Bits Bucket for January 26, 2014
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
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Is the market turmoil over yet?
IMF says they are watching emerging market turmoil ” very carefully”
20 hours ago | January 25th, 2014 11:32:27 GMT by Mike Paterson
I think we all are, but can they do anything about it?
IMF deputy- director Min Zhu is firmly in the camp that blames the effect of bond tapering by the US Federal Reserve for causing global liquidity to dry up.
Mr Zhu said this had combined with a slow structural crisis in a number of developing states that have already picked the low-hanging fruit of catch-up growth, warning that those that resist market reforms “will face trouble”.
Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff sought to reassure investors that this week’s currency collapse in Argentina would not spread to the Brazilian real, insisting that all contracts would be honoured and that foreign funds would be “treated well”.
The real has weakened by 20% against the dollar this year, breaking through the crucial line of 2.40 in trading yesterday.
Is anyone really surprised by all this and the effect of tapering after an extended period of cheap money just floooding into the stock markets?
And the Fed/others haven’t even really started” normalization” yet.
We all knew there was a trigger out there, and global liquidity was one of the top trigger possibilities being mentioned for the last six months.
But then BB (Yellen) will say they were caught by surprise.
This almost free money was given to cover deficits, bail out bank liquidity, save the mortgagees. Soon it will no longer be almost free money. They don’t have any choice.
Watch Libor rates coming to town soon. This is a system that could collapse for lack of loanable funds from the banking industry running at 30 (instead of say 18). The rats ate the cheese.
“…a trigger out there…”
All those financial movers and shakers plus a broad representation of the global central banker cartel holding conclave in Davos makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
S&P 500 Slides Most Since June on Emerging Market Turmoil
By Nick Taborek Jan 24, 2014 1:54 PM PT
Photographer: Jin Lee/Bloomberg
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Jan. 24, 2014.
U.S. stocks sank the most since June, capping the worst week for benchmark indexes since 2012, as a selloff in developing-nation currencies spurred concern global markets will become more volatile.
Caterpillar Inc., General Electric Co. and Boeing Co. slid at least 2.6 percent to pace losses in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (INDU) Kansas City Southern plunged 15 percent, the biggest retreat since 2008, after reporting lower-than-estimated earnings. International Game Technology tumbled 15 percent as the maker of slot machines posted first-quarter profit that missed analysts’ projections.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (SPX) retreated 2.1 percent to 1,790.29 at 4 p.m. in New York to close at the lowest level since Dec. 17. The benchmark index declined 2.6 percent this week. The Dow slid 318.24 points, or 2 percent, to 15,879.11 today. The 30-stock gauge lost 3.5 percent this week. About 8.8 billion shares changed hands on U.S. exchanges, the busiest trading day of the year.
…
how many more people will be pushed on to the food stamp rolls this year cause of inflationary pressures?
It’s kind of funny how the members of the global central banking cartel constantly harp on the hobgoblin of deflation, never bothering to mention how inflation can be equally if not more destructive to household economic stability.
Deflation causes debts to go unpaid. The IMF is a bank.
Deflation causes the real value of a currency to rise. I’m an adult member of a household whose incomes and savings are denominated in dollars, and there are hundreds of millions of American Lilliputians out there just like me. It’s no skin off my back if the highly paid financial geniuses who run banks run their operations in a manner that leads to them going out of business. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that if CEOs were made to bear the full brunt of bad decision making, we’d have fewer too-big-to-fail banks out there which are able to profit off foolish speculation.
Briefing
All You Folks Snickering About The Idea Of A Stock-Market Crash Should Read This
Henry Blodget
Jan 3 2014, 2:23 AM
Stock market crash 1929
Stocks have started trading in the new year of 2014.
They’re down!
Fortunately, they’re not down much. Yet. But one alarming thing about making any negative observation about the stock market these days is that you quickly get heaped with scorn and ridicule. Meanwhile, Wall Street strategists are already one-upping each other in the race to be the most bullish.
The amazing run that stocks have had over the last several years has certainly been exciting and fun for those of us who own stocks.
I own stocks, so I have certainly enjoyed it.
I hope stocks continue to charge higher through 2014, but, unlike most Wall Street strategists, I can’t find much data to suggest that they will. I only have a vague hope that the Fed will continue to pump air into the balloon and corporations will continue to find ways to cut more costs and grow their already record-high profit margins and earnings. And, yes, if the U.S. economy finally starts cranking again, that will likely be a huge help.
But, meanwhile, every valid valuation measure I look at suggests that stocks are at least 40% overvalued.
That doesn’t mean that stocks will crash. But it does strongly suggest that, at best, stocks are likely to produce lousy returns over the next 10 years.
Which valuation measures suggest the stock market is very overvalued?
…
Canada is about 30% less historically than the US Dow is right now.
Prediction. You might be right about 40%.
Yellen’s ability to blow hot air is less than Bernake’s was.
His market whispering skills are proven, while hers are relatively untested. I wouldn’t count her out before she has a chance to prove herself, though.
God loves an honest market analyst!
Business Insider More: Stocks
Sorry, Folks, It’s Time To Warn You About The Latest Data Suggesting That Stocks Might Crash…
Henry Blodget
Jan. 8, 2014, 10:54 AM 13,585 22
As regular readers will know, I have recently become concerned about the possibility of a stock-market crash — or, at the very least, a long period of crappy stock returns.
Importantly, I’m not predicting a crash, but I think the odds of one are increasing. And I am holding onto my own stocks only because I have a balanced portfolio and a long-enough investment horizon that I am comfortable with the possibility of stocks plunging, say, 50%, over the next year or two.
Of course, stocks have done so well over the past five years that almost everyone is bullish these days, so whenever I talk about the possibility of a market crash, people cackle with laughter or dismiss me as hater, shortseller, or moron.
For what it’s worth, I’m not short stocks. I’m very long. I hope stocks continue to charge higher, but I just can’t find much valid data to suggest that they will. I only have vague hopes that the Fed will continue to pump air into the market balloon, the U.S. economy will finally start cranking again, and corporations will continue to find ways to cut more costs and grow their already record-high profit margins and earnings.
…
50% correction? Bring it on and shake out the weak handed. I am in for the long haul since I have plenty of short term securities and precious metals for safety. Nice to see my municipal bond funds sniff fear and are starting upward.
fifty-three percent
BTW, as I noted in a comment to yesterday’s bits bucket, the Shiller PE ratio bottomed out below 10 in the first two major bear markets of the past century. It remains to be seen whether it will do so again in the present one.
P.S. Last time the market crashed I found out in retrospect that I reallocated to stocks too early and before the market bottomed out. Next time I will err on the side of lateness.
Jan. 23, 2014, 11:48 a.m. EST
How about a 50% crash?
By John Nyaradi
For a long time, we have been hearing that the stock market is headed for a significant crash. Is 2014 the year?
…during the past few weeks, we have been receiving warnings from outside the usual “gloom and doom” sphere. Most notably, bond guru Jeffrey Gundlach gave a webcast presentation on Jan. 14, which raised more than a few eyebrows. Gundlach explained that as the Federal Reserve proceeds to taper its monthly bond purchases, stock market volatility will escalate. He considered the record-high margin-debt levels on the New York Stock Exchange as a signal of a stock market “top.”
Gundlach’s presentation included a handy chart depicting the effects of the various quantitative-easing programs on the stock market, from March 18, 2009, through Jan. 6, 2014. The chart makes it very clear that the stock market’s advance during the past five years has been fueled by the Fed’s liquidity pump. As the pump gets throttled back, what can we expect to happen?
The recent growth in stock prices has surpassed earnings growth. The trailing 12-month price-to-earnings multiple has soared from 12.8 in January of 2012 to 17.3 in January of 2014.
Using Robert Shiller’s Cyclically Adjusted Price/Earnings (CAPE) formula, the CAPE ratio comes to 25.4. As a result, it the stock market “corrects” to the point where Robert Shiller’s CAPE ratio declines to where it was in the late 1980s, (approximately 12.5) the S&P 500 would have to drop 50% from its current level to 919. Even if a less-extreme correction were to occur, wherein the trailing 12-month price-to-earnings multiple would fall from the current P/E multiple of 17.3 back to the 12.8 observed in 2012, the S&P 500 index would sink 35% to 1,195.
In considering what could trigger such an event, it is important to keep in mind that the current level of stock prices is apparently being largely driven by investor sentiment, rather than by fundamentals.
For example, those high-momentum stocks, which draw an enormous amount of trading volume, have absurd price/earnings ratios and suffer/enjoy wild swings based solely on “mo-mo.” In the event of a meaningful decline, those stocks would likely lead the way down since their investors would have the most to lose. Beyond that, there are quite a number of S&P 500 stocks with trailing 12-month price/earnings ratios in excess of 20. What will happen to the S&P 500 if/when those shareholders start running for the exits?
The triggering event for such a selloff would most likely be somehow associated with the Federal Reserve. Inability to control interest rates or a misstep in the taper could trigger extreme volatility. Just a simple loss of confidence in the Fed and/or its new Chair could be a catalyst for the first significant decline in years.
Complacency is at extreme levels, based largely on confidence in the Federal Reserve being able to stave off any and all evil forces in global financial markets. However, during previous periods of confidence and extreme bullishness, the Fed has been proven unable to stop significant stock-market declines.
While no one can forecast the future, one can get a feel for the “mood of the market” and whether the tide is ebbing or flowing. At this point, it’s quite possible that the high-water mark has been reached and that the tide may be turning. In the final analysis, whether or not we see a 50% crash is irrelevant since all market environments offer potential opportunity for those who are ready to change and adapt to the challenges of today’s new realities.
Why emerging markets worry Wall Street
Adam Shell, USA TODAY 7:44 a.m. EST January 25, 2014
The big bull market in U.S. stocks is confronted with an unexpected headwind: a fresh bout of financial turbulence in emerging markets.
stocks
(Photo: Kin Cheung, AP)
Story Highlights
- U.S. stocks tank as turbulence in emerging markets spawns fear
- Analysts worry that crisis could hurt emerging economies and U.S. profits
- Memories of past currency crises in Mexico, Asia and Russian keeps Wall Street wary
Wall Street is a world away from Turkey and Argentina and the other developing economies dotting the globe. But recent news of financial tumult and plunging currencies in some emerging markets, coupled with bad memories of past crises over the past 20 years that began in Mexico, Asia and Russia, has imported a boatload of financial angst back to the United States.
Indeed, the great bull market on Wall Street has suddenly run into a stumbling block that few investment strategists were even talking about at the start of the year: swooning currencies and capital flight out of vulnerable emerging markets like Turkey and Argentina.
The financial turbulence, which is being greatly exacerbated by a slowdown in growth-engine China, has raised fears of a potential crisis that could inflict damage on these developing countries’ economies and perhaps infect other nations as well. That lethal combination could ultimately crimp earnings of U.S. multinationals. It could also prompt investors to dump risky assets, a response that already seems to be underway.
Indeed, the emergence of risks in emerging markets, coupled with fresh 2014 headwinds, such as U.S. stocks no longer trading at below-average valuations and Corporate America reporting less-than-stellar fourth-quarter earnings so far, has put the bull market on hold.
In the past two trading sessions the Dow Jones industrial average has tumbled more than 494 points to 15879, extending its year-to-date loss to 4.2%.
…
This time is different.
ft dot com
January 24, 2014 9:55 am
Similarities with 1997 emerging markets crash only go so far
By James Kynge, Emerging Markets Editor
Argentine currency’s drop shows broader frailties but is seen as extreme
Suddenly, it feels like 1997 all over again. The biggest one-day swoon of Argentina’s peso on Thursday was more than a little reminiscent of the day 17 years ago when the Thai baht was driven into free fall, triggering a wave of contagion through Asia.
However, economists said such similarities only go so far. While there are clear vulnerabilities or evidence of economic mismanagement in several emerging markets, including Venezuela, Ukraine, Turkey and South Africa, the frailties that Argentina succumbed to are not broadly representative.
“Argentina is probably a special case,” said Neil Shearing, chief emerging markets economist at Capital Economics. “The problems that we have seen in Turkey, Ukraine and Argentina have led to talk of a new emerging markets crisis. But this misses the key point that emerging markets are very different from each other.”
Craig Botham, emerging markets economist at Schroders, said a flurry of investor nerves following the Argentine shock was centring on Latin America with “people pulling out while they reassess what is going on”. He added that Brazil, which has been intervening to stem currency depreciation in a way similar to Argentina, had come in for extra scrutiny.
Turkey, which has seen its lira fall more than 6 per cent this year, is attracting added concern because of a trend among its citizens to seek refuge in the dollar, another characteristic of Argentina’s economy before Thursday’s currency decline.
Underlining the nervousness in emerging markets, the Turkish lira fell to a record of 2.3070 to the dollar, while the South African rand fell to more than 11 to the dollar from 10.98 in morning trade.
However, economists emphasise that, while some emerging markets share some characteristics with Argentina, few suffer from so pronounced a mix of domestic economic mismanagement and external frailties.
…
Emerging markets selloff picks up, drags down Europe, U.S.
By David Gaffen and Francesco Canepa
NEW YORK/LONDON Fri Jan 24, 2014 8:13pm EST
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange January 14, 2014. REUTERS-Brendan McDermid
Pedestrians walk past an electronic board showing various stock prices, which are reflected in a polished stone surface, outside a brokerage in Tokyo January 24, 2014. REUTERS-Yuya Shino
(Reuters) - A full-scale flight from emerging markets accelerated on Friday, as investors sold shares in major markets and bought safe-haven assets such as U.S. Treasuries, the yen and gold.
On Wall Street, the benchmark S&P 500 stock index tumbled 2.0 percent on the day, and ended the week down 2.6 percent, its worst week since June 2012.
Concerns about slower growth in China, reduced support from U.S. monetary policy and political problems in Turkey, Argentina and Ukraine drove the selling.
The Turkish lira hit a record low as the cost of insuring against a Turkish default rose to an 18-month high. Argentina’s peso fell again after the country’s central bank abandoned its support of the currency.
The declines mirror moves from last June when developing country stocks fell almost 18 percent over about two months and hit global shares after the Federal Reserve indicated it would soon reduce its bond-buying.
“The world is suffering from the emerging markets’ flu,” said Michael James, managing director of equity trading at Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles.
The broad nature of the selloff combines country-specific problems with the reality that reduced U.S. Federal Reserve bond buying reduces the liquidity that has in the past boosted higher-yielding emerging markets assets.
The Fed last month pared its monthly purchases of bonds by $10 billion to $75 billion. The U.S. central bank will hold a policy meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday and is widely expected to again pare its stimulus program.
“We expect the emerging market selloff to get worse before it starts getting better,” said Lorne Baring, managing director of B Capital Wealth Management in Geneva. “There’s definitely contagion spreading and it’s crossing over from emerging to developed in terms of sentiment.”
…
Denial ain’t a river in Egypt.
Emerging markets
The perils of denial
Jan 24th 2014, 16:11 by Buttonwood
THE big sell-off in emerging market currencies yesterday is an odd example of “remembrance of things past”; one’s mind is drawn back to 1998, or even 1982 and the crises of old. Not that long ago, it was the developed economies that were causing all the problems and the emerging markets that seemed to offer hope; now the news out of the rich world is a lot more positive whereas the weaknesses of some developing countries are showing again.
Margaret Thatcher is not a popular heroine in Argentina but it is tempting to recall her aphorism that “you can’t buck the markets”. The country was running with an exchange rate that was (and still is) out of whack with the black market rate; its government was also quoting an inflation rate that was well below independent estimates of 23.4%. Defending the exchange rate required official intervention that was eating away at the country’s reserves. Yesterday, the authorities stopped intervening; today, they relaxed capital controls. While there was brave talk that a rate of 8 pesos to the dollar was fair value, the black market rate is more like 13. The scope for the official rate to fall dramatically is clear. The big question concerns the economic consequences of the devaluation; will this lead to a big rise in the cost of imported goods (pushing inflation up further and putting more downward pressure on the peso) or does the cost of private sector goods already reflect the black market rate?
The other case of denial was in Turkey, where it seems clear the central bank would have liked to raise rates this week, but was discouraged from doing so by the government. Turkey has a current account deficit of 7.5% of GDP and inflation of 7.5%; monetary tightening looks appropriate. (The central bank indicated that it may allow interbank rates to hit 9% on some days, but they are normally 7.75%, ie, barely positive in real terms). Again, a big fall in the lira will boost Turkish exporters but creates the peril of a further surge in the inflation rate. The Turks have intervened to support the lira but how long can they do that; at $33 billion, their reserves are only a little larger than Argentina’s.
The broader question is whether these sell-offs are just “little local difficulties” or are a herald of a 1997/1998-style collapse?
…
A colleague of mine recently visited Argentina. She indicated the demand for the dollars in her pocket was very strong!
Would you rather invest in BRICs, MINTs, CIVETs, or none of the above at this point?
MORONomics will only get you so far.
BRIC or MINT? Investors suffer acronym anxiety
A full moon rises behind the skyline of Lower Manhattan and One World Trade Center in New York (Gary Hershorn Reuters, / January 15, 2014)
Carolyn Cohn Reuters
8:08 a.m. CST, January 20, 2014
LONDON (Reuters) - Which investment takes your fancy: BRIC, MINT or CIVETS? For many fund managers seeking the next big thing in emerging markets, the answer is none.
Acronym investment - putting money into small groupings of markets which often have little in common beyond a broad economic concept - is giving way to acronym anxiety.
Former Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill set the ball rolling in 2001 when he created the BRIC family of Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Many of these countries and others lumped together under separate acronyms have, at least until recently, enjoyed turbo-charged economic growth. But investment gains are not guaranteed and underperforming local stock markets have led fund managers to flee what had been fashionable groupings.
Assets under management in BRIC funds fell to 9 billion euros at the end of last year from 21 billion at the end of 2010, according to Lipper data, while assets under management in broader emerging equity funds have grown in that time.
Goldman Sachs’s own BRIC fund has lost 20 percent in value over the past three years.
Undaunted, O’Neill has coined a new acronym. In a series on BBC radio this month, he championed the MINT group - Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey - as the next giants after the BRICs. O’Neill stresses that MINT - like BRIC before - is an economic, not an investment, concept and his programs explored each country’s problems as well as its potential.
Nevertheless, the appeal of acronym investment is fading. Fund managers say such groupings do not take into account different stages of development of the countries involved and risk sidelining other promising markets. The groupings have also frequently suffered from disappointing performances of their listed companies, the main target of foreign investors.
O’Neill’s timing is not ideal. Turkey has been rocked by an investigation into alleged corruption following street protests last summer, while Nigerian politics are in turmoil before elections next year.
Indonesia, along with other emerging economies which are running large current account deficits, is experiencing a flight of investors.
“Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey are all very interesting countries but not much connected beyond the excuse for having an acronym,” said Richard Titherington, chief investment officer of emerging equities at JP Morgan Asset Management. Titherington prefers groupings by concepts such as markets where companies offer the highest dividend yields.
Investors in the BRIC countries have already found out the hard way that economic growth may not convert into stock market gains, and some analysts blame problems with corporate governance in markets such as Russia and China.
BRIC markets have underperformed the broader MSCI index of emerging stocks in dollar terms in the past three years, with emerging markets in turn lagging developed markets.
NO MORE CIVETS
In another sign of acronym anxiety, HSBC closed its CIVETS fund last year, leaving no managers tracking another group of emerging markets - Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa.
Both the BRIC and MINT groupings focus on demographics - countries which are going to grow rapidly by the middle of the century, due to their young populations.
…
My hunch: These acronym-based investment concepts are doomed to join yesteryear’s NIFTY-FIFTY in history’s dustbin of bad ideas.
I agree and it can’t happen soon enuf for me. Reminds me of the pop culture fad of abbreviating the names of pop and screen stars. J-Lo, Scar-Jo, Li-Lo, Barf-Mo.
What I meant to say is the share prices associated with those acronyms are soon to get flushed down the toilet, if not already down the tube.
I understood it, just hoping the acronyms get flushed as well.
“…just hoping the acronyms get flushed…”
Already happening, per article I posted.
Is all this day to day market worrying antithetical to proper financial management?
There is only reason to worry if you manage your finances wrong.
Pimco Total Return Fund Lost 14% of Assets in Four Months
By Charles Stein and Alexis Leondis
Sep 4, 2013 2:19 PM PT
El-Erian Sees September Fed Taper of Treasuries
The world’s biggest mutual fund keeps getting smaller.
Bill Gross’s $251 billion Pimco Total Return Fund (PTTRX) dropped more than $41 billion, or 14 percent of its assets, in the past four months through losses and investor withdrawals. The fund suffered $7.7 billion in net redemptions in August, Chicago-based researcher Morningstar Inc. (MORN) said today in an e-mailed statement, the fourth straight month of withdrawals and the second highest amount this year.
Top managers from Gross to Jeffrey Gundlach and Dan Fuss have seen their funds shrink after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke in May raised the possibility that the central bank would begin to scale back bond purchases. The Barclays U.S. Aggregate Index, among the most widely used fixed-income benchmarks, declined 3.2 percent this year and fell almost 3 percent since May 22.
The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note rose to 2.9 percent today from 1.93 percent on May 21, the day before Bernanke spoke. U.S. Treasuries lost 3.5 percent this year through yesterday, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch indexes.
In the past four months, investors redeemed about $26 billion from Pimco Total Return Fund, which became the world’s largest mutual fund in 2009. The fund lost 3.9 percent this year through yesterday, trailing 86 percent of peers, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. During the past five years, the fund advanced 6.7 percent, putting it ahead of 87 percent of similarly managed funds.
…
Hint: Try not to buy what everyone else is buying and sell what everyone else is selling.
MIDEAST STOCKS-Dubai shares lead regional losses after global sell-off
Sun Jan 26, 2014 7:51am EST
* Dubai trading volume falls, market ends well off low
* Some see pull-back as healthy
* Saudi petchem index recovers to close higher
* Qatar falls on local selling; foreigners are buyers
* Egypt drops marginally after political violence
By Nadia Saleem
DUBAI, Jan 26 (Reuters) - Shares in Dubai and Abu Dhabi tumbled on Sunday, leading a region-wide decline following a sharp sell-off in U.S. and emerging markets on fears of slowing growth in China and reduced support from U.S. monetary policy.
Dubai’s bourse, which has been driven to hefty gains by local retail investors, fell 2.2 percent - recording its biggest one-day loss in more than two months as it came off Thursday’s five-year high.
Trading volumes were lower than they were during last week’s gains and the market closed well above the day’s low, suggesting buyers are ready to step in on dips.
Neighbouring Abu Dhabi’s measure lost 1.8 percent, also retreating from a five-year high.
Gulf economies are mostly insulated from a pull-back in emerging markets and currency risks there, because of their state budget and current account surpluses, as well as continued government spending on infrastructure projects.
“The market was registering higher highs and in a way, this was a good trigger for some profit-taking, which is healthy,” Rami Sidani, Schroders Middle East head of investment, said of Dubai.
Small-cap shares had led gains in recent sessions, increasing the potential for a sharp pull-back.
“We are seeing buyers who have been waiting on the side for some correction - this will continue to be the case because the local fundamentals are robust and economies are resilient,” Sidani added.
…
The market’s big crash last week has set off a twittering frenzy.
Tweet your losses!
Dow suffers worst week since 2011
By Hibah Yousuf @CNNMoneyInvest
January 25, 2014: 7:51 AM ET
NEW YORK (CNNMoney)
Good riddance to this week. It was another ugly day on Wall Street — and for markets around the globe.
The Dow dropped nearly 320 points Friday, or almost 2%. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq fell more than 2%. CNNMoney’s Tech 30 index also fell about 2%, despite a jump in shares of Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) following strong quarterly sales and earnings.
The losses come at the end of the worst week for stocks in recent memory. The Dow tumbled more than 3.5%, its worst week since November 2011. The S&P 500 slid more than 2.6%, logging its biggest weekly decline since May 2012.
Meanwhile, the Nasdaq tumbled almost 1.7%, its first weekly decline of the year and the worst since August.
All three indexes are now in negative territory for the year. The selling has some investors bracing for a correction, usually defined as a decline of 10% or more.
“$SPY If market doesn’t bounce here, I imagine this will end up being a full 10% correction,” said StockTwits trader kgpittm.
StockTwits user Fundraising pointed out that he’d prefer a correction sooner rather than later so that stocks can resume their upward trend.
“$SPY with how much correction talk out there I would rather have it now so it has more legs to run later Bullish,” he said.
…
It may be premature to ask this, but in case the current global stock market turmoil has legs, and turns out more like the 1997-1998 Asia crisis that preceded the dot.com bust of 2000, is it safe to assume U.S. housing prices will continue marching skyward as they did during the early-2000s period?
Best aspect of current turmoil: It will give the Fed plenty of cover for slowing down the schedule for implementing the taper.
Watch for this to come out of next week’s meeting.
How much more money do you plan to lose on your stock investments before you pull them?
Global Dow Realtime USD
DJI: GDOW
Market closed 2,415.64
Change -6.83 -0.28%
Jan 26, 2014 8:03 p.m.
Previous close 2,422.47
Day low 2,415
Day high 2,421
Open: 2,420.89
52 week low 2,053
52 week high 2,497
Market Turmoil: Correction or Selloff?
Jan. 24 (Bloomberg) –- Affinity Investment Advisors Jeremy Hill and Alix Steel discuss the markets closing down for the second day in a row and what this means for global markets in “On The Money” on Bloomberg Television’s “Street Smart.” (Source: Bloomberg)
53% correction. Dollars to doughnuts. Deal?
I am in at 35 -
Is a company in trouble a sign the CEO deserves a raise?
CEO of troubled JPMorgan Chase to get raise
Posted: Jan 25, 2014 9:51 PM PST
Updated: Jan 25, 2014 10:37 PM PST
The bank’s board voted for Jamie Dimon raise’s despite the bank’s recent troubles. (Source: CNN)
(CNN) - Despite paying billions of dollars in fines and settlements, JPMorgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon is expected to get a raise.
The New York Times reports that the bank’s board has approved the increase for 2013. There’s no word on the amount.
Dimon had his 2012 pay slashed by about half to $11.5 million after JPMorgan suffered estimated trading loss of nearly $6 billion dollars.
Before the bank’s troubles over the past two years, Dimon had been the top paid bank chief executive officer in 2011.
I’ve never heard of any low pay CEO hiring people and them giving them jobs. Poor CEOs do not create jobs.
I thought highly paid CEOs specialized in laying people off. And when they do hire, it’s in low wage, 3rd world countries.
‘I thought highly paid CEOs specialized in laying people off. And when they do hire, it’s in low wage, 3rd world countries.’
Nope, CEOs are rock stars. They walk on water.
No, you’re confused. They crawled out from underneath a rock in many cases. That’s different from being a rock star. I can see how a person could make that mistake, though.
I left off the /s.
Listening to this podcast on a lazy, cold Sunday:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/cfp-radio/2014/01/11/the-coming-bank-bail-ins-wealth-confiscation-economic-collapse
Only thing one can try to do is to keep under the radar despite fists pounding on the desk telling you should buy a house.
Yes folks we are definitely in Bubble 2.0. I turned on the boob tube this morning at 5:00am EST and who has replaced Tom Vu? It’s Armando Montelongo pitching on a half-hour infomercial on making big money in real estate. And you can do it without your money or credit. Yes, you can do it after attending his “live” event at various suburban Boston and Southern NH hotel conference rooms.
And don’t forget he was the “star” of A&Es Flip this House blah, blah, blah. Everyones making money and there is never been a better time to buy.
HE goes on and on showing you his “millionaire students”. He doesn’t tell you when you come to his “free” seminar to bring your credit card and checkbook so you can purchase more of his “secrets of success” on dvd, print etc.
There’s a sucker born every minute. This a$$ clown need to be locked up along with “Than and Paul” and the rest of the A&E house flipping crew.
A coworker was pushing me to go to a Montelongo “seminar” last year. This coworker was seriously annoyed at me because I would not go. He felt that I was refusing to “learn the method”.
I just can’t deal with that type of personality. I allowed him to believe that he was a genius. This dude was born into wealth, but he has gone flat broke more often than anyone I’ve ever met. He somehow managed to find a rich lady to marry him (after many divorces past). If it weren’t for her, he wouldn’t have any money left to lose!
Why not just tell him: “Montelongo is a huckster, people who know how to make money easy don’t give it away. C’mon think about it.”
Then walk away. Not super insulting, but should make it clear.
Why can’t someone tell the FED, just stop printing more money
What difference does that make?
Printing a few trillion and storing in warehouses has zero effect.
Printing a few trillion and storing in warehouses has zero effect.
It sure helped the banks’ balance sheets, so I wouldn’t say that it has “zero effect”.
Yeah, it depends on who owns the warehouse. If it was somebody who would otherwise be treated as insolvent…
From yesterday:
“Comment by Whac-A-Bubble™
2014-01-25 12:29:55
NEVER, EVER BUY A FORECLOSURE HOME, IN THIS LIFE OR THE NEXT.”
Isn’t this why Zillow doesn’t include foreclosures in the average sale price of homes. The pool of end consumers and the pool of unhabitable foreclosures rarely overlap.
It sounds counter-intuitive, but ISTM that a large inventory of foreclosures will ultimately make the price of habitable homes go UP. Who’s going to go into a foreclosure home, fix only the bad systems, and sell for a little less than average? Nobody, of course. They will fix only the systems they have to, load up on HGTV cosmetics like pergraniteel and IKEA-type “pops of color”
and price at top dollar. Thus the list price goes up. Whether or not the buying public believes the flipper price is the next issue.
realtors are liars
It is an interesting mindset that thinks it can sell that condo for top dollar and — simultaneously — buy a house for cheap because they are all just sitting on the market without selling.
I ran across that this week.
The post was coiffed for you specifically and you bought it.
Stunning.
I was mainly alluding to the possibility the former owner might be a psychotic killer who could return to extract revenge on the new occupants.
Movie “Foreclosed”:
Excerpt
Trailer
Rent and enjoy a night of fantasy terror! But try to avoid having this ever happen to you by never buying a used home. Any used home you buy could turn out to be a former foreclosure, with the facts covered up by a Realtor® just like the one in that movie.
Don’t miss out on the chance to become the owner of a used home from which another family was recently evicted by force.
Come on in, folks, the water is fine!
San Diego Foreclosures
2,160 Results
After watching footage from that movie, I have a hard time envisioning a used foreclosure home that has the right feng shui.
” According to one principle, you should not be able to see the toilet when opening the bathroom door, as your luck will be flushed.”
Or maybe the chi will just be disgusted by what it sees and flow right back out of the bathroom? Really, FS was around before toilets…
That said, I loved those 2006-2007 vintage books/articles about employing Feng Sui to sell your home. Actually, FS does work, but only because it forces the seller to clear 90% of their crap out of the home.
“I was mainly alluding to the possibility the former owner might be a psychotic killer who could return to extract revenge on the new occupants.”
There’s a foreclosure close to my office that’s been sitting empty for at least two years. A friend who has had his eyes on the place told me it last sold for $160k plus, but the recent bids have stopped at $36k. Apparently the previous owner really destroyed the place from the inside out with a chainsaw.
“Apparently the previous owner really destroyed the place from the inside out with a chainsaw.”
So long as the place is properly prepared and the future owner is 100% certain Joe Chainsaw isn’t going to reappear once the place is reoccupied, I guess there shouldn’t be any cause for concern.
“So long as the place is properly prepared and the future owner is 100% certain Joe Chainsaw isn’t going to reappear once the place is reoccupied, I guess there shouldn’t be any cause for concern.”
It’s a lousy location, not a “buy” neighborhood, IMHO.
My friend is a reasonably smart guy, thinks outside the box, etc., but recently he has become inflicted with buyer’s fever. His girlfriend and a tallish realtor are working on him. I’m doing my best, e-mailing him with articles that this is no time for contractual financial obligations, but recently he’s been estimating how much he can afford to lose if things wrong. Last Friday’s sell-off likely elevated my position. Fingers crossed.
“I’m doing my best, e-mailing him with articles that this is no time for contractual financial obligations,…”
Why not send him the link to the Foreclosed movie trailer (the scary one, not the feel-good ‘it’s OK to be foreclosed cause we’re all Christians’ short) and propose to watch it with him and his girlfriend some time?
“Why not send him the link to the Foreclosed movie trailer…”
This one?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQmAC_m4nek
Yes — same as I posted above. The city shot suggests the setting is La-La-Land.
Truly delusional wishful thinking that foreclosures will make prices go up. You really are desperately worried that the second leg down is here.
It’s not a reason from Zillow, it is an excuse and justification to try to help their REIC partners.
It amazes me how anyone I’ve ever met with a PhD in hard science believes such study immediately confers economics expertise. These same folks freely offer wildly implausible conjectures on economics.
Can you imagine a PhD economist who never opened a chemistry book offering stream-of-consciousness opinion on how chemical processes work? I certainly can’t.
test tube washer
In defense of hard scientists who dabble in economics, some amateur economists are quite capable. I even know one guy with a hard science degree who got hired by DB to conduct real-world economic analysis. They prefer him to economists with preconceived (and potentially incorrect) notions about how markets work.
Apparently there are two recent movies out with the title ‘Foreclosed.’ The one discussed here may induce vomiting, while the other will induce terror.
“Who’s going to go into a foreclosure home, fix only the bad systems, and sell for a little less than average? Nobody, of course.”
I thought that was one of Ben Jones’ lines of business, but please correct me if I misunderstood.
My understanding is that Ben — at least in the past — mainly cleaned up, secured, and maintained foreclosures at status quo only until a contractor came to fix them. Ben didn’t restore them.
During the height of the bust, Ben saw a lot of houses which were so drastically underpriced that it even a modest flip would be profitable. Investment opportunity! But that was several years ago, in an area which had been so bubbly that the pop overswung the pendulum far in the other direction. Evidently, Blackstone et al saw the same thing that Ben did, and snapped up similar houses for flip, or rent, or to simply wait for the pendulum to swing back to normal so Blackstone could sell — again to a contractor for flip, or to a household, depending on condition.
[for all we know, maybe Ben was working for Blackstone!]
Anklepants, I’m not so sure about a second leg down. In my neighborhood there are several “pre-forclosures.” From what I can tell, distressed houses in passable condition sell as a short sale for current market minus the cost of a mostly-cosmetic reno. After the reno cost and profit, the short sales houses are effectively priced as regular inventory; they are no longer depressed, in condition or price. The few true foreclosures sell for much less, but they tend to have such serious issues that again, the sale price is market minus a much bigger restoration cost. In the end, those too become regular inventory.
SALE price drops appear to be solely tied to the house condition and repair cost, not to any drop in the general market. LIST prices might be dropping, but those I think were overlisted in the first place and are just dropping to normal. I don’t have time to dig out that data right now.
“SALE price drops appear to be solely tied to the house condition and repair cost, not to any drop in the general market.”
No mention there of interest rates or massive infusions of Fed Funds into MBS purchases. Hmmmm…
you are ignoring the past couple of years of history on forclosures because you want to see something that ain’t there.
you are trying to convince yourself.
you sound like a realtard and we got plenty of those already.
“I don’t have time to dig out that data right now.”
Instead of that, maybe you should carve out some time to reflect on your stunningly distorted perspective on the value of a dollar. Truthfully I’ve never encountered anyone with a warped and twisted general perspective as you.
You’ve alot to learn. Why not make the effort to do so?
The Joshua Tree Fund, managed by Ben Jones, has bought, rehabbed, and rented out houses for a tidy profit. He would have flipped them, but the rents were too profitable and easy to justify that. When the next bottom hits, he will probably buy more.
The trick is that Ben knows how to value the houses, and also how to find them. Unlike most investors, he doesn’t just buy houses that are close to his own residence. He buys them where the returns are best.
“The Joshua Tree Fund”
Too funny!
It’s an ideal moniker.
“The Joshua Tree Fund”
+1 All depends on which end you’re on.
“Thus the list price goes up. Whether or not the buying public believes the flipper price is the next issue.”
Take a freshmen microeconomics course and get back to us. In case you are seriously interested, check out the MOOC offerings on coursera.org.
I also understand that MIT and a few other top universities may offer econ courses as MOOCs. If others have details on this, please share.
Why should I take an econ course when I have a whole blog full of them telling me that prices are gonna craaaater… any minute now… really… right after these messages…
Just a suggestion for your own self-education. Take it or leave it.
And self respect, self preservation, self discovery, etc.
“I have a whole blog full of them telling me that prices are gonna craaaater”
Taking an econ class could also potentially help you understand the intuition which convinces those of us who have studied quite a bit of economics to doubt the sustainability of Echo Bubble reflation.
“the price of habitable homes go UP…”
I suspect the breaking of your neighbors will not elevate the price of your house. There is an event on its way that will help you stop thinking so.
“There is an event on its way that will help you stop thinking so.”
Details, please?
You have enough nightmares already.
I sleep like a baby. If my posts give you nightmares, I apologize.
They don’t, not at all. I thought you were still traumatized by that late night movie you mentioned.
I was kidding about being traumatized. If it hadn’t already been 2am when I turned it on, and well past the happy beginning to the movie, I would have probably watched the whole thing. I may try to get my wife to watch it with me some time, as she is a big-time fan of James Denton.
“There is an event on its way that will help you stop thinking so.”
Are garbage can fires, soup lines and free WiFi about to debut?
My plastic garbage can wouldn’t hold up very well to that.
Alameda, CA Housing Prices Crumble 25% Year Over Year
http://www.movoto.com/alameda-ca/market-trends/
Foreclosure Settlement Still Failing 700,000 Families One Year Later
Posted: 01/22/2014 7:55 am EST | Updated: 01/22/2014 8:49 am EST
One year after federal bank regulators pledged that a nearly $10 billion legal settlement would quickly deliver cash to foreclosure abuse victims, hundreds of thousands of people are still checking their mailboxes each day, only to find them empty.
As of January, about 732,000 settlement checks had not been cashed, according to data shared with The Huffington Post by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — a number that exceeds the entire population of Baltimore. The total value of this unclaimed heap of money: $600 million.
Regulators say they are doing everything they can to make sure that all of those who qualify — 4.4 million people who received a foreclosure notice from one of more than a dozen major U.S. banks — receive their share of the $3.6 billion pie. It’s not clear how many of the uncashed checks were delivered to the wrong address, though regulators have acknowledged in the past that tracking people down has proved vexing.
An OCC spokesman said that Rust Consulting, the paying agent, has reissued more than 850,000 checks since autumn in an effort to make sure as many people as possible collect on what they are due.
Rust Consulting did not respond to a request for comment, but in the past has said that many of the addresses provided by the banks were old and inaccurate.
To those who are still waiting, these explanations provide little comfort.
“This is ridiculous,” said Roberta Reid, who is due a payment she reckons should be about $5,000. She said she has strived to get answers about why her check hasn’t arrived at her home in Portland, Maine, to no avail.
“I’ve called dozens of times,” she said. “It’s as bad as trying to get an answer from a bank.”
…
Who was that troll yesterday attempting to claim that prices haven’t been aligned with incomes since the 50s?
Who ya gonna believe, me or your Lyon eyes?
Yeah… That was a good one that got slapped silly right out the gate.
It was a legit question, and I was talking about the economy as a whole, not the housing world. read the post. enough trolls on the board already.
From a housing standpoint I definitely agree that median price: median income is the stat everyone should be looking at and we’re still above the nominal range.
As for the decoupling of home prices from the prices of everything else, you don’t have to look very far for evidence that home prices never previously became wildly out of line with the rest of the economy until the late 1990s. The figure depicting a time series of U.S. housing prices since 1890 in Robert Shiller’s Irrational Exuberance book shows this at a glance.
From Shiller’s web site for the book, one can access an Excel file with the data set (used and described in the book) on home prices, building costs, population and interest rates since 1890, updated. Point, click, open the file, and educate yourself!
One thing caught my eye on Shiller’s housing price graph which I hadn’t seen before, likely due to the addition of new data:
Outside the period of the rise and fall of the first Housing Bubble peak and collapse, the echo bubble price level the Fed’s Housing Bubble reflation policy recently achieved exceeds all other peak levels reached from 1890-2000.
“echo bubble” = “sucker’s rally”
Are there any highly edumacated economists who look at the ratio of median PITI: median income or is that relegated to the stupid STEMs?
It’s been changed from STEM to STEAM. Trying to include “Arts” now!
What does it matter when the P alone is 6x income?
It doesn’t. But it does matter if P is, say, 3.5x income instead of 2.5x income.
Whether the P is inflated 50% over trend or 250% over trend is a distinction without a different. You’re getting ripped off either way.
And it’s 2x annual income. NOt 2.5.
Either gov is worried about terrarists or they are hosting industrial espionage. Sort of a new red scare going on, except everybody can be eavesdropped on and have a dossier compiled permanently and easily hackable. It is interesting that google says, trust us, we will encrypt your data. And then they will have the key to decode it too?
http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/24/5340488/eric-schmidt-google-chairman-says-encryption-could-give-people-voice
Google is the biggest conspirator with the NSA! There are no morals at the top of that company at all.
Google is the biggest conspirator with the NSA!
My understanding is that they were instead the unwitting tool of the NSA—that the NSA was tapping their data-links between the datacenters, which were previously unencrypted but presumed secure (it used to be considered hard to tap fiber-optics). The fact that the NSA was tapping their links between data-centers was part of the public disclosure that came from Snowden. If Google were a co-conspirator, the NSA would have been working INSIDE the data-centers, not tapping links in between them.
There are no morals at the top of that company at all.
Supporting evidence?
Prime:
Google can tell if it’s being hacked. They have people watching that all the time. The direct-connection to their datalines was just a way of making it more efficient, so no one at Google had to spend the time or take the liability of actually handing the data over.
Google can tell if it’s being hacked.
You don’t know much about tech, apparently. When someone is tapping your fiber-optic cables somewhere in the middle, you have no way of knowing that you have been hacked. The data that is sent still arrives on the other end, undisturbed. There are no symptoms of the breach.
The only solution is to encrypt everything.
Prime:
That is not true. Fiber-optic cables are a physical device. You would observe aberrations if someone were tapping them.
“My understanding is that they were instead the unwitting tool of the NSA…”
That could be a CYA propaganda line to avoid p-o-ing their customer base. How would you know if it was?
That could be a CYA propaganda line to avoid p-o-ing their customer base. How would you know if it was?
Sure, it _could_ be a clever cover story.
Let’s just say that I know several people who work there, and they seemed legitimately _pissed_ (at least to me) when they saw the CIA post-it note (complete with smiley-face) that Snowden leaked:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html
“My understanding is that they were instead the unwitting tool of the NSA—that the NSA was tapping their data-links between the datacenters, which were previously unencrypted but presumed secure (it used to be considered hard to tap fiber-optics).”
I’ve read that most if not all of the digital traffic from Asia and the SF Bay Area are siphoned though a former pac-bell operations center in San Francisco where the government leases several floors that are loaded with remotely operated super computers running specialized sorting algorithms that quickly rank and forward suspect packets to other analytic systems.
So, you know the guys at the top, do you?
How’s the pimping gig going Pimp?
So, you know the guys at the top, do you?
I didn’t say that—and note that I also made no assertion that they do have morals.
The one who is making a claim or accusation is the one who bears the burden of providing supporting evidence.
Got this in an email from a friend:
Famous Presidential Lies
Written by To The Point News
LBJ:
We were attacked (in the Gulf of Tonkin)
Nixon:
I am not a crook
GHW Bush:
Read my lips - No new taxes
Clinton:
I did not have sex with that woman… Miss Lewinski
GW Bush:
Iraq has weapons of mass destruction
Obama:
I will have the most transparent administration in history.
The stimulus will fund shovel-ready jobs.
I am focused like a laser on creating jobs.
The IRS is not targeting anyone.
It was a spontaneous riot about a movie.
I will put an end to the type of politics that “breeds division, conflict and cynicism”.
You didn’t build that!
I will restore trust in Government.
The Cambridge cops acted stupidly.
The public will have 5 days to look at every bill that lands on my desk
It’s not my red line - it is the world’s red line.
Whistle blowers will be protected in my administration.
We got back every dime we used to rescue the banks and auto companies, with interest.
I am not spying on American citizens.
ObamaCare will be good for America
You can keep your family doctor.
Premiums will be lowered by $2500.
If you like it, you can keep your current healthcare plan
It’s just like shopping at Amazon
I knew nothing about “Fast and Furious” gun running to Mexican drug cartels
I knew nothing about IRS targeting conservative groups
I knew nothing about what happened in Benghazi
I have never seen my Uncle from Kenya who is in the country illegally and that was arrested and told to leave the country over 20 years ago
And, I have never lived with that uncle. (He finally admitted today, (12-05-2013) that he DID know his uncle and that he DID live with him.
And the biggest one of all:
“I, Barrack Hussein Obama, pledge to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.”
Nice cherry picked list there bro.
Why can’t you just admit you don’t like Obama because he is black?
Two groups of whites. Who hate each other with a passion. And one group uses people of color as shock troops against the other.
Thanks for playing!
http://www.picpaste.com/good-comrades-Wf0SnR1k.jpg
Hear, hear +100,000.
You forgot “Just tell grandma to take an aspirin”
You’re that gullible?
My comments were to jose up above.
The share of the San Diego residential market consumed by all-cash buyers has jumped to an unprecedented level north of 30% in the past couple of years. Before the first leg down of the bubble, the highest ever share of all-cash buyers was 7.9% in 2006, and it rose steadily over the following years to the current all-time high level.
I wonder what will support the market when this unprecedented infusion of hot and easy money dries up?
Besides, those aren’t really “all-cash buyers” in the traditional sense. They are institutional investors using OPM to make a fee for themselves. They are not terribly concerned with the actual value of the assets they’re buying.
“They are institutional investors using OPM to make a fee for themselves.”
The really big question is how much of the supposedly ‘all-cash’ purchases are leveraged up by ultra-low rate borrowing by the big financial institutions flooding the market with easy money. I imagine we’ll get a much better idea about this as interest rates return to normalcy.
Based on the reports I’ve seen, I think the institutions are using approximately 50% borrowed money. And those would be commercial loans.
“And those would be commercial loans.”
And those would be subject to shrinkage once the QE3 taper gets underway.
Hope and Change from the Washington Post
“Until this past week, one might have thought of the McDonnells as a family that bantered about taking the Ferrari for a joyride, the next golf outing at the club or what to engrave on the Rolex, all while enjoying a lavish spread in the Executive Mansion dining room.
But the federal indictment of former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, offers a glimpse of a family that may have been having a very different, and much more difficult, conversation around the kitchen table. The McDonnell household appears to have been in serious financial distress — in a way that many Americans should be able to identify with.
They were having trouble paying credit card bills and covering mortgage payments. They had college expenses to deal with and a wedding to plan.
“We are broke, have an unconscionable amount in credit card debt already, and this Inaugural is killing us!!,” Maureen McDonnell wrote in a December 2009 e-mail to a senior staffer.
“Kids. Asking for help,” the governor said in a February 2013 e-mail to his five children. We “need to rent the beach houses at Sandbridge more.”
Okay, so maybe the average American isn’t worrying about having to pay the mortgage on beach houses, plural. But the McDonnells were like a lot of people who tried to take advantage of the real estate boom and ended up in over their heads. Near the peak of the market, they invested in property in a Richmond suburb, at the Wintergreen resort and at Virginia Beach. Those properties had lost $600,000 in value as of the most recent assessments.
The two Virginia Beach rentals McDonnell mentioned in his e-mail were a particular source of concern. The houses “required capital infusions of up to $60,000 annually,” according to the indictment, and the McDonnells had to rely on loans from family and friends — at least until they met Star Scientific chief executive Jonnie R. Williams Sr., who offered to help them out.
It’s easier to understand why they would have accepted loans to pay the mortgage or to pay off credit card debt than why they would have said yes to the Rolex, the Oscar de la Renta dresses and the other items on the indictment’s list of property subject to forfeiture. But consider that the McDonnells were people of relatively modest means trying to adjust to life — and expectations — in the Executive Mansion on Capitol Square.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bob-and-maureen-mcdonnell-middle-class-in-the-governors-mansion/2014/01/24/930309ec-847d-11e3-9dd4-e7278db80d86_story.html
Obama Launches Chilling Purge Against Political Enemies
D’Souza & McDonnell charges part of accelerating crackdown on dissent
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Infowars.com
January 26, 2014
Throughout history every culture has had maxims in law denouncing the openly corrupt sitting in judgment. The Obama Justice Department is openly launching a night of the long knives-style purge of their political enemies that should send chills up the spine of all Americans.
This was followed on Friday with the news that Dinesh D’Souza, director of the hit 2012 documentary 2016: Obama’s America, had been arrested in New York for allegedly violating campaign finance laws for donating more than the legal limit to the campaign of Wendy Long, who ran in 2012 for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. Long’s opponent and victor in that race, Kirsten Gillibrand, is a vehement supporter of Clinton and recently declared that she was, “on the bandwagon for Hillary Clinton in 2016.”
D’Souza himself, whose donations to Long totaled just $20,000, was in the middle of producing another anti-Obama documentary entitledAmerica, which is set to be released later this year.
Matt Drudge responded to D’Souza’s arrest by tweeting that Attorney General Eric Holder was “unleashing the dogs” on Obama’s most prominent critics.
“In light of the recent events and the way the IRS has been used to stifle dissent, this arrest should send shivers down the spines of all freedom-loving Americans,” said Gerald Molen, D’Souza’s co-producer. “When American citizens begin to suspect that people are being arrested for alleged minor violations because of their vocal dissent against their elected representatives or rulers, it breeds disrespect and contempt for the law and suspicion of those officials. … If this unfortunate action against Dinesh is intended to deter the release of his upcoming film, America, that effort will fail.”
Radio host Laura Ingraham warned that the administration was, “criminalizing political dissent in the United States of America. Welcome to the Brave New World of retribution justice.” Rush Limbaugh also responded by warning that the Obama White House is “trying to criminalize as many Republicans and conservatives as they can.”
Fox News Katie Pavlich also questioned the dubious coincidence of an anti-Obama film maker being targeted by Eric Holder’s DOJ.
The political purge continued last week when conservative activist group Project Veritas announced that it was being targeted by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who recently asserted that conservatives “have no place in the state of New York”.
“We got a subpoena over the last week from the Board of Labor and they’re asking for every single financial transaction over the last three years,” O’Keefe told the Steve Malzberg Show.
“I’ll be happy to cooperate but there’s some funny business going on, especially when there’s so much corruption in the state of New York and they’re going after my organization and compelling me to give them every transaction,” added O’Keefe, lamenting that he would have to follow Sean Hannity’s in leaving New York altogether.
All three instances of conservatives being targeted in just the last week alone arrive after last year’s scandal wherein the IRS targeted conservative and Tea Party groups by scrutinizing their political themes. The IRS was also more recently accused of targeting Hollywood conservatives by demanding to know all the names of members of the Friends of Abe organization.
As Alex Jones explains in the video above, a view which is supported by the majority of respondents to the Hollywood Reporter article about D’Souza’s arrest, when compared to the crimes and corruption of Eric Holder, who has been embroiled in no less than 16 different scandals, from Fast and Furious, to Benghazi, to Solyndra, to spying on conservative reporter James Rosen, D’Souza and McDonnell’s alleged infractions pale into insignificance.
Also recall that the Obama campaign itself was responsible for violations of campaign finance laws that dwarf those alleged to have been committed by D’Souza or McDonnell.
The Obama campaign committee was hit with one of the largest ever fines handed down by the FEC when it was found to have illegally hid and improperly disclosed thousands of political donations to Obama’s 2008 presidential run totaling nearly $2 million dollars.
In addition, according to a report by the Government Accountability Institute, the Obama campaign was flooded with illegal donations from foreigners in 2012, fraudulent contributions that were policed by the campaign itself without FEC interference.
While these huge campaign finance scandals were largely glossed over by the media, comparatively paltry sums in the case of D’Souza and McDonnell have been seized upon as part of the transparent persecution of Obama’s political adversaries.
“Kids, asking for help.”
See most parents would have said “Kids, here’s the new deal”.
I suppose better late than never.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/01/26/mccain-gop-arizona-censure/4909683/
Can’t wait to hear him snap and snarl back.
How Economists and Policymakers Murdered Our Economy
Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars.com
January 26, 2014
The economy has been debilitated by the offshoring of middle class jobs for the benefit of corporate profits and by the Federal Reserve’s policy of Quantitative Easing in order to support a few oversized banks that the government protects from market discipline. Not only does QE distort bond and stock markets, it threatens the value of the dollar and has resulted in manipulation of the gold price.
When US corporations send jobs offshore, the GDP, consumer income, tax base, and careers associated with the jobs go abroad with the jobs. Corporations gain the additional profits at large costs to the economy in terms of less employment, less economic growth, reduced state, local and federal tax revenues, wider deficits, and impairments of social services.
When policymakers permitted banks to become independent of market discipline, they made the banks an unresolved burden on the economy. Authorities have provided no honest report on the condition of the banks. It remains to be seen if the Federal Reserve can create enough money to monetize enough debt to rescue the banks without collapsing the US dollar. It would have been far cheaper to let the banks fail and be reorganized.
US policymakers and their echo chamber in the economics profession have let the country down badly. They claimed that there was a “New Economy” to take the place of the “old economy” jobs that were moved offshore. As I have pointed out for a decade, US jobs statistics show no sign of the promised “New Economy.”
The same policymakers and economists who told us that “markets are self-regulating” and that the financial sector could safely be deregulated also confused jobs offshoring with free trade. Hyped “studies” were put together designed to prove that jobs offshoring was good for the US economy. It is difficult to fathom how such destructive errors could consistently be made by policymakers and economists for more than a decade. Were these mistakes or cover for a narrow and selfish agenda?
In June, 2009 happy talk appeared about “the recovery,” now 4.5 years old. As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear, “the recovery” is entirely the artifact of the understated measure of inflation used to deflate nominal GDP. By under-measuring inflation, the government can show low, but positive, rates of real GDP growth. No other indicator supports the claim of economic recovery.
John Williams writes that consumer inflation, if properly measured, is running around 9%, far above the 2% figure that is the Fed’s target and more in line with what consumers are actually experiencing. We have just had a 6.5% annual increase in the cost of a postage stamp.
The Fed’s target inflation rate is said to be low, but Simon Black points out that the result of a lifetime of 2% annual inflation is the loss of 75% of the purchasing power of the currency. He uses the cost of sending a postcard to illustrate the decline in the purchasing power of median household income today compared to 1951. That year it cost one cent to send a post card. As household income was $4,237, the household could send 423,700 postcards. Today the comparable income figure is $51,017. As it costs 34 cents to send one postcard, today’s household can only afford to send 150,050 postcards. Nominal income rose 12 times, and the cost of sending a postcard rose 34 times.
Just as the American people know that there is more inflation than is reported, they know that there is no recovery. The Gallup Poll reported this month that only 28% of Americans are satisfied with the economy.http://www.gallup.com/poll/166871/americans-satisfaction-economy-sours-2001.aspx?version=print
From hard experience, Americans have also caught on that “free trade agreements” are nothing but vehicles for moving their jobs abroad. The latest effort by the corporations to loot and defraud the public is known as the “Trans-Pacific Partnership.” “Fast-tracking” the bill allowed the corporations to write the bill in secret without congressional input. Some research shows that 90% of Americans will suffer income losses under TPP, while wealth becomes even more concentrated at the top.
TPP affects every aspect of our lives from what we eat to the Internet to the environment. According to Kevin Zeese in Alternet, “the leak of the [TPP] Intellectual Property Chapter revealed that it created a path to patent everything imaginable, including plants and animals, to turn everything into a commodity for profit.”
The secretly drafted TPP also creates authority for the executive branch to change existing US law to make the laws that were not passed in secret compatible with the secretly written trade bill. Buy American requirements and any attempt to curtail jobs offshoring would become illegal “restraints on trade.”
If the House and Senate are willing to turn over their legislative function to the executive branch, they might as well abolish themselves.
The financial media has been helping the Federal Reserve and the banks to cover up festering problems with rosy hype, but realization that there are serious unresolved problems might be spreading. Last week interest rates on 30-day T-bills turned negative. That means people were paying more for a bond than it would return at maturity. Dave Kranzler sees this as a sign of rising uncertainty about banks. Reminiscent of the Cyprus banks’ limits on withdrawals, last Friday (January 24) the BBC reported that the large UK bank HSBC is preventing customers from withdrawing cash from their accounts in excess of several thousand pounds. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25861717
If and when uncertainty spreads to the dollar, the real crisis will arrive, likely followed by high inflation, exchange controls, pension confiscations, and resurrected illegality of owning gold and silver. Capitalist greed aided and abetted by economists and policymakers will have destroyed America.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.
This article was posted: Sunday, January 26, 2014 at 6:06 am
Tags: economics
As Goonie has predicted, in a couple of generations only a small minority of Americans will live what would today be considered a middle class lifestyle. And the situation will be especially dire in portions of flyover.
Also these agreements eliminate tariffs. Japan is being coaxed by ten member nations of the upcoming TPP to eliminate all its tariffs. And at this time Japan agreed on 89% elimination.
Before the 16th amendment, most of the revenue in the USA was from tariffs. Now they are all but eliminated in favor of inflicting crime on the American people.
What TPP and NAFTA do is keep the member nations illegally taxing their own people. Taxation is illegal in that there is nothing binding a citizen to pay taxes. There is no such thing as a social contract. “Social contract” is just a “progressive” meme to ward off the necessary revolution against thugernment.
As a regular buyer of precious metals in physical form, maybe it will be nice to have a 20% correction in stocks to shake the stocks out of the weak hands of gamblers and into the hands of investors who know that as long as a species of rational animal exists, there will be growth and better products.
What product in 20 years will be the Macintosh or iPad or polio vaccine of its era? That is the question.
“What product in 20 years will be the Macintosh or iPad or polio vaccine of its era?”
Twitter
It ranks with Fire, the Wheel, Agriculture, in the evolution of humanity.
As someone who works in technology every day and is typically an early adopter of “new stuff”, I have to say, Twitter has to be the most useless technology “invention” in a very long time.
The South Park episode on this was classic, and summed up my feeling pretty well. I have no need to “text the world” anything. And I’m not sure why anyone else (who’s not a celeb) does either.
the portable fMRI lie detector
Also the portable laser hair remover I just saw on an infomercial
I think this year the haters of precious metals will hate on the stocks (while the investors yawn and continue to dollar cost average).
“dollar cost average…”
Just another way of saying “pouring money mindlessly into the stock market no matter how ridiculous the price is”.
Yup. In its blaring form that is exactly what frustrates the people who claim they can time the market. Dollar cost averaging is buying fewer shares at high prices and more shares at low prices. The “market timer” is always fooled into thinking he will buy all the stares he wants at the bottom and sell all at the top. If market timing works then all of us would have net worth in the hundreds of billions.
Returning to “buying more shares at low prices and fewer shares at high prices, this is a sure way to lower your cost basis. While it wont get you the all time bottom, if you dollar cost average over two or three decades your cost basis would very likely be under any NAV in that investment in the past ten years.
My cost basis in my Asian emerging market fund is way below what it has been for more than ten years. However I did not add a dime to it since the mid 90s.
Timing the market has become as easy as falling off a log. You don’t have to buy at the very rock bottom, or sell at the very tippy-top. As long as you’re in the range, then you will make twice as much money as a dollar-cost averager. Since we now live in a time of perpetual bubbles, the dollar-cost averager would do just as well buying government bonds at microscopic yields.
DCA works great until stocks take a 50% drive then remain stuck in the basement for two or more decades. It happened in the Japanese market in the early 1990s, as I am painfully aware, having tried to buy the dip and eventually dumping the shares. It might have worked out similarly for U.S. stock market investors in the wake of the Fall 2008 haircut, but the Fed initiated QE1 in March 2009, then QE2 and QE3, which helped support asset prices (stocks, bonds, houses, gold, etc).
The proof in the pudding will come when and if the Fed follows through on taper plans. Stay tuned!
“a sure way to lower your cost basis…”
Only if you cannot tell the difference between a low cost and a high cost. Acting like a random monkey only works when everything is going up over the long term.
“Only if you cannot tell the difference between a low cost and a high cost.”
How does one do this with stocks? Financial economists have been scratching their heads over that one forever. DCA is a strategy which admits ignorance and deals with it (except maybe not in the 20-year dip case).
Let’s not fly in the face of the mass of Financial Economists then.
The Problem With Dollar Cost Averaging
53% correction
Hope and Change by the Bay
“San Francisco condominium prices rose 18 percent in December 2013 over the previous year, according to the Condominium Pricing Index released by The Mark Company, an urban residential marketing and sales firm. Yet new construction inventory was 78 percent lower than a year before. “With so few new condominiums now for sale in San Francisco, price appreciation is likely to continue in 2014,” states Erin Kennelly, senior director of research at the Mark Company.
The Condominium Pricing Index, part of the firm’s monthly Trend Sheet represents the price per square foot of a new 10th floor, 1,000-square-foot condominium. It is based on recent sales data, and uses a proprietary quantitative method to measure trends in market demand. It tracks the value of a new construction condominium without the volatility of inventory changes. The Mark Company Penthouse Pricing Index, which applies the same methodology to a new 30th floor, 2,000-square-foot condominium, was $1,776 per square foot, up 18 percent year over year. The condominium price per square foot was $868 for resales, up 26 percent over December 2012.
http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2014/01/23/s-f-s-year-end-condo-prices-inflate-18-or-more-as-inventory-shrinks/#19759101=0&19760103=0&19761105=0
More Hope and Change by the Bay
“Google’s corporate mantra may be to do no evil, but to a determined band of activists in San Francisco the company could just be the devil incarnate.
Corporate buses that Google and other tech companies lay on to ferry their workers from the city to Silicon Valley, 30 or 40 miles to the south, are being targeted by an increasingly assertive guerrilla campaign of disruption. Over the last two months, a groundswell of discontent over the privatisation of the Bay Area’s transport system has erupted into open revolt.
Well organised protesters have blocked buses, unfurled banners and distributed flyers to tech commuters who have seemed either nonplussed, embarrassed or downright terrified. And this could be just the beginning.
“We’re in the planning process for the next protest,” one of the organisers, Erin McElroy, told the Observer. “We’re trying to stay creative with each one, not just repeat over and over.”
Just before Christmas, a window was smashed on a Google bus in Oakland, across the San Francisco Bay. Last week, protesters doorstepped a Google engineer who they claimed was involved in working with the government to develop eavesdropping techniques and “war robots” for the military. “Anthony Levandowski is building an unconscionable world of surveillance, control and automation,” they wrote on flyers left near his house. “He is also your neighbour.”
Corporate security guards have started to make a discreet appearance as the protests escalate. The core grievance is one keenly felt by almost everyone in San Francisco: the way the tech sector has pushed up housing prices in the city and made it all but unaffordable for anyone without a six-figure salary. Almost no San Francisco police officers live in the city any more, and neither do most restaurant workers or healthcare workers. The funky, family-owned shops that once defined the city are closing because owners cannot afford the business rent, never mind the rent on their housing.
The activists claim that the so-called “Google buses” are exacerbating the problem, because they are making it easier for tech workers who might otherwise live closer to their offices to live in San Francisco instead.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/25/google-bus-protest-swells-to-revolt-san-francisco
All Google has to do is send a robot from the future to get those pesky, meddling protesters.
Even More Hope and Change by the Bay
“A California multimillionaire has attracted ridicule after the Wall Street Journal published his letter comparing criticism of super-rich Americans to the Holocaust.
Venture capitalist Thomas Perkins, who is thought to be worth around $8billion, wrote to the paper from San Francisco, where a class war is currently brewing over rich tech employees who are driving up the city’s cost of living.
He opened his letter to the paper: ‘Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.’
Mr Perkins describing the hatred attracted by Google workers in San Francisco and an incident in which his former wife author Danielle Steele was branded a ’snob’ in the San Francisco Chronicle in a row over the height of her hedge.
He then added: ‘This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2545918/Criticism-super-rich-like-Holocaust-says-Silicon-Valley-billionaire-WSJ-letter-sparked-outrage.html
“…the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco …”
This person could not be more egotistical. It’s bad enough that he is pulling the same old dum comparison between the Jews and himself, in a pitiful appeal for sympathy ($8 bil, and he wants sympathy). It’s unbelievable that a person could have enough hubris to praise a city, a geographical location, as a place where thought can happen more easily than another place. And of course it happens to be the place where he is, so we can conclude that he thinks better than we do.
All praise the San Franciscans, for they are better than us.
I kind of agree with him, but he would be spot on if he equated hatred of Jews with hatred of capitalists. By definition, I am a capitalist, particularly since my investments give an annual average gain higher than my wages as a software engineer. If I could figure how to not get scammed, I would move some of my wealth to Chile and some to Hong Kong.
Alas, I will build up my precious metals and quality wine collection instead. Movable, hidable wealth.
“If I could figure out how to not get scammed …”
Those regulated free markets are starting to look real sweet, eh? Funny how anarchy doesn’t turn out to be freedom. Without controls on socially-destructive, nonproductive, class-oppressing behavior, the markets become corrupt. Just like any other system in society.
Hold on there. Many countries make a point to maintain financial privacy, as that is the selling point.
Douglas Casey recently on Kitco discussed ways to make sure your movement of wealth to, say, Panama, can be done safely.
You can buy honesty in the transactions. It’s part of the cost to escape an ever growing thugernment in the U.S. that has way overreached its proper role when it used to be a government.
Have you done a compartive analysis between the Panamian government and the US government? I’m not sure Panama has the better record.
You’re not a capitalist. You are a rentier and a hoarder. Congrats on having savings. If you feel paranoid now, don’t expect relief from that in Central America!
Hope and Change from the Most Transparent Administration in History
“The National Security Agency is involved in industrial espionage and will take intelligence regardless of its value to national security, the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has told a German television network.
In text released ahead of a lengthy interview to be broadcast on Sunday, the public broadcaster ARD TV quoted Snowden saying the NSA does not limit its espionage to issues of national security and citing the German engineering firm Siemens as one target.
“If there’s information at Siemens that’s beneficial to US national interests – even if it doesn’t have anything to do with national security – then they’ll take that information nevertheless,” Snowden said, according to ARD, which recorded the interview in Russia, where Snowden has claimed asylum.
Snowden also told the German public broadcasting network he no longer has possession of any documents or information on NSA activities and has turned everything he had over to select journalists. He said he did not have any control over the publication of the information, ARD said.
Questions about US government spying on civilians and foreign officials arose last June, when Snowden leaked documents outlining the widespread collection of telephone records and email to media outlets including the Guardian.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/26/edward-snowden-nsa-industrial-sabotage
Funny how Congress signed this act into law, without apparently reading or comprehending it, and now they’re all trying to act like they were bamboozled or something.
Who knew Obama had another “son”
The UK Guardian reports:
“Moreover, it has now been reported that police in Los Angeles now say they did not find biscuit jars filled with marijuana and empty codeine bottles in his house when they executed a search warrant on Tuesday after Bieber was accused of throwing eggs at neighbours (Bieber is said to favour a drink known as “sizzurp”, usually a mixture of Fanta and codeine-laced cough syrup.)
“The house was orderly. It didn’t look like a drug pad,” one investigator reported. “I didn’t see any empty codeine bottles. I didn’t smell weed.”
I think it more like Biden’s “son”.
Real journalists hard at work
“A national newspaper chain with nearly 100 publications and 1.6 million readers is considering building “state-by-state databases” on concealed weapons permit holders, according to an internal e-mail.
The plan, laid out in an email from a top editor at North Carolina-based Civitas Media, could be similar to a controversial project a New York state newspaper carried out in 2012 which included an online map that identified gun owners in two counties by name and address. Civitas’ database project was detailed in a Jan. 19 e-mail to newsrooms across the chain, which has papers in 11 states, including Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania.
The newest project “examines the explosion of ‘conceal and carry’ gun permits across the U.S.,” wrote Jim Lawitz, Civitas’ director of content, in an e-mail first obtained by the Buckeye Firearms Association. “Through public records act requests, we will attempt to build state-by-state databases that list those who have the right to carry a concealed weapon.”
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/01/24/newspaper-chain-seeks-to-build-state-by-state-concealed-weapon-databases/
Florida Man with Gun at Home Gets Pulled Over, Searched, ‘Humiliated’ in Maryland
by AWR Hawkins 17 Jan 2014
When Floridian concealed carry permit holder John Filippidis and his family drove through Maryland on their way to New Jersey for Christmas, he was pulled over by the Maryland Transportation Authority Police (MTAP), accused of having a gun, humiliated, and searched along with his car and family.
According to The Tampa Tribune, Filippidis normally carries a Kel-Tec semi-automatic pistol for concealed carry. But knowing the gun laws in Maryland and New Jersey, he decided to leave it at home in his safe instead of bringing with him on the trip.
Said Filippidis: “I know the laws and I know the rules, but I think it’s a better idea to leave it at home.”
While driving through Maryland, he was pulled over by a MTAP officer who asked for vehicle license and registration, then went back to the patrol car. “Ten minutes later” the officer came back to the driver’s window, asked Filippidis to exit the Ford Expedition and took him behind the vehicle to ask where his gun was.
Filippidis told the officer he left it at home in a safe.
The officer then walked up to the passenger window and asked Filippidis’ wife where the gun was, and she said: “I don’t know… Maybe in the glove [box]. Maybe in the console. I’m scared of it.”
Following this, the Tribune says the officer returned to Filippidis, called him “a liar,” then spent roughly 90 minutes searching the car for a gun that wasn’t there. This meant emptying the car of its contents—”riders, luggage, Christmas gifts, laundry bags,” and all.
After finding no gun, the officer issued Filippidis a warning and sent him on his way.
The officer’s captain and “a Maryland Transportation Authority Police internal affairs captain” have since both apologized for the incident. Filippidis has not decided yet what his next step will be.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/01/17/Florida-Gun-Owner-With-No-Gun-Pulled-Over-Searched-And-Humiliated-In-Maryland - 78k -
I’ll bet all the people without guns will probably track down and harass all the people with guns.
The irony is I think they decided to schedule the Super Bowl in the NE to make a statement on global warming. Well they have:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2545153/U-S-braces-coldest-month-century.html
The NFL wanted to make a statement re global warming?
Ok. It couldn’t have anything to do with the new stadium. Good point.
I don’t see why they don’t hold one in Denver. We get most of our snow in early Spring.
The NFL does not put the super bowl in cold weather climates and the building of numerous new stadiums did not change that, I think it was a PR stunt just like the recent attempt to reach the South Pole that has gone terribly wrong. Related point, I think the globalists had a very interesting plan of global warming that has been frustrated by the black swan (for them) of the Sun going quiet. The normal high for an interglacial period is 2 degrees Celsius higher than our present global temperature. They intended to use that to persuade the public to send hundreds of billions of dollars to the third world and fund a global government agency to “prevent” warming. They were just counting on nature to do the same thing it has done for the last half a million years. They could have then claimed that all the money had accomplished its purpose.
They intended to use that to persuade the public to send hundreds of billions of dollars to the third world and fund a global government agency to “prevent” warming.
Just to clarify they did not intend to tell people about the normal warming just use the actual warming to claim man was the primary cause of the warming . One other advantage, to the globalists, of getting Europe, the US and Japan to stop using fossil fuels is that it frees fossil fuels for the developing nations. Part of China’s slow-down is due to China running out of cheap energy. They only have 30 years reserves of coal at their present production rates, we have close to 250 years.
so the NFL is a sock puppet of the globalist…ok, got it.
“so the NFL is a sock puppet of the globalist…ok, got it.”
Close.
It’s a tool of the empire for international consumption.
so the NFL is a sock puppet of the globalist…ok, got it.
With the possible exception of the Green Bay Packers the owners of NFL teams are very rich mostly billionaires and yes most of them are globalists. Actually, you do not seem to get very much and besides being snarky, you do not seem to be able to make an argument.
I love how the folks that are crowing about the fact that the recent cold spell completely debunks climate change do not even comment about the heat waves scorching the southern hemisphere. Typical American myopia at it’s finest. 116 degrees in Buenos Aires last week. Tennis players collapsing from heat at the Australian Open. American exceptionalism in it’s absolute ugliest form! I am not going to stand here and say that this is all being caused by man, but I do beleive that man has to be contributing to this in some degree.Lets not forget the dust bowl from the 30s and how that was brought about. We humans have a long history of screwing up the planet with our folly and ignorance.We continue to be reactionary and will wait until it’s a code red before making any amends. Not really all that different to what has been done to the economic system and leaving the young people holding the tab.
Fwiw, today’s high in Fairbanks Alaska was 31 degrees. Average high temp for January there is 1 degree F.
Cherry pick much? How come we have not have global warming for almost 20 years, colder now than 1998.
Nice cherry pick yourself, cherry pickin’ daddy.
The FT Goes There: “Demand Physical Gold” As One Day Paper Price Manipulation Will End “Catastrophically”
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/25/2014 19:32 -0500
What have we done: after a series of reports in late 2012 in which we showed, with no ambiguity, that not only might the Bundesbank’s offshore held gold be severely “diluted” (follow our 2012 exposes on German gold here, here, here, and here), but that on at least one occassion, the Fed and the Bank of England conspired against the Buba in returning subpar quality gold, the Bundesbank shocked everyone in early January 2013 when it announced it would repatriate 300 tons of gold helt in New York and all of its 374 tons of gold held in Paris. But convincing the Bundebsbank to demand delivery was peanuts compared to changing the tune of the Financial Times - that bastion of fiat “money”, and where the word gold is mocked and ridiculed, and those who see the daily improprieties in the gold market as nothing but “conspiracy theorists” - to say the magic words: “Learn from Buba and demand delivery for true price of gold”, adding that “one day the ties that bind this pixelated gold may break, with potentially catastrophic results.”
In other words, precisely what we have been saying since the beginning.
Welcome to the ‘conspiracy theorist’ club, boys.
From the FT’s Neil Collins: “Learn from Buba and demand delivery for true price of gold: One day the ties that bind the actual and the traded commodity will snap:
A year ago the Bundesbank announced that it intended to repatriate 700 tons of Germany’s gold from Paris and New York. Although a couple of jumbo jets could have managed the transatlantic removal, it made security sense to ship the load in smaller consignments. Just how small, and over how long, has only just become apparent.
Last month Jens Weidmann, Bundesbank president, admitted that just 37 tons had arrived in Frankfurt. The original timescale, to complete the transfer by 2020, was leisurely enough, but at this rate it would take 20 years for a simple operation. Well, perhaps not so simple. While he awaits delivery, Herr Weidmann is welcome to come and look through the bars in the Federal Reserve’s vaults, but the question is: whose bars are they?
In the “armchair farmer” fraud you are told: “Look, this is your pig, in the sty.” It works until everyone wants physical delivery of their pig, which is why Buba’s move last year caused such a stir. After all nobody knows whether there are really 260m ounces of gold in Fort Knox, because the US government won’t let auditors inside.
The delivery problem for the Fed is a different breed of pig. The gold market is far more than exchanging paper money for precious metal. Indeed the metal seems something of a sideshow. In June last year the average volume of gold cleared in London hit 29m ounces per day. The world’s mines are producing 90m ounces per year. The traded volume was many times the cleared volume.
The paper gold in the London Bullion Market takes the familiar forms that bankers have turned into profit machines: futures, options, leveraged trades, collateralised obligations, ETFs . . . a storm of exotic instruments, each of which is carefully logged, cross-checked and audited.
Or perhaps not. High-flying traders find such backroom work tedious, and prefer to let some drone do it, just as they did with those money-market instruments that fuelled the banking crisis. The drones will have full control of the paper trail, won’t they? There’s surely no chance that the Fed’s little delivery difficulty has anything to do with the cat’s-cradle of pledges based on the gold in its vaults?
John Hathaway suspects there is. He worries about all the paper (and pixels) linked to gold. He runs the Tocqueville gold fund (the clue is in the name) and doesn’t share the near-universal gloom of London’s gold analysts, who a year ago forecast an average $1700 for 2013. It is currently $1,260.
As has been remarked here before, forecasting the price is for mugs and bugs. But one day the ties that bind this pixelated gold may break, with potentially catastrophic results. So if you fancy gold at today’s depressed price, learn from Buba and demand delivery.
So, did Buba get delivery?
“Demand Physical Gold” As One Day Paper Price Manipulation Will End “Catastrophically”
It’s happened before, though if I recall correctly, along with a law banning the ownership of physical gold.
Unfortunately the ones who’s rowboats capsized in the lakes while they rowed their gold to the other shore and turn into the bank could not turn in the gold.
The US government justice system has ruled mostly in favor of government. At some point soon, all its decisions will be pro government and anti liberty. Waco 93, Randy Weaver, and Jackboot Janet was the era of the turning point to where our government is mostly about taking away individual liberty that rightfully we own.
The U.S. government is the biggest threat, most Americans say, a bigger threat than big business and big labor. That is a very striking sentiment. Hopefully it will catch on and we will do what is necessary to bring back our individual freedoms.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/166535/record-high-say-big-government-greatest-threat.aspx
It’s a stupid question.
Gov works for the elite.
The way you can tell this is that our gov officials for the most part are millionaires not billionaires. No putin has a net worth north of 40billion. Sadam had 70 billion. Hosni Mobarek billions.
The banks the corporate elite pull the strings and the gov goes into action, figuring out how to sell a sht sandwich to Americans.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-25/gold-mint-runs-overtime-in-race-to-meet-world-coin-demand.html
It’s a buyer’s market. Fortunately for me, I have access to my favorite LA coin shop that occasionally has temporary sold out situations. Many weeks last year silver eagles were sold out.
April is a good month for me to buy more quarter ounce eagles.
November is when I start throwing platinum in the mix.
keep stacking
I just realized that I have been posting on yesterday’s Bits Bucket.
- “Mz. Craterton” is a good name for a pet.
- I started to read that thread over at CityData, but I felt like I was going to have a heart attack from the stress.
“- “Mz. Craterton” is a good name for a pet.”
Blog Mascot
I like “Hoover” for a dog name - in tune with the times and cleans the carpet like a champ.
Actually that’s his name for me. I get a lot of nicknames. Did you know that I’m a realtor whore, a debt slave, a leech, various types of donkey, and an elitist pig, all in one week? I would have ordered a t-shirt just to keep track, but the names wouldn’t all fit.
Boo hoo.
But if we name the beloved blog mascot after you (Mz. Craterton), then your name will be redeemed, and you will be vindicated.
“…realtor whore, a debt slave, a leech, various types of donkey, and an elitist pig…t-shirt…”
If anyone makes a Tee-shirt like that one, I’m interested in buying some.
Not every day I have a sphinx moth on the car. Anyone know which type?
http://picpaste.com/0a520e6e8f79352d1912f77f9a2998de.jpg
That’s a cute moth. Most of them are ugly.
Looks like the Sphinx inspired the B2 bomber design.
It’s a beaut. It looks to be wearing combat fatigues.
Summer 2014, if I can help it:
vimeo.com/82628989
Lotsa money. Gotta find a home:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/30/merrill-bond-prison-idUSL2N0K91BD20131230
Don’t forget about healthy though unemployed people who “go on disability” as a source of supplemental income.
10:58 am Jan 7, 2014
Social Security
Disability Fraud Bust Comes as Social Security Agency Is in Flux
By Damian Paletta
CONNECT
The arrest of more than 100 people on Tuesday as part of the latest fraud bust involving Social Security disability benefits comes as the agency is under growing pressure from Congress to rework the system for deciding who gets benefits and who doesn’t.
Roughly 11 million Americans collected Social Security disability benefits in 2012, with the government paying them close to $140 billion. Both figures are up sharply from prior years. The program is spending so much money that it is projected to exhaust its trust fund reserves by 2016, making it the government’s most financially insecure entitlement program.
…
Roughly 11 million Americans collected Social Security disability benefits in 2012, with the government paying them close to $140 billion.
Which averages out to $1060 a month. Can’t buy much with that.
That’s a lot of cable TV and cheese puffs.
Got Cheetos?
The real good actors in the frauds also have the handicapped placards to hang from the rear view mirrors so they can park their big cabooses within 20 feet of any shop.
Two years ago we offered $180k for a 5/2.5, they countered $220k, just closed to another family for $265k.
Late on prop taxes the while time…
They’ll be begging for mercy in 24 months at 140k.
Florida to get most relief from $2B mortgage case
December 19, 2013|
By Donna Gehrke-White,
Sun Sentinel
Floridians are expected to get the “highest principal reduction relief in the country,” after the nation’s largest non-bank mortgage loan servicer agreed to a $2.1 billion settlement to resolve misconduct allegations, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Thursday.
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2013-12-19/business/sfl-florida-highest-relief-mortgage-settlement-20131219_1_mortgage-settlement-oversight-bondi-reduction-relief - 39k -
Foreclosed homeowners to get less than $1,500
by Kim Miller
January 24th, 2014
More than 1,700 Floridians who lost their home to foreclosure will start receiving $1,480 reparation checks next week as part of the landmark National Mortgage Settlement negotiated in 2012.
Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the check distribution this afternoon, noting that the total payout is $2.5 million.
Borrowers had to apply to receive the money, and were only eligible if their homes were repossessed between 2008 and 2011 and they were clients of one of the five banks named in the settlement.
The banks include Bank of America, Ally Financial, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and Citi.
The amount of the checks and number of recipients was first announced in June of last year, but are just now making their way to homeowners.
How much borrowers received was based on how many applied for the money. Based on the number of eligible borrowers, it was initially thought just $850 would be awarded.
In Florida, about 53 percent of the 167,400 borrowers who were mailed letters applied. Nationwide, 55 percent of the more than 1.7 million borrowers applied.
But ultimately, not all borrowers met eligibility requirements, which included that the home foreclosed on was a primary residence.
Some consumer advocates have questioned the $1,480 payments, saying they are an admission of the fraud committed by the banks and do little to offset the loss of a home taken in a challengeable foreclosure.
“These checks are a joke,” said South Florida real estate attorney Roy Oppenheim last year. “If homeowners sued the banks for the fraud, forgery and perjury they committed, they could be getting more.”
This entry was posted on Friday, January 24th, 2014 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Foreclosures, Real estate bust. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Jeff, have you seriously considered “buying” and immediately stop paying? You could prob save for 2-3 years, then buy right before you get foreclosed.
My what a world we live in!
Angry birds attack peace doves released by Pope Francis
January 27, 2014 - 8:46AM
Birds attack Pope’s peace messengers
A crow and a seagull swoop to attack as Pope Francis’ peace doves are released in St Peter’s Square.
Two white doves that were released by children standing alongside Pope Francis as a peace gesture have been attacked by other birds.
As tens of thousands of people watched in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, a seagull and a large black crow swept down on the doves right after they were set free from an open window of the Apostolic Palace.
One dove lost some feathers as it broke free from the gull. But the crow pecked repeatedly at the other dove.
It was not clear what happened to the doves as they flew off.
…
This is a story made for comedians!
Or a deleted scene from Mars Attacks.
I hope they’re OK. They’ve been living in a cage I think their entire lives. Can they survive on their own?
I’ve never seen seagulls and crows working together before. Why would a seagull and a black crow, two complete strangers, just suddenly decide to attack two perfectly harmless flying doves? This is freaking me out. It has to be a setup. If not, then everyone might as well quit working and move to Colorado, ’cause the end days are nigh.
Clearly the seagull and the crow were sent by Al Qaeda.
That’s a weird-looking crow.
Here’s the kind of place I could be comfortable with if it were priced around $180k, but $375k means guaranteed losses going forward. It has decent curb appeal, and a quick scan at Google street level shows decent neighbors, no PM’s, no cars parked on the front yard and no dead cars on the street. There’s probably 4 or 5 months where the water bill for the yard is outrageous.
http://www.movoto.com/scottsdale-az/8231-e-hazelwood-st-scottsdale-az-85251-471_5056418/
Oh yuck, that thing is a hole. Why did they take a picture of the bathroom trashcan and toilet seat, and the gap between the washer and dryer? Why is the description written in all caps? What are “unexpected extra rooms”?
Grass doesn’t do well in Phoenix anyway. You’re better off with desert landscaping of some type, perhaps with some drought-tolerant trees. Actually, you’re better off just taking $200k out on your credit cards (cash advances), and setting it on fire, and just standing there staring at it, wondering about the white doves that were just attacked by other birds at the Pope’s house.
And the storage are only for “guy toys”. What if I need to store canned food and toilet paper?
I don’t even know how I ended up here, but I thought this post was good.
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) Cheers!
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