The Housing Bubble

“…he routinely watches companies fill tankers before inventory counts, and then unload again afterward.”

That sounds like a far more expensive form of accounting fraud than others (e.g. Enron creating fake offshore accounts to hide liability…).

it’s a replay of the ol’soybean oil scandal from the 60s, perpetrated by Tino De Angelis in Bayonne, New Jersey.

First debase the inventory to raise cash. Then substitute water for inventory, all the while getting large loans on the basis of field warehouse receipts. Then corner the futures market.

As with derivatives, Tino De Angelis owned more soybean oil (physical) in New Joisey, ready for export, than could be attributed to the entire US production.

Ponzi scheme. Possibly with a few refinements added in account’a modern times. Goldman Sachs - or whoever we’re talking about this time - is aping mob tactics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tino_De_Angelis

Are you saying prices have a very long way to fall?

Why wouldn’t the PTB keep those millions of excess houses off market until the recovery is fully in place? Is it because the resulting artificially high prices would only serve to stimulate more construction, adding to the extant supply glut?

Is it because the resulting artificially high prices would only serve to stimulate more construction, adding to the extant supply glut?

That didn’t seem to stop them in the last round…

Exactly. Add more inventory to the already massive excess housing supply.

No problem on the excess “shadow” inventory. The rotting shacks which are neither for sale nor rent are already on the Fed’s balance sheet. They will be eligible under some future “program” which uses taxpayer dollars to tear down houses which are contributing to blighted neighborhoods.

Using bulldozers to tear down empty, rotting shacks will provide jobs and Keynesian stimulus to a future generation of workers, so it’s all good!

I’m planning to stick around as long as possible to see where it goes from here.

So am I, but by the looks of things, another 45 years isn’t enough time.

Eventually prices turn around when wages rise.
Look at inflation too, not just house prices.
2012 may have been the bottom, or 2015 will be the bottom, but eventually prices gradually rise.

Houses depreciate, thus housing prices fall.

Sure, they may not have to bring money to the table to close but they’re losing part of their down.

I suspect that detail is completely lost on many bubble-era buyers.

And the longer they hold onto the depreciating house, the greater their losses.

Regardless of the transaction costs, I’m talking about other people buying the same house for less and less shortly after you closed. That rankles other prospective buyers way more than the transaction costs they may need to recover years from now. It has an effect on the market much more than transaction costs.

I never suggested that the effect of seller transaction costs is any different if one puts down more money. The costs are insanely high with regard to the actual services rendered, and everyone who must sell to relocate is penalized in this fashion unless they avoid dealing with UHS types entirely.

My assertion about being underwater at closing is because I’m counting the future transaction costs of liquidating in the effective asset balance. This should always be the case IMO. If one can’t come up with any meaningful down payment to begin with, where in the world are they going to come up with the money to pay into settlement, a year or two from now?

We all make our plans, but sh** happens in life. The wise take steps to prepare for contingencies, at least to some reasonable extent.

It’s a deflationary spiral J

I just realized something: 9yrs later, and we’re still arguing about whether the outcome will be inflation or deflation.

LOL. I remember that being a hot topic here back in 2005.

Meanwhile the price declines accelerate.

“I just realized something: 9yrs later, and we’re still arguing about whether the outcome will be inflation or deflation.”

And 9 years later, pretty much everything is more expensive in dollar terms.

Mauldin’s book, Endgame, has a graph that shows inflation/deflation going back decades. There are bouts of real price deflation every few years (every economic cycle)…until we went off the gold standard. Then there is never a year in the US with price deflation.

Everyone speaks about whether we will be Japan, but that is one of very few examples of price deflation over many countries with fiat money, over many decades and many bouts of financial distress. Japan is the exception, and not likely.

The question isn’t about whether there will be inflation, but whether we will have tame 1-3% inflation, limited periods where it gets upwards of 5%, or inflation approaching double-digits.

My guess is that there is a 65% chance of not exceeding 3% over the next decade, a 30% chance of on-occasion getting above 3%, but below 5%, and only a 5% chance of having periods where inflation approaches double digits.

“Japan is the exception, and not likely.”

China could prove to be the next exception.

7:35 am ET
Nov 12, 2014
Bank of England
Grand Central: Troubling Signs of Deflation in China

HILSENRATH’S TAKE
The U.S. and China have announced a slew of deals on the environment, security, trade and travel during President Obama’s travels east. Perhaps less noticed was news out earlier this week which paints a disturbing picture of the strains hitting China’s economy. Wholesale prices fell 2.2% in October from a year earlier in China, the 32nd straight month of industrial sector deflation. Consumer prices were up 1.6% from a year earlier, well below the central bank’s 3.5% objective.

Prices are a window into the dynamics of an economy, a telling outgrowth of the cosmic tug between supply and demand. They’re an especially important indicator in China, where measures of demand and output are unreliable. Persistent producer price deflation suggests deep-seated overcapacity in China’s industrial sector, a point underscored by long-running declines in global commodity prices. Oil’s sharp drop below $80 per barrel is in part a related to U.S. production from fracking – but surely also from weakened demand in the world’s second-largest economy.

China is shaping up as the global economy’s great wild-card for 2015. The U.S. policy makers I talk to have great respect for the savvy and technical skill of China’s leadership. They tend to be confident Chinese leaders will manage the growth slowdown effectively. Yet over capacity is over capacity, and empty apartment buildings are empty apartment buildings. These problems tend to weigh on global growth, push down global inflation and interest rates, and raise the risk level of some new global economic or financial shock.

- By Jon Hilsenrath
…

Does it seem to others that every move by the global central banking establishment to offset deflationary pressures translates into a further wealth transfer from the 99.9% into the pockets of the 0.1%?

Cheap oil may be a sign of bigger problems
Published: Nov 21, 2014 12:31 p.m. ET
By Ivan Martchev

Looking at oil dispassionately, one has to admit that for all intents and purposes, WTI crude oil has been down for seven straight weeks. The glass-half-full crowd will note that consumers get more money to spend for the holidays, and this is true. The glass-half-empty crowd will say that oil price weakness indicates weak global demand and consumers cannot possibly make up for that. This does not necessarily have to be the case, although it is certainly a possibility with rising probabilities at the moment.

Brent crude oil futures (the European benchmark) are much weaker from a trading perspective as they have taken out key support levels with rather persistent selling that indicates weak demand at a time when oil markets have ample supply. European economic data signifies what is in effect an economic rarity — a triple-dip recession — as the eurozone never really recovered from its sovereign-debt crisis. Shrinking eurozone bank lending over the past two years already told us with a high degree of certainty that this was coming, but now that it is here, we are starting to see repercussions in key commodities.

One thing that strikes me about this oil-price decline is how persistent and methodical it has been. Commodities trend much differently than stocks as strong trends sometimes seem almost linear in nature with very shallow countertrend moves. I have used the analogy that the zigs and zags of stocks are typically much better defined than those for key commodities in strong trends.
…
How low can the oil price go? One of my favorite strategists, Russell Napier of (former) CLSA fame, who has now gone independent, used to say that it was hard enough to get the direction right, and nearly impossible to get the target price right. All forecasts are inherently flawed in nature as they try to project into the future, and none of us are clairvoyant.

But we know that the cash cost of shale oil is about $60 per barrel, varying among different producers, and that historically, commodity producers have been known to produce their respective commodities at a loss to keep personnel and equipment going, as well a service debts that have financed their recent expansion. In that regard, it would be interesting to note that energy junk bonds comprise 16% of the junk-bond market, and their issuance is up 148% to $211 billion according to Fitch. So, yes, I think the oil price can decline below $60.

As to how low the oil prices can go, that depends on how much China will slow down as the number-one consumer of oil. China’s financial system is operating on record leverage at the moment. Record leverage in the financial system and a sharply weakening real-estate market suggest that their economic slowdown has the potential to carry far below Beijing’s GDP growth target of 7%.

Yes, China has had three real-estate downturns in the past seven years, but the latest one is coming at a time of debt-driven boom, which means the consequences this time can be quite different. I used to think that China was a classic savings-and-investment economic-growth model, and it was, but that was 10 years ago. I no longer think that, since GDP growth in the past five years has come from ever-increasing leverage ratios in the banking system. No debt-driven boom is permanent by definition, so the decline in the Chinese real-estate market has the potential to create a domino effect there in 2015.

Energy sector and company implications

If China does decelerate well below 7% in 2015, an oil price target in the $30 to $40 range is completely realistic. Such predictions may sound dramatic in theory, but in the end, what we are after here in these pages are the investment implications of macro trends. Looking at the world from a top-down perspective is not meaningful if it does not produce actionable ideas. Clearly, I see downside potential for oil, which suggests one should consider gravitating toward investments that make their money on volume and not on price in the oil market.
…

“And 9 years later, pretty much everything is more expensive in dollar terms.”

Not “pretty much everything”.

Cheaper:
Concrete
Pipe
lumber
structural steel
finished architectural products

And give it time. The global credit bubble is just beginning to burst as evidenced by collapsing commodities. This is positively bullish.

Is there anything non-construction-related that is cheaper now than it was then?

Oil, refined fuels, etc.

1%ers in income are making extremely high amounts and I doubt many don’t have significant assets pretty quickly after beginning that income, especially compared to the rest of the shlubs.

My post covered that case:

…or whose income is so extremely high that it doesn’t matter,…

but $8.4 mil is enough to live on without working at all.

You can live without working on a lot less than that!!

That kind of asset-base would translate under a traditional 3-4%/yr annuity income stream into $250K-340K of annual income!

Surely most can live on less than that (see 99% of society for supporting evidence).

How so? I’m saying if the world’s climate is indeed heating up, which all evidence points to being so. Whether or not it’s man-made or stoppable are separate issues.

Heating up at a rate that is going to matter in several lifetimes? And how do you know the trend won’t reverse in three decades for whatever reason?

Tell it to the wine growers, they accept global warming as a given, as they are experiencing it all over the world. They’re probably the farmers most sensitive to climate change. Although global warming is also accepted as a given, because its effects are being felt, in forestry and wildlife management, agronomy, botany, entomology and the rest. In the real world, not the political one, the effects are already apparent.

How do I know it won’t reverse in 30 years? I don’t, but it seems like wishful thinking to me. How do we know it won’t rain gold? If it keeps the Chinese from building more coal-powered plants, it’s hard not to see the “belief” in global warming as a good thing, even if it’s somehow proven to be wrong, or magically fixed by a deus ex machina.

“Tell it to the wine growers, they accept global warming as a given, as they are experiencing it all over the world.”

Are you suggesting this group of farmers has the scientific expertise to distinguish short-term climactic variation from long-term, irreversible trend?

I’m saying they’re the canaries in the coal mine because their grapes have been selected over the centuries as the perfect grape to grow in that spot of that region. And they thrived there for centuries. And now they’re not growing and maturing like they always have, ripening too soon or too late, too much sugar, too much water, whatever, the micro-climates have changed and many of the changes, like in harvest time and sugar levels, are showing increased warmth. And it’s happening all over the world, google it.

Global warming is occurring, and changing our climate. We can argue the extent to whether it’s man-made and if anything can be done to stop it, but it’s occurring. The evidence is everywhere. It’s a given in the real world that deals with its effects.

From the charts, it looks like this current mini bubble out of the major bubble has peaked, And it looks like sometime in the next 3 years a good downturn in SFH prices is about to happen. Or it could be a long, long housing depression, based on the birth dearth and student debt.

In the mean time selling off individual stocks, adding to the pile of cash, buying “a couple ounces” of precious metals every 6 months and dollar cost averaging into stock mutual funds are the way to bide your time.

Stay productive and employed. As Combotechie says, having a steady career (not necessarily same company) to keep the income stream is important these days.

It’s funny, my motivation for buying a house was never as an investment. I wanted a place that I could live in for a long time (without outgrowing it), that my kids would consider “home”, and where I could have relatives over frequently (and comfortably) for life events/holidays.

“I wanted a place that I could live in for a long time…”

Do you know the definition of investment? I didn’t think so.

For what it’s worth, our plan is to hold our multifamily essentially forever, generating solid income once paid off and eventually being passed down to one of my children before the government gets its hands on it. Same goes for my parents house, which is paid off. Will be passed to me in the next few years and eventually given to my children.

I see no reason to sell, as long as rental income generates a good profit after expenses and upkeep.

I think your plans are going to change in ways you don’t imagine right now.

First time in several months I’ve gone biking. Irvine has this bike share deal. I signed up with The Irvine Company. Piece of cake! I borrow a bike and can peddle it around to the Spectrum for a cup of coffee or a Red Robin lunch. On weekends like today I can cruise along the San Diego Creek bike path - a dedicated path that has connections with other dedicated paths all over the freaking place. You can even go into Newport Beach. It’s fairly flat and easy. My part of Orange County is in the hills.

My office complex in Irvine has the bikes I can use. The only problem is dodging traffic for a mile until the dedicated bike route and safety. But I could even ride it around the office complex parking lot and that is a one mile loop. An anarchist’s dream is bike sharing. They do that in San Francisco, Portland, and other cities. Good for Irvine!

Meant to post that at the bottom, not on this thread. oops

Yeah, there’s always that. HSAs do reduce your AGI, so there’s a more immediate gain.

You have reminded me to check whether an HSA can be used to pay ObamaCare premiums while simultaneously enabling people to qualify for ObamaCare discounts via reduced AGI. Knowing that wouldn’t affect me directly, but it’d be interesting to know just the same.

Could be a way for individuals to lessen ObamaCare’s threat to their well-being.

It sits in your name, via your employer. Quit your job or get fired, the money is yours. Not your employers. You could be out of work for five years and the HSA proceeds are still yours. I don’t know what happens to HSA assets should the owner die.

You get the interest. Tax free. You can also invest your HSA in stocks and bonds. Tax free in and out.

One has nominees for the HSA who will get amount once the owner dies just like a brokerage account / bank account or any other assets. The recipient obviously will have to pay any amount due to the windfall.

Most HSAs have ETFs etc. that one can put the HSA money in, with the risk that any reduction in the fund price will reduce your gains / principle.

Thanks, shendi. That seems to make sense.

The shame is the low contribution limits (approx. 3200 individual, 5000 for married).

Still, if you have a son or daughter in their 20s, why not write them a check to cover the HSA contribution they make through their employer?

The $3000 you give them is free of tax for both parent (gift tax) and child (income tax).

Quasi-private insurance.

Credit and welfare is not the solution.

“And yet Americans are working longer hours than ever, in many cases holding down multiple jobs.”

Are you sure about that? Consider19th century farmers. Consider turn-of-the-last-century factory workers.

I don’t think that it’s the hours worked that has changed…instead, it’s prices of basics (food, housing, utilities) in relations to non-essentials that have changed.

I really just wanted to point out the “noblisse” part.

There was time, not so long ago, when the sons of the rich actually fought in our nation’s wars. And not just in the reserves or the rear. If the rich are fighting on the front lines, as they once did, then there is noblesse oblige, and perhaps a worthy political system. If not, you live in a crass oligarchy, be it of the “left” or the “right”.

A fair number of the regular posters on this blog are caricatures.

I don’t know about that. But consider this; every day we get up and go to work to earn pieces of paper. Yet people in highly secure buildings create the same money, the equivalent of our labor, at will. Our entire financial system is based on the idea that there’s a finite amount of this money when it’s just not true. Look at Japan. They’ve thrown off any pretense of what money used to be. And yesterday companies traded billions of our money for Yen.

to earn pieces of paper.

Great post, Ben; there is a scary truth in what you say. Yet I would make a minor distinction.

The vast majority of the “pieces of paper” that I earn will never see paper form. They exist only in electronic form for most of their lifetime; in other words, it’s a shared fiction or maybe delusion—call it what you will.

We get up and go to work to convince each other that we did something of value to others. We take those digital bits in a computer somewhere as compensation; the financial system keeps score for us. And we hope at the end of the day that we have created sufficient value that our needs will be met by society.

But consider this; every day we get up and go to work to earn pieces of paper.

It is an old scam.

“A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.”
–Napoleon Bonaparte

“We take those digital bits in a computer somewhere as compensation; the financial system keeps score for us.”

Is fiat virtual currency better than bitcoin?

Having a bank create our money, which they loan out at interest, is a pretty dumb game and can only end one way. A ever increasing pile of debt has to accumulate to service the interest. I am pretty sure this crazy experiment is falling apart. The Fed broke the rules of their own game the past few years just buying trillions of dollars of crap in an effort to keep money moving and it hasn’t fixed the problem of too much debt that cannot be paid back. I’d like to imagine that somebody in our central powers has a clue what comes next, but there is no evidence of that.

“Having a bank create our money, which they loan out at interest, is a pretty dumb game and can only end one way.”

I always thought that was the point of our once lenient bankruptcy laws. To extinguish these excessive debts and provide discipline to lenders. Is it a coincidence that we had an exponential credit explosion so soon after we made our bankruptcy laws more creditor friendly? I sometimes think that was the primary cause of this whole mess.

+ 1

Particularly when all that you know is how to do glib and smug.

It will die down or stop with the next irrefutable leg down in housing.

Because post acquisition variances in valuation determine my ROI….yep, everything I needed to know about investing I learned on the HBB.

“The banker? They merely processed the transaction, filling out paperwork and pocketing the transaction sizable associated fees, and shipping the risk downstream.”

This is so very true but I do not do any of this for my own personal gain. Instead, I do it for the children.

This is so very true but I do not do any of this for my own personal gain. Instead, I do it for the children.

One of the most amusing actions I see are those, like Mel Watt or the NAR, who constantly push for more lending to the unqualified (i.e. predatory lending), and state those policies are solely to benefit the underprivileged who have no other way to purchase a house.

They never state who else benefits from the increased debt.

Never.

“They never state who else benefits from the increased debt.”

Are you referring to the lenders who enjoy a federal guarantee of principle, just in case their loans to low-income folks are never repaid?

We also know that the way things are going we’ll be lucky to ever make it to a future where any effect from global warming will matter.

I’m not sure about that itself. With nuclear arms by governments, WWIII could have instantly vaporized the earth surface. But nukes in the hands of some terrorists will kill maybe one or two cities, very catastrophic for them but most humans will survive.

The problem is the USA is causing terrorism and blowback. USA meddling in the middle east has been the biggest recruiter for terrorism. There was no Muslim terrorism before the USA propped up Israel. Arab nations were not a threat at all to western nations before the 1940s.

“USA meddling in the middle east has been the biggest recruiter for terrorism.”

Isn’t sowing the seeds for endless war a basic part of the Military Industrial Complex business model?

But it won’t this time, just wait and see.

Life is about to be snuffed out.

Just ask your local Enviro-Nut. If one of those is tied up right now, ask your local Holy Roller.

Who knows? They may be the same person.

The global climate has changed over the long course of geologic history by much larger than 1 percent C swings

+1. Warmists never seem to get this.

They also don’t seem to be able to reason through the concept that if the petro-products that we pump are truly organic/carbon-life-based in origin, then at some point in the past, all of that carbon was living on the surface, and prior to that, most likely all of it was in the atmosphere (which is where plant-life absorbs CO2 from; in other words, we already have an existence proof of the global ecosystem surviving and thriving in a much more carbon-rich environment.

Hmmm, let’s see. Not sure your carbon equation really works. It took about 3 billion years of accumulated organic/carbon life to become the oil reserves we have today.

I have a big problem with people who refuse to adapt to change.

The premise (and it’s credible) is that climate will change regardless of human activity.

The tree huggers now say we must stop human activity.

Notice “stop” is a verb.

So they propose to do human intervention on the climate to make it somehow stable. No more desert age. No more tropical age. No more ice age.

Does anyone see the inconsistency in the warmists?

The other deal is that you ask a tree hugger about whether living things should be allowed to remain in their natural state. You catch them in a trap because they reply without hesitation “yes.” Then you explain humans’ natural state is to use raw material from earth and blend reason with it to create products. Then the tree hugger will get angry and walk off. They do not want to allow humans to exist in their natural state.

I do. Humans are at the top of the gene pool on this earth. We have both a responsibility and also deserve pride. We have just as much justification to be what we are as an amoeba has for what it is.

Note that conservatives are naturally against change and you would think they would be the first to sign up for the AGW crusade. But “progressives” and anti-change don’t seem to mix.

The hypocrisy is to do human intervention to stop human intervention. Dumb tree hugs.

It is kind of funny how tree (and whale) huggers fail to notice that humans are also part of the animal kingdom, and hence part of the ecosystem they strive to balance (sans humans).

The ecosystem they want is one without humans, silly.

You know that you’re out of the realm of evidentiary science when everyone involved is first classified by their “school of thought”.

The parallels today between “economic science” and “climate science” are interesting in this regard. Similar forces drive both of them, under the surface.

As one who makes a living based on applying actual proven science (and being accountable if I get it wrong), the pseudo science that gets bandied about regularly on so many fronts is amusing. And the carnival barkers on either side of the arguments never seem to have the humility to allow for the possibility that sometimes we just don’t know a lot of the answers, at all.

You’ve offered some very well written posts, shoe. Thanks.

+1.

I need to correct one thing I said above - it’s “when”, not “if” I get it wrong.

The goal for those of us whose living depends on delivering working designs with some regularity is to keep our batting averages high. And to keep the outward-appearing levels of self-confidence in line with the real underlying probabilities, because nothing is ever 100.000% certain.

You know that you’re out of the realm of evidentiary science when everyone involved is first classified by their “school of thought”.

It’s oddly similar to classifying everbody’s thinking as Retardican or Dumbocrat, or Libruhl versus Biblical. At the end of the day, religion and politics don’t mix well with evidence-based science.

Yeah, it’s true that references to schools of thought usually happen in non-scientific fields. But who is using the term in regards to climate science?

Al Gore, and everyone who takes their cues from him, maybe? Just for starters.

I doubt that he would refer to a school of thought in climate science.

It’d be interesting to see whether the The Sky Is Falling drumbeats beat louder and more furiously a few months before the next year’s funding needs to be secured.

https://www.walkscore.com/CO/Denver

Correct answer! Go to the head of the class.

And that’s the best accuracy you can hope to obtain for an individual point source measurement. You’re still at least a few dozen miracles away from correlating a relatively small number of non-equilibrated point source measurements, mostly taken in low thermal mass atmosphere, into a single “global earth temperature”.

I realize that none of this really matters, because it’s not about the science. But it is fun to poke needles into the hot air balloons once in a while, though.

“You’re still at least a few dozen miracles away from correlating a relatively small number of non-equilibrated point source measurements”

Funny. I just happened to come across a 1977 cartoon that illustrates a very similar thing!

Try getting a single 0.1 degree accurate measurement today, with all our advanced sensors and instruments. Air is turbulent, temperature is always stratifying. Only certain types of temp sensors are that precise to begin with. That kind of total system accuracy can be achieved, but it’s not easy.

For a majority of industrial temperature measurements, where hundreds of thousands of dollars of material being processed are involved (i.e., the stakes are high) realized accuracies are on the range of 0.5 to 2% of full scale range. 0.1% is usually laboratory-level stuff, maybe high dollar semi or pharma processing where PhDs are tending the production lines.

Note: Most atmospheric temperature measurements don’t fall into either of these levels of performance. That applies today, not 100 years ago.

Scroll, scroll, scroll …. Scroll.

+1. Sure mark of an imbecile: confusing droll comments by a caricature with actual trolling.

I think the same thing happened to Lola before he popped his cork.

So there’s no real person behind all of that claiming that Americans are stupid? What’s going on then?

Or is it “$cam”?

“Or is it “$cam”?”

I don’t like the word scam or $cam because such a word implies that some sort of fraud or misrepresentation is involved.

Believe me there is no misrepresentation on my part; When a schmuck comes in to the bank all prepped and lubed and lathered up and wanting to borrow some money the terms he agrees to are spelled out in clear and precise English possibly, if not probably, with such a word as “adjustable” closely attached and connected to the words “interest rate” which heavily implies that the cost to the borrower for signing the dotted line today will most likely be altered sometime in the future which means the borrower does not know the price he is going to pay for the money he is agreeing to borrow.

Let me throw this question out to the board: How many of you schmucks will agree to buy something that you really have no idea - NO IDEA - to as to what the final price will be?

People who are smart do this every day.

Mr. Banker, you da man!

A scam need not be fraud. The best scams are taking advantage of something perfectly legal, like Congress being able to trade on inside info. Or Baksters getting bailouts.

“Purple drank is a slang term for a concoction which includes a prescription-strength cough syrup used in a manner inconsistent with its labeling, as a recreational drug. The mixture became popular in the hip hop community in the southern United States, originating in Houston.

The prescription-strength cough syrup used in purple drank contains codeine and promethazine (not to be confused with dextromethorphan; DXM). The cough syrup, used in doses much higher than medically recommended, is typically mixed with ingredients such as the soft drink Sprite or Mountain Dew and optionally “a Jolly Rancher hard fruit candy thrown in for extra sweetness.” The purplish hue of purple drank comes from dyes in the cough syrup. The amount of cough syrup used “can exceed up to 25 times the recommended dose.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_drank

So did he not shoot the kid or was the kid carrying a gun?

How many dozens of black kids were murdered in Chicago last month.

Why don’t they count to obama?

Because he can’t politicized them and get new democrat voters with them or energize his base with them…

“So did he not shoot the kid or was the kid carrying a gun?”

Here are some details which are routinely omitted from the “unarmed black teenager” MSM sound bite.

Report: Michael Brown’s blood found on Officer Darren Wilson’s gun, car door
By Faith Karimi and Michael Martinez, CNN
updated 8:43 PM EDT, Sat October 18, 2014
Source: CNN

(CNN) — Forensic tests have found the blood of Michael Brown on the gun, uniform and police cruiser belonging to Officer Darren Wilson, who fatally shot the unarmed teen two months ago in Ferguson, Missouri, The New York Times reported.

The revelation, provided by unnamed government officials familiar with a federal civil rights investigation, marked the first public account of Wilson’s testimony to investigators.

That it could potentially serve as exculpatory evidence — or at the very least, used by Wilson’s supporters to back the officer’s account of what transpired on Canfield Drive on August 9 — immediately drew suspicion and anger from leading activists who portended an ominous reaction from Brown supporters.
…

“All is good.”

Almost … but not quite. China’s real estate market MUST be saved, and if cutting interest rate won’t do the trick then somebody such as the Fed or the World Bank or the IMF - SOMEBODY - will have to step up and buy up those millions of Chinese houses.

Maybe the people who run American Homes 4 Rent are up to it.

I guess we can expect a lot more concrete pouring to come in China going forward, then?

“I guess we can expect a lot more concrete pouring to come in China going forward, then?”

Yes. If the children are to be saved it must be done.

It’s going to be interesting to see what becomes of all this freshly-poured concrete over the next few decades.

What will become of it?!

Global warming! And increased taxes.

There’s a federal law that defines who’s Jewish? Where did you hear about this?

Anyone who has an Indian princess in their ancestry can call themselves native American. That probably includes everyone on the HBB.

“chemotherapies my doctors are prescribing for me are keeping the cancer at bay, but they are also rather pricey”

“Best wishes, phony. My heart goes out to you.”

Tarara

That was from the comments section from the article, I am terribly sorry to have not been clear about that.

I am sure your Best wishes and heart landed where they should have with the disabled veteran who wrote it.

I’m glad to hear it. I’ve a terrible head cold for days, and a little discombobulated. I can’t wait until it’s gone.

I can’t wait until it’s gone.
Please hold on to the one you already have.

Too late; passed on to mother and daughter, despite (obviously inadequate) precautions Typhoid Tarara.

The people get older and worse condition. And the costs mount as more enter the system, supply and demand. Also there will be waaaay more people facing this decision of liquidating their possible inheritances to care for the parents and then ensuing stories about how that money is being wasted when these people could “die with dignity.”

this decision of liquidating their possible inheritances
What possible inheritances? What % of elders even have one? Soon the Fed will have devalued most all that anyway.

I just knew Romney was Socialist!

Totally fake Republican.

Totally fake Republican.

Pretty much why the republican base stayed home and Romney lost.

Hopefully, the same mistake will not be made in 2016…

Don’t know if Romney’s a socialist as popularly defined.

He is a NeoCon, however.

And NeoCons = Progressives.

Video: Romney Praises Gruber at 2006 RomneyCare Signing …
http://www.infowars.com/…/ - 91k - Cached - Similar pages
4 days ago …

Rip off the Feds for 400 million dollars a year Ago? This is the kind of legal scam I was referring to above.

Others are give away pensions to public Union employees.

Others are give away pensions to public Union employees.

A ruling Friday by an Illinois judge that a law intended to fix the state’s mounting pension crisis is unconstitutional paves the way for a legal showdown before the Illinois Supreme Court.

Sangamon County Circuit Judge John Belz ruled in favor of state employees and retirees who sued to block the state’s landmark pension overhaul.

In his ruling, Belz found that the “protection against the diminishment or impairment of pension benefits is absolute and without exception.”
…
Illinois Senate President John Cullerton, D-Chicago, who has long questioned the constitutionality of the pension reform law, said he believed there is a legal way to confront the state’s pension challenges.

“Today’s ruling confirms that, while the need for reform is urgent, the rule of law is absolute,” Cullerton said in a statement. “I remain committed to working with all parties to address our budget pressures and pension problems in a manner consistent with the Illinois Constitution.”

Labor leaders, meanwhile, hailed the ruling as a victory.

“This is a huge victory for teachers, nurses, firefighters and police and all the working people in the state,” Illinois Federation of Labor President Dan Montgomery said. “They did what they said they were going to do, rule it unconstitutional.”

Must not be any working people (unionized public employees excluded) left in Illinois, then. That trivial little detail the public unions earlier had inserted into the Illinois state constitution was the real giveaway that went unnoticed for so long.