The Housing Bubble

Seems circular. Forgive some of the debt so that more can be loaned to pay to the creditors. Who is the patsy?

Several EU economies are now back to 2008 levels, of cause all this will mean nothing if China goes pop.

Who does Ireland mostly trade with? I’m guessing that it’s with other EU nations. Will this bode well for them as Europe “goes Greek”?

Good luck finding parking!

I am off the the high sierras for a week! Mammoth is awesome, even during a drought! Fly-fishing in the morning, fantastic dining at night.

All community organizers?

What’s a real job? Why is an administrative assistant not a real job?

Read the article and none of the millennial twits quoted has a real job, LOLZ

Maybe that’s why they’re behind Sanders? They know that their lot won’t improve with HillaryJeb! Of course, it’s possible that Sanders will make things worse.

Fourth turning stuff, Old Ben kanobi befriends young hipster Luke Skywalker while the boomers play Darth Vader and the evil empire.

As usual, Hillary have enjoy complete impunity for her malfeasance. That’s just how the Oligopoly rolls.

Tom Brady needs to get her lawyers.

The intelligence community is a spy agency. What?

homewrecker

Philadelphia also has a huge population of muslims

But they vote nearly 100% democrat so all is good

“American foreign policy is decided by people like Mike Huckabee, Lindsey Graham, Scott Walker, John McCain, Marco Rubio, or any other @sshole talking about “boots on the ground”

The Cuckservatives!

People who vandalize cemeteries should be taken out and horsewhipped, then hanged. We really need a “POS” statute, and once you’ve demonstrated that you’re a POS, you get stripped of all rights of citizenship and get treated like the POS you are.

…strangers who may have been foolishly loaned a large sum of other people’s money to finance a foolishly high purchase price.

In other words, gambling on others to be bigger fools than you. Or musical chairs, where the people who buy at or near the peak are the biggest losers.

Is the “evil dentist shot lion” over already?

Not until he’s extradited and prosecuted. Surely you’re not defending this cowardly dirtbag? I’m perfectly fine with the sport of hunting… but what this scoundrel did was not “hunting” nor “sport.”

I see men criticizing women all the time for spending too much on clothes and makeup to attract the opposite sex, and those same men buy Hummers, wear hunting attire, and buy boats all to show what desirable winners they are.
The big game hunters who spend 80,000 to bag a rhino, or lion, or polar bear are absolutely pathetic.
As bad as aging Chinese men who eat tiger penis.

Marketwatch dot com
Asia Markets
China shares suffer worst month in nearly 6 years
By Chao Deng
Published: July 31, 2015 4:25 a.m. ET

Investors jittery ahead of China manufacturing data

China’s shares suffered their worst month in nearly six years this July, after confidence in a government-led recovery wavered earlier this week, knocking shares lower.

Shaken conviction in Beijing’s support drove wild intraday swings this week in the Shanghai Composite Index which ended 1.1% lower at 3,663.73. The smaller Shenzhen Composite fell 0.8% to 2,110.62.

This week’s rout followed an earlier wave of heavy selling, which at one point wiped out nearly a third of the value from Chinese equities. Authorities’ near-constant market intervention supported a rebound of as much as 18% from a trough on July 8.

But now the benchmark is down again, off 29% from its mid-June peak. For the month, it is off 14%, its worst monthly performance since August 2009.

On Friday, China’s securities regulator announced it had launched a probe into automated trading and restricted 24 stock accounts suspected of “influencing securities trading prices,” according to its official website. The investigation seeks to root out possible causes of the recent volatility that has rattled China’s stock market.

China shares have been reeling since an 8.5% loss on Monday, the biggest daily decline in more than eight years, when investors dashed for the exits on worries that government-backed funds might wind down market support.

Fluctuating confidence about the government’s role in the market has led to wild intraday swings in recent days. While that’s spooked some investors, others have seen an opportunity to chase short-lived surges while the government appears to be buying in.

“The game between speculative funds and state funds adds to volatility on the market,” said Miller Zhao, analyst at Trade Blazer, a Shanghai-based private-equity firm. “To put in plain language, speculative investors want to take profits from government-backed funds.”

Analysts warned of further volatility in Friday’s afternoon trade ahead of Chinese official manufacturing data Saturday. An early gauge of manufacturing last week, which hit its lowest level in 15 months, could throw doubt on the health state-owned enterprises, according to analysts at IG.

“This question might see negative trading in the afternoon as investors close out positions to mitigate that possible risk,” wrote IG analyst Evan Lucas in a note.

Fears that China’s selloff could spiral beyond the domestic equities market has unsettled the rest of the Asia region in recent weeks. Investors have withdrawn $12.1 billion from emerging-market Asian equity funds in the last three weeks ending July 29, the largest three-week outflow in more than a decade, according to ANZ Research and EPFR Global, a fund data provider. The withdrawals also come as investors prepare for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in the U.S. later this year.

Some $1.8 billion of that outflow has come from China, which has suffered its deepest market selloff since the global financial crisis.

Signs of a deepening slowdown in China also have pushed currencies in Asia to multiyear lows this month.
…

Slide Show
5 charts show how brutal July has been for markets, like China
By Barbara Kollmeyer
Published: July 31, 2015 9:47 a.m. ET
China posts its worst monthly performance in six years
Reuters
It is it time to fret about China?

Ahead of Friday’s open, the S&P 500 index is set to finish the month of July up 2.2%, while the Nasdaq Composite is looking at a gain of nearly 3%.

In fact, the S&P 500’s (SPX, -0.03%) gains in July are on pace to be the second-best monthly performance of the year, behind February’s 5.5% rally and the Nasdaq Composite Index’s (COMP, +0.13%) monthly gain is second-best to a 7% surge in February.

But elsewhere in the financial universe, July has been absolutely brutal.

Investors in China, commodity stocks, emerging markets and even Twitter (TWTR, -1.87%) down 11% for the week and Yelp Inc. (YELP, -0.35%) which rung up a 25% weekly drop, would gladly take those U.S. gains.

The biggest losers of the month have one common thread: China and its tenuous economy and Wild West stock market. Here’s a look at some of the most downbeat moves of the month:
…

Bulletin Chicago purchasing index shows big July improvement in business conditions

Craig Stephen’s This Week in China
Danger mounts as China’s equity bust resumes
Published: July 30, 2015 3:42 p.m. ET
The outlook for Shanghai stocks has only grown murkier.
By Craig Stephen
Columnist

The dramatic fall in Shanghai A Shares (000002, -1.13%) early this week has confirmed there will be no quick resumption of normality for Chinese equities as the fragility of the recent recovery is exposed.

This always looked likely when an equity revival had been held together with a mixture of government buying, mass stock suspensions and a six-month ban on share sales by large investors. Although further buying support from Beijing looks likely, don’t be surprised if this also fails to arrest the natural course of an equity bubble bursting.

Investors need to consider what the next policy move will be in this new context, where Beijing has been exposed as not being all-powerful, nor having all the answers.

If China’s leadership has to deal with a deflationary shock from a full-blown equity collapse, one possibility is it may have to revert to the tested playbook of other large countries facing a similar predicament: interest rates cut to zero, central banks engaging in unorthodox quantitative easing, currencies left to slide.

Such a move is not the base case of many analysts, and it goes against Beijing’s stated policy. But given the extreme and unexpected level of government intervention in recent weeks, and a $4 trillion equity crash, it looks prudent to consider.

This uncertainty has left investors on edge, caught between worrying that the economy is in much worse shape than the government is letting on and that authorities have lost control of an equity bubble.

In a new research strategy note, Goldman Sachs flagged a number of possible triggers for this week’s renewed selloff. One was the economy may again be slipping after July’s weak manufacturing PMI, which came in at 48.2 and below expectations. This cast further doubt on second-quarter GDP figures that came in suspiciously right on target at 7%.

Another factor that has unnerved investors was a statement last Friday by China’s State Council indicating the yuan-trading band will be widened.

The potential here to spook investors is that policy may be inching closer toward the devaluation option.

The Goldman note said this intervention raised concerns that the yuan might become more volatile and capital outflows increase.

Capital outflows need to be watched carefully as it is here that China’s domestic policy intersects with the outside world. It would hardly be a stretch if investors were not just losing confidence in Chinese equities but also in yuan-denominated assets given Beijing’s recent policy moves.

The danger with any hint that Beijing is considering devaluation is it can lead to self-fulfilling capital flight and spiral out of control.
…

“I’m Gonna Make Him An Offer He Can’t Refuse”

China wants brokers to hand over their stock-market trading records
Michelle Price and Pete Sweeney, Reuters
Jul. 31, 2015, 6:57 AM
An investor checks on his mobile phone in front of an electronic board showing stock information at a brokerage house in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China, July 29, 2015.
REUTERS/Stringer Thomson Reuters

China is asking foreign and Chinese-owned brokerages in Hong Kong and Singapore to hand over stock-trading records, sources with direct knowledge of the requests told Reuters, extending its pursuit of investors shorting Chinese stocks to overseas jurisdictions.

Three sources at Chinese brokerages and two at foreign financial institutions said the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) had sought to identify traders and investors who had taken net short positions, or bets that prices would fall, against Chinese-listed shares.

“The implied threat by the CSRC is that anything that is not a hedge is a no-no,” a source in Hong Kong with knowledge of the requests said. This person added that foreign brokers were likely to comply as best they could with the requests.

“When the CSRC makes an offer, you cannot refuse it.”
…

When will Yellin’ start buying Chinese stocks in the name of global stability?

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist
China’s Naked Emperors
JULY 31, 2015

Politicians who preside over economic booms often develop delusions of competence. You can see this domestically: Jeb Bush imagines that he knows the secrets of economic growth because he happened to be governor when Florida was experiencing a giant housing bubble, and he had the good luck to leave office just before it burst. We’ve seen it in many countries: I still remember the omniscience and omnipotence ascribed to Japanese bureaucrats in the 1980s, before the long stagnation set in.

This is the context in which you need to understand the strange goings-on in China’s stock market. In and of itself, the price of Chinese equities shouldn’t matter all that much. But the authorities have chosen to put their credibility on the line by trying to control that market — and are in the process of demonstrating that, China’s remarkable success over the past 25 years notwithstanding, the nation’s rulers have no idea what they’re doing.

Start with the fundamentals. China is at the end of an era — the era of superfast growth, made possible in large part by a vast migration of underemployed peasants from the countryside to coastal cities. This reserve of surplus labor is now dwindling, which means that growth must slow.

But China’s economic structure is built around the presumption of very rapid growth. Enterprises, many of them state-owned, hoard their earnings rather than return them to the public, which has stunted family incomes; at the same time, individual savings are high, in part because the social safety net is weak, so families accumulate cash just in case. As a result, Chinese spending is lopsided, with very high rates of investment but a very low share of consumer demand in gross domestic product.

This structure was workable as long as torrid economic growth offered sufficient investment opportunities. But now investment is running into rapidly decreasing returns. The result is a nasty transition problem: What happens if investment drops off but consumption doesn’t rise fast enough to fill the gap?

What China needs are reforms that spread the purchasing power — and it has, to be fair, been making efforts in that direction. But by all accounts these efforts have fallen short. For example, it has introduced what is supposed to be a national health care system, but in practice many workers fall through the cracks.

Meanwhile, China’s leaders appear to be terrified — probably for political reasons — by the prospect of even a brief recession. So they’ve been pumping up demand by, in effect, force-feeding the system with credit, including fostering a stock market boom. Such measures can work for a while, and all might have been well if the big reforms were moving fast enough. But they aren’t, and the result is a bubble that wants to burst.

China’s response has been an all-out effort to prop up stock prices. Large shareholders have been blocked from selling; state-run institutions have been told to buy shares; many companies with falling prices have been allowed to suspend trading. These are things you might do for a couple of days to contain an obviously unjustified panic, but they’re being applied on a sustained basis to a market that is still far above its level not long ago.

What do Chinese authorities think they’re doing?
…

Markets | Fri Jul 31, 2015 8:26am EDT
Commodities, China stocks lick wounds after brutal July
LONDON | By Marc Jones and John Geddie

Commodities and China investors waved a relieved goodbye to July on Friday following a brutal sell-off that has revived fears about the global economy and overshadowed more encouraging news from the U.S. and Europe.

There were signs that the rout wasn’t over yet as Chinese stocks - which have suffered their worst monthly drop in six years - wobbled again, oil prices slipped following a more than 15 percent July slump and metals from industrial copper to precious gold hit multi-year lows.

That happened despite a pause in the dollar’s recent rise, which has been compounding the commodity pressure as signs build that the U.S. Federal Reserve is heading for its first rate hike in almost a decade.

European shares fell slightly with commodity stocks leading the market lower, but remain on track for a 4 percent monthly rise with worries around Greece’s ongoing membership of the euro area kicked into the long grass.

Wall Street was set to open down 0.2 percent.

“The main moves this week have been the continued broad-based weakness in commodities,” said Societe Generale strategist Alvin Tan. “Essentially they have been on the downtrend for a month and of course we have been on a roller coaster ride in China equities and that has affected sentiment.”
…

FT Alphaville
Markets go up, markets go down… apparently even in China
David Keohane| Jul 28 11:29

Chinese equity markets are nuts. And the search for a narrative to explain this week’s moves is becoming ever nuttier. As Deutsche said: “It ceased to be a free market a long time ago so analysing it is tough”.

Since we can’t yet provide you with a decent narrative — rather than an occasionally ridiculous menu which butts up against the idea this is a largely controlled market within which there are rumours “that leveraged funds through illegal channels are dumping shares” — have some sentences about Chinese stock market volatility. They go nicely with today’s swings.

After dropping some 5 per cent near the open, the Shanghai Comp rallied on heavy buying of state owned banks to close down 1.7 per cent. As the FT says, at “its intraday low the Shanghai index was approaching the nadir of 3,507 points it hit on July 8, when the government announced a raft of measures to prop up a market that had collapsed more than 30 per cent in less than a month.”
…

Yup, this is why support for Obamacare is so low — nearly all Repubs hate it and half of the Democrats don’t like it either. It’s a forced subsidy of a bloated and overpriced HMO/PPO industry that adds little value to the doctor-patient relationship. All they do is act as a middleman and suck profit out of the healthcare system. Repeal Obamacare and just give us single payer already.

Looks like ISIS is a state

Has a 360-degree view!

Help my ailing, aging brain - wasn’t there a Mel Brooks movie a while back about a guy who was the emporer of some made up spoof of a nation? I can’t recall but there is something in the ether of my brain that says I saw this once.

Hail Robonia!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4pTejRBxSc

I have met one of the people involved in that offshore platform data haven thing. One year he gave a talk that was positive about it, then the next year and basically told all. The banks wouldn’t respect them at all and thus they could never process credit cards and were cut off from a lot of money transactions. And most of the customers were sketchy.

Bitcoin could change it a bit now I suppose.

He said for long periods of time the wifi or commercial PTP wireless link would go down and the entire thing was running on a 9600 baud cellular connection.

I like the currency peg to the cost of Pillsbury cookie dough (in US$). Their cookie dough contains sugar, wheat flour, and canola oil, so you have a strong commodities base, as well as a manufacturing element and the US dollar all reflected in the price of your currency.

And he was charged with murder.

There will be 20 dead blacks this weekend in Chicago and LA. Neither you or the press will give a damn.

No money in it
No votes in it
No way to stir up the base with it
Doesn’t fit the meme

WASP culture

One of my favorite parts of Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire Of The Vanities” is when the Jewish lawyer character discovers that everyone in New York is not Irish or Italian or Jewish or Black or Hispanic and learns that there is this rare creature known as the WASP that actually owns and controls Manhattan

P.S. my late Uncle Goon was Princeton class of ‘42 and Chicago Social Register

Remember, the cops are always telling the truth, and the ‘thugs’ are always lying.

New Body Cam Videos Show Cops Coalescing Around False Narrative of Sam DuBose Killing

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/07/30/sam_dubose_murder_phillip_kidd_and_david_lindenschmidt_suspended_after_backing.html

You’d have more credibility, Nat, if you said the cop was amped up on adrenaline, power tripping, and possibly scared for his life in that situation, as a lot of cops are getting shot at traffic stops. I seriously doubt the cop derived any “fun” from the situation, though it does seem like another example of needless escalation over a trivial traffic infraction. That said, it does seem like a clear-cut case of excessive force. You don’t seem to have been on the HBB long enough to know quite a few of us “WASPs” have been highly critical of police for abuse of authority, bullying and trampling on the rights of citizens (all of them, not just black people) and failing to “protect and serve.”

I don’t remember people complaining about low rates in the build up to the last bubble, but now, there’s no shortage of people pointing out that low rates are what got us into the last mess. There are a lot of people who will be able to say I told you so this time.

Yes, failing Kansas schools: a prime example of what happens when you have smaller and smaller government with less and less taxes. But, have no fear, “trickle down” will save Kansas as jobs fall from the sky and a shining city on a hill will rise from the plains.

Cut taxes for the largest corporations and give them subsidies that they don’t need… but pay teachers as little as possible. Then, when you can’t find enough teachers, just put substitutes (who don’t have a college degree) in the classroom.

Sounds like an awesome plan. Also explains why small town USA continues to be hollowed out.

Letting Bangladesh know that it won’t exist a few decades from now will be a good place to start.

Not only that, they chose to create those jobs in a city, passing on suburbs on both sides of the state line.

The Camp of Saints is turning out to be non-fiction

I’m about ready to quit reading breitbart articles just because of the annoying way they continually jump up and down as various ads open and close while you try to read the article. It’s an annoying trend everywhere on the web, but breitbart has brought it to an unacceptable level. It’s like trying to read while whitewater rafting.

Anyway, Lincoln was the first black president, Clinton (Bill) was the second, Obama possibly the third (has anyone rubbed his skin really hard?). And this article is as poorly written and reasoned as the breitbart piece on Kochservatives, even without the nonstop jumping page.

Where do you want it?

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S U V W X Y Z

Gimme an “E”.

Gimme an …

how many shares did you buy? You gonna dollar cost average in?

How long before oil is the new coal?

“If the Bank of Japan can become the only game in town for its ‘own’ bonds and kill the market for these bonds that way, what can we expect from central banks moving head first into stocks? What about a permanent high, or, to be precise, a permanent higher, as long as they keep buying, and after that a whole lot of nothing because all trade has been stifled? Why do we even still talk about bond ‘markets’ and stock ‘markets’? Doesn’t that imply there should be actual trading going on?”

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article46078.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZRa5_DHgl4 - 220k -