Back Into Conversations We Were Having Pre-Bust
It’s Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. “The secondhand housing market cooled in December in Beijing and Shanghai as turnover fell, and an increasing number of sellers dropped prices, leading industry observers to wonder if the move indicates an inflection point in the white-hot property market. In Beijing, the volume of secondhand transactions decreased 16.6 percent in the period from Dec 1 to Dec 22, compared with the same period in November, according to Homelink. In October, 59.7 percent of sellers registered at the brokerage offered a lower price than in the previous month, and the same ratio rose to 69.3 percent in November and to 71.8 percent in December. The same thing happened in Shanghai.”
“In some cases, the closing price for a single unit dropped 250,000 yuan ($40,851) in a short period, while the offering price for some homes on sale also fell by more than 10 percent, Chinese media reported. ‘The credit supply at the end of the year is usually tight, and that contributed directly to the cooler secondhand market. Whether this is a temporary phenomenon depends on the credit supply at the beginning of 2014. If credit conditions remain similar, then this could last,’ said Zhang Dawei, director of Centaline Property’s research center. ”
“Capital has been fleeing Southeast Asia as investors seek higher returns in North America. ‘Property companies will do badly, particularly in Singapore where there’s a perceived housing bubble,’ Lee King Fuei, a Singapore-based fund manager at Schroders, which oversees about $420 billion. ‘Singapore’s neighbors have not been doing so well, particularly Indonesia, where many of the property buyers in the city come from,’ said Khiem Do, Hong Kong-based head of Asian multi-asset strategy at Baring Asset Management Ltd. ‘There’s no driver to spur investor interest in Singapore. The recent penny stock crash isn’t really helping the case for investing in Singapore.’”
“At the end of the second quarter this year, says a Liases Foras report, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region had an inventory of 58 months, NCR 41 months, Hyderabad 32 months, Pune 31 months and Bangalore 30 months. ‘This has been one of the worst years in the realty sector… sales are down, inventory is high and prices have peaked,’ says Pankaj Kapoor, managing director, Liases Foras, a real estate research firm. ‘There is a wide gap between affordability and pricing, which is why sales are not happening.’”
“After years of a hot streak, the real estate market in Canada appears set to cool to a simmer in 2014. ‘Credit growth has slowed down, home ownership levels are at record levels and employment growth is moderating. Everything is telling me that this market is going to level out, go sideways. Maybe go through a bit of an adjustment,’ said Scotiabank chief economist Warren Jestin.”
“With a budget of around $400,000, Mike Lock and his wife were severely limited in their options in Toronto where the average house price in November was nudging $540,000 - up 11 per cent year-over-year. But last week, their offer of $385,000 for a house in east Toronto was accepted. ‘Back in 2010, I thought things would go down because prices were so high. But it just continued shooting up since then,’ he said. ‘I’ve learned the lesson that you can’t time the market; you buy when you can and you hold for a long time.’”
“Rising home prices and diminishing housing affordability pulled home sales down across California last month.The median home price of an existing single-family house in Fresno increased to $193,020 last month from $182,620 in October. A year ago, the median home price was $148,240. ‘Improving home prices are a double-edged sword for the housing market,’ said Kevin Brown, the 2014 association president. ‘While welcomed news for homeowners and prospective sellers, diminished affordability is squeezing out many buyers and dampening their enthusiasm for home purchasing.’”
“Existing home sales dropped for the first time in more than two years statewide and nationwide and slowed considerably in Alachua County in November. The 6.6-month’s supply of homes on the market also includes a portion of distressed properties and stagnant listings that are priced too high, said Greta Rice, president of the Gainesville-Alachua County Association of Realtors. ‘There’s not as much inventory to go around as far as customers are concerned,’ Rice said.”
“Now that demand for Big Sky property is on the rise, so are the prices. ‘We’re starting to see pricing more ($300,000) and up. The common blight of a resort town is how expensive the real estate is, the dirt underneath the home,’ said Big Sky Real Estate owner Martha Johnson. While there is plenty of opportunity for employment, those prices aren’t affordable for most of the Big Sky workforce. ‘We’re entering right back into the conversations we were having pre-bust. We’re having problems finding housing for employees in Big Sky, so that pushes pressure out towards Bozeman and down south towards West Yellowstone,’ said First Security Bank General Manager Joe Miller.”
“While the data supporting the case for a housing bubble are out there, few people are actually paying attention, real estate advisor Mark Hanson said on CNBC. ‘According to our research, house prices on a monthly payment basis today, with rates at 4¾ percent, are more expensive than they were in 2006 at the height of the bubble. And that’s because from 2003 to 2006, people used other than 30-year fixed-rate loans,’ he said.”
“In California, housing prices on average are 26 percent lower than they were in 2006, while housing payments were 12 percent, higher, he noted. ‘There’s not a lack of supply in which to live out there,’ Hanson added. ‘There’s hundreds of thousands, if not millions, out there of individual and institutional investors who have bought houses who are readying them to put on the market.’”
“U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff spoke exclusively with CNBC in some of his first public comments following the controversial essay in the Jan. 9 edition of the New York Review of Books headlined, ‘The Financial Crisis: Why Have No High-Level Executives Been Prosecuted?’ In the article, the judge writes that if the financial crisis is a result of intentional fraud, ‘the failure to prosecute those responsible must be judged one of the more egregious failures of the criminal justice system in many years.’”
“‘If you prosecute a CEO or other senior executive and send him or her to jail for committing a crime, the deterrent effect in my view vastly outweighs even the best compliance program you can put in place,’ he said. ‘I think it’s common sense to say that the longer away from a crime it gets prosecuted, the less deterrent effect there is.’”
“Five years after the 2008 housing bubble burst, history is repeating itself. The Associated Press reported this week, a number of economists are worried the Federal Reserve’s policy of maintaining super-low, below-market interest rates is inflating asset bubbles throughout the economy.”
“Nothing in economics is so politicized as the forecasting of business cycles, and for every bear who sees a pending collapse, there are two or more bulls who say never mind the torpedoes, full speed ahead. For them, bubbles aren’t a bug, but a feature, at least until they burst. That is the problem with bubbles. Not only can no one agree on when the economy is in a bubble until it’s too late, no one can even agree on whether bubbles are good or bad until it’s too late.”
“Oddly, no one ever seems to think bubbles were good after the fact, by which time the embarrassing proclamations are already in print or on YouTube for all posterity to see. In an Aug. 2, 2002, column, Nobel Prize winner and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote, ‘To fight this recession the Fed needs … soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that … Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.’”
“We saw how well that worked.”
“Back Into Conversations We Were Having Pre-Bust”
And I … fe-e-e-e-e-e-eel…like I’ve been…here before.
“Whether this is a temporary phenomenon depends on the credit supply at the beginning of 2014.”
Not to worry.
Don’t Worry Be Happy
Are China and America in the process of trading places, economically speaking? (I’m talking about market liberalization, not economic prowess.)
China’s Central Bank Eases Fears of Credit Crisis
By NEIL GOUGH
Published: December 24, 2013
HONG KONG — China’s central bank injected fresh money into the markets on Tuesday, easing the pressure on the financial system and quelling fears about a credit crisis.
In response, interest rates in China’s money markets, a crucial source of day-to-day funding for banks, quickly dropped. Rates had surged over the past week, climbing to six-month highs.
The volatility highlights the challenges the government faces as it looks to overhaul the financial system.
A plenum meeting of the top Communist Party leadership concluded last month with pledges to deliver on broad new policy mandates that would give the market a larger role in setting the speed and direction of China’s economic development.
In part, that means reining in the country’s sprawling state-owned enterprises, which for the past decade have grown increasingly reliant on cheap and plentiful credit to fund their expansion. At the same time, the government needs to ensure that China’s private companies, which typically struggle to get loans from state-owned banks, can gain access to the money they need to continue growing and creating more jobs.
The goal for the central bank, the People’s Bank of China, which is widely regarded as one of the institutions at the forefront of the country’s effort to liberalize the economy, is to experiment where it can with looser rates.
China’s ceiling on savings deposit rates, for example, remains in place. This helps ensure that commercial banks do not erode their profitability by raising rates in competition for deposits and that they retain an ample supply of cheap money to lend to state-owned enterprises.
China’s money markets, by contrast, do not have the same direct impact on ordinary savers. Instead, it is banks in need of short-term funding — or those engaging in the so-called shadow banking activities of risky, off-balance-sheet financing — that are most vulnerable to swings in money-market interest rates.
“The interest rate environment is kind of a means to an end,” said Arthur Kroeber, the Beijing-based managing director of GaveKal Dragonomics, an economic research firm. “Broadly speaking, the central bank would like to see rates somewhat higher than they were previously as a way of slowing the rate of growth of credit and also redirecting it from the state to the nonstate sector.”
…
Gordon G. Chang, Contributor
I write primarily on China, Asia, and nuclear proliferation.
Op/Ed
12/22/2013 @ 5:53PM |7,835 views
In China, Rates Soar, Stocks Fall, Businesses Fail
The failure of a coal miner in Shanxi Province exposes cracks in China’s shadow banking system. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
On Friday, fears of another quarter-end credit crunch drove money-market rates in China sharply higher despite emergency central bank intervention announced Thursday. In the last five business days, interbank rates have doubled. The seven-day repurchase rate hit 9.9%, a level not seen since June, when it reached a record 10.77%. The one-year rate swap last week exceeded an all-time high.
The People’s Bank of China , the central bank, refrained from its regular open-market operations last week. Instead, it added liquidity through the larger commercial banking institutions, to the tune of 200 billion yuan according to Netease but maybe more. Banks in recent days have been scrambling to meet quarter-end regulatory requirements, such as loan-to-deposit and reserve requirement ratios.
Analysts say the central bank is trying to tighten credit to discourage dangerous lending practices and at the same time avoid a crisis like the one in June, when banks defaulted and the interbank market froze. Then, the People’s Bank, to avoid a failure of the Chinese economy, massively—and secretly—intervened beginning June 21. There would have been a short-term increase in rates at the end of the third quarter but for a flood of liquidity from the central bank.
…
Banks in recent days have been scrambling to meet quarter-end regulatory requirements, such as loan-to-deposit and reserve requirement ratios.
Did I read that correctly: banks only have to paint their books at the end-of-quarter???
Sounds like a recipe for end-of-quarter disasters.
China borrowing costs tumble as central bank acts to ease credit crunch
One-week borrowing costs drop sharply as People’s Bank of China acts to avert a liquidity crisis
China’s central bank acted after attempts to inject cash into the system last week failed to stem a deepening cash crunch as liquidity dried up and struggling lenders hoarded funds. Photo: AP
By Telegraph Staff and agencies
9:51AM GMT 24 Dec 2013
China’s cash squeeze eased on Tuesday after made its first market-wide injection of cash in three weeks.
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) auctioned 29 billion yuan (£2.9bn) of seven-day reverse-repurchase agreements at a yield of 4.1pc.
After the injection benchmark one-week borrowing costs, a gauge of liquidity in the banking system, dropped nearly 40pc – or 344 basis points – to 5.4pc.
China’s central bank acted after attempts to inject cash into the system last week failed to stem a deepening cash crunch as liquidity dried up and struggling lenders hoarded funds. This pushed the seven-day rate to 8.84pc on Monday – the highest since the cash crisis in June that sent minor tremors through the financial system.
The fall in one-week borrowing costs after the PBOC action was the biggest since February 2011 and stock markets in China gained as growth fears for the world’s second-largest economy and the threat of defaults eased.
…
If China, India, Canada and California simultaneously crash into the affordability wall, 2014 is destined to be the most interesting year yet in the Housing Bubble annals.
The Chinese economy is a bug in search of a windshield.
The Chinese economy is also a canary in the coalmine for the global economy.
My SIL’s ex-husband was over a couple of nights ago (still part of the holiday family gathering when my SIL isn’t around). He is a tax accountant for a multinational corporation HQ-d in France.
I dragged him into a conversation about the Chinese economic picture, and he was completely incredulous. Eventually I had to get out my laptop to convince him I wasn’t making stuff up.
He still seemed utterly amazed, even though convinced, after I showed him several news stories on the massive overbuilding of entirely empty cities. Being the humanitarian spirit he is, he was distressed over reports that traditional villages were razed and inhabitants cleared out to make room for building of brand-new, uninhabited and unaffordable investment condo developments.
Does your ex-BIL live in a cave?
There is not much difference between working for a multinational corporation and living in a cave. (Been there, done that…)
There are a lot of intelligent people who are clueless about these things, partly because they get all their nf from the MSM.
“…they get all their nf from the MSM.”
As do all of their colleagues.
That’s been on 60 minutes and retuning 60 minutes. It’s very common knowledge to anyone paying attention.
Many people might watch 60 minutes, then forget about what they saw. Attention span. But reading it in a blog is another thing.
Two Other things you will not see echoed all over: The Marriage Strike in America, the 33% of Japanese males becoming “herbivores” - not wanting to marry, not wanting to have responsibilities, not wanting to become fathers, not wanting to work themselves to death like their fathers, but only doing minimum for their own survival.
Originally published November 28, 2013 at 6:19 PM | Page modified November 28, 2013 at 8:43 PM
Impact of younger workers’ woes ripples throughout U.S. economy
A 23-year-old would-be educator who graduated from college last year has had to move back in with her father to ride out the underperforming economy.
By Kevin G. Hall
McClatchy Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — Facing faint job prospects and mounting student loans, Courtney Schlottman did what many others her age have done, and moved back in with a parent. She became one more data point contributing to the nation’s stunted rate of household formation.
That’s a fancy way to describe the rate at which grown children leave the nest or depart the world of roommates for their own places. Derived from Census Bureau data, it’s an important economic indicator because, when normal, it portends a healthy housing sector, which in turn bodes well for the wider economy.
Statistics aren’t high on the list of worries for Schlottman, 23, a would-be educator who graduated from Bloomsburg University last year. She’s moved back in with her father in Reading, Pa., while riding out an underperforming economic recovery.
“In order for me to be financially stable, I have to live with my father,” she said. “I’m hoping it’s not much longer, maybe a year or two. But going to interviews and not hearing anything back, it’s not promising. My hope is one or two years from now I can get a full-time job.”
Since 1965, the number of households has grown at a rate of 1.5 percent annually, according to census data, and that’s meant about 1.3 million new ones every year. But since the Great Recession began in December 2007, and going well beyond its end in June 2009, the rate of new households has slowed sharply.
“The number of households, via quarterly Census Bureau data, (suggests) we’re only adding about 600,000 to 700,000 this year,” said David Crowe, the chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders.
Schlottman personifies why economists worry about the flagging household-formation rate. Unable to find full-time work, she’s underemployed, working as a college-educated teacher’s aide and forced to live at home in order to pay off student loans.
Multiply her plight across the economy, and there’s a huge ripple effect.
“While younger adults … make up a relatively small proportion of heads of households, they account for almost three-quarters of the overall shortfall in household formation,” Timothy Dunne, who was then a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, said in an August 2012 report, citing numbers that haven’t improved much.
…
‘I’ve learned the lesson that you can’t time the market; you buy when you can and you hold for a long time.’
You could even get stucco forever if you time your purchase very, very badly.
“In an Aug. 2, 2002, column, Nobel Prize winner and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote, ‘To fight this recession the Fed needs … soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that … Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.’”
““With a budget of around $400,000, Mike Lock and his wife were severely limited in their options in Toronto where the average house price in November was nudging $540,000 - up 11 per cent year-over-year.”
I’m sorry, but buying something in Canada for the kind of prices that they’re asking in places like Toronto/Vancouver takes an almost breathtaking amount of stupid. Rent or leave, those are the only two options that make sense for Canadians who live in these cities (and the ones like them).
At least most of the places in the US that have crazy high home prices have something “special” about them. LA has incredible weather, as does Hawaii. NYC is a special place, I hate it, but it’s undeniably different from most other places on the planet. San Fran has amazing job opportunities if you’re in the right field (technology).
But Toronto? At 500-1000/sq/ft? Are you kidding me? Canada is one of the least populated countries on the planet; land should be nearly free in most areas. The weather is atrocious. The job opportunities aren’t as good as the US major cities. Taxes are high. I mean, seriously, WTF? I love visiting Canada, and, if it was cheap enough, might actually consider moving there. But we’re talking cheap. Like 50/sq/ft. And instead, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s not cheaper, it’s more expensive. That makes absolutely no sense.
Does anyone happen to have a graph that compares home prices in a major US city to those in a major CN city through time? A ratio per sq/ft would be perfect, how much does a home in Toronto cost per sq/ft compared to one in NYC, develop a ratio, and compare that through time. That should give us some idea of how overpriced RE is in those areas today. If it’s not at least 2-3X over historic norms, I’d be shocked.
What this means is not that Canada is overpriced; but that the US is severely underpriced. US buyers shouldn’t worry about prices being too high; all they need to do is to compare to places like Vancouver and Hong Kong to convince themselves they’re getting a steal. Because the US has better weather than Canada and better water than Hong Kong.
Hanson throws a touchdown pass once again.
“Everything is telling me that this market is going to level out, go sideways.”
sideways = TIMBER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Into the egg nog are we?
I could sure use a glass filled to the brim with spiked egg not about now!
notnogI haven’t had a drop to drink since last week, seriously!
Sounds like we may eventually learn if HA is correct when he repeatedly insists there are millions of homes in California shadow inventory. I’d guess he is right, if one includes in the shadow inventory count the millions of recent investor purchases on the plan to hold the properties ‘until prices come back.’
Houses held off the market are the ticking time bomb. Banks only know when said bomb will explode. Tick tick tick…Crash!
“‘If you prosecute a CEO or other senior executive and send him or her to jail for committing a crime, the deterrent effect in my view vastly outweighs even the best compliance program you can put in place,’ he said. ‘I think it’s common sense to say that the longer away from a crime it gets prosecuted, the less deterrent effect there is.’”
Lesson learned: You can get away with fraud and America, provided you generated enough cash flow to provide the appropriate campaign contributions and pay for the best attorneys.
‘fraud in America’
(A week w/o coffee is beginning to take its toll!)
“(A week w/o coffee is beginning to take its toll!)”
Bixby > Ferrigno headache?
Green tea = methadone treatment for coffee drinkers
I can’t do Green tea. I love it but it gave me kidney stones a few years ago and has fluoride, which counteracts my prescription for thyroid stuff.
(A week w/o coffee is beginning to take its toll!)
Yikes, would be you cast out of the family if you brought your own?
I’d probably choose to go under the radar with something I could smuggle, like instant or even those single-serving in a tea-bag arrangements. “Just drinking my tea, folks!”
“Yikes, would be you cast out of the family if you brought your own?”
No. To be honest, it was my decision to go a week w/o coffee. I like to reassure myself from time to time that I am not really addicted to the stuff, and could quit any time I wanted to do so. My MIL is so accepting of my habit at this point that she enabled me by purchasing some Starbucks gift cards, which I will enjoy after the holidays.
Good lesson to everyone about the real way of he world. The Golden Rule: He who has the gold …
Thus has it always been. The internet allows it to be more known.
(P.S. This is how you know there isn’t some crazy conspiracy by some ruling class illuminati, because they’d never have let the internet into public hands.)
‘He who has the gold …’
‘This is how you know there isn’t some crazy conspiracy’
Sounds a little contradictory.
Oh, thanks for pointing this out. What I meant was that those who have the gold do rig the game. In every organization, those at the top rig it for themselves. The last couple of years should sear this into everyone’s brain when it comes to the business world and the government.
But they don’t control everything like some would think through a vast shadow conspiracy with everything planned out in advance. Less phony scandals and Spook, but also less nanny staters from that end.
I suppose in the end it doesn’t matter if the results look the same.
‘Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble’
They didn’t know what it was when it got loose.
Illinois Governor Delays Housing Recovery With New Foreclosure Moratorium
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/clout/chi-quinn-signs-foreclosure-measure-into-law-20131226,0,6361163.story
With foreclosure moratoriums in all 50 states, housing will remain toxic and radioactive.
“Maine mortgage defaults rose in 2013″
http://www.sunjournal.com/news/1464182#
This is no great revelation.
Jed S. Rakoff for president.
‘Rakoff said he wrote the article because he was puzzled by what he called “seeming inconsistencies,” with some parts of the government—such as the independent Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission—concluding that there was fraud, while the Justice Department has so far declined to prosecute top Wall Street executives.’
‘Rakoff said some prosecutors’ explanation for the lack of high-level cases is “implausible.” He called the suggestion by top officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, that some prosecutions would damage the economy—the “too big to jail” argument—”a doubtful proposition.”
I wonder if the oath of AG has a part where he is allowed to decide which laws to enforce?
‘The regime’s nervousness is shown by the fact that a national audit of local government debt, the first since 2010, has still not been published. The audit was ordered by Premier Li Keqiang in June this year, following the declaration of bankruptcy by the US city of Detroit. At the time it was reported that at least 36 major Chinese cities had a greater debt-to-GDP ratio than Detroit. This list includes Nanjing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Hefei, Changsha, Wuhan, Harbin, Xi’an and Lanzhou, according to business magazine Caixin.’
‘Jiangsu province, for example, which is the second largest provincial economy in China, with a GDP greater than Turkey’s and Saudi Arabia’s, is experiencing major financial stress among local government finance vehicles (LGFVs) that were set up to channel cheap bank loans into mega infrastructure projects as part of China’s 2009 stimulus package. Indicating the problems across China, many of Jiangsu’s flagship companies – in relatively new sectors such as shipbuilding and solar power – are on the brink of bankruptcy, with no markets, slashing tens of thousands of jobs. If China as a whole is not yet a Japanese-style ‘zombie economy’ of loss-making companies that are kept afloat by debt rollovers and which act as a permanent drag on economic activity, this scenario has already arrived in provinces like Jiangsu.’
‘China is trapped in a vicious circle whereby an ever larger share of new credit is used to service existing debts rather than fund new investment. The latest China Beige Book (CBB), a quarterly business survey produced by US economists based on interviews with Chinese companies, confirms this. It shows that the number of firms receiving new credit declined for the seventh consecutive quarter. “In the fourth quarter [of 2013], we’re seeing corporate loans decline significantly, very shockingly most of our bankers say less than 20 percent of their lending goes to new loans. Most of it’s going to debt rollovers or increases, they are not funding expansion. That indicates that this is not a period of strong expansion,” Leland Miller, president at CBB said.’
‘So, paradoxically, while China is experiencing runaway credit growth it is facing a credit squeeze at the same time, constraining growth in all sectors except manufacturing according to CBB.’
‘One of the biggest risks is with wealth management products (WMPs), which Fitch Ratings describes as a “hidden second balance sheet” of the banks. These opaque and sometimes fraudulent financial instruments alone are now worth an estimated US$2 trillion – equivalent to 54 percent of China’s famed pile of foreign exchange reserves. As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph notes, “Half of all [WMP] liabilities have to be rolled over every three months and a further 25 percent every six months. There are reports that some are already under water.” Not for nothing has Xiao Gang of China’s banking watchdog CBRC described wealth management products as a “Ponzi scheme”. Yet their usage is growing!’
‘A recent US Securities and Exchange Commission probe into potential securities violations by China-based pork company AgFeed Industries may impact confidence among American investors with US-listed Chinese companies, experts said this week.’
‘The company, which filed for bankruptcy in July with acknowledgement of “fictitious sales” logged between 2008 and 2011, is accused of misrepresenting “formula-based analysis” of its accounts, overstating assets and underreporting debts and expenses to create an illusion of increased profitability. Additionally, the company is alleged to have “created fraudulent account receivables’.
‘Among the emails unearthed in the investigation was an exchange that detailed the full knowledge of AgFeed managers regarding bogus revenue figures. “Sometimes I really want to work well on the real stuff, but the need to balance the falsified data often takes up my time,” wrote AgFeed manager Wu Jiangqi in an email to then-CEO Xiong Junhong.’
‘Xiong responded that the issue could “only be resolved by money”, noting that the company was in the process of “thinking of ways to get 30 to 40 million to resolve this”.
‘The fact that the fraud was not discovered by auditors should serve as a warning to American investors to be prudent when working with US-listed Chinese companies, former chief accountant at the SEC Lynn Turner told Bloomberg.’
“What’s the difference between investing in a Chinese company where you can’t do your homework and going to Las Vegas to play at the craps table?” Turner asked. “At least at Las Vegas you get some entertainment value.”
Help me.
I need to find ground for new investments.
I’m currently in seven stocks and am going to have to do better than I
am right now or I can’t make Europe this summer.
The major question right now is gold since I own 2800 shares of a variety of mining stocks primarily gold operated and all midcap stocks.
Is there a real investor who can bounce around ideas INTELLIGENTLY.
If you want fast money it’s not there.
The high flyers spook me too much. There needs to be some deflation of this rally. Nothing can rise that fast forever.
Thus, I have to rely on neglected sectors like coal, metals, oil
etc. My oil has been doing quite well recently. A true bear does well in any market.
Oil.
True. There is no fast money. But if you had a portfolio diversified outside of stocks and worth 15 times the cost of going go Europe you would sell some of your best performers and then re balance the remainder across assets. No problem.
I’m not that well heeled. I am getting older and there is no reason to just hold on to money all my life. Experience is just as valuable to me as money or asset classes or job skills.