The Housing Bubble

Hahah…the first HBB ad I see is for buying properties in Mongolia.

“Real Estate Investments in Mongolia High Yield Investment Opportunities”

Wow…this is getting so ridiculous.

Just borrow more - and get in the property ladder!

And embrace the new obama economy!

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Expenses went up in 2013 for families
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | May 27, 2014 | Ann Belser

A survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the average income for families of all sorts decreased from 2012 to 2013 by $103 to $65,069 before taxes, but their expenses went up by $777 a year to $51,408.

…

The biggest share of the increased expenses of the average American household went to transportation, which cost a total of $8,999 a year, or $494 more than the previous year, as a result of purchase prices going up.

what will be the catalyst for the market to tank and the FED print some more money to bailout overleveraged banks again?

It must be nice to make risky bets and then be bailed out when they finally go south. You simply cant lose in this scheme.

Was it presented by this guy?:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQNdi-fRExc

http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=140305

McNear, Obama’s college girlfriend, wrote him a letter discussing her term paper about T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” He responded with the following:

“I haven’t read ‘The Waste Land’ for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this.

Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/02/obama-t-s-eliot-_n_1472524.html

Apparently cable news ratings are way down across the board. What really stood out to me from this article is that the _media_ Bill O’Reilly viewer is 72 years old. That is not a typo. Seventy-two.

Out of 2 million viewers for his show, only 300k are “in the demo”, which means 24-49 yrs old. (I’m willing to bet well over half of those are over 40.)

Despite lower overall ratings, MSNBC beats Fox News among people “in the demo” and particularly under 40. Which is why I always think it’s funny when people are like “MSNBC has less viewers, they will go out of business”. Oh really? You think Comcast (NBC Universal’s owner) doesn’t know exactly what it’s doing? LOL.

Overall TV is just being crushed by the internet and by streaming (N-flix in particular).

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…Another key factor coming from May ratings is just how old Fox News viewers are. Take for example, Bill O’Reilly’s show, “The O’Reilly Factor.” O’Reilly had his lowest month since 2001 in the key demo, with 308,000 viewers. Yes, O’Reilly is still the No. 1 program in cable news in both total and demo viewers, averaging 2,136,000 total viewers in May. But the majority of those viewers are over the age of 55. In fact, the median age for O’Reilly is now just over 72 years old. The average Fox News viewer overall is 68.8, while the average ages of MSNBC and CNN viewers were 62.5 and 62.8, respectively.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/05/may-cable-news-ratings-spare-no-one-189393.html

Taking a break from ghosting to post some local newz

Denver Business Journal - Denver home prices reach all-time high

“Denver-area home-resale prices rose an average 9.1 percent in March from a year earlier, and also were up 1.4 percent from February, reaching an all-time high level, according to the latest monthly S&P/Case-Shiller Home Prices Index.

Denver’s Case-Shiller home price index for March was 148.20, meaning that local home resale prices averaged 48.2 percent higher than they were in the benchmark month of January 2000.”

It will be 92 and sunny here today, with winds gusting to 30 mph, perfect weather for wildfires. Today’s air quality forecast is “unhealthy for sensitive groups” and there is an ozone action day in effect.

Denver is a toilet. Don’t move here. You’ll be really disappointed if you do…

Crafty billionaire: “Insider trading shouldn’t be a crime. I’m not doing anything hundreds of other people aren’t doing.” (paraphrased)

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http://nymag.com/news/features/steven-a-cohen-2014-6/

Even billionaires have feelings,” Alexandra Cohen had taken to saying. Her husband, Steve Cohen, is the billionaire in question. He’s one of the most successful hedge-fund managers in history—“the Michael Jordan of trading,” in the words of one Wall Street observer. He’d built SAC Capital Advisors into one of the most profitable hedge funds in the world while amassing a net worth estimated at $11 billion. Cohen was never known for his attention to feelings. He had a reputation for brusque, money-talks-bullshit-walks office interactions. He was the opposite of a ­sentimentalist—if one of his traders missed his numbers, he was gone.

But that was before U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, suspecting him and his firm of insider trading, began pursuing Cohen as if he were a crime boss. Federal agents bugged his home phone and raided the offices of former employees who’d started their own hedge funds. They subpoenaed millions of pages of SAC documents while working their way up the chain of command, flipping one former employee after another. They even had one past portfolio manager attempt to infiltrate Cohen’s company by getting himself rehired, though Cohen didn’t take the bait.

As Bharara’s web closed around him, Cohen complained to associates that his success had made him a target. “I’m not doing anything different than a hundred other people have done,” he said to a colleague. “It’s not who I am, it’s what I am.” He called Wall Street peers, trolling for sympathy: “I feel like I’m watching a bad movie and I’m the star,” he’d say. On vacation one year, he ran into a fellow hedge-fund manager: “It’s not fair,” he complained. “Why me?”

The US Housing Market’s Darkening Data

http://www.investing.com/analysis/the-us-housing-market%27s-darkening-data-214843

When looking at residential real estate, we often tend to focus almost solely on recent price movements in assessing the health of the housing market at any point in time. But as both homeowners and income-earners in the larger economy, of which the housing market is an important component, to really understand what’s going on, we need clarity into the larger cycle driving those price movements.

The more we look at today’s data, the more it looks like that we are in a new type of pricing cycle — one that homeowners and housing investors have no prior experience with.

And the more we learn about the fundamentals underlying the current cycle, the harder it becomes to justify today’s home prices on any sustained level. Meaning a downward reversion in home values is very probable in the coming years.

June 3, 2014, 5:00 a.m. EDT
Too much of your retirement money in stocks?
Many retirement savers have 100% of their IRAs in equities
By Richard Eisenberg
This article is reprinted by permission from NextAvenue.org.

Recently, I was alarmed by new data showing how people in their 50s and 60s are investing for retirement.

Roughly a third of “consistent traditional individual retirement account (IRA) investors” in their 50s — 31% of those age 50 to 54 and 29% age 55 to 59 — have 100% of their IRA money in stocks , according to the Investment Company Institute, the trade group for mutual funds.

A quarter of these IRA investors (defined as ones with IRA accounts in every year between 2007 and 2013) age 60 to 64 have all their IRAs in stocks, too.

A lack of diversification?

Not what you’d call a well-diversified portfolio, on the face of it. “It does seem high, no doubt about it,” said Wade Pfau , Professor of Retirement Income at The American College in Bryn Mawr, Pa., the largest nonprofit educational institution devoted to financial services.
…

Dallas-area home prices up 10.4 percent in April

http://bizbeatblog.dallasnews.com/2014/06/corelogic-dallas-area-home-prices-up-10-4-percent-in-april.html/

crater

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/hedge-fund-worlds-one-man-223000799.html

“Mr. Abrams also is among the small group of investors that has taken a big bet on government-controlled mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, wagering that the Obama administration’s plan to wind down and replace the entities will fail, according to investor documents.”

Rising RE taxes may price Austinites out of their own homes
On a recent evening, more than 300 homeowners who are worried about their rising property tax bills filled First Unitarian Universalist Church in North Austin for a town hall meeting. If something doesn’t change, many said, they will soon be priced out of their homes.

Two nights later, a similar discussion played out in South Austin, where homeowners gathered at Grace United Methodist Church in Travis Heights to talk about what can be done to slow escalating residential tax values.

“I’m at the breaking point,” said Gretchen Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8,500 this year.

“It’s not because I don’t like paying taxes,” said Gardner, who attended both meetings. “I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore. ”
whoda thunk that voting for things is related to paying for things?
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Propelled by job and population growth and a robust housing market, the market value of homes in Travis County jumped 12.6 percent on average for 2014, to $320,032.

“Our appraisals are reflecting what we see in the market,” Crigler [chief appraiser Travis Central Appraisal District] said. “The Austin market is really, really strong.”

Another good day to realize another $2500 in gains - locked in!

I just had a very good friend phone me this morning about his recent trip to Vegas for a class on real estate investment. This friend is in his early 30′s and has a new family, so a small mom and pop potential investor. He mentioned that they are preaching the use of OPM (Other People’s Money) and using 5/1 ARMS with minimal down payments to purchase several homes at a time for the potential appreciation.

We’re both in the same field of work and have known each other for years. I advised him to watch out for people peddling investment strategies to the public, and especially to avoid leveraging himself to purchase properties out of state on what is essentially a gamble. He’s a pretty smart guy, so i’m hoping he heeds my advice. It looks like the scum are back to their old tricks once again unfortunately. Meanwhile I have been stockpiling a nice cash position for when this house of cards all inevitable comes crashing down once again.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the price is spiked up to the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of realtoRs in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of the seller’s intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question. . . 10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the posers come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow cheeto dust that rubs its back upon the window-panes
The yellow crater that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, 20
And seeing that it was a soft October night
Swallowed at once the entire house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the mortgage broker that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create global financial crises,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a signature on a dotted line; 30
Time for you and time for me to buy a house,
And time yet for a hundred car payments
And for a hundred visions and revisions of political history
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the brokers come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the apartment stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— 40
[They will say: "He must be doing poorly"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: "But how his bank account must be thin!"]
Do I dare
To rent a dwelling when my friends have bought?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which dotted line will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all;
Have known the interest rates, prices, and inventory trends, 50
I have measured out my wages with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the musical chairs from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my working days and renting ways? 60
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
realtoR arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with gorilla-like hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or offer me researched housing choices.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets 70
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of rentier men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

I should have been a pair of ragged hooves
Scuttling across the hardwood floors of Washington DC.
. . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, mocks the homemoaner neighbors with their Mariachi band!
Prodded by pointed fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or the stench malingers,
Stretched on the presumed market floor in pricing, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? 80
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my retirement (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet–and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of some bubbles flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while, 90
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say, “I will not rent at all.
I will not, not at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while, 100
After the signing and the escrow and the patching of the roof,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the short skirts of realtoRs that clip-clop along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I earn!
But as if a crystal ball threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“We are underwater now,
We are bankrupt and foreclosed.” 110
. . . . .

No! I am not the Wolf of Wall Street, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant tenant, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Advise the internet; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obese;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Greater Fool, BUT NOT QUITE.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . . 120
I shall wear my money roll.

Shall I part myself from my money? Do I dare to eat a cheeto?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the loaners moaning, each to each.

I do not think they will groan to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water up, then back.

We have lingered in the chambers of the mainstream media
By reporters wreathed with press passes and salaries from Rupert Murdoch 130
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Never Say “I Kill White People Like You” When Asked To Turn Off Your Phone Post-Takeoff

June 3, 2014

Following takeoff from Nashville Sunday afternoon, a United Airlines passenger warned a fellow flyer that, “I kill white people like you” when she was asked to turn off her cell phone, investigators allege.

The disruption on Flight 4205, which was bound for Houston, resulted in the Embraer 135’s return to Nashville’s airport, where Lashonda Lee Williams was arrested for assault.

The 43-year-old Williams, seen at right, was asked by another female passenger to “turn off her cell phone due to the aircraft being in flight,” according to a court affidavit. In reply, Williams allegedly said, “I kill white people like you.”

Investigators noted that Williams told the other passenger, K. Colleen Coult, 50, that she would follow her upon reaching Houston “and find out where she lived.” The comments “created fear in Coult for her safety,” the affidavit notes.

A United flight attendant told cops that Williams’s statements “were causing anxiety and fear throughout the cabin.”

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/in-flight-cell-phone-threat-674312 - 27k -