative to pre-crisis trends, and prolonged high unemployment. Understanding why this is the case is important because the answer determines the correct policy action. Fortunately, the news is good. The stability of inflation seems to be a reward for the credibility of inflation targeting. That gives policy makers room to risk expansionary policies. Ironically, the success of inflation targeting has revitalised Keynesian macroeconomic stabilisation.
A chapter in the latest World Economic Outlook from the International Monetary Fund presents the case for this encouraging conclusion, as has already been noted by, among others, Gavyn Davies and Paul Krugman. Its starting point is with the stickiness of inflation, despite the lengthy period of very high joblessness. Thus, states the IMF, “we find a dog that did not bark”.
A possible explanation for this phenomenon is structural. It is argued by many, for example, that the workers who lost their jobs in construction and other bubble-era activities have the wrong skills or are located in the wrong places to take up the new jobs that might now – or soon – be on offer. Again, if unemployment is allowed to remain high for long, what starts as temporary joblessness is likely to become permanent, as workers lose the skills and networks that make it relatively easy to find jobs. So the duration of the Great Recession has put long-term joblessness near record levels. All this tends to make competition in labour markets weak.
An alternative explanation is more encouraging. It is that inflation targeting has anchored expectations and so labour market behaviour. Moreover, these targets are close to zero. We know that workers are resistant to cuts in nominal wages. This has remained true throughout the Great Recession: it is indeed one of the reasons why the adjustment in the eurozone is so painful. So, for this reason too, inflation would be sticky, at least downwards.
…
there is no inflation. the 59 ounce half gallon of orange juice is just as delicious as the 64 ounce half gallon was.
All the planning, all the money, all the actors and 90% of Americans behind them and stll it fails?
Senate blocks expanded gun sale background checks
ALAN FRAM, AP
35 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Republicans backed by a small band of rural-state Democrats scuttled the most far-reaching gun control legislation in two decades on Wednesday, rejecting calls to tighten background checks on firearms buyers as they spurned the personal pleas of families of the victims of last winter’s mass elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn.
Attempts to ban assault-style rifles and high capacity ammunition magazines also faced certain defeat in a series of showdown votes four months after a gunman killed 20 elementary school children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary.
Some of the parents of the Sandy Hook victims watched the votes from the spectators’ gallery that rings the Senate floor. They were joined by relatives of victims of other mass shootings in Arizona, Virginia and Colorado.
At the White House, press secretary Jay Carney said some of them had met earlier in the day with lawmakers, who he said should “consider who they’re representing.
Jack McCabe just posted this on the last Florida thread:
‘Ben,
I read through the HBB reader’s comments and found them informed, intelligent, and insightful.
Below is my column from last month on the topic. I believe It’s the burgeoning economic story of this decade, and next debacle.
South Florida Daily Business Review
Real Estate Insight with Jack McCabe: Hedge fund buying spree may risk another bubble - Part 2
By Jack McCabe
March 21, 2013
In my last column I described the recent events of hedge funds acquiring substantial numbers of single-family homes in concentrated geographic areas in Florida and other Sun Belt states and some concerns I have about future market manipulation by investment groups causing another disastrous artificial market and subsequent crash.
There are a lot of folks in my industry who swear that isn’t possible again, that circumstances are completely different now than last decade.
Last year there were 5,289 single-family homes purchased in bulk by investment groups and hedge funds, and I believe this number could quintuple by year-end 2013.
Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties were the top four in the state. However, the Sarasota market is of particular interest as a microcosm for what may lie ahead for Florida and the nation.
The previous belief was foreign investment firms and large hedge funds along with institutional investors would focus buying in major metropolitan areas to achieve economies of scale and sizable portfolios to rent and market as securities abroad.
While more than 60 percent of South Florida sales have been to foreign national individuals and firms, most small investors expected to find real estate gold in Florida’s coastal secondary markets.
In Sarasota and Manatee counties last year, bulk buyers of foreclosed single-family homes accounted for 280 sales at an average price of $133,104. What’s curious and alarming is comparable sold properties had an average open market appraisal value of $94,208.
Hedge funds and other investors have seemingly infinite war chests full of cash to buy. No appraisals necessary or desired.
While most early acquisitions of foreclosures and bank real estate owner property was at highly distressed or greatly reduced pricing, many of the funds’ recent purchases are at inflated, artificial values. They seemingly are willing to outbid their competitors even though it may cost tens of thousands of dollars more.
Danger Ahead
Why, you might ask, would they do this? And, why now?
Blackstone’s THR Florida LLC acquisition arm bought 296 single-family homes in the Sarasota market in 2012 and has reportedly earmarked $1 billion for Florida acquisitions. It also has been acquiring homes by the hundreds in the Tampa and Orlando markets.
Fundamental REO, another large Wall Street investment firm, entered the market after Thanksgiving with an initial bulk purchase of 14 homes. One was purchased for $149,900. The previous owner bought it two months before for $89,900.
Other 2012 large area bulk investors include Portfolio Trust, Northern Trust Co., Sp1 Inc. and local investor Karl Helbig.
In 2013, many other investment groups have moved into the Sarasota market.
Here’s where, as I see it, the danger lies ahead:
Investment groups escalate acquisitions of banks and distressed properties and control a sizable percentage of future sales for a period of years. Whether collaboratively or collectively, they continue to overpay for homes and gobble up inventory.
As long as banks and homeowners favor cash offers over those requiring mortgage financing, individual buyers seeking the American Dream and middle class America will be shut out and priced out with limited inventory at artificially inflated values.
This scenario raises the specter of a possible large percentage conversion from a society based on homeownership to a rental society with devastating, unintended consequences. In my opinion, there is a high potential for a shifting of real estate wealth and a tremendous blow to consumer spending and middle-class financial security.’
http://thehousingbubbleblog.com/?p=7674#comment-2163586
“This scenario raises the specter of a possible large percentage conversion from a society based on homeownership to a rental society with devastating, unintended consequences. In my opinion, there is a high potential for a shifting of real estate wealth and a tremendous blow to consumer spending and middle-class financial security.’
Is he sure those consequences are unintended?
Right. For instance, suppose a bunch of Chinese oligarchs wanted to turn American into a serfdom populated by a wage-slave renter class. How should they proceed?
This is the part of the game where the wealthy take everything. This was the plan from the beginning.
Here is to hoping “the wealthy” get wiped out by a crash that “nobody could have seen coming,” only to discover that no further bailouts are forthcoming from the Fed, the Treasury or any other broke government institution…
Posted: 10:00 p.m. Saturday, April 13, 2013
Wall Street moves onto main street, meet your new landlord
By Kimberly Miller
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Don Cameron, a real estate investor who owns a South Florida franchise of We Buy Ugly Houses, is concerned the Wall Street buyers are paying too much for homes, artificially driving up prices. He said the regulars at Palm Beach County’s online foreclosure auctions have backed off bidding because the companies are paying “maximum dollars.”
“In the last seven, eight, 10 months, the market has been changing and changing rapidly,” said Cameron, whose firm bought about 100 homes in the past year to renovate and sell.
In 2010, just 8.8 percent of homes bought at Palm Beach County’s foreclosure auction were purchased by third-party buyers who are typically investors. That increased to 28 percent during the first quarter of this year, according to the Palm Beach County Clerk and Comptroller’s office.
Instead of curtailing his buying, Bryan, a former flipper, changed his business model. He said he saw the industry morphing in mid-2011 and began buying with the intent to rent in 2012.
“concerned the Wall Street buyers are paying too much for homes
Happy New Year! Welcome to 1999!
Suckers have been paying too much for 15 years. We estimate that 50-60% of them have bailed out or have been washed out as a result of their misguided decisions. There are many more losses to be taken and much larger price declines to come.
Iwog
The best part will be seeing the Wall Street scrum get washed out again, with zero political support for further bailouts. I promise to cry tears of joy when it happens!
They seemingly are willing to outbid their competitors even though it may cost tens of thousands of dollars more.
Danger Ahead
Why, you might ask, would they do this? And, why now?
”
They do what they are told. Or they are idiots your choice
Still haven’t run out of dummies with buckets of money and boxes of stupid, it seems…
“I read through the HBB reader’s comments”
Is he using “read” in the past tense (prounounced “red”) to mean that he had read only the one Florida post? Or is it general present tense, as in he always reads (”reeds”) the blog? Because that bit about J6P getting shut out of the market by hedge funds, and only being able to rent, sounds eerily familiar.
If anyone has historical evidence on past (pre-1995) housing market recoveries driven by inventory shortages and bid wars, even in the face of elevated levels of unemployment and recent foreclosures, please post.
I expect no responses, but will be pleasantly surprised by any convincing evidence to suggest that this housing recovery is just like all others that preceded it.
Who would be crazy enough to take out a mortgage to buy on these terms, where your competition consists of strong hands, including all-cash Canadian and Chinese oligarchs and Blackstone?
The situation definitely sounds like A MANIA!!!!
Strategies for the Spring Housing Scrum
By Carla Fried - Feb 28, 2013 2:59 PM PT
People attend an open house in Palo Alto, California, in this file photo. Pohtographer (SIC): Annie Tritt/The New York Times via Redux
It all seems so quaint now: the casual walk-throughs, the drives to check out the neighborhood, the luxury of sleeping on the largest financial decision you’ll likely ever make. Trying to buy a home now feels more like being thrust into the trading pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange — the frenzied bidding, the need for lightning-fast decisions, the packs of sharp-elbowed competitors.
In one fraught situation, a home near Union Station in Washington, D.C., drew 168 offers in December and sold for almost twice the asking price. In the tonier neighborhoods of Los Angeles, 20 bids per house is not uncommon, according to real estate agent David Kean. And the speed of deals can be intense. “In the middle of a snowstorm we have seen houses sell in one day,” says Sam Schneiderman, owner/broker at the Greater Boston Home Team agency. “At open houses on million-dollar homes you are literally bumping into people, it’s that crowded.”
Finding an Edge
A dearth of homes for sale has run smack into a suddenly energized buying crowd egged on by rising values. The National Association of Realtors says the number of existing homes on the market in January — 1.74 million — was 25 percent lower than a year ago, and the lowest level since 1999. Over the past 12 months the inventory of existing homes for sale has dropped from a 6.2-month supply to a 4.5-month supply, the lowest level since 2005.
Price is obviously the main lever in all deals. What’s particularly important now is to understand how the seller will handle bids. Some collect all bids and immediately choose a winner, typically the highest offer, which is often more than the asking price. Other sellers give the top three or five bidders the chance to make one counteroffer. In those instances, you want to get into the bake-off but leave yourself room to counter.
…
I expect no responses, but will be pleasantly surprised by any convincing evidence to suggest that this housing recovery is just like all others that preceded it.”
I can’t remember any bubble like this one? Nation wide ?
Usually it was a region that got hit because of a industry slow down Aerospace in CA in the 1990’s
The early-1990s aerospace industry slowdown also hammered the Midwest city where I lived when my wife and I got married and bought our first home. I was young and naive at the time, so it didn’t really occur to me that the reason so many of the houses we toured were obviously vacant and abandoned was that their former inhabitants had most likely been foreclosed and evicted.
We experienced a true buyer’s market, as there was absolutely no shortage of inventory on the market, the selection of homes for sale was extremely broad, and prices were soft — no federally-guaranteed subprime loans in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for “needy people,” all-cash foreign investors or hedge funds snapping up investment properties at prices that ordinary households could not afford, lender inventory withholding or bid wars were in evidence, whatever…and we bought our first home at a reasonable price (under 3X our annual household income) in an arm’s length purchase.
I am guessing the Newtown parents who flew into DC on Airforcse 1 are on the Greyhound back to Connecticut by now.
Anyone here know the best way to kill a lawn off, so we can pour a patio?
It’s overgrown and full of crickets (currently not being water, except rain) , but I prefer not to use poison and Round Off is a last resort. Someone suggested tarping it and letting it die underneath. Has anyone tried this?
“pour” a patio? LMAO
How much did you pay for your debt-dump?
If you pour a concrete slab on top of grass, it will probably kill the grass under it. Otherwise, salt will kill plants.
Thanks, Ben.
Good old table salt or another type?
We need to get rid of the tall grass, so the patio sits lower. We need to be able to frame the patio, which have split brick on top as a finish. We’re doing the work.
The cheapest salt will do. Rock salt probably; water it in. Just don’t get it where you want anything to grow.
“Anyone here know the best way to kill a lawn off…”
1. A large, unchecked rabbit population appears to do quite well.
2. A leaky sprinkler system that keeps the lawn perpetually drowned will also do the trick.
Don’t take my word for it: Ask our landlords (LOLSEES!!!)…
Just hold your nose and go with the RoundUp. Be sure to apply it judiciously and on a still day. You’re going to cover it with concrete. That’s pretty blatant.
Tarping is will just let it grow back the next season, because the roots will still be there waiting.
But be SURE you really, really want to get rid of the lawn. They’re a lot harder to reestablish after you’ve erradicated them than to kill off their ecosystem and try to bring it back.
I just learned something today….. Like we’ve heard here before…..
Realtors Are Liars. Don’t trust a word they say
(crab)Apple CRATERS to new 52 week low
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/17/us-apple-shares-idUSBRE93G0PA20130417
Steve Jobs must be rolling over in his grave.
California Housing Prices Resumed Their Downward Price Adjustment
http://picpaste.com/pics/d039f4edecda272a64d53fe7fd280007.1366254482.png
Here is an easily testable hypothesis:
The HBB has more posts on down days for the Dow than on up days.
If I find the motivation, I will conduct a hypothesis test and post the results soon.
I did it, and I was right — there is a significant inverse correlation between the number of HBB posts and the daily move on the Dow (on days when the markets are open), at least for data back to 3/1/2013 (posted below).
Roughly speaking, up days on the Dow tend to have around 300 HBB posts, and most days with significantly fewer posts than 300 were on stock market rally days. By contrast, it was more typical to see around 400 posts on Dow selloff days, and the one really big recent selloff (4/15/2013) featured north of 500 HBB posts. I also didn’t see how well the inverse correlation held up with this outlier omitted.
Perhaps the HBB’s name should be changed to The Bear’s Lair?
Date DJIA_Change HBB_posts
04/17/13 -0.0094 395
04/16/13 0.0108 348
04/15/13 -0.0179 516
04/12/13 0.0000 406
04/11/13 0.0042 275
04/10/13 0.0088 309
04/09/13 0.0041 317
04/08/13 0.0033 293
04/05/13 -0.0028 472
04/04/13 0.0038 247
04/03/13 -0.0076 283
04/02/13 0.0061 409
04/01/13 -0.0004 363
03/28/13 0.0036 247
03/27/13 -0.0023 368
03/26/13 0.0077 282
03/25/13 -0.0044 366
03/22/13 0.0063 371
03/21/13 -0.0062 368
03/20/13 0.0039 295
03/19/13 0.0003 255
03/18/13 -0.0043 340
03/15/13 -0.0017 315
03/14/13 0.0058 350
03/13/13 0.0004 271
03/12/13 0.0002 387
03/11/13 0.0035 218
03/08/13 0.0047 364
03/07/13 0.0023 338
03/06/13 0.0030 367
03/05/13 0.0089 377
03/04/13 0.0027 369
03/01/13 0.0025 325
April 17, 2013, 5:06 p.m. EDT
Moody’s may downgrade $12.5 billion in muni debt
By MarketWatch
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Credit rating agency Moody’s Investors Service revised its methodology for analyzing municipal pension obligations Wednesday, in the process placing the credit ratings of $12.5 billion in municipal securities under review for possible downgrade. Those cities under review for downgrade include Chicago, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Santa Fe, and Portland. Pension liabilities have been a key cause for concern in the $3.7 trillion municipal bond market, with the two most recent cities to file for municipal bankruptcy — Stockton, CA and San Bernardino, CA — both suffering from outsized liabilities. In an effort to recognize the impact of liabilities on credit-worthiness, the rating house will take into account the size of adjusted pension obligations relative to total resources, Moody’s said.
VIX ETFs lag even as fear index spikes
April 17, 2013, 3:08 PM
Market volatility as measured by the so-called fear index has risen following a period of relative complacency, but it remains to be seen whether those heightened levels are here to stay.
On Monday, the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX +18.27%) jumped 43%, its biggest one-day percentage gain of the year, to close at 17.27, only to ease 19% Tuesday to 13.96. On Wednesday, the VIX was back up, gaining more than 20% threatening to close at its highest level since late February, when the Cyprus crisis was making headlines.
The CBOE said VIX option volume reached an all-time high of nearly 1.4 million contracts on Monday.
While some strategists have made suggestions on how to play volatility if you think it’s here to stay, and exchange-traded products that track the VIX have gotten a boost in the past week, keep in mind those same products have vastly underperformed the index since the beginning of the year.
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Did all the investors sell in May and go away two weeks ahead of time this year?