Bits Bucket for May 2, 2015
Post off-topic ideas, links, and Craigslist finds here.
The Housing Bubble
Examining the home price boom and its effect on owners, lenders, regulators, realtors and the economy as a whole.
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Name:Ben Jones
Location:Northern Arizona, United States
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Realtors are liars.
You can say that again…
I do not need my crystal ball to predict he will.
Then you say it.
For you Goon:
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/politics/2015/05/01/sanders-fundraising-presidential-bid/26727045/
Why can’t free market, bootstrapping Republican candidates come up with bright ideas like this?
…
Financial reform
Sanders: A fierce critic of Wall Street, Sanders has advocated breaking up big banks to end the era of government bailouts of “too big to fail” financial institutions. He’s similarly skeptical of the Federal Reserve, leading the push to attach an amendment to the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial industry reform law that enacted the first ever audit of the institution.
…
Sanders might have good intentions, but even in the extremely unlikely event he gets elected - statistically impossible when 95% of the electorate are idiots who will most likely vote for HillaryJeb - he still has to deal with Wall Street’s future lobbyists in the Senate and the House.
Realtors are god’s people.
And GS is doing God’s work?
Actually, I can see how a person living in the Hamptons can rationalize their actions as God’s work. Globalization does reduce poverty in the world and acts to promote equality of nations. However, the banksters are keeping too much of wealth that is moving from the developed to the developing nations. Also, there is no dispute that it is the working poor in “rich” countries that are most adversely impacted by globalization. Thus, if you are a president of the U.S. doing your constitutional duty, you would be attempting to at least slow the transfer of wealth and jobs from this country to the developing world. But if you are like W, who actually said that America was more an idea that an country or Obama and look at yourself as a world citizen, you promote trade deals to facilitate that transfer of wealth to reduce inequality which makes one world government more feasible.
Lawyers make that happen. Lawyers today are nothing more than the mafia foot soldiers.
The overlords are providing very well for their ants. The ants eat better, love better, are more educated, more entertained and healthier than ever ever ever in history.
Who cares if they keep 99 percent if the 1 percent crumb you are left is the size of a cake!
“The overlords are providing very well for their ants.”
The overlords? The overlords are providing very well for their ants?
“The ants eat better, love better, are more educated, more entertained and healthier than ever ever ever in history.”
And this is due to the actions of the overlords?
How about considering that it just might be due to the actions of the ants?
Because it is not true. For blue collar workers the peak was 1973. One salary was sufficient for a decent life. Now, economists like to point to household incomes. But is a shirt cleaned outside the home cleaner? Outside meals better? Child care better? All these services provided by stay at home moms did not get included in the GDP but more importantly did not result in taxes when they were provided free.
Who cares if they rule us as our overlords, as long as we get plenty of bread and circuses.
Bread and circuses is exactly it. No people overall are not doing worse. Even taking out the 1 percent the remaining 99 percent on average are doing much better. There were no Arby’s Big Montana’s or iPads in the 70s. Also no yoga pants. The 70s was long stretches of boredom interspersed with Beegees and Led Zep shaginess.
Combotechie: How about considering that it just might be due to the actions of the ants?
It’s the advance of technology that creates the improved standard of living.
The financial sector often tries to take credit for this improved standard of living. They handle currency and other logical constructs, and currency is one pillar of the modern economy.
But it’s science that improves lifespan, improves building materials, improves food safety, improves car safety, improves communication. A significant chunk of the financial sector simply acts to suck out value of the economy.
“All these services provided by stay at home moms did not get included in the GDP but more importantly did not result in taxes when they were provided free.”
Awesome point. That just really jumped out and hit me. In hindsight it seems obvious this was a form of financial and tax engineering, but I never quite looked at it that way, just as sort of general decline in wage growth.
A significant chunk of the financial sector simply acts to suck out value of the economy.
Another note: Imagine if the money spent on the financial sector by the government instead went to WPA-type programs for the underclass.
Everything has consequences, both intended and unintended.
I don’t think handing out money to people is useful. I think people are designed to work and strive. Also, simply handing out money to the underclass creates all manner of dysfunction. But giving them jobs and forcing them to show up for work to collect a livable paycheck, and providing some opportunity for advancement, could go towards curing what ails them.
Of course, crafting an industrial policy which could do those kinds of things would be optimal, but Congress is essentially useless at this point.
“Actually, I can see how a person living in the Hamptons can rationalize their actions as God’s work”
There are very few full time residents in the East Hamptons, most of them show up during the summers mostly on weekends. We have a franchisee in the East Hamptons who is a retired cop from the East Hamptons. So I have visited the area many times and am quite familiar with it. People providing services in the area gossip quite a bit as to who’s who. The decent contractors have the home owner’s credit cards on file. Jobs are asked to be done. Then the contractor bills the credit card most of the time prices are not even asked. I guess they have trusted contractors working for them. As an example 27 thousand spent on outdoor cushions for cleaning. The care takers who live or are on the property most of the year on the average make 250K per year. It’s wide believed that if someone starts a service business in the Hamptons that they will become a millionaire within 10 years. In my opinion the Hamptons is a boring, desolate place to be year round with nothing to do except go to the movies.
Blue collar people in the 1970s could afford to buy in Coronado, CA in the early 70s good luck with that today, but here is the overall numbers at least for male workers:
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/17/140554967/median-male-workers-income-lower-than-in-1973
@Neuromance: “Another note: Imagine if the money spent on the financial sector by the government instead went to WPA-type programs for the underclass… I don’t think handing out money to people is useful. I think people are designed to work and strive. Also, simply handing out money to the underclass creates all manner of dysfunction.”
+1 Excellent point. Now take it one step further: if the underclass was paid a living wage ($15/hr) to do WPA-type work, they would have more money to spend, stimulating the economy with trickle-up, which is far more efficient at boosting the velocity of money than trickle-down. It would actually make the wealthy wealthier (increased sales of widgets), but in a way that is healthier for the economy and reduces wage inequality.
Why stop at $15 make it $50. Sorry the problem is open borders supported by Obama, the market sets wages to try to achieve full employment, increased supply causes decreases in wages and government involvement only makes it worse, raising the minimum wage will only act as a magnet for illegals, and will raise the cost of everything we buy and cause increased taxes to pay for programs for the unemployed. It will hurt the middle class.
If illegals cause wages to fall… then why does the GOP whistle and look the other way with regards to cracking down on employers who hire them?
Too many Republicans are like that and when Republicans like Cruz want to prevent amnesty they are attacked. But name one Democrat that opposes obama’s amnesty?
BTW, if it comes down to Jeb vs. Bernie, I would vote for Bernie.
WPA-type programs for the underclass.
Who is going to force them to work? Also they are “disabled.”
Doesn’t Ted Cruz’s wife work for Goldman Sachs?
Ted’s wife works for Goldman Sachs, but Ted is their bitch.
Why does he oppose amnesty and do he shut down the government against their will?
God uses his people (the Realtors) to punish Conspicuous Overconsumers by saddling them with crushing debt.
“Realtor Faces Felony Theft Charges”
http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/burr-ridge/news/ct-dbr-realtor-charged-tl-0416-20150414-story.html
Real estate agent busted trying to lure boy
Court records: Suspect works as local real estate agent
By Brent Weisberg (Twitter: @BrentKOIN) Published: April 13, 2015, 10:47 am Updated: April 13, 2015, 12:16 pm
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN 6) — Police said they caught a local real estate agent trying to lure a 15-year-old boy for sex during an undercover internet operation.
Douglas Scott Jodoin, 48, was arrested by Portland Police and charged with one count each of first-degree online sexual corruption of a child and luring a minor. The arrested occurred last week. Jodoin appeared in Multnomah County Circuit Court on Friday and entered a plea of not guilty.
Police said Jodoin intentionally took substantial steps towards physically meeting with the boy. The arrest stemmed from an undercover operation in which a police officer was pretending to be a 15-year-old boy, court documents state.
…
What is it about Realtors™ and sex with minors?
What is wrong with this organization? It’s as though they deliberately seek out and hire the shadiest characters they can find.
Do they run job fairs at prisons?
Do they run job fairs at prisons?
Worse, at Obama rallies.
Vanguard rocks!
I was checking my account balances last night and learned that they lowered the expenses on several of the Admiral index funds.
Total Stock Market and S&P 500 Index Fund expense ratios are down to 5 basis points.
Yes, been that way since a year ago. Sometimes they surprise me by further drops. We might see 3 cents expense in the 500 Admiral fund in a few years.
Maintain your house and there will be little to no depreciation.
How much have you spent on muffler bearings and blinker fluid Poet?
Don’t let your pride get in the way of buying a house.
Douglas-fir will last forever if you keep the moisture out of it!
I saw an 1860 house for sale on craigslist today and the wood still looks good as new.
Don’t let reality impose on your delusion Poet.
Houses depreciate rapidly. Even your shanty.
buy a house today, get some equity tomorrow!
Not with falling prices…. Data Poet data!
Davis, CA List Prices Plunge 7% YoY; Inventory Balloons On Rising Foreclosures
http://www.movoto.com/davis-ca/market-trends/
What is wrong with this organization? It’s as though they deliberately seek out and hire the shadiest characters they can find.
Do they run job fairs at prisons?
Douglas-fir will last forever if you keep the moisture out of it!
I saw an 1860 house for sale on craigslist today and the wood still looks good as new.
We have dome research on wood boards from over 100 year old barns falling apart in NY State. Yes the wood is still good but unhealthy with gross amount of mold growing both inside and outside. People should not occupy those buildings for an extended time.
How do you keep the moisture out of it?
It rains and the water behaves like a universal solvent and it will dissolve the coatings applied on the wood after that mold will begin to eat at it. Constant maintenance of wood gets very expensive.
“How do you keep the moisture out of it?”
With a roof?
Until the roof depreciates after 20 years.
Get your wallet out.
“Maintain your house and there will be little to no depreciation.”
And you can maintain it for all the money in the world but if your neighbors do not maintain theirs, your statement is false.
When you buy a house you buy your neighbors. And we keep knocking HOAs on this board but it’s a way for the responsible property owners to have more confidence their own house value will be maintained.
Buying houses is really for families with kids or who want kids. that’s really the big driver of all this.
How many all-cash foreign investors fit this description?
These are who investors have to eventually sell to, which is why it is all doomed too crash.
That is true mr bill. You cant control your neighbors so you pay the hoa to do that.
some of the older neighborhoods in sacramento have no hoa and you have a mess in some yards.
Unless your house is built of native rock, the dry air sucking the moisture out of the woodwork does just as much damage as the humid Florida air that eventually warps every board. All structures purchased with a 30 year mortgage will have 30 years worth of wear and tear when the bank is through taking its share.
Yessirree…… because houses are depreciating assets no different than cars.
the dry air sucking the moisture out of the woodwork does just as much damage ??
How is that ??
Have you ever been to AZ to see what the heat and sun do to unprotected wood? Picture driftwood in the desert. Extreme heat and humidity must be fought constantly. And cold too. Load up on the paintbrushes, scrapers and turpentine, because you have decades of fun to look forward to.
what the heat and sun do to unprotected wood ??
Well Duh…..Add to that water….
Load up on the paintbrushes, scrapers and turpentine, because you have decades of fun to look forward to ??
BS…Your buying into HA’s line of BS….
He’s looking at reality Dave. Try it sometime.
So you’re saying that church and houses in Bodie, CA have pretty much turned to dust, then? Unmaintained for 70 or more years, and many of those structures look like they are still standing…
I’m calling bs on that too.
“…many of those structures look like they are still standing…”
Nonetheless, it is hard to argue the financial depreciation was any less than 100%.
financial depreciation was any less than 100% ??
Thats because it has run its economic life…I am quite sure it was prosperous for many decades before it hit the wall…My bet is they got far more out financially than they put in…
“what the heat and sun do to unprotected wood ??”
The Sun light makes the wood grey making the top layer of wood cells completely destroyed but the constant hydration and dehydration will make the wood wrap and crack. This is what happens to decks all the time especially on parts where the stress and strains are the greatest.
Yep. There’s some depreciation too. Get your wallet out.
There’s nothing like the smell of old rafters in the morning. I guess the fact that old buildings don’t turn to dust after 70 years proves that houses require no work whatsoever. Get away from the keyboard for a few minutes and inspect those beams in the attic. If its a new house, notice how poor the quality of the wood is. And while you’re at it, inspect all that concrete for cracks too. Maybe after 30 years you can find some sucker to overpay for the house that has been accumulating your body odor. Maybe. But it won’t be me.
Don’t put words in my mouth—I never said they don’t require any work whatsoever. Clearly they require maintenance: primarily to keep the water out: paint, roofing, flashing, fascia, siding, etc. Water destroys, and quickly.
The only thing I took issue with was your assertion that DRY weather destroys wood. I call BS on that.
It’s called dry rot my friend.
Dry, hot weather causes wood to crack, and makes it brittle as well. Try putting a nail into an old dry board and see what good it does. My parents house is a hundred years old and the frame and doors are made of the kind of oak they don’t use anymore. Its still hard to put nails into, which sucks because the baseboards could use some reinforcement, and the heavy duty nails that were used originally have loosened over the years. The doors still look good, but they have warped to the point where some of them don’t shut very well. I can’t imagine that the pine and chemically treated plywood used in today’s houses will be around in a hundred years without some major rebuilds.
Permanent vacation
http://goo.gl/VR2XOS
Aquadonk my friend
Don’t start away uneasy
You poor old sod
You see it’s only me.
Dont quit yer day job.
“Dont quit yer day job.”
I’ve been thinking about going into professional protesting.
Data!
Ashburn, VA(DC metro) List Prices Sink 16%YoY As Housing Recovery Gains Traction
http://www.movoto.com/ashburn-va/market-trends/
Isn’t that what you do now?
Jimmy!
James Lola?
“James Lola?”
From Wikipedia
Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder (September 9, 1918 – April 21, 1996)
According to his autobiography Jimmy the Greek, Snyder bet US$10,000 on the 1948 election between Thomas Dewey and Harry S. Truman, getting 17–1 odds for Truman to win. In a later interview he indicated that he knew Truman was going to win because Dewey had a mustache and “American women didn’t trust men with a mustache”.
He invested money in oil drilling and coal mining, but when those ventures failed, Snyder moved to Las Vegas in 1956 and began a weekly pro-football betting line.
Racist comments and dismissal
On January 16, 1988, he was fired by the CBS network (where he had been a regular on NFL Today since 1976) after commenting to WRC-TV reporter Ed Hotaling at Duke Zeibert’s Washington, D.C. restaurant that African Americans were naturally superior athletes at least in part because they had been bred to produce stronger offspring during slavery:
Don’t quit your day job.
A real graphical design talent, there.
“A real graphical design talent, there.”
If only the Obama administration was as transparent as you guys.
Underwater donkey.
Well we do have diversity:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3065009/Booked-six-Baltimore-officers-facing-30-years-prison-murder-Freddie-Gray-police-van-cops-union-attacks-prosecutor-rush-judgement.html
Good luck getting a conviction out of this one.
It is a “snitches get stitches” person killed by people that live by the “code of silence”. They feed off each other. You have much to fear and a judicial system does work when either one of them is prevalent. If they are both prevalent you have a neighborhood that you should definitely avoid.
Good luck getting a conviction out of this one ??
Police & DA thought they had enough to arrest them…That says something…All your going to need is one of those six to roll over and sing like a canary…He will never be able to be a cop again, will need to leave the area but he likely gets off easier…
Police & DA thought they had enough to arrest them
Big difference between probable cause and beyond a reasonable doubt.
Interesting stuff: I found this in Wikipedia:
“Skin color paradox”
“The skin color paradox refers to the fact that no matter how differently African Americans are treated based on their skin color, their political and cultural attitudes about “blackness” as a form of identity and their feelings of relatedness and solidarity with other blacks tend to remain consistent. Although light-skinned African Americans receive many socio-economic advantages over dark-skinned African Americans, who have much more punitive relationships with the criminal justice system and greatly diminished prestige, and although African Americans are aware of this disparity in treatment and status, both light-skinned and dark-skinned African Americans have similar political attitudes towards discrimination and race solidarity.
“Political scientists would suggest that skin color is a characteristic perhaps equally important as religion, income, and education, which is why this paradox is so surprising, but studies show that skin color has no real bearing on actual political preference. Affirmative action is another example of the paradox between colorism on the one hand and political preference on the other. Studies show that most African Americans that benefit from affirmative action come from families that are better educated and more well off, and historically this means that the lighter-skinned portion of the black group is receiving the majority of the aid. Yet beneficiaries of this special treatment tend to hold on to their political identification with “blackness.”
Being “too black” has recently been acknowledged by the U.S. Federal courts in an employment discrimination case under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In Etienne v. Spanish Lake Truck & Casino Plaza, LLC the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, determined that an employee who as told on several occasions that her manager thought she was “too black” to do various tasks, found that the issue of the employee’s skin color rather race itself, played a key role in an employer’s decision to keep the employee from advancing.”
I used to know a guy from India (engineer, great guy who helped me out a lot) who married a lady from Pakistan whose skin was rather lighter than his. He told me that there had been great resistance from her family to the marriage based on the fact that he was darker than she was. The family felt she was “marrying down” based on his skin color.
A common phenomenon in most of the third world.
Alexandria, VA List Prices Crater 7% YoY; Inventory Explodes 75%
http://www.movoto.com/alexandria-va/market-trends/
1 in 4 US renters must use half their pay for housing costs
Posted 5:02 p.m. yesterday
By JOSH BOAK, AP Economics Writer
WASHINGTON — More than one in four U.S. renters have to use at least half their family income to pay for housing and utilities.
That’s the finding of an analysis of Census data by Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit that helps finance affordable housing. The number of such households has jumped 26 percent to 11.25 million since 2007.
Since the end of 2010, rental prices have surged at nearly twice the pace of average hourly wages, according to data from the real estate firm Zillow and the Labor Department.
“It means making really difficult trade-offs,” said Angela Boyd, a vice president at Enterprise Community Partners. “There are daily financial dilemmas about making their rent or buying groceries.”
Read more at http://www.wral.com/more-americans-spending-at-least-half-their-pay-on-housing/14616616/#gy8KXof60GXSwIT4.99
1 in 2 loanowners spent half of their incomes paying mortgages.
And the other half on maintenance and taxes.
“The number of such households has jumped 26 percent to 11.25 million since 2007.”
What happened in 2007?
spent half of their incomes paying mortgages ??
All the way up to the point that the mortgage is paid off….
And a lifetime of losses to depreciation.
The carrying costs never go away, but for a well-built house, it is possible that they can drop below rent.
The occasional maintenance frenzy, or new roof can offset that, dramatically increasing costs. And the monthly payment never goes away (Taxes, Insurance, Utilities, Maintenance, Fees).
The question is, what’s the best way to build net worth?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m an advocate of ownership - but only in those limited circumstances when it can actually, truly improve net worth and the standard of living.
The carrying costs never go away ??
Correct…Both for owner occupied and for rentals…Who do you think pays for those “carrying costs” on a rental ??
Losses to depreciation are $2-$3/sqft/yr. Not a very profitable way to improve net worth.
Dave,
Remember…. Landlord expenses are never automatic passthrough cost to the end user.
“1 in 4 US renters must use half their pay for housing costs”
Is this a sign of a healthy real estate market?
For the record, our rent is now something like 19% of our pre-tax income…lowest it’s been since we started renting.
Don’t ask about our tax bill. There has never been a worse time in history to be dependent on your labor market income rather than living off capital gains on bubble-valued assets…
My taxes are more than twice my rent… in San Francisco.
Because everyone has gone crazy …
“Science Fiction-Like Vertical City Could Rise in the Sahara Desert”
Note the word “city”. Not condos, not apartments, but a city.
“The plan is to build a 1,400 foot tall vertical city in the Sahara Desert (self-sustaining, of course), in a structure called the City Sand Tower, which would be asymmetrical and earth-colored in order to make it look like a giant boulder and blend in to the barren surroundings. The surrealness of the project is only enhanced by the description on the architects’ website, which, translated from French (by Google), reads like a prologue to a novel set on a desert planet.”
https://homes.yahoo.com/news/science-fiction-vertical-city-could-172827560.html
I have always thought it peculiar that with so much space, there would be a market for living very close to other neighbors so that you can hear or smell their annoying habits.
At least they won’t be driving Harleys on any of the floors.
They better have very good soundproof walls and dual paned windows.
Isn’t that what a person who lives out in the country would say about living near Irvine?
What is the ideal distance between dwellings? Being way off by your self seems like a nightmare to some.
Yeah there are some places too close together in Irvine. I could not imagine why anyone would plunk $800,000 into a house in Irvine ten feet from another wall. And you don’t even own the land underneath. You lease it from the Irvine Company, and pay $800,000 plus interest for the privilege of occupying it.
And then the people with dogs that bark all night at all hours. What can you do about them?.
But people in crowded cities put up with it because (unlike the Sahara Desert example), there are hundreds of square miles of things to do in the area. Universities, sports complexes, pubs, museums, surfing. You essentially get out from your cramped quarters and stretch. That tall Sahara building - do they expect people to spend many years in one place?
There will be a ” maze of streets that recall the oriental souks”, also ” hotel, housing, shops, a spring
panoramic restaurant, a meteorological observatory”. There are parks in the city, apparently. If you need more space, you go on a picnic in the desert.
The ideal distance is far enough that I can’t hear your TV or your kids squaking.
5 acre lot? That’s the McMansion size.
The people on the adjacent 10 acre lot are loud. Sometimes “out in the country” is so quiet, you can hear everything.
“As a reminder, the buyback-fueled rally comes at a cost. When corporations issue debt to repurchase shares, they’re taking on interest expense (even if, thanks to the Fed, borrowing costs are low) but are not investing in the future growth they’ll need to service the growing debt pile. So while record buybacks can support the rally, artificially inflate EPS, and enrich management teams in the short-run, over the long-haul, financial engineering is not a viable strategy for producing sustainable corporate growth and profitability.”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-02/us-equity-bubble-depends-corporate-buybacks-heres-proof
No commentary needed.
https://homes.yahoo.com/photos/china-s-ghost-cities-a-fever-of-destruction-construction-and-abandonment-1430518770-slideshow/photos-a-fever-of-destruction-construction-and-abandonment-in-china-photo-1430515470959.html
Big picture. most estimates that I have seen about vacate houses in China put the number at 49 million. China has four times the population of the U.S. Thus, if the U.S. has more than 12.5 million vacate houses than China it has more per capita. Most people on this board assert that we do have more than 12.5 million vacate houses. So why all the attention placed on China’s housing situation?
“So why all the attention placed on China’s housing situation?”
Because after the West ran out of money China’s exports to the West fell off so China decided to start building lots of stuff - including lots of housing stuff - in order to keep it economy going.
The reason for building all this housing stuff wasn’t to fill the needs of people who needed houses to live in, the reason was because China needed to keep the money flowing.
“So why all the attention placed on China’s housing situation?”
Seriously?
Markets | Mon Apr 20, 2015 5:03pm EDT
China’s banks foil support measures for housing market
BEIJING | By Koh Gui Qing and Clark Li
(Reuters) - China’s drumroll of policy support for its flagging housing market has met an unlikely foe: banks.
Beijing has tried to revive a flagging housing market as it looks to arrest an economic slowdown, but banks are increasingly worried about bad debts and are not passing on policy steps like interest rate cuts and lower downpayment requirements to home buyers.
The show of independence among state-owned banks comes at an awkward time. On one hand, having banks that lend only when it makes business sense is a coup for China, where reforms are aimed at developing a more market-driven economy.
But the banks’ stance means policy is not feeding through to the real economy. And as the housing market accounts for about 15 percent of China’s economy, it is crucial to stopping the loss of economic momentum.
“It’s difficult because our margins are already squeezed, there isn’t much differentiation in the market, so our focus is on how much our capital costs are,” said a banker at a top-10 Chinese lender, explaining why his bank is reluctant to lend.
…
China is a hybrid economy part planned and part free. It has plenty of tools to keep the 7% rolling. For example, you posted the flash manufacturing figures for April for China but I have not seen the PMI which just came out posted. It showed that manufacturing grew last month. China responded to the weakness early in April caught by the flash PMI, it cut interest rates and boosted infrastructure spending. Eventually, China will exhaust its tools but in the long run we will all be dead. Right now with relatively high interest rates and low federal debt, it can goose the economy at will.
From China Daily:
BEIJING - Chinese manufacturing business activity continued improving in April, with an important index remaining in expansion territory, official data showed on Friday.
The manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI), a key measure of factory activity in China, posted at 50.1 in April, unchanged from 50.1 in March and up from 49.9 for February, according to data compiled by the National Bureau of Statistics and the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing.
Excerpt from China Daily, interesting if the paper was government controlled as claim by many on the board they would be saying this, in any event I think it shows positive movements:
For decades, the most coveted jobs in China have been in government, with their steady income, job security and power. Now people like Nymar Li are changing that perception by leaving government jobs to seek their fortunes at startups.
Li became the pride of his family when he landed a job in the customs bureau right out of college a decade ago. Then last year, he gave up the security of employment for life to join an e-commerce startup working in Hangzhou, following the path of Jack Ma who helped found Alibaba Group Holding Ltd in the same city and then pulled off the largest initial public offering ever.
It is a sign of a broader shift in China as the economy slows and state-backed companies falter. People like Ma are inspiring a generation to become entrepreneurs and seek their fortune in the private sector, just as a crackdown on corruption makes it less prestigious and lucrative to be a civil servant.
“The brightest of our generation no longer yearn to be in the system,” said the 34-year-old Li. “As long as you have the caliber, there’s a real possibility you can make it in the market.”
The number of people taking the civil entrance exam fell to a record low, down 7.5 percent to 1.4 million, according to the State-run People’s Daily.
Liu Yuan, an investment manager at ZhenFund, sees the shift through the startups he backs. Last year, the Beijing-based angel investor pumped $70 million into 100 startups, with about half of his most recent investments founded by college graduates born after 1985.
“Kids these days no longer find going into government on top of their list,” said the 26-year-old Liu. “Setting up their own startups is what they have their eyes on.”
New businesses are sprouting at a record pace, with China’s version of Silicon Valley birthing 49 startups a day last year. More than 1,000 organizations are investing in startups with capital exceeding 350 billion yuan ($56 billion), according to the ministry of science and technology.
So China’s half command-and-control economy, half free market economy is a superior hybrid to a free market?
No. But you have to understand it, to predict it and you cannot ignore the differences when you try to figure out why their data is smoother than our data. They work to create smooth data, it does not mean it is fake.
“It has plenty of tools…”
You accidentally spoke the truth there.
But I have been right and you have been wrong about China’s growth rate. You are the tool, a tool of Obama.
“they work to create smooth data, it does not mean it is fake”
Nothing fake about a ghost city.
https://homes.yahoo.com/photos/china-s-ghost-cities-a-fever-of-destruction-construction-and-abandonment-1430518770-slideshow/photos-a-fever-of-destruction-construction-and-abandoment-in-china-photo-1430505970387.html
(In the 29th picture it looks like they’re building a commercial multi-story building with bamboo as the framework.)
Those pics are great but did anyone else check out the Rent-a-Foreigner video documentary also linked to there?
Pretty funny stuff:
http://yhoo.it/1DIrEBP
That video is hilarious. Especially the ‘British guards’, and the guy who tells the realtor his skill is ‘drinking lots and lots of beer’.
AlbqDan = tool of Hitler (especially the racism and the 24/7 propaganda barrage)
Even for you a new low. You show there are no lengths you will not go to defend Obama.
You are so infatuated with Obama that you mention him in every post. Of course, this pales compared to the adulation you are destined to shower on Hillary during her upcoming two-term presidency.
Because there is a contingent that insists that US real estate and stock prices will go up forever because of Chinese investors. However, if Chinese investors have the same problems as US investors, then there is no reason to believe that the Chinese have any ability to somehow save the US economy or whatever.
So wth 49 million (low-end guesstimate) vacant homes in China’s Potemkin cities, the economic recovery plan is to artificially goose housing demand in order to stimulate more construction?
What could possibly go wrong?
Jerry Jasinowski
Fmr. President of the National Association of Manufacturers
China’s Potemkin Villages
Posted: 09/09/2014 8:17 am EDT
Updated: 11/09/2014 5:59 am EST
SHANGHAI
Grigory Potemkin was a successful military leader and sometime lover of his patron Catherine the Great of Russia. But he is known to history primarily for building faux villages along a route the great queen would pass to put on a show of prosperity for her and her royal guests who came from all over Europe.
On August 3, Lesley Stahl of CBS’s Sixty Minutes aired a report from China about that nation’s obsession for building apartment and condo complexes without end in new cities all over the country, though there are precious few people who can afford to live in them. It is always difficult to glean reliable data from China, but some reports suggest China has invested upwards of $2 trillion in what may prove the most expansive real estate bubble in history.
Beijing has a tiger by the tail. Tens of millions of Chinese have bought condos in these ghost towns as long-term investments. Each condo represents the life savings of a middle class Chinese family. Many millions more Chinese are employed building these vacant edifices and the roads around them that are mostly empty of traffic. The bureaucrats in Beijing do not dare puncture this balloon so it just keeps expanding.
Predictably, the Chinese banking system is heavily over-extended in property. Chinese banks have huge portfolios of non-performing loans that are being swept under the rug because the problem is simply too big to deal with. The Chinese government is pushing forward on interest rate liberalization to inject more competition into the financial sector dominated by state institutions, but this amounts to closing the barn door after the horses have fled.
…
ok guys if you cannot see the BS going here you deserve to lose your money.
home depot shareholder equity in 2011 = 18.89 billion
home depot shareholder equity in 2015= 9.32 billion
Over that same period total liabilities (debt) has went up 10 billion.
http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/hd/financials/balance-sheet
Total amount of shares in 2011 = 1.65 billion , 2015 1.34 billion
basically 300,000.00 shares bough back over that period
any comments?
any comments ??
Lowes has better stuff…More complete stock…
“any comments?”
“has went up”
Sorry for being a grammar nazi.
On a more serious note, having worked on and off for five years for a company that was a vendor to HD (and other enterprises), I was in and out of some of the stores in this area over that period and witnessed a steady decline and demoralization of the floor employees at the hands of store management, much of which I think trickled down from upper management. Managers cut long time employees who had built up a halfway decent hourly wage, which reduced expenses and increased bonuses.
I also witnessed customers walking out in disgust when they couldn’t find help to get what they needed and wanted.
Our local branch of HD, in an effort to reduce expenses, shut off as much light and AC as possible and it remains that way until this day. I had to go there a couple of weeks ago and it struck me how dim the lighting was and still is. Really not a good idea for Florida during the summer time, at least the AC part. I’ve seen a customer or two almost pass out from the heat. It’s like being in a humid dim cave. That, combined with the lack of floor personnel, doesn’t exactly encourage shoppers to stay and look around and see what else they might need.
On a final note, there are two houses here in the nabe undergoing renovation. Home Depot is pretty much right up the street. about five minutes away. Lowe’s is about 20 minutes north. Both houses have been getting their materials delivered from Lowe’s.
I went into a home depot store about a year ago and asked somebody if they had plumbers tape. It took about 10 people to figure out wtf I was talking about.
Home Depot CEO “Craig Menear’s pay also includes incentives of 200 percent of his base salary if he meets certain performance targets plus $3.5 million in stock options”
There you go. Got stock options? Check. Engineer stock buyback, reducing the float, price goes up. Check. Collect huge profit. Check.
This type of self-serving, conflict-of-interest behavior should be illegal. But Congress won’t pass a law to regulate this because anything that regulates bizness is socialism and anti-freedom.
somebody gets in! I think it is fraud myself. They will leave shareholders holding the bag eventually.
Seems like corporations have become the biggest gamblers in the market.
I feel like I’m talking about the housing bubble in 2004.
This type of self-serving, conflict-of-interest behavior should be illegal. But Congress won’t pass a law to regulate this because anything that regulates bizness is socialism and anti-freedom.
Congress won’t protect the public interest because Congress is a wholly owned subsidiary of the banks, corporations, and their army of lobbyists. We have no hope of getting a better class of Congressmen since 95% of the electorate are cretins who keep voting for more of the same.
Home Prices in Greater Boston Soared in the First Months of 2015
Meanwhile, a number of towns and neighborhoods have blown past home price highs set back in 2005, the peak of the last boom.
At $1.3 million, Cambridge’s median home price is more than double what it was back during the first three months of 2005, when it was $667,500, while the median price of a home in Somerville back in the spring of 2005 was $428,500, not $590,000, as it is today, Warren Group numbers show.
Needham’s median price of $980,000 represents a nearly 50 percent increase over a decade ago, when it was $663,750.
http://www.boston.com/real-estate/news/2015/04/30/home-prices-greater-boston-soared-the-first-months/9NQye9kleG8XADq1wKGFBJ/story.html#sthash.oiIafGCL.dpbs
The Warren Group? Be skeptical.
Boston Metro Sale Prices Plummet 14% YoY; Prices Down YoY Statewide
http://www.zillow.com/ma/home-values/
Baltimore police mugshots released; confuse the heck out of race-baiters
Michael Dorstewitz
Bizpac Review
May 2, 2015
On Friday night, the Baltimore police Department released the mugshots of the six police officers charged in the homicide of Freddie Gray
The officers, who have all been released on bond, were previously identified as Lt. Brian Rice, Officer Garrett Miller, Sgt. Alicia White, Officer William Porter, Officer Edward Nero, and Officer Caesar Goodson.
That half of the officers are black appears to dispel the notion that the death of Gray was racially motivated, but the debate raged on social media:
http://www.darkpolitricks.com/…/ -
This reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about in years.
In about 1971 my father took me to a church fundraiser dinner where a guy named Dave Herman who played right guard for the New York Jets in Super Bowl III was the guest speaker.
He was a pretty funny and entertaining guy. Besides talking about lining up against Bubba Smith in the Super Bowl one of his stories was about his rookie training camp and a play where he had to pull. He said he ran the play 3 times and slipped and fell each time where he was supposed to turn up field.
He said his head coach Weeb Ewbank a short fat old man pushed him out of the way, got in a 3 point stance and ran the play. He slipped and fell on the same blade of grass Dave Herman had 3 times.
He said Coach Ewbank got up threw his hat on the ground and screamed…
“Herman! You’ve got this position so screwed up nobody can play it!”
What about the mug shots confuses you?
“What about the mug shots confuses you?”
Ask Bernie Sanders.
The second degree homicide charge was actually filed against a black man. From the evidence I heard so far he has the best evidence against him. Charging the officers that arrested him for having a weapon seems to be quite the overreach.
Classic:
Cops Charged in Freddie Gray’s Death Receive Lower Bails Than Teen Rioter
by Daniel Politi
When Baltimore’s chief prosecutor charged one police officer with murder and five others with separate crimes related to the death of Freddie Gray, many cheered the decision. But the injustice of the justice system quickly became evident after they were arrested and received lower bails than a Baltimore teenager who turned himself in after he was photographed smashing a police car window with a traffic cone. Allen Bullock, 18, voluntarily turned himself into authorities at the urging of his parents and was held on $500,000 bail, according to the Guardian. The accused officers, meanwhile, all received bails of between $250,000 and $350,000, according to the Baltimore Sun.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/05/02/cops_charged_in_freddie_gray_s_death_receive_lower_bails_than_teen_rioter.html
The accused officers, meanwhile, all received bails of between $250,000 and $350,000, according to the Baltimore Sun.
You know, as officers of the lawy, probably are lower flight risks. Shouldn’t that be reflected in the bail amount that is required to ensure that they stick around and show up at trial?
The guys with the lower bail are charged with killing someone. The guy with the higher bail voluntarily turned himself for smashing a car window with a traffic cone.
If you can’t see the difference, that explains so much, bro.
Car windows matter.
The guy who voluntarily turned himself in is a flight risk?
You’re smarter than that, prime.
$500,000 bail,
Ok, I’ll admit it: I hadn’t read the whole thing. $500K for busting a car window does sound incredibly excessive.
Course, the judge who set the bail may not have been assuming that this individual was _only_ responsible for the damage that was recorded on video. $500K is probably too low for whoever burned down any of the stores that got torched.
I haven’t been following this story very closely, but I’m confused by the charges. Wasn’t there a witness saying that the guy was trying to hurt his own self, and didn’t the cops bring him to the hospital when they noticed he was injured?
Also, don’t cops commit abuse against all types of people? It’s not just black men. They also do it to white men, women, messicans, and everyone they can get their hands on basically.
Cops will beat a white boy just as happily as a black one.
+1. But if the victim is black, he probably deserved it. Right, phony?
Oddfellow
Are you Ben Affleck’s second cousin three times removed or third cousin twice removed?
The Janus party.
Yes, the two parties do differ on social issues. The rhetoric they spout implies more of a difference than their actions do.
But when it comes to economics and foreign policy, both their words and actions are very similar.
The Janus party.
Brilliant.
I wish I could take credit for it but I can’t. I read it elsewhere and thought it was a perfect description as well.
Janus: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Janus1.JPG
A colleague of mine has a condo in Redondo Beach, owns a rental house in Hollywood - an old house his late aunt and uncle used to own, and owns a house in Fresno he bought for a sister to live in.
He’s spending a lot of money maintaining all three. And also maintaining his upscale car. L.A. was hammering him for getting the sewer lines fixed in his Hollywood rental and he had to take two vacation days from work to wait for the plumber. The house in Fresno was nice brand new but the sister has pet rabbits and there are rabbit droppiings all over. She basically trashed it.
The Redondo Beach condo does have a HOA but he has complained about having to take time off from work to let someone in his place to fix some common wiring (FIOS) that goes to a neighbor’s place.
I learn from people like this. The question is “who is running your life, you or your possessions?”
That would be the rabbits.
Crushing.Housing.Losses.
CraterRage Photo Of The Day
http://goo.gl/Z69z7x
Washington license plate I spotted this week: GOTRAGE
When the price of anything and everything fall to dramatically lower and more affordable levels, this happens ——> http://goo.gl/loFyZ5
It happened to gasoline for awhile. Now I see the price at the pump is back to near $4 in my area.
The house price drops in my area have yet to begin. But I really enjoy the lack of ownership on my part because of the freedom I have. I somehow prefer multiple unit dwellings to SFHs. My places are mostly quiet without the annoying dogs that bark all night. Though lots of neighbors have those four legged poop factories.
Do I really care if house prices drop? I hope they do because that will encourage rent prices to fall. In my experience, yes in L.A. I had an occasion when my rent price dropped 20%. It was in 2009 or 2010. My “just South of Irvine” area rent stayed the same as I renewed the lease. That’s a good thing.
My salary is stagnant. My car is over 12 years old now. I don’t go out and buy up the economy because of my stagnant salary. I am on strike against high prices. There is only so much that I can afford. I stopped going to strip joints 5 years ago, the height of my compensation and income. Happy to throw $1s and higher bills at the girls…
Is it safe to say this is a stock party on shareholder equity?
Visited some of my buddies in Wichita when I came back thru on Friday. Nothing there has changed, thus reaffirming my decision to leave 15 years ago….
-Used to be most of the tech service and management staff was promoted from the wrench turners on the floor. Not any more.
This plan has been replaced by the “anyone with a management degree can manage this program’ plan, in conjunction with the “Bigger A-Hole = Better Manager” Plan.
The Division VP is a guy I used to have on my crew. Fits the profile. Prime example of why NYC/New Jersey residents aren’t regarded highly out here in BFE.
Also doesn’t help that he’s installing friends and cronies from outside the company as managers. One of them is evidently the wife of his best friend. Hasn’t spent a day in the airplane business, but is now in charge of one of the biggest departments.
One of the direct results is that guys who have been with the company for 20-30 years are being demoted or retired left and right, if they don’t fall in with the “my way or the highway” plan.
One of the things that has been changing in this business is the belief of airplane owners that they no longer need an “in house” mechanic. Their function will supposedly be taken over by “aviation management” companies, or the OEMS.
Good luck with that. These guys believe any random idiot can be sent out to fix an airplane, and the less you pay him, the more money there is for the management
Recently, I was asked to look at a problem a local guy had. Seems that he’d spent $20K with a big-name shop to fix a problem, but they still had it. Shop didn’t care, they got their $20K before the airplane left.
(-fixr identified the problem by looking at the airplane for less than five minutes, took about six hours to fix it, including undoing the half-azzed work of the first shop. Not meaning to brag, but this is the difference between knowing what you are doing, and not knowing).
Fortunately, the -fixr is working for a guy who seems to be concerned about the quality of maintenance on the airplane that is flying him and his family around, and figured out quickly that he needed a full time guy.
“Fortunately, the -fixr is working for a guy who seems to be concerned about the quality of maintenance on the airplane that is flying him and his family around, and figured out quickly that he needed a full time guy.”
You are fortunate, believe me. My guess is that it’s going to get worse before it gets better and people start demanding “a good job” and are willing to pay for it.
There does seem to be this delusional attitude of “good help is a dime a dozen” that tends to trickle down from the top. Everyone’s expendable, presumably. I left one of my old employers because of the little side games they liked to play, bending me over to nincompoops they employed, one of them a friend of the boss. So I quit. Now they have to pay THREE people at 2-3x the hours to get the production I was getting.
At my current gig, fully half of the operators on the floor do not speak English. I work in regulated industry, so you would think there would be a limit to this, but there isn’t. I think it’s the same all over the country, and in every line of work. Hire the cheapest worker bees you can get, put up with their inability to do the job, and promote the biggest JERKS into management, even though they can’t solve problems or use their noggins in any way.
I attribute this to the devaluation of labor due to a lack of tariffs and enforcement of immigration and labor laws.
As mentioned here before I get to experience the joys of Six Sigma where I work.
As of now the big push is getting the numbers properly tweeked so as to reduce the amount of time spent doing Operating Expense related stuff, and one way this is being done is to call the time that is being spent as doing Capital Expense related stuff.
The NUMBERS are the same but WHAT THEY ARE CALLED is what is different. And what they are called is what matters.
When people ask me where I work I tell them Comedy Central. When they ask me what I do I tell them I generate numbers. If they ask me what sort of numbers I generate then I tell them whatever numbers are in demand at that particular time.
People who do not work under Six Sigma do not get it. People who work under Six Sigma do.
The company, once upon a time, used to be market driven, now it is budget driven.
When it was market driven the marketing folks held the clout; What the marketing folks wanted - what they needed - they got.
Now that the Six Sigma guys arrived on the scene the marketing guys have to depend on the budget guys to fulfill their role. But if a particular sector of the company that the marketing guys depend on has its forecasted budget shot then the marketing guys get to pound sand. And this sand-pounding usually takes place:
1. When the item that the marketing guys need is expensive (expensive = budget-busting) and
2. It is near the end the quarter.
At the beginning of the next quarter everything becomes wonderful again because this is when new budgets are forecasted and replenished with cash.
As I said, Comedy Central.
Johnny Carson once caused a run on toilet paper because he made a joke about a shortage of toilet paper.
Go here:
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/01/johnny-carson-once-caused-a-month-long-toilet-paper-shortage/
There’s a lesson here: If you think there is going to be a shortage on a much-needed item then you are going to stock up on that item when ever you happed to run across that item.
This works with toilet paper and it also works with much-needed-but-hard-to-get items needed to perform one’s job.
And this means there will always be a chronic shortage of these much-needed items as long as the much-needed items are hard to get because since they are hard to get they will end up being hoarded - as soon as they show up they will disappear.
This makes the budget guys really unhappy because while they claim the much-needed items have been shipped to wherever it is they to go the guys on the receiving end claim they never received them.
So there ends up being a lot of arguing back and forth and eventually another item gets shipped and - if one is not careful - it too will disappear.
So the budget guys who have all these plans and schemes designed to save money end up spending a lot more money than they ever possibly could have imagined.
I’m a green belt. I have heard of these games being played, but I have never seen it with my own eyes. Why don’t you just tell the CEO that it’s bullshit? It’s his/her job to ferret that stuff out.
“I have heard of these games being played, but I have never seen it with my own eyes.”
Maybe this is because, as a green belt, you are positioned at the wrong end of it.
“Why don’t you just tell the CEO that it’s bullshit?’
The proponents of Six Sigma demand a full - A FULL - commitment to the plan by everyone - especially from the CEO - and anyone who is considered to not be fully committed (aka a team player) will be run off.
“I still believe that before this cycle ends, the quantity of U.S. deals, including co- investments, should rise to a record given the unprecedented low rates and the current extreme reluctance to make new investments in plant and equipment (how old-fashioned that sounds these days) rather than into stock buybacks, which may be good for corporate officers and stockholders, but bad for GDP growth and employment and, hence, wages.”
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/grantham-says-fed-bound-and-determined-to-engineer-full-fledged-bubble/
Bernie Sanders, I love you man!
“Social Security: Expand it, don’t cut it” — by Sen. Bernie Sanders
“…The truth is that Social Security is a success story. Without it, nearly half of seniors, and 1 million children, would be living in poverty today. It’s financially self-sufficient, forbidden by law from adding to the federal deficit, and its operating costs are far below those of private-sector retirement plans.
Some politicians have an ideological problem with Social Security, because they hate government. Social Security is a government program that works very well and is extremely popular with the public. That threatens their philosophy — so they claim that it’s “going broke” instead.
That’s not true. The retirement trust fund has $2.8 trillion in surplus, enough to pay full benefits for 18 years (and three-quarters of benefits afterwards). Why not longer? In large part, because income inequality — the huge gap between rich and poor — has soared, hurting millions of Americans and all but wiping out the middle class.
Income inequality has also hurt Social Security’s finances, by leaving most of the wealthiest Americans’ earnings above the cut-off point for the payroll tax which funds it. A Wall Street CEO who makes $18 million per year pays no more in payroll tax than someone earning $118,000.
America doesn’t have a problem with “greedy geezers,” to quote one Social Security adversary. It has a “Robin Hood in Reverse” problem, a problem with policies that take from working families and give to the rich.
I have reintroduced legislation that would apply the payroll tax to earned income above $250,000 as well as investment income. This would allow us not only to increase benefits to meet the elderly’s higher living expenses, but to extend Social Security’s solvency until 2065.”
==
You have earned my vote, Sir!
A self-described socialist has earned your vote, I’m shocked.
I know. Somehow “mainstream Democrat” got redefined as “socialist.”
As the quality of education, quality of jobs, quality of health care declines in the US we might have to actually admit someday that the socialist-capitalist Benelux and Nordic economies actually work better. Higher quality of life, longer life spans, lower infant mortality, etc…
+1
He’s an odd breed of socialist to want to increase competition in the banking sector by breaking up the crony capitalist too-big-to-fail banks.
I’m no socialist, but I would vote for Bernie over HillaryJeb any day. May no agree with him right down the line, but he at least has a notion of basic decency and looking out for the public interest.
Then again, I’m in the non-retard 5% of the electorate who refuses to vote for crony capitalist water carriers.
That’s not true. The retirement trust fund has $2.8 trillion in surplus, enough to pay full benefits for 18 years (and three-quarters of benefits afterwards
Exactly my point social security is only 18 years away from having to cut benefits by 25% plus. Obama is not even talking about it at least Sanders has a plan, it will not get passed but at least he is addressing it. For Obama to allow social security to get as close to insolvency as it is without seeking some type of compromise is gross negligence of his duty.
Hey, we actually agree on something!
Why is it that the only candidate who seems willing to talk about solutions to substantive structural problems happens to be unelectable?
Not that this is anything new. It’s been this way for 100 years or more, based on my reading of this book.
Why is it that the only candidate who seems willing to talk about solutions to substantive structural problems happens to be unelectable?
Because 95% of the electorate are morons. Haven’t I explained this already?
The major political parties set up dummy candidates during the Primaries to say things that make their party look better than it really is, while making their prechosen winner seem to have beaten out the competition in an actual race of some sort.
I’ve learned over the years that much of politics is Grand Kabuki choreographed to resemble a public policy process in order to legitimize the decision that was made behind the curtain.
“#4 According to numbers that were just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, inone out of every five American families nobody has a job. So how in the world can the “unemployment rate” be sitting at “5.5 percent” when everyone is unemployed in 20 percent of all families in the United States? It doesn’t make any sense.”
#9 McDonald’s plans to permanently shut down 700 “poorly performing” restaurants over the course of 2015. Why would they be doing this if the economy is “getting better”?
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/16-signs-that-the-economy-has-stalled-out-and-the-next-economic-downturn-is-near/
Economy is better so they are eating at upscale restaurants?
They are eating at taco carts run by illegals?
They are eating at taco carts run by illegals ??
Not here there not;
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=9&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CEoQFjAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dmtc.com%2Fcalendar%2Fdetail%2Ftruck&ei=kAxFVeyMFdbtoATj4oHYCQ&usg=AFQjCNErVwPfbNtkJSkzncGHwdoBXrrRuA&sig2=S4FYXfOkCgwx00-Sj6l2iQ&bvm=bv.92291466,d.cGU
Glad to see the Grilled Cheese Truck, in which I am a major shareholder, is represented there. Frightened to see that two other trucks have illegally stolen our grilled cheese idea.
I’ll alert the company’s lawyers.
Why would they be doing this if the economy is “getting better” ??
I think it may be deeper than the economy…I think it may be a demographic and ethic change…There was a time that I would go to Mc’s and order two cheeseburgers…Put them together as one giant double-cheese…Its been so long ago I did that I can’t remember when…I don’t like to eat that food anymore for both palate & health…
I think it has a lot to do with their prices. They use to be cheap but 6 dollar value meals are over the top. I personally dont see any value there besides the dollar menu.If you have kids the bill can add up quick.
Prices have got so high that folks are going to competitors like carls jr and places like chipolte.
There is nothing price wont fix.
I hate McDonalds and never ate there on a regular basis even when I was young and ate similar food but much better from local vendors in Burlington, Vermont. However, I do end up eating there a few times a year when I am on the road. The thing is they are no longer cheap and I don’t think that people making the minimum wage can afford to eat there as often.
There are a lot of semi-retired boomers who do freelancing, under the table work, trade securities, collect dividends, etc., that on paper are not employed and not unemployed. Causes the labor participation rate to fall.
^ LOL
“#4 According to numbers that were just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, inone out of every five American families nobody has a job. So how in the world can the “unemployment rate” be sitting at “5.5 percent” when everyone is unemployed in 20 percent of all families in the United States? It doesn’t make any sense.”
How many of these families are senior citizens? Is this writer completely uninterested in that question?
Mike even look at Ireland which has a claimed 10% unemployment rate, yet if you look at the participation rate it is only two or three percent lower than the US. Our unemployment rate and participation do not match.
That’s because Ireland has more poor people who can’t afford to live without working.
Becauase two retired people living in a household is a family.
Plague in Colorado! What a backward state this is…..
Well … there are millions of prairie dogs in the state, and they are known to carry the disease.
And all the millions of Californians and Texans coming into the state look like disease vectors to me. Send ‘em back!
Late response from yesterday:
Comment by Ben Jones
2015-05-01 05:27:32
Keep in mind we are breathlessly told how HOT these areas are.
[...]
‘Calls to the number listed on the notice led a Queens Chronicle reporter to a Wells Fargo hotline. A spokesman for the bank said in an email that it is the “servicer on the loan” and that Freddie Mac, a government-sponsored firm, is “the investor and actual owner of the loan.”
“There have been efforts to sell the property ‘as is’ via short sale, but the previous offers were declined by Freddie Mac,” the spokesman added.’
Short sale means they haven’t foreclosed. At least 5 years since it’s been abandoned, and it hasn’t been foreclosed.
I would posit that it hasn’t been foreclosed because the paperwork is not in order to do so.
Further, I would argue that this is a backdoor bailout of the big banks. These loans without proper paperwork _could_ have been pushed back to the originating banks, in the case where they are either still in business or were purchased by another company still in business.
But Freddie Mac chose not to do that for some reason… which begs the question: why not?
Opinion: A bullish argument for stocks turns out to be wrong
By Mark Hulbert
Published: May 1, 2015 5:30 a.m. ET
There is little evidence of cash ‘on the sidelines’ ready to be invested
Americans don’t actually have any money to invest in the stock market.
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (MarketWatch) — What appears to be a bullish argument for the stock market turns out to be a compelling case for why it’s in trouble.
I’m referring to the notion that a huge amount of cash is sitting “on the sidelines,” as investment professionals say. And it’s just ready to propel the market higher once Nervous Nellie investors finally decide that this bull market is for real.
I admit that it would indeed be bullish if there were a lot of sideline cash. As market folklore has it, bull markets don’t come to an end until the last bear throws in the towel.
And I also admit that it certainly appears as though we’re nowhere close to having the last bear turn bullish. A recent Bankrate survey, for example, found that only 48% of Americans are investing in the stock market. It was close to 70% in the early years of this century.
But there’s a big problem with this otherwise compelling story: There is scant direct evidence that this huge pile of sideline cash actually exists. Ned Davis of Ned Davis Research earlier this week went so far as to pronounce, after extensively looking for such evidence, that “I simply cannot find it.”
…
“There is scant direct evidence that this huge pile of sideline cash actually exists. Ned Davis of Ned Davis Research earlier this week went so far as to pronounce, after extensively looking for such evidence, that “I simply cannot find it.”
Yeah? Well that’s what makes it king.
I am not seeing much deflation at the gasoline pumps.
$2 gallon fuel oil, $2.20 gas, 2.85 diesel…
What’s not to like?
Not what the national surveys are showing, NM does not even match those levels and it usually has prices lower than the national average. What city has those prices according to you?
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Resources/2015/05/01/Gas-prices-mirror-crude-oils-rise/4961430473380/
Excerpt from link that will soon post:
AAA reports a national average retail price for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline at $2.60 for Friday, the first day of May. That’s up two cents, or three quarters of a percent, from Thursday and 57 cents, or 28 percent, higher than in late January.
AAA spokesman Avery Ash said that, while it’s normal for gasoline prices to climb as summer approaches, the rate of increase is faster than in the past. The national average price for Friday is the highest since Dec. 12 and has increased at the fastest rate since late 2012.
Don’t know what to tell you Dan. I just filled a 500 gal fuel oil tank. Slip says $2.039/gallon.
Remember…. What we need is falling prices. Falling prices accelerate the economy like nothing else.
Of course, the Chinese can afford to rent a RV and pay for the gasoline now, unfortunately their demand drives up our prices:
http://www.shanghaidaily.com/metro/public-services/Recreational-vehicles-get-ready-to-roll/shdaily.shtml
What demand? Crude production is at record highs, tanks farms are overflowing and demand is cratering.
Remember…. Falling prices of all items is positively bullish and good for the economy.
gas is going up daily here. Like 3.20 up to 3.50 for chevron commercials.
something seems shady to me.
You’re in the land of fruits and nuts where everything is shady Poet.
queen
Happy Crater Sunday, all.
So when we they finally announce were in a recession so stocks can crater?
lather, rinse , repeat?
What makes you think we are in a recession?
I do note that the Great Recession was already underway in December 2007 though not made official until after the 2008 election.
ECONOMY
Analysis finds 26 pct. surge since Great Recession in US families who face burdensome rents
Published May 01, 2015
Associated Press
This Friday, Feb. 27, 2015, photo shows a sign advertising a house for rent in Los Angeles. More than one-in-four renters must devote at least half of their family income to housing and utilities, according to a new analysis of Census data by Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit that helps finance affordable housing. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel) (The Associated Press)
WASHINGTON – The surging cost of rental housing has squeezed a rising proportion of U.S. families since the Great Recession struck in 2007.
For more than one in four renters, housing and utilities consume at least half their family income, according to an analysis of Census data by Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit that helps finance affordable housing. The number of such households has jumped 26 percent to 11.25 million since 2007, a sign that the 6½-year-old recovery from the recession has given scant relief to much of the country.
The government defines housing costs in excess of 30 percent of income as burdensome.
“It means making really difficult trade-offs,” said Angela Boyd, a vice president at Enterprise Community Partners. “There are daily financial dilemmas about making their rent or buying groceries.”
The crisis reflects one of the shortcomings of the recovery: Wages have failed to match rising rental prices. At the same time, construction has failed to keep pace with demand from renters. The recession pushed more millennials, former homeowners who faced foreclosure and low-wage workers into rental housing.
A result is that 2.3 million more families face pressures that leave them perilously close to homelessness. It’s a reality faced by Lisette Duarte, a 37-year-old living in a two-bedroom apartment with her family in northeast Los Angeles.
Duarte’s husband lost his job as an electrician more than three years ago. With both their son and daughter on the autistic spectrum and in need of care, he chose to stay at home while she worked a job requiring a 90-minute commute each way. The lost income forced them out of a three-bedroom house and eventually into a hotel, where vouchers over the course of five months helped them save for a security deposit for an apartment.
About a year ago, the family moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the Highland Park neighborhood where Duarte had grown up. Two-bedrooms in that gentrifying community rent for an average of about $1,600 a month, according to the online service Apartment List. The expense, along with utilities, consumes half of Duarte’s paycheck.
The family relies on prepaid cellphones. They don’t dine out or go on vacations. Whatever extra income they have often goes for health care.
More than 30 percent of renters in California, Florida, New Jersey and New York state devote at least half their incomes to housing and utilities, according to the analysis. Other than Alaska, South Dakota and Wyoming, at least 20 percent of renters in every state face similarly high costs relative to income.
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Quick — somebody warn the record number of investors in U.S. residential real estate:
- The birth rate recently hit a record low.
- Future demand is toast.
- You got stucco.
12:00 am ET
Apr 28, 2015
Economics
Just How Much Did the Recession Make 20-Somethings Delay Children?
By Neil Shah
CONNECT
Americans had children in 2012 at a pace that would lead to 948 births per 1,000 women in their 20s—the “slowest pace of any generation of young women in U.S. history,” the Urban Institute said.
KATIE COLLINS/PA WIRE/ZUMA PRESS
That the Great Recession of 2007-09 made Americans have fewer kids is no surprise, but a new study shows how big the toll was.
Birth rates for U.S. women in their 20s dropped more than 15% between 2007 and 2012, just before and after the recession, the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan policy research group, said in a new analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention released Tuesday.
Among Hispanic 20-somethings, the birth rate dropped 26%. Non-Hispanic blacks? 14%. By contrast, non-Hispanic white 20-somethings saw an 11% decline.
All told, Americans had children in 2012 at a pace that would lead to 948 births per 1,000 women in their 20s—the “slowest pace of any generation of young women in U.S. history,” the Urban Institute said.
Put simply, millennials could end up having smaller families than Gen Xers—and partly due to the recession.
Past downturns, most notably the Great Depression, temporarily depressed the nation’s fertility rate. In some cases, women who postponed childbearing simply made up for lost time later; in especially bad recessions, many women may simply end up with smaller families.
Six years after the recession ended, a rebound in U.S. fertility has yet to show up in the numbers. For every 1,000 U.S. women of childbearing age—15 to 44—there were just 62.5 births in 2013, down from 63 births in 2012 and a new record low, CDC data show.
Of course, many things affect fertility, not just the economy.
The recession reduced immigration, which lowers fertility since recent immigrants tend to have higher birth rates. More women are putting off having children until their 30s, and Hispanic and African-American women have been having fewer children for a while.
The next batch of numbers—the economy picked up in the second half of 2014 and saw strong job growth—could finally contain proof of the long-anticipated birth rebound.
But Urban’s study is the latest to suggest how big and lasting the Great Recession’s footprint on young-adult fertility could be.
Last fall, a paper by Princeton University researchers Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt cast doubt on the notion of a baby rebound.
Women in their early 20s who went through the recession, the researchers said, are likely to forgo births, not just postpone them.
In its study, Urban found that, across racial and ethnic groups, the recession accelerated a long-term decline in the share of women married in their 20s. The recession also generally brought a decrease in the birth rates of unmarried women.
Among Hispanic 20-something women, more than 60% of the total decrease in fertility between 2007 and 2012 could be explained by falling birth rates among the unmarried, Urban said. For non-Hispanic blacks, even more of the decrease—more than 75%—was linked to a drop in unmarried women’s rates. For non-Hispanic white women, about 80% of the decrease was linked to declining marriage rates.
“In the near future, there will be at least a temporary drop in the number of very young children,” Urban said. “If these low birth rates to women in their 20s continue…the U.S. might eventually face the type of generational imbalance that currently characterizes Japan and some European countries.”
…
LOLZ!
China ‘hiring white people to sell real estate’
April 30, 2015, 3:18 pm
Finance
Chinese real estate agents are finding foreigners in bars to help them with their property sales pitch.
These two young foreigners were hired as ‘models’ by a real estate agent in China. Image: The New York Times/Screenshot.
Desperate Chinese real estate agents are using innovative tactics to sell empty apartment blocks across the country.
According to a documentary by the New York Times, foreigners are being hired to pose as models, musicians and businessmen to boost interest in vacant properties.
New York Times filmmaker David Borenstein travelled to West China to document how real estate companies were trying to solve the problem of China’s many ghost towns.
What Borenstein came across was a recruitment industry dedicated to finding expats for rent.
Jingjin is one of China’s many ghost towns. It has completed about 3000 villas but the occupancy rate was just about 10 per cent. Image: Getty.
One real estate agent told the New York Times that part of her job was to uncover foreign ‘talent’ in China, and the first place to look was in bars.
She said the best way to add value to a property was for a foreigner to be associated with it.
“Once you put a foreigner out there, everything changes,” she said.
“It is no longer some remote building built by an unknown developer. It becomes an international city of the future.”
For those foreigners who are hired, the job is simple.
They have to stand there while the potential buyers arrive; in one instance an expat was hired to serve drinks behind the bar.
But according to this real estate agent, there’s a racial hierarchy when it comes to the westerner of choice.
“The price of white people is expensive, but it makes the place feel classier’.
The white ‘models’ hired to take part in a fashion show in one of the buildings can’t believe their good fortune.
“In China, if you’re from the West, you can be anything without any knowledge or education,” one of the ‘models’ told the NYT.
“Everything is fake. We just show up to give them a white face.”
In some cases these young foreigners are even hired to pretend to be the building engineer.
“The real value of a house or any product doesn’t really matter. As long as there is a good image, people will be willing to buy.”
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phony scandals