The Housing Bubble

and congress goes home leaving millions with no unemployment benefits…

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/realestate/new-yorks-multimillion-dollar-condo-market-booms.html

high home price means higher political donations from the financial community.

I think a very interesting story is what the metadata for this blog could tell when compared to housing prices and the change thereof. Number of screen names from the same IP address. Number of IP addresses of posts going back to Stealtor sites. Number of posts by obvious shills/Stealtors indicating more time sitting at empty open houses or at desks with no phone ringing.

I see an ad today from CVS or somewhere showing a can of white albacore tuna for 99 cents, limit 10. That’s a heck of a deal. I think I was paying triple that 20 years ago, same size can. What with all the talk of inflation in food prices, I think a careful shopper could eat quite well and healthy cheaper than ever these days.

All this food desert stuff is nonsense. Poor white, black, and Chinese cuisine is now served as gourmet in some places. And it’s damn good.

Officials blast ICE for dumping overflow of illegal immigrants — including kids — at bus stations

Scores of illegal immigrants, caught by authorities in Texas trying to sneak into the country via the Rio Grande Valley, are being flown, bused and then abandoned out of state in places like Arizona, New York and Maryland.

If the immigrants had been from Mexico, authorities would release them back across the border. But these would-be immigrants come from Central American countries, such as El Salvador and Guatemala, and trying to get them back to their country of origin has been a costly and largely unsuccessful endeavor.

Multiple media outlets have reported horrific stories from border districts on youngsters, ranging from toddlers to teens, being raped and murdered on their way to the U.S. border.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/05/31/officials-under-fire-for-dumping-illegal-immigrants-in-us/?intcmp=latestnews

This is a truly tragic story that’s been made appalling by ICE. How can they just dump them off in Phoenix? It was 105 yesterday!!! Why not dump them off in Flagstaff instead.

Yep, this country is a mere shadow of its former self. Last night, we had our fr dr slider opened to cool off our bedroom and it sounded like Mexico out there, with all the conflicting Mariachi music and Ranchera music. A culture’s music reflects it’s people and last night was telling. Give me Samba and Tango Music instead. Flash Back- Gomez and Morticia doing the Tango…lol

Phoenix housing market officially “weak and declining”:

http://www.freddiemac.com/mimi/metro.html

When does it potentially make sense to invest your life savings in a home purchase?

1. When homes are not historically overvalued.

2. When you have no self-discipline to invest your savings in a diversified portfolio, so that the forced savings of a monthly mortgage payment is your only viable option.

3. When you don’t expect to have to relocate for a very long time.

I posted on another blog about house prices in a neighborhood. The topic was appropriate and I said I bought up stock index funds instead of obligate my money in a single family house.

Got this reply:

‘You’re 55 and you don’t a piece of “the American Dream”? Why not? You worked all your life and have nothing to show for it?’

I said:
“My not owning should not make you upset or should it? I’ll just say I am debt free and I really enjoy low maintenance - my mix of assets returns more than my income at my job. The portion in bonds pays all my rent so why should I be a slave to my possessions?”

I love to point out to the general public that their memes they have been taught are not necessarily good choices: SFH-moanership, expensive cars that fall apart every 8 years and must be replaced by other expensive cars, having 3 or 4 brats, one of which could turn into an Edgar Rodger, getting married so that you can give away half your wealth to someone who you became a stranger…

Crisis actors rock

“came back with a no-knock warrant”

SWAT team throws a stun grenade into a toddler’s CRIB during drugs raid leaving him in a coma with severe burns

By Helen Pow
Published: 17:55 EST, 29 May 2014 |

A family is in shock after a SWAT team threw a stun grenade into their 19-month-old son’s crib during a midnight drugs raid, leaving the baby in a medically induced coma with severe burns.

Wisconsin mother Alecia Phonesavanh, her husband, Bounkham, and their children including toddler, Bou Jr., were visiting her sister-in-law in Atlanta, Georgia, when police raided the home early Wednesday.

Phonesavanh said officers threw a stun grenade, which landed in the sleeping child’s crib.

‘It landed in his playpen and exploded on his pillow right in his face,’ the distraught mother told WSBTV. ‘It’s my baby. He’s only a baby. He didn’t deserve any of this.’

Deputies said they bought drugs from the house and came back with a no-knock warrant to arrest a man known to have drugs and weapons, WSB reported. They arrested Wanis Thometheva, 30, during the raid.

Darby told WSBTV that the entire police unit is upset over the incident, which was an accident.

It’s not clear if any drugs were found in the home during the raid

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/…enade-toddlers-CRIB-drugs-raid-leaving-coma-severe-burns.html -

U.S. Gasoline Consumption Plummets By Nearly 75%

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=a103600001&f=m

He called the housing crash. What’s next?
By Jonathan Horn
6 a.m. May 30, 2014

Rich Toscano, a partner at Pacific Capital Associates, who runs the blog Piggington’s Econo-Almanac. Rich Toscano, a partner at Pacific Capital Associates, who runs the blog Piggington’s Econo-Almanac. — Sean M. Haffey

In November 2005, when San Diego County home prices were riding a record high, Rich Toscano penned two ominous blog posts.

The first was called “Risks of a Serious Home Price Decline.” A few hours later, he posted “Evidence of a Southern California Housing Bubble” on his site, Piggington.com.

At the time, real-estate tracker DataQuick reported that the median price for a home in the county was $517,500. It was a price only 9 percent of income earners could afford using a 20 percent down payment, according to the California Association of Realtors. But that didn’t stop almost anyone from buying a home, hence the risk, Toscano noted online.

“People are getting around the low affordability by making very small down payments and getting ‘creative’ loans whose monthly payments start quite low but increase over time,” said Toscano in his first ominous post that November day. “While this ‘buy now, pay later’ strategy has worked well thus far, it has rendered the Southern California market unusually vulnerable to rising interest rates or tighter lending standards.”

Toscano, who began warning of a bubble in 2004, was met with skepticism. After all, he was a computer scientist by trade who simply found the numbers fascinating. By January 2009, the median price was down to $280,000, completing the collapse of the housing market in the Great Recession. That also happens to be the time Toscano bought his house in Bay Park, timing he attributes simply to luck.

The U-T caught up with Toscano, who now works as a financial adviser, to talk about the real estate market, past and present. His answers have been edited for length.

Q: What do you recall about the time you wrote those blog posts warning of a bubble?

A: There were definitely other people thinking it. Not very many. My memory of it is most people thought it was not a bubble and had absolutely no compunction telling me so, in colorful terms. But there was kind of a smallish fringe group of people who kind of were on the page of, ‘this is a bubble.’ It definitely was not the popular viewpoint.

Q: When the housing market crashed, it hurt a lot of people and was bad for the economy. Putting that aside, how did you feel about your personal vindication on your prediction?

A: There were a lot of nice people that got hurt doing what they were told to do by their financial adviser. They were just doing what they thought was the right, responsible thing and they ended up in hardship.

I wasn’t like dancing around. There were a lot of jerks that told me what an idiot I was. I put a lot of work in trying to figure this out. There was definitely an element of satisfaction but also awareness that well it’s kind of a bummer what entailed.

Q: We’ve had some major appreciation in the county recently, raising some speculation of another bubble. Do you think we’re in another one?
…

San Diegans owe millions on property tax
By Jonathan Horn
8:06 a.m. May 28, 2014

The newly built County Waterfront Park next to the County Administration Building Downtown. This park is 16 acres in size and features a number of fountains, children’s play areas, small food court, and large grassy areas. The newly built County Waterfront Park next to the County Administration Building Downtown. This park is 16 acres in size and features a number of fountains, children’s play areas, small food court, and large grassy areas. — Sean M. Haffey

Tens of thousands of San Diego County property owners are collectively late on more than $88 million in property taxes, the county treasurer-tax collector announced Tuesday.

The county this week is mailing out delinquency reminder notices to 37,887 property owners, a 10.2 percent drop from last year. If those people don’t pay their property taxes by June 30, they’ll face a 1.5 percent penalty per month added to their bill. That’s on top of a 10 percent late fee.

In September, the county treasurer-tax collector mailed out tax bills to 981,829 property owners, expected to generate $4.8 billion. Payments were due in two installments, the first on Nov. 1. For the first installment, taxpayers had a grace period that lasted until Dec. 10, at which time the first installment became delinquent and a 10 percent late penalty was assessed.

The second installment was due Feb. 1. Again, taxpayers had a grace period until April 10, at which time the bill became delinquent and an additional 10 percent charge was assessed.

If the bills are not paid in full by June 30, taxpayers will be assessed a monthly 1.5 percent charge. (After five years of unpaid property taxes, the county can auction off a property.)

In total, San Diegans owe $88,058,906 in property taxes for the 2013-14 tax year, which ends June 30.
…

14er mt democrat as seen from where loanowners don’t get to go:

http://www.picpaste.com/IMG_20140531_154839_860-chXOfklX.jpg

going off grid for a while, c y’all later

The population increase Ponzi run has gone into reverse!

Economic Fears Spread As Birth Rates Continue To Drop Worldwide
May 7, 2014 12:57 PM
File photo of newborn children in a nursery.
(Photo by DESHAKALYAN CHOWDHURY/AFP/Getty Images)

The financial crisis that followed the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008 did more than wipe out billions in wealth and millions of jobs. It also sent birth rates tumbling around the world as couples found themselves too short of money or too fearful about their finances to have children. Six years later, birth rates haven’t bounced back. (Photo by DESHAKALYAN CHOWDHURY/AFP/Getty Images)

NEW YORK (AP) — Nancy Strumwasser, a high school teacher from Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, always thought she’d have two children. But the layoffs that swept over the U.S. economy around the time her son was born six years ago helped change her mind. Though she and her husband, a market researcher, managed to keep their jobs, she fears they won’t be so fortunate next time.

“After we had a kid in 2009, I thought, ‘This is not happening again,’” says Strumwasser, 41, adding, “I never really felt comfortable about jobs, how solid they can be.”

The financial crisis that followed the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008 did more than wipe out billions in wealth and millions of jobs. It also sent birth rates tumbling around the world as couples found themselves too short of money or too fearful about their finances to have children. Six years later, birth rates haven’t bounced back.

For an overcrowded planet, this is good news. For the economy, not so good.

We tend to think economic growth comes from working harder and smarter. But economists attribute up to a third of it to more people joining the workforce each year than leaving it. The result is more producing, earning and spending.

Now this secret fuel of the economy, rarely missing and little noticed, is running out.

“For the first time since World War II, we’re no longer getting a tailwind,” says Russ Koesterich, chief investment strategist at Blackrock, the world’s largest money manager. “You’re going to create fewer jobs. … All else equal, wage growth will be slower.”

Births are falling in China, Japan, the United States, Germany, Italy and nearly all other European countries. Studies have shown that births drop when unemployment rises, such as during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Birth rates have fallen the most in some regions that were hardest hit by the financial crisis.

In the United States, three-quarters of people surveyed by Gallup last year said the main reason couples weren’t having more children was a lack of money or fear of the economy.

The trend emerges as a key gauge of future economic health — the growth in the pool of potential workers, ages 20-64 — is signaling trouble ahead. This labor pool had expanded for decades, thanks to the vast generation of baby boomers. Now the boomers are retiring, and there are barely enough new workers to replace them, let alone add to their numbers.

Growth in the working-age population has halted in developed countries overall. Even in France and the United Kingdom, with relatively healthy birth rates, growth in the labor pool has slowed dramatically. In Japan, Germany and Italy, the labor pool is shrinking.

“It’s like health — you only realize it exists until you don’t have it,” says Alejandro Macarron Larumbe, managing director of Demographic Renaissance, a think tank in Madrid.

The drop in birth rates is rooted in the 1960s, when many women entered the workforce for the first time and couples decided to have smaller families. Births did begin rising in many countries in the new millennium. But then the financial crisis struck. Stocks and home values plummeted, blowing a hole in household finances, and tens of millions of people lost jobs. Many couples delayed having children or decided to have none at all.

Couples in the world’s five biggest developed economies — the United States, Japan, Germany, France and the United Kingdom — had 350,000 fewer babies in 2012 than in 2008, a drop of nearly 5 percent. The United Nations forecasts that women in those countries will have an average 1.7 children in their lifetimes. Demographers say the fertility rate needs to reach 2.1 just to replace people dying and keep populations constant.

The effects on economies, personal wealth and living standards are far reaching:
…

June 1, 2014, 7:25 a.m. EDT
Don’t bother saving for college – it will get cheaper
Online learning, deflation will help bring costs down
By Chuck Jaffe, MarketWatch

My friend Dan recently congratulated me on the college graduation of my daughter, having read the advice I gave her in a column.

Dan became a grandfather, again, right around the same time and he asked if I had college advice for his children, the ones who “now have to save a gajillion dollars in the next 18 years for when their babies go off to school, and who think they will never save enough.”

My advice surprised him.

Save what you can, but expect college to be more affordable for newborns than it is for today’s graduates.

Having just come through National College Savings Day (5/29, for the 529 college savings plans), it’s important to recognize that I am not suggesting to parents that tuition costs will ever be cheap — or that parents who want to fund educations don’t save as much as possible — just that new parents could have it a little easier than their forebears.

The paying-for-college dilemma is headed for major change, so the price tag on tuition should be a whole lot less than a gajillion by the time Junior is ready to set off for school. At the very least, the inflation in college costs appears headed for a reversal in trend.

Truthfully, much of that will happen because the cost of tuition has reached the nation’s breaking point. With almost any commodity — and that’s what an education is, no matter how much academics scoff at the idea — once that point is reached, it’s the model, and not the will of the people, that breaks.

The College Board has reported that a “moderate” college budget for an in-state public college for the 2013–2014 academic year averaged $22,826. A moderate budget at a private college averaged $44,750.

While plenty of surveys show costs a bit higher or lower than those levels, what’s important is that virtually every measure of college costs shows that the price tag is 75% to 100% higher today than it was in 1991-92, when the current crop of college graduates was born. It’s up about 150% from the time frame when today’s young parents were born.

Clearly, that rate of inflation can’t keep up forever, and it won’t.

Jeff Weniger, an investment strategist at BMO Global Asset Management, compares college costs to oil prices, noting that around the time gas reached four dollars per gallon, significant inroads were made in fuel efficiency that have helped to stave off inflation since.

He thinks the situation will be much more drastic in the case of college tuitions, saying on my radio show this week that “you could see 100 percent deflation.”

“Within 10 or 20 years, the old wonderful experience I had — going to a dorm room and going to college parties and studying on the side — that’s going to go away and it’s all going to be on the Web for peanuts,” Weniger said.
…

How are your bond investments holding up?

DOW 20,000,000 by 2015!