The Housing Bubble

Region VIII

http://www.picpaste.com/IMG_20150523_112008-iVotG2zc.jpg

“Agricultural Prices Are Cratering”

http://www.dailylocal.com/business/20150513/naroff-consumers-cautious-as-sales-stall-in-april

“Existing Home Sales Crater”

http://www.housingwire.com/articles/33963-existing-home-sales-crater-in-april-falling-33

Realtors are lonley people.

This is florida.

http://s1123.photobucket.com/user/phedger/media/Oldpeoplebeach_zps1cc6e6a9.jpg.html

Anyone else here following Bank of America vs. Caulkett in front of the SCOTUS? It seems the underlying issue is if second mortgages could just be wiped away in bankruptcy since the value of their house is so low. Not sure what the Pros and Cons would be with their ruling, but I just have a hard time understanding why you would just get rid of a second mortgage because the house is worth less. We see stories all the time of people getting into bidding wars and offering above asking price - you made your bed and signed on the dotted line. Deal with it.

Buffett: This is better than raising minimum wage

Rebecca Ungarino
Friday, 22 May 2015 | 11:19 AM ET

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett, in commentary for The Wall Street Journal, said expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a smarter alternative to raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Buffett said a “major and carefully crafted expansion” of the EITC is a better answer to leveling the growing wealth gap in the U.S., wherein millions of employees are working, though just scraping by, as the rich get richer. But the wealth gap, Buffett wrote in the Journal, is not to be blamed on any sort of “conspiracy.”

Buffett writes the widening wealth gap is an “inevitable consequence of an advanced market-based economy.” But he does not deny the issue: “In recent decades, our country’s rising tide has not lifted the boats of the poor.”

Not sure I entirely trust zerohedge’s source on this one, but given that Al-Queda was created by Washington, this does not surprise me. I do, however, trust Judicial Watch, which the source quotes.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-23/secret-pentagon-report-reveals-us-created-isis-tool-overthrow-syrias-president-assad

Yesterday’s article about FDR and Pear Harbor inspired me to search the net for similar interesting stuff and I came across this documentary about the U.S.S. Liberty:

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/uss-liberty-dead-in-the-water/

BTW, congratulations to Rand Paul, and from the bottom of my heart, many thanks for the hard work on putting an end to the NSA data collection program.

And the Greek Kabuki theater rolls on. I think the odds are zero that Greece will be allowed to default, as that would bring down the entire Eurozone house of cards built on debt and credit.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11626969/Greece-to-miss-IMF-payments-amid-fears-of-catastrophic-eurozone-rupture.html

I thought I would post a “No More Hesitation” target for the HBB

Why homebuyers face a tough spring

By ALEX VEIGA and JOSH BOAK, AP Business Writers
Updated 7:32 am, Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Eager to buy your first home this spring? Already own, but want to trade up? Be warned: there’ll be plenty of competition

Bidding wars have broken out in hot real-estate markets like Denver and Los Angeles, where there aren’t enough houses to meet demand. The lack of supply is a key reason home sales nationwide have yet to return to healthy levels following the housing collapse in 2008.

“Inventory is still fairly low in a lot of markets across the country,” said Skylar Olsen, senior economist at real estate data firm Zillow. “Buyers are not going to have the easiest time out there.”

Further tilting the market in favor of sellers are low mortgage rates, which have ratcheted up pressure on buyers to wrap up deals before borrowing becomes more expensive.

Robert DeNiro tells it like it is during a graduation speech to art school grads.

http://www.businessinsider.com/robert-de-niros-art-school-graduation-speech-yeah-youre-f-ked-2015-5

Dobie gray- drift away - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr_eVcCAUXo - 285k -

From Yesterday;

Comment by Dman
2015-05-23 14:24:21

What about the houses built between 2000 and 2008? Does anybody have any first hand knowledge about them? With so many thousands of homes being built by so many apprentice carpenters, and who knows how much Chinese drywall, I don’t know if I would want one ??

What State do you live in ??

Is there a silver miner worth buying?
Tia

I was 13 when WABC (AM) New York was playing this song. “The number one song was heard about every hour during the day and every 75 minutes or so at night. The other top 5 songs were heard nearly as often”

“WABC was the station that teenagers could be heard listening to on transistor radios all over the New York metropolitan area. Due to its strong signal, the station could be heard easily over 100 miles away,”

B.W. Stevenson: My Maria (1973) - Lyrics - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAQlg2qSR2w - 303k -
—————————————————————————–
What was the original sticker price of a 1973 Ford Mustang
http://www.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_original_sticker_price_of_a_1973_Ford_Mustang - 250k

Basic retail prices for 1973 Ford Mustang begins at $2,760 for the basic 6 cyl. 2dr. Hardtop to $3,189 for a 8 cyl. 2dr. Convertible. Dealer or factory added options will add a little more to the basic retail price.
——————————————————————————
Cost of Living 1973

Average Cost of new house $32,500.00
Average Income per year $12,900.00
Average Monthly Rent $175.00
Cost of a gallon of Gas 40 cents
A Dozen Eggs 45 cents

What Events Happened in 1973

OPEC

Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), announce they will restrict flow of crude oil to countries supporting Israel on October 17th causing price of oil to increase by 200%

U.S.

Alaska Oil Pipeline bill is passed to allow construction of a pipeline to access oil from the North Slope of Alaska

OPEC

Recession begins in Europe following OPEC Oil price increases

U.S.

Chrysler and other US car makers close a number of plants affecting 100,000 workers

Vietnam

US Troops withdrawn from Vietnam and U.S. involvement in Vietnam War ends with the signing of peace

U.S.

World Trade Center in New York becomes the tallest building in the world

U.S.

Supreme Court of the United States rules on Roe v. Wade. January 22nd

U.S.

Roe v. Wade makes abortion a US constitutional right

U.S.

Watergate Hearings begin in the United States Senate and President Richard Nixon tells the nation , “I am not a crook.”

U.S.

The Mississippi River reaches its peak level in St. Louis during a record 77-day flood.

John Nash and his wife are dead and gone. For a man who persevered so much hardship in his personal life, there’s a sad irony in ending it in the wicked expedience of a car crash.

What happened in Waco Shootout? - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7bNBkQAsYM - 314k - Cached - Similar pages
18 hours ago

Really no time to post today but I have to post this, more evidence we are headed toward Idiocracy:

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/world/Are-pop-songs-dumb-Study-offers-evidence/shdaily.shtml

P.S. should be able to post tomorrow, I intend to relax.

Neo-con and Wall Street f****** Scott Walker: Portrait of a Crony Capitalist.

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/05/12827/walkers-wedc-full-meltdown-privatization-fail

This is REALLY, REALLY NEAT!

Watch the world’s weather in REAL TIME: Live interactive 3D map lets you watch rain, clouds and even hurricanes across the globe.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2741821/Watch-world-s-weather-REALTIME-Live-interactive-3D-map-lets-watch-rain-clouds-hurricanes-globe.html

Town Pays $40,000 After Cop Shoots Pet

Witnesses said dog was chewing on rawhide bone when slain

by WND | May 24, 2015

A Colorado town has agreed to pay a family $40,000 after one of its police officers shot and killed the family pet – a dog witnesses described as lacking any aggressive behavior and was, in fact, chewing a rawhide bone when she was shot.

The move by the town of Erie is the latest development in a long string of such shootings on which WND has reported.

ABC’s affiliate in Denver reported the decision to make the payment to Brittany Moore for the shooting of her German shepherd, Ava, ended four years of litigation.

The dog was shot by Erie police officer Jamie Chester when he went to her home after she reported a threatening telephone call.

Charges were not filed against the officer because the Boulder County prosecuting attorney found the officer “justified in using deadly and physical force.”

Sunday funnies.

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2015/05/24/sunday-funnies-64/

The Oil Industry’s ‘Man Camps’ Are Dying
Drillers spent big to house workers in the new boomtowns. No more
by David WetheKelly Gilblom
3:57 PM PST
April 15, 2015
Roughnecks in a man camp before their shift outside Watford City, N.D.
Photographer: Bryan Denton/Corbis

At the peak of the fracking boom a few years ago, Jeff Myers converted his South Texas hunting camp into rental oilfield housing. Little wonder: The industry had an almost insatiable hunger for the grunt laborers—the roughnecks—to work the fields, and employers were happy to spend whatever it took to house and feed them. Today that boomtown demand—and $100-per-barrel prices—is a bittersweet memory, and occupancy at Myers’s once-packed Double C Resort has dropped to 10 percent as job cuts take hold. “There aren’t going to be any winners down here,” he says. “Everybody’s going to have to adjust.”

America’s oilfield “man camps”—as the industry calls them—are turning into ghost towns as drillers cut back the free housing, food, and air travel once used to lure shale boom workers. The mini-settlements that sprang up throughout drilling regions in Texas, North Dakota, and Colorado are fading away as energy companies look to slash as much as $114 billion in spending this year, says a Cowen Group survey, and lay off tens of thousands of employees.

“The money flies” when the oil field’s booming, says Milton Allen, who’s built and developed facilities for the oil industry for the past 15 years and operates a 12-room man camp in the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas. “Then when the market starts to trim down, the money stops.”

During the shale boom, some companies were paying as much as $40 million a year to house and feed a group of 1,000 workers, according to worker services company Target Logistics. The man camps they built ranged from dozens of RVs neatly lined up on the edge of oil fields to entire communities of mobile homes or manufactured housing thrown up in the middle of the Texas scrub country or North Dakota Great Plains.

Competition for well-trained, specialized employees grew so fierce that extravagant benefits were necessary to recruit top talent to remote drilling areas. Lodging perks included daily room cleanings; catered meals such as beef barbecue, shrimp, and lobster; and flatscreen TVs with hundreds of channels. Many workers even got free air travel to commute between job sites and home during breaks.

Halliburton President Jeff Miller recently cited housing expenses as one area ripe for cuts as the industry moves from a “boomtown mentality” back to “normalcy.” “We have an entirely commuter workforce that flies to and from an area,” he told investors at a Credit Suisse energy conference in February. “They live in our company-paid housing. We’re feeding them 24 hours a day. The cost of all associated services skyrockets as well.”

With layoffs now the rule, many workers are grateful just to keep their jobs. So more employers are asking them to cover their own rent, pay for their own clothing, and find their own transportation to drill sites.
…

Greece, The Euro And Truth

2015-05-24 14:11 by Karl Denninger

Perhaps there is some means of playing games that will allow them to make the next IMF payment — a payment, I remind you, that is basically giving back what they just took out. They took those funds out of their SDR account because they had no other option to make the payment, and now they have to put them back but still don’t have any more funds as they’re running an operating deficit (that is, they’re still spending more than they make in taxes.)

The Greek people, in short, need to grow up and stop pretending, which is utterly necessary for the government to stop pretending. But the ECB and IMF must stop pretending too. Selling off assets doesn’t change the fundamental problem, which is found in the simple fact that Greece is and has been spending more than they take in.

There comes a point at which the common people must simply stand up and tell those who have been robbing them that they’re not going to allow it any more — and mean it. This is not an easy thing to do by any means as one must expect that those who have been engaged in these actions are not going to simply say “oh, ok, we’ll make good” when they can’t as the value that was stolen has been spent. This in turn means that some sort of conflict is inevitable with the only question remaining being whether those who did the stealing and defrauding, and thus are culpable, will turn to violence.

Unfortunately the problem exhibited is not by any means limited to Greece. If Germans think they have the right to profit from said active frauds committed by their governments and banks they’re wrong; nobody has that right. Never mind that Germany as a nation is one of the very few who did profit; virtually the entire Eurozone got screwed instead by a very few rich and powerful people in both government and non-government roles as a result of these acts fraud that are now sought to be perfected into savagery, slavery and subjugation.

It is time to stand up folks, everywhere and anywhere touched by this — and that includes the lies told to us as Americans by our government and the frauds engaged in with regard to deficit spending, our budgets, so-called “ratings” on government debt and the sequential 30 years of theft from employment taxes used to lie about our fiscal status beginning with Ronald Reagan and continuing with every administration since.

As for Lagarde and the rest of the people in Europe trying to have it both ways, claiming that Greece’s people and government are subject to the former government’s agreements only when it suits them the correct answer to that claim, just as it is here in America, is found right here:

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=230159

ft dot com > Comment >
May 24, 2015 4:01 pm
The fate of Greece lies in Tsipras’s hands
Wolfgang Munchau Wolfgang Münchau
If the deal offered by the country’s creditors is reasonable, the prime minister should accept
BERLIN, GERMANY - MARCH 23: German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras listen to their countries’ national anthems upon his arrival for talks at the Chancellery on March 23, 2015 in Berlin, Germany. The two leaders are meeting as relations between the Tsipras government and Germany have soured amidst contrary views between the two countries on how Greece can best work itself out of its current economic morass. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
©Getty

It is all up to Alexis Tsipras now. The Greek prime minister will decide soon whether or not he wants a deal with his creditors that would allow Athens to service its debt. If he says “no”, Greece will default. At that point, it is possible the country will have to leave the eurozone.

What should he do? He will know his own political constraints. I will focus on the economics. The short answer is: if the deal is reasonable, he should accept. So where is the line between reasonable and unreasonable?

The rough answer is whatever it takes to end the uncertainty. No investor is going to put their money into Greece so long as there is a threat of Grexit — a Greek exit from the eurozone. For an agreement to be viable, it would need to reduce the probability of Grexit to zero. The same applies to the policies needed if Mr Tsipras says “no”. On that day he would need a brilliant economic plan.

So what economic criteria should he apply to evaluate any offer?

The single most important part of the agreement concerns the fiscal adjustment that Greece’s creditors are asking Athens to undertake. The variable to look out for is the primary surplus — the fiscal balance before payment of interest on debt: essentially the money a country has for debt servicing. There is no such thing as an objectively right or wrong number. But experience shows that large primary surpluses are politically unsustainable. It was the unsustainability of the previous agreement between Greece, its European creditors and the International Monetary Fund that brought Syriza to power.

I heard a respected expert on this issue recently proclaim that a primary surplus of 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product would probably work. The Greeks have demanded 1.5 per cent, which is a reasonable opening bid. One of the so-called “non-papers” — the documents officials leak without leaving fingerprints — that are circulating among the negotiators had mentioned a figure of 3.5 per cent, which strikes me as too high. A primary surplus of 4.5 per cent, as was demanded from 2016 onwards by the previous loan agreement, is plainly ludicrous.
…

It’s good to be an oligarch, especially when the sheeple vote for their own fleecing.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/jeb-bush-to-build-lavish-kennebunkport-home/article/2564996

Is the Fed rightfully terrified of what might happen at the point of interest rate liftoff?

The prop mgr just emailed to say I’d be getting a 30 day notice (so my rental can be sold.) So out by June 30th.

My landlord has apparently gone psycho hearing we didn’t want to go through showings (we’ve done it before, don’t want to do it again, and my mother’s ill). They said wifey would start showing it FSBO on July 1, so I emailed him that we’d try to be out of here before then.

He didn’t respond to emails, so no discussion. This could have been handled gracefully, but nooooo. Four years, eight months of on time payments, no hassle, one time he said how great we were and they were grateful to have their mortgage paid. Fixed the small things ourselves. No good deed goes unpunished.

Under Nevada law if you’re over 60 and/or disabled you can “request” for 60 days. I don’t know who grants the “request”. The Nolo article did not say. That would make his head explode. I might have no choice. My rental search isn’t going too well.

Showing your rental is like training someone to take your job.

phony scandals