The Housing Bubble

Living in a rental will never feel like a real home.

“Get what you can get for your house today because it’s going to be less tomorrow for many years to come.”

That’s right. Housing prices are falling once again.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-13/blackstone-fueled-single-family-home-boom-lifts-chicago.html

From the article:

Chicago home prices climbed 11 percent in November from a year earlier, the biggest jump in almost a quarter century, according to S&P/Case-Shiller data. While gains are slowing across the country, the Windy City was one of nine areas in the group’s 20-city index to show a year-over-year increase in housing values.

“They flocked in the early recovery to places such as Phoenix and Las Vegas and parts of California, and Chicago and some other markets lagged behind a little bit,” said Lance Ramella, a senior vice president at John Burns Real Estate Consulting in Naperville, Illinois. “Chicago just wasn’t providing that yet and now it is.”

Institutional investors, led by companies such as Blackstone’s Invitation Homes and American Homes 4 Rent (AMH), have bought as many as 200,000 U.S. properties in the last two years, taking advantage of real estate prices that fell as much as a third from the 2006 peak, and rising demand for rentals among Americans who lost their houses in the foreclosure crisis. Their reach has stretched from the hard-hit regions of California to small Ohio towns to the sprawling suburbs of Atlanta.

Chicago trailed some other markets for attracting investor interest because Illinois is a judicial foreclosure state, meaning home repossessions require approval by a court, slowing down the process, and there were fewer opportunities to buy distressed real estate in bulk, Ramella said. Prices in other cities fell further than in Chicago, making them more appealing.

Now that values in other areas have bounced back so much, buying there isn’t as attractive and investors have turned to other areas, such as Chicago, for better pricing, Ramella said.

“They’re looking for distressed property and a lot of runway for appreciation,” Ramella said. “We’ve got a lot more room to appreciate here.”

This is NOT going to end well…

Honey, do you smell gas?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/13/usa-kentucky-explosion-idUSL2N0LI0C720140213

Pimp that natgas! Kentucky Fried! It’s cheap and crispy.

More Chinese millionaire news…

http://thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=30&art_id=142474&sid=41562685&con_type=3

Canada slams visa door

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Canada has abolished a controversial program that gave wealthy immigrant investors, many from the mainland, a fast track to citizenship.
The Immigrant Investor Program offered permanent Canadian residency in exchange for a five-year loan of C$800,000 (HK$5.64 million).
The end of the program was revealed in the 2014 federal budget unveiled by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty.
The government’s line in reaching the decision was that the program “significantly undervalued Canadian” permanent residency.
It will be replaced with a couple of new programs.
One will match skilled immigrants with labour market needs and the other with the Immigrant Investor Venture Capital Fund, which will lock arrivals into investing money rather than committing the C$800,000 to a five-year, zero-interest loan to one of Canada’s provinces.

Is the EM crisis finally over now, with blue skies and clear sailing ahead?

Are your Bitcoin holdings holding up well?

Private non-farm payrolls finally rose to just over the peak level in 2007 just before the recession. That’s about 116,000 vs a low of 107,000 at the end of 2009. Yet the percentage of the population on food stamps is still at 19%, up from 8% before the recession. Mortgage applications are at the lowest they’ve been since the bubble started to deflate.

60 million people on food stanps! By definition, too poor to provide for their own nutrition. How many technically having income above the poverty level but up to their eyeballs in debt service. We are a very fragile society.

real journalists at the washington post discuss matt drudge’s relationship with hillary clinton, note that matt drudge is not a real journalist, you should only trust journalism written by real journalists

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/02/12/matt-drudge-and-hillary-clinton-a-history/?tid=hpModule_ba0d4c2a-86a2-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394

comcast and time warner to merge in $45 billion deal

as predicted by fugazi in the song ‘five corporations’

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JoAYOBDdJMM

hope and change in a reuters piece linked from drudge

’severe pollution in beijing has made the chinese capital ‘barely suitable’ for living, according to an official chinese report, as the world’s second-largest economy tries to reduce often hazardous levels of smog caused by decades of rapid growth.

pollution is a rising concern for china’s stability-obsessed leaders, keen to douse potential unrest as affluent city dwellers turn against a growth-at-all-costs economic model that has tainted much of the country’s air, water and soil.’

Remember… The value of a house is entirely founded on input costs. And current asking prices of resale housing are 200%+ higher than input costs(lot, labor, materials and profit).

have people finally figure out that saving money in a bank at .01% interest is not very smart? Do they finally get the FEDS mandate of manipulating asset prices to jump start the economy?

Europe Considers Wholesale Savings Confiscation, Enforced Redistribution

Zero Hedge
February 13, 2014

At first we thought Reuters had been punk’d in its article titled “EU executive sees personal savings used to plug long-term financing gap” which disclosed the latest leaked proposal by the European Commission, but after several hours without a retraction, we realized that the story is sadly true.

Sadly, because everything that we warned about in “There May Be Only Painful Ways Out Of The Crisis” back in September of 2011, and everything that the depositors and citizens of Cyprus had to live through, seems on the verge of going continental. In a nutshell, and in Reuters’ own words, “the savings of the European Union’s 500 million citizens could be used to fund long-term investments to boost the economy and help plug the gap left by banks since the financial crisis, an EU document says.” What is left unsaid is that the “usage” will be on a purely involuntary basis, at the discretion of the “union”, and can thus best be described as confiscation.

The source of this stunner is a document seen be Reuters, which describes how the EU is looking for ways to “wean” the 28-country bloc from its heavy reliance on bank financing and find other means of funding small companies, infrastructure projects and other investment. So as Europe finally admits that the ECB has failed to unclog its broken monetary pipelines for the past five years – something we highlight every month (most recently in No Waking From Draghi’s Monetary Nightmare: Eurozone Credit Creation Tumbles To New All Time Low), the commissions report finally admits that “the economic and financial crisis has impaired the ability of the financial sector to channel funds to the real economy, in particular long-term investment.”

The solution? “The Commission will ask the bloc’s insurance watchdog in the second half of this year for advice on a possible draft law “to mobilize more personal pension savings for long-term financing”, the document said.”

Mobilize, once again, is a more palatable word than, say, confiscate.

And yet this is precisely what Europe is contemplating:

Banks have complained they are hindered from lending to the economy by post-crisis rules forcing them to hold much larger safety cushions of capital and liquidity.

The document said the “appropriateness” of the EU capital and liquidity rules for long-term financing will be reviewed over the next two years, a process likely to be scrutinized in the United States and elsewhere to head off any risk of EU banks gaining an unfair advantage.

But wait: there’s more!

Inspired by the recently introduced “no risk, guaranteed return” collectivized savings instrument in the US better known as MyRA, Europe will also complete a study by the end of this year on thefeasibility of introducing an EU savings account, open to individuals whose funds could be pooled and invested in small companies.

Because when corporations refuse to invest money in Capex, who will invest? Why you, dear Europeans. Whether you like it or not.

But wait, there is still more!

Additionally, Europe is seeking to restore the primary reason why Europe’s banks are as insolvent as they are: securitizations, which the persuasive salesmen and sexy saleswomen of Goldman et al sold to idiot European bankers, who in turn invested the money or widows and orphans only to see all of it disappear.

It is also seeking to revive the securitization market, which pools loans like mortgages into bonds that banks can sell to raise funding for themselves or companies. The market was tarnished by the financial crisis when bonds linked to U.S. home loans began defaulting in 2007, sparking the broader global markets meltdown over the ensuing two years.

The document says the Commission will “take into account possible future increases in the liquidity of a number of securitization products” when it comes to finalizing a new rule on what assets banks can place in their new liquidity buffers. This signals a possible loosening of the definition of eligible assets from the bloc’s banking watchdog.

Because there is nothing quite like securitizing feta cheese-backed securities and selling it to a whole new batch of widows and orphans.

And topping it all off is a proposal to address a global change in accounting principles that will make sure that an accurate representation of any bank’s balance sheet becomes a distant memory:

More controversially, the Commission will consider whether the use of fair value or pricing assets at the going rate in a new globally agreed accounting rule “is appropriate, in particular regarding long-term investing business models”.

To summarize: forced savings “mobilization”, the introduction of a collective and involuntary CapEx funding “savings” account, the return and expansion of securitization, and finally, tying it all together, is a change to accounting rules that will make the entire inevitable catastrophe smells like roses until it all comes crashing down.

So, aside from all this, Europe is “fixed.”

The only remaining question is: why leak this now? Perhaps it’s simply because the reallocation of “cash on the savings account sidelines” in the aftermath of the Cyprus deposit confiscation, into risk assets was not foreceful enough? What better way to give it a much needed boost than to leak that everyone’s cash savings are suddenly fair game in Europe’s next great wealth redistribution strategy.

This article was posted: Thursday, February 13, 2014 at 5:44 am

Tags: economics, foreign affairs

Alexandria, VA(DC area) Housing Prices Dive 16% Y-o-Y

http://www.movoto.com/alexandria-va/market-trends/

Speaking of the 1%er pigmen, here Bloomberg reports on Manhattan. Article notes that for residences listed for more than $20 million last year, the average asking price per square foot was $4,977.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-13/manhattan-trophy-home-sellers-test-buyer-limits-on-price.html

Realtor Scams Bank Netting $17 Million and 6 Years in Prison

http://www.winknews.com/Local-Florida/2014-01-07/Cape-realtor-who-defrauded-investors-will-learn-his-fate

Phony scandals posted an article about Justice Clarence Thomas’ comments that Northeastern liberals are racist.

Here real journalists correct the narrative on racism

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/opinion/blow-thomas-speaks-blindly-about-race.html?hpw&rref=opinion

Clarence Thomas is not a real journalist. Only real journalists who have been cleared by the Media / Academia Race Hustlers Industrial Complex are authorized to talk about racism.

Damn polar vortex balled up retail sales!

Feb. 13, 2014, 9:52 a.m. EST
Sales at U.S. retailers sink in January
Business slow at most stores; December sales also weaker
By Jeffry Bartash, MarketWatch

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Sales at U.S. retailers fell sharply in January and December turned out to be worse than initially reported, offering more evidence the economy may have softened toward the end of the year.

Sales dropped a seasonally adjusted 0.4% last month, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Economists polled by MarketWatch had expected a 0.1% decline.

Unusually cold and snowy weather in January appeared to dim the desire of Americans to shop, but the weak retail report also suggested that poor conditions were not the only thing holding consumers back. One example: Sales at Internet stores, which should not be affected by the weather, fell 0.6% in January.

What’s more, sales in December and November were both revised lower. December’s originally reported 0.2% increase was cut to an outright decline of 0.1%.

U.S. stock futures (ESM4 -0.35%) were notably lower after the retail data, as well as a separate report showing an 8,000 increase in initial jobless claims.
…

Article for Downlow Joe discusses gay conversion therapy and the Ex-Gay movement:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/opinion/ending-gay-conversion-for-good.html?_r=0&referrer=

PEs to Consider:

Amazon: AMZN : The PE of Amazon is 592, Valuation is $160 Billion
Linked In: LNKD : PE of Linked In is 837, Valuation is $23 Billion
Facebook : FB: Facebook PE is 106, Valuation is $165 Billion
Priceline : PCLN : PE of Priceline is 36, Valuation is $64 Billion
Hertz : HTZ: PE of Hertz is 37, Valuation is $12 Billion
Starbucks : SBUX : PE of Starbucks is 483, Valuation is $57 Billion
Boston Beer (Samuel Adams) : SAM : PE of Boston Beer is 43, Valuation is $3 Billion

The irony is the corrupt press has never been happier…

—————

Finland No. 1, US sinks to 46th in global press freedom rankings
Yahoo | Feb. 12, 2014

The U.S. plummeted 13 slots to 46th overall “amid increased efforts to track down whistle-blowers and the sources of leaks,” Reporters Without Borders warned in an annual report.

Here, in order of rank, starting with No. 1 Finland: Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Denmark, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, Estonia, Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, Jamaica, Canada, Poland, Slovakia, Costa Rica, Namibia, Belgium, Cape Verde, Cyprus, Uruguay, Ghana, Australia, Belize, Portugal, Suriname, Lithuania, Britain, Slovenia, Spain, Antigua and Barbuda, Latvia, El Salvador, France, Samoa, Botswana, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, Papua New Guinea and Romania.

How to move to Socialism 101:

1. The government creates a crisis through over-regulation
2. The government blames the private sector for the crisis
3. A large segment of the population — the lazy and unproductive who are looking for something for nothing — agree with the government
4. The government then takes over more and more of the economy.

——————————

Argentina’s Fernandez slams supermarkets for ‘price speculation’
Reuters | 2/12/14

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez criticized supermarket chains and said they could face consequences for what she claimed was price speculation on basic products, as the government tries to keep a lid on inflation.

Fernandez said consumers had denounced supermarkets for not complying with a recent voluntary agreement between the government and food suppliers to contain the price of goods including beef, sugar and yerba mate tea.

“We are going to take all the measures that we have to,” said Fernandez in a speech at the presidential palace broadcast on television on Wednesday.

I signed up for LinkedIn but have never really been on it. All those PEs are horrible but the media ones are the worse. How can FB continue to grow rapidly now that it has lost its cool status? Are the barriers to entry for possible competition to these companies high enough to justify these PEs. I do not think so, but people can make money off the bigger fool for quite a while.

I did a first pass at the taxes with the H&R Block software last night. One thing I noticed on the W2 is that it now shows how much the company paid towards the health insurance. In our case it was almost a whopping $18,000. Which is more than a full time minimum wage income.

What is especially interesting is that this coverage is not considered “Cadillac”. It would have to cost $27,500 to meet that definition.

So what kind of coverage did those $400 a month family plans actually offer?

The whole thing can be found at China Mining but the key parts:

Reuters)
Updated: 2014-02-12 13:51
Counter:44

A high-yield investment product backed by a loan to a debt-ridden coal company failed to repay investors when it matured last Friday, state media reported on Wednesday, in the latest sign of financial stress in China’s shadow bank sector.

The product, which raised 289 million yuan ($47.7 million) from wealthy clients of China Construction Bank (CCB) , China’s second-largest lender, was created by Jilin Province Trust Co Ltd and backed by a loan to a coal company, Shanxi Lianmeng Energy Co Ltd.

“It matured on Feb. 7, but CCB passed on an announcement from Jilin Trust saying ‘We currently can’t be certain when (Lianmeng) funds will be returned,’” the official Shanghai Securities News quoted an unnamed investor in the trust product as saying.

Though the maturity date has already passed, producing a technical default, Jilin Trust appears to be working to recover investor funds.

“Restructuring isn’t bankruptcy. As far as we know, there is no problem with the firm’s assets. The firm is in negotiations with investors,” the paper quoted an unnamed Jilin Trust official as saying.

Jilin did not immediately respond to requests seeking comment on Tuesday morning.

Chinese markets were on edge last month when a similar product created by China Credit Trust Co Ltd warned investors that it might not pay off on time when it matured on Jan. 31. That product was also based on a loan to an indebted coal producer in Shanxi.

In the end, however, investors in China Credit Trust’s “Credit Equals Gold” product recovered their principal when an unnamed investor stepped in to purchase collateral assets.. In this case, default has already occurred, the paper said.

The popularity of investment trusts and other so-called wealth management products has exploded in recent years, with banks and trust firms marketing them as a high-yielding alternative to traditional bank deposits.

“A report made by a vindictive ex-wife that Witaschek kept firearms in his home led to two searches of his home.”

Gun owners beware: DC man faces jail for having empty shotgun shell

January 23, 2014
by Michael Dorstewitz

A successful Washington, D.C. businessman with a spotless criminal record is preparing to go to trial for possessing a single, misfired and inoperable shotgun shell in his own home.

When Mark Witaschek isn’t working as a financial adviser, he enjoys hunting. Unfortunately for him, he also lives in a city with gun control laws so draconian, possessing an empty shell casing is punishable by one-year incarceration and a $1,000 fine, according to The Washington Times.

His firearms are kept at his sister’s house in Virginia. The shotgun shell he kept at home as a keepsake — something to remind him of an incident that occurred during a hunting trip.

A report made by a vindictive ex-wife that Witaschek kept firearms in his home led to two searches of his home. The first yielded live ammunition — a felony subject to the same two-year sentence as for possession of an illegal firearm. But it was conducted without a warrant and thrown out by the judge.

The Washington Metropolitan Police was smarter the second time out, and arrested him on the basis of the misfired shotgun shell and a pack of sabots — sleeves having no propellant that are wrapped over a projectile before it’s rammed into a muzzleloading gun.

Gun owners beware: Man pulled over, harassed for having permit but no gun

Several plea offers have been made by the prosecutor and rejected by Witaschek. He rightfully feels as though he’s done nothing wrong. So he and his lawyers are preparing for a costly trial — costly to him and costly to the taxpayers.

The Washington Times notes an equally outrageous set of circumstances connected to the case:

A year ago this month, the attorney general for the District of Columbia let NBC News anchor David Gregory off scot-free for possession of a “high capacity” magazine because doing so “would not promote public safety.”

Now, Irvin Nathan refuses to use that same prosecutorial discretion for an average citizen who violated a bizarre technicality that makes empty casings and shells a crime as serious as having an illegal firearm.

“Since the night my home was invaded and family terrorized by a militarized D.C. police force, I am more afraid of what government is doing than I am of any of the people I encountered when I spent the night in jail,” Witaschek told The Times. “The Second Amendment was meant to guarantee individuals the right to protect themselves against government — as much as against private bad guys and gangs.”

The problem with “gotcha” gun control laws like those in Washington, is that rather than focusing on the criminal, they’re designed to make criminals out of law abiding citizens like Witaschek. That’s not justice — it’s stupidity.

http://www.bizpacreview.com/2014/01/23/gun-owners-beware-dc-man-faces-jail-for-having-empty-shotgun-shell-96062 - 106k -

I was just reading an article on financial regulation. The author identifies two general approaches - rule-based and general principle-based.

I think a combination of the two are the way to go. And the over-arching general principle should be: “STOP FINANCIAL POLLUTION.”

Financial pollution is costs imposed on those outside the transaction. Just like regular pollution, when a factory dumps effluent in the river.

The financial sector likes to portray itself as gunslinging risk takers, but they only do it with other people’s money and if there is a big enough crisis, their bought politicians and the central bank bail them out. Very much a “Heads I win, Tails you lose” proposition created by captured legislators.

So, to stop that financial pollution, there should be a focus on limiting the consequences of a financial transaction to just the participants, not imposing the cost on those outside the transaction. That should be IMO, the guiding principle behind financial regulation.

“ANOTHER reason why bubbles inflate is that there is little reward for not taking part. When the bubbles burst, central banks slash interest rates to bail out borrowers. But in so doing, they penalise savers who had kept their money in cash and avoided the bubble assets. In theory, the prudent could benefit because they could buy assets at rock-bottom prices (as Warren Buffett did in 1973-74). But governments also step in to prop up asset prices (in housing, for example) so the great bargains don’t appear.

….

There really is no reason other than political pressure for the Fed to take us from bubble to bubble by cutting interest rates to near zero and flooding the market with liquidity. Ironically, the lesson friom the Great Depression - that letting the banks go under is not a good idea - has been so well absorbed by the Fed that it is played for a patsy by the banks.”

http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2010/06/saving_prudence_and_economics

Ya gotta laugh….. Now that prices started down again, the realtrolls are coming out of the woodwork…. just like in 2007.

It’s time to go back to your stock in trade whatever it might be… tending bar, waiting tables, etc.

The Yellen saga is just beginning.

As is typical with women, she’s taking the middle, consensus, road by tapering — which means the Fed is STILL injecting money directly through its spigot to the Primary Dealers and rest of the ‘top feeders.’

She will be judged on whether she reverses the taper. Ben did so twice.

If she stays steady on her course, the markets might actually muddle through 2014.

I expect disruptions from:

1) Puerto Rico — it’s issued more ‘municipals’ than Manilanders can imagine.

It pimped many for the dons of Wall Street.

Most Americans are not aware that PR bonds are/ have been DOUBLE tax exempt. This means that they sell very well to residents of NY, MA, RI, ME, etc. Many take the form of ‘sheathed’ corporate bonds. That is, they are actually backed by corporate enterprises. PR has over flowed with such ‘Revenue Bonds.’

Airport development bonds are a classic example of a Revenue Bond. The indenture will specify that the issuing government does NOT stand at risk for payment: only landing fees and duty free shop revenues are pledged.

A default by PR — which is really a junk bond issuing entity — should be the leading edge of wide spread municipal defaults.

I note that most stock market investors refuse to watch the junk bond market. The somnolent propaganda networks omit any talking-head action where they are concerned.

Somnolent propaganda: “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. Move along.”

It’s the absolute inverse of agitprop. It’s to keep the proles with the flock: Baaa, baaa.

2) Overseas financial fiascos. Japan, Red China, Europe, Turkey, Venezuela … it’s a competition to see who can take their nation totally over the cliff.

It’s what you’d expect when you put Wile E. Coyote in charge. In the case at hand, he’s been cloned.

3) A cash flow crisis within the American Medical-Pharma-Insurance Cartel. Fundamentally, the cash is not flowing. The Insurance Cartel is freaking out over liquidity issues: retail defaults are a rash all over the nation. This reality is suppressed.

The Insurance Cartel is trying to force price rollbacks down onto the Medical Cartel. These are epic in scope. Because they are line-by-line price rollbacks, the specifics overwhelm public analysis and discussion. The Medical Cartel has as many price points / craft services as Walmart. We’re talking terrabytes of database detail.

As you might imagine, both Cartels love that grit. Like two lawyers in a small burg, they feed on it. Vast armies of paper chasers push the digits to and fro. This overhead is then passed on to the nation at large.

My dentist used to have but ONE office employee. That was thirty-years ago. Now every dentist in town has a staff chasing payment. A hefty percentage of dental charges are no longer going to him/ her — just to pushing bits.

4) Some hostile power is engaging in “Telefon” with our power grid. If it were to be as disrupted as Japan’s, the follow on impacts would be epic.

Let’s start with food: America is THE global exporter of food. Electric power is used at every step of the way. Foodstuffs can’t even make it onto the ship if the grid is down. Grain elevators are not wired like the Pentagon or your city hospital. It’s regular juice — or nothing.

That’d be bad news for the Ummah. The desert nations are, by far, the main market for food exports. Adverse price moves would re-birth the Arab Spring.

On present trends, the only thing that’s going to hold down Ummah food demand is a population collapse — the hard way. (Somalia, writ large.)

Globalization is leaving the Ummah behind. From Turkey to Kazakhstan, they’re living the nightmare.

I can see Yellen flip-flopping entirely if any of these nasty events unfolds.

She is also a top tier regulator of the American banking system — by statute. I await some attempt to rein in the pervasive corruption of the mega-banks. As it stands, the sociopaths are running the tables.

“The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state controlled police and the military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an ‘equalizer.’ Egalite implies liberte. And always will. Let us hope our weapons are never needed - but do not forget what the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny… If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government - and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws.”

- Edward Abbey
in his book, Abbey’s Road (1979)
“The Right to Arms” p. 132

California Foreclosure Starts Skyrocket 57% Year over Year

http://www.realtytrac.com/images/reportimages/california_foreclosure_starts.jpg

Homeland Security to Activate ‘National License Plate Recognition Database’

UK version of spy system was used to target political activists

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
February 13, 2014

The Department of Homeland Security is set to activate a national license plate tracking system that will be shared with law enforcement, allowing DHS officers to take photos of any license plate using their smartphone and upload it to a database which will include a “hot list” of “target vehicles”.

The details are included in a PDF attachment uploaded yesterday to the Federal Business Opportunities website under a solicitation entitled “National License Plate Recognition Database.”

The system will “track vehicle license plate numbers that pass through cameras or are voluntarily entered into the system from a variety of sources (access control systems, asset recovery specialists, etc.) and uploaded to share with law enforcement” in order to help locate “criminal aliens and absconders.”

In other countries that have activated license plate tracking networks, such as the United Kingdom, political activists have been targeted by having their vehicles added to a “hotlist” after attending protests. One example led to a man being questioned under anti-terror laws after he traveled to take part in an anti-war demonstration.

As the image above illustrates, the cameras are also used by local governments in Australia to keep records of people who violate parking restrictions. Critics of the system in Australia have condemned it as “a Pandora’s box for abuse of power, mistakes and illegal disclosure,” stressing that the technology allows authorities to record “your number plate at a certain time and location,” allowing police to “compile an extraordinary amount of data about you. This includes your name, address, contact details, driving history and licence status.”

“Innocent people are increasingly being treated with suspicion due to the tiny chance that some offence may be committed,” writes David Jancik.

The DHS’ database will allow authorities “to determine where and when the vehicle has traveled,” using data compiled “from a variety of sources nationwide,” including “metropolitan areas” within the United States, suggesting the system may be linked in with regular surveillance cameras as it is in the UK.

The system will also allow DHS officials to take a picture of any license plate via their smartphone, upload it to the database and immediately receive an alert if the plate is on the watchlist.

“The NLPR data service should provide details on clarity of photos provided. The Government would prefer a close-up of the plate and a zoomed out image of the vehicle,” states the solicitation.

The system must also have the capability to “flag license plates and conduct searches anonymously so that other law enforcement agencies may not have access.”

Given rampant concerns that the Department of Homeland Security, which is ostensibly introducing this system in the name of catching illegal aliens, is in fact an increasingly bloated federal bureaucracy designed to target the American people, the notion of the DHS enjoying access to a fully integrated nationwide license plate tracking grid is chilling, especially given the fact that the agency has funded reports which characterize “liberty lovers” as potential terrorists.

The DHS also recently awarded the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority $7 million dollars to outfit its buses with high tech 360 degree surveillance cameras. The federal agency is simultaneously supporting the rollout of ‘Intellistreets’ lighting systems that double as surveillance hubs which can record conversations.

“Do not kid yourself. This is tracking of an individual that can be accessed at a whim,” writes James Smith. “Yearly, officers are terminated for accessing the LEDS/NCIC database for looking into the histories of ex-lovers, future spouses, and potential sons/daughters-in-law. And with license plate tracking toy (not a tool), they will know where you are, as long as you have driven into the cross hairs of this new weapon for tyranny.”

Magic number figure for me - cross another $100,000 boundary - this time the part of my portfolio that is outside stocks and stock mutual funds. By that I mean government securities, physical precious metals and cash.

If the stock market gets a 70% cut I will still have a net worth of $1 million.

Diversification is king.

And I did post a few times in 2013 that gold has precedence in going opposite of the stock market indexes. The last five weeks have proven this to be the case. Hence why my assets outside of stocks have gone up.

The even nicer thing is to have as extra two gold ETFs and a small gold mine company stock. Currently short term investments and up 17.66%.

Adding insurance against a stock market collapse is showing up as a good strategy - before the collapse. Remember we had 59 months of a bull market in stocks. Very rare. These bull markets don’t last forever without a big crash. And big crashes in gold stocks don’t happen without huge runups the next year or two.