The Housing Bubble

true

But know you can work for one of these wealthy guys and make some money. They get money for free and the minions have to work. Its like having the govt control who gets what.Trickle down?

Trickle down does not work. We just tested it. The inequality gap grew much larger and more people on welfare.

Also a number of working age adults out of the workforce approaching 100 million.

Trickle down = abject failure.

How many of these are Obama Zombies, McCain Mutants, and Romney Retards who should be declared mentally incompetent and made wards of the state?

Trickle down does not work. We just tested it.

No—we just tested ponz-economics. Or is that ponzi-conomics? Think I prefer the former spelling. And I’m pretty sure I just coined an oh-so-appropriate term.

A country’s GDP growth rate means little with regards to average stock market returns. Over the last 20 years GDP growth in the US averaged 2.5% while the US stock market gave an average 7.8% rate of return. A slowly growing economy can and does give birth to rapidly growing companies.

Ahahahahahahahaa. 7.8 percent. After ZIRP and QE Infinity and bailouts and losers dropping out. I guess China can just invest in the US stock market.

The recommended discount rate assumption for pension liability valuation is to use a proxy for the risk-free rate, such as long-term Treasury yields. Hence a 7 or 8 percent discount rate was reasonable back in the late 1980s, when long-term Treasury yields were comparably high.

Current yields on the low end of the 2 to 3 percent range do not support using a 7 percent discount rate assumption.

Crazy idea: maybe pensions should be required by law to use the current long-term Treasuries yield in their calculations?

“Crazy idea: maybe pensions should be required by law to use the current long-term Treasuries yield in their calculations?”

Kind of like how mark-to-market accounting is required?

Business
FASB Eases Mark-to-Market Rules
By Kara Scannell
Updated April 3, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET

U.S. accounting rule makers made it easier for banks to limit losses, but in an unexpected move they bowed to critics and backtracked on one proposal that would have let companies ignore market prices in some cases.

The vote by the Financial Accounting Standards Board followed a debate in which members of Congress pushed for steps to help banks weighed down by troubled assets, while some investor groups warned that the plans would allow executives to cover up losses. The rules change spurred Thursday’s stock-market rally.

For the most part, the board ratified proposals it had put out for comment two weeks earlier, including changes that would lessen the need for banks to take an earnings hit when assets run into trouble. Financial stocks led the market up in the morning on the expectation that the rules would be approved, but faded and ended roughly on a par with the broader market.

Bankers argue that the “mark-to-market” principle of valuing assets at market prices is sometimes flawed because markets have ceased to function. They say that can lead to unnecessary alarm about the financial system’s stability, an argument lawmakers have echoed.

One member of the five-member accounting standards board tried to address criticisms that the body had bowed to political pressure.

“We are an independent standard setter and it’s important that we maintain our independence,” said Lawrence Smith. But he said the board can’t “ignore what’s going on around us” as banks plead for help.

Under one of the changes adopted Thursday, the definition of an asset that is “other than temporarily impaired” will change. Once an asset gets that designation, it triggers a write-down in value that feeds through to the bottom line. In the case of banks, that may put capital below regulatory requirements.
…

Market Snapshot
Get ready for a lousy September as investor sentiment slips
By Wallace Witkowski
Published: Sept 6, 2015 9:00 a.m. ET
International concerns outweigh domestic ones

Stocks are looking at a bearish autumn.

Investor sentiment has suffered with the recent correction and is not likely to improve in the short term, setting stocks up for a volatile September as international concerns overshadow domestic ones.

Stocks took a big hit last week with the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA, -1.66%) dropping 3.3%, the S&P 500 index (SPX, -1.53%) shedding 3.4%, and the Nasdaq Composite Index (COMP, -1.05%) falling 3%.
…

Dismal VIX, Av PE headed down, china selling it’s USD, ZIRP worldwide distortions, interest rate threat, hedge fund guys crying (good) - -

I hope Yellen now has the desire to do what is right. The longer it is left the bigger the hole to get out of.

Artificial interest rates (wonder what that will do to corporate earnings when it is corrected ).

I read that of the four trillion printed 60% of it went to repurchase shares - and that more than that was lost on the market in the last two weeks !

And these people get paid for their decisions !!!!

“I read that of the four trillion printed 60% of it went to repurchase shares - and that more than that was lost on the market in the last two weeks !”

You can’t help but wonder how much money highly compensated employees were able to skim by cashing in their bubble-priced repurchased shares, before the latest stock market selloff brought valuations back to Earth?

‘Why buy a rapidly depreciating house at a grossly inflated price when you can rent it for half the monthly cost?’

That has credence if you can invest the other 50% monthly in something that will outperform housing by over factor of 2. The only fiscal end game IMHO is down the road, years, a paid for house will refund you something above the total mortgage+maintenance costs in a generous way. Also, some people are just not meant to own a house.

A house doesn’t “perform” no less “outperform” unless you opt use FoolsMath and exclude losses to depreciation.

That “outperform housing” is complete debt donkey BS. Housing is an expense, not a performance of profit. It is easy to minimize housing expense, or it is easy to maximize it if you believe leverage (AKA debt) will make you rich.

If you didn’t mortgage up like most have in this mania, you could stop working 20 years earlier. Outperform that.

We bought our house 36 years ago and paid off the mortgage in 10 years. We’ve been living mortgage free for the last 26 years.

And your point is?

We bought our house 36 years ago and paid off the mortgage in 10 years. We’ve been living mortgage free for the last 26 years.

Yes, but home much money did you lose? AH

That is the operative question Lola.

Good point. Ecommerce was somehow overlooked by the scribes who wrote the Bible.

Time for Testament 3.0 ? (Or 4.0 if you’re a Mormon.)

Not new, just repackaged and resloganed.

And crater to $20 barrel again.

Unemployed people don’t drive.

Retired people do. 10,000 Baby Boomers Turn 65 Every Day

That’s a whole lot of dying people and excess empty houses huh Lola.

Retired people do. 10,000 Baby Boomers Turn 65 Every Day

or

people leaving the work force.

Everyone dies Lola. Especially in their 60s and older.

The Boomers are the living dead.

Our country is full of sheep, lemmings, and zombies. But at least some are finally waking up, not a minute too soon.

Circus barker who is leading in all polls. You mad, bro ??

Polls…You sound like Adan now with Rasmusson…We have 14 months to election day..He will be irrelevant by Thanksgiving…

Mad ?? Whats their to be mad at..The potential Trump presidency ?? LOL…

Well I will give you credit. You put a concrete date on your prediction. Three months and he’ll be irrelevant. We’ll see. I’d bet sooner on Dan’s $80 oil.

Russia and NATO backing opposing sides in Syria - what could possibly go wrong?

http://www.voltairenet.org/article188522.html

Asad and Russia are the lesser of the 2 evils. Freaking neocons..what a corrupt bunch.

“The friend of my enemy is my friend”? Until he’s my enemy again?

“The guys who doesn’t care who wins are my enemy?”

“If you are not with us, you are against us”?

It’s getting tough to keep the war sloganeering straight nowadays

Credit for the prose goes to the article’s author, not me, just so we’re clear. But he mostly captures my sentiments exactly.

You ask too much Ben. Most moderators likely have no clue who/what WTO is.

If he does, I doubt if he’d say it. He would dance around the question.

I really do think he’s in it to win it. And he’s not going to show all his cards.

He reminds me of a Democrat politician we used to have here in Florida who walked a fine line between business and the people. His opponents used to say that he was in the pocket of “Big Sugar”, but the interesting thing was, while he recognized the former power of that industry in Florida and was supported by it, he’d always negotiate from a position of “OK, fine, you get this. What’re you gonna give me for my peeps?”

I wish he’d become governor, but he didn’t because JEB!

And he’s not going to show all his cards ??

Or spend his own money….Not in any serious way…Why, because he’s knows he is a charlatan and can’t win a national election so it would be just pissing money away….

Do you intend to get out of the WTO?

Trump’s new strategy is when asked a difficult question is to criticize the reporter for asking “gotcha” questions.

asking “gotcha” questions ??

In some ways Trump is similar to Palin…They don’t like those type of questions because it reveals their ignorance to the answer…

Trump’s new strategy is when asked a difficult question is to criticize the reporter for asking “gotcha” questions.

Yeah, I didn’t care for Trump’s buffoonery with Megyn Kelly or the radio guy for asking perfectly legitimate questions.

Like having 57 states…

It also looks like China is dumping USTs to finance propping up their Ponzi markets, which is offsetting the Fed’s QE. To what degree is hard to tell. Both central banks are completely unreliable when it comes to providing honest data.

AZ You have indicated a very good question.

How can these phoney dollars that were used to purchase government debt (used for consumables presumably, aircraft, etc.) and stocks (all of which appears to have been lost in the last two weeks) be repaid with an in-kind asset ?

Horribly increase interest rates to devalue the ultra low interest rated treasuries, then repurchase them with debt !

Let the taxpayer foot the bill thru a lower standard of living.

Data my friend…. data.

San Diego, CA Housing Prices Dive 10% YoY

http://www.zillow.com/san-diego-ca-92109/home-values/

Never got an answer to my question on what the “free marketers” think will happen when 80% of the population can’t make enough to survive, much less become entities like “consumers” and “homeowners” again.

Don’t you think we’re quite a ways away from that?

Not saying that there isn’t a reason to be concerned, but it seems to me there’s a lot of fat left to trim before most folks can’t ’survive’ — cell phones, large flat-screen TVs, cable, new cars every few years, 3000+ sqft houses, dinners out, etc etc.

The trends are not our friends.

50% of kids living in families below the poverty line.

Try being a 50 year old and find a job that pays more than half-2/3 of what you made before you got laid off.

I’m seeing/hearing that version about ten times more often than the “I got laid off, but found a better job in a couple of months” story.

“For some reason, many of the people in group one think that they are still working due to their superiority as employees, not because they happened turn up winners in a giant lottery.”

“… not because they happened turn up winners in a giant lottery.”

A winner in a giant lottery = A union member.

Along with a union contract you get work rules. Without a union contract you get whatever rules the Man in Charge says you will get.

Story on CNN from August 27……….USAF loses $62.4 million dollar electronic intelligence aircraft (and almost loses 27 crewmembers), because contract maintenance guys didn’t tighten a nut on an oxygen line.

As noted (repeatedly) by yours truly, you can pay the price now, or a whole lot more later.

“A winner in a giant lottery = A union member.

Along with a union contract you get work rules. Without a union contract you get whatever rules the Man in Charge says you will get.”

So the progressives were/are right?

no they weren’t right.

unions aren’t the best way to get ‘the man’ to pay you more.

And I assume this is the point where we are supposed to guess what is?

you don’t want to go there, do you?

No, guessing games lost my interest after I entered my teen years. You’ll see.

what will i see?

You have to guess.

Lola why all the usernames?

i thought you hated guessing games? i thought you didn’t play them (since being a teen)? yet here you are, wanting to play a guessing game?

It’s called irony, tj.

You’re ducking Lola

Comment by Oddfellow
2015-09-06 12:53:28
No, guessing games lost my interest after I entered my teen years. You’ll see.

Comment by tj
2015-09-06 12:59:50
what will i see?

Comment by Oddfellow
2015-09-06 13:31:21
You have to guess.

—–

did those two bolded sentences just come off the same keyboard? that’s not irony, it’s inconsistency. you say you don’t play guessing games since being a teen, and then you want to start a guessing game.

in my first post on this i made a statement. i don’t care if you make guesses about it or not. and i didn’t ask for any guesses to be made, you did.

Bed time, tj. Your assignment for tomorrow is to learn the meaning of irony. It might be on your SATs.

You’re backpedalling Lola.

GFixer

Remember that 80% are employed, and probably the majority are employed adequately. And job losses to automation and offshoring have pretty much run their course.

In your industry, there used to be as many as four “pilots” up front and the engineer had to tag all equipment that wasn’t working properly.

That has changed - only two up front mostly because the equipment isn’t breaking nearly as much. Therefore less ad hoc maintenance required.

But less maintenance might also be the result of excellent requirements for servicing at pre planned dates.

All north American industries have taken massive hits as better operating systems have taken over. Oil and gas refineries running 100,000 b/d used to have as much as 15,000 employees. Today 200,000 b/d can use less than 500. Ever seen inside a car plant - one little controller is responsible for all of that automation, at each robot. And he doesn’t get paid.

Offsetting this automation has been the creation of many new jobs by research and development. This is North America’s forte and must be given the room to thrive in.

Note: “pilots” in my context are pilot, co-pilot, first engineer, navigator. Guess that shows how old I am !

glad you could get back to me so quickly odd-alpha, as you had a whole 3 sentences to write.

your assignment is to look up the requirements for a statement to be ironic.

hint: “take a guess.” doesn’t qualify.

since this is probably going to end here, i’ll bend my rules and give you an example. you could have said: “with your vast knowledge you should take a guess”

that would have been ironic. but you weren’t ironic. you were just puzzlingly inconsistent.

One might reasonably guess menial labor supply to be near the textbook model of perfectly elastic, which appears as a horizontal line on a Marshallian supply and demand graph; in practical terms, there are lots of low-skilled workers who would take the next minimum wage job that opened up. By contrast, demand for menial labor is not perfectly elastic, as a lower wage (price of labor) will result in more employment of low skilled labor.

Under the above assumptions, employers will have to still pay at least the minimum wage by law, and will not expand the number of jobs due to the EIC as the credit goes to low-wage workers. However, low wage workers lucky enough to have jobs will enjoy more after tax pay.

Political rhetoric aside, it’s the employee, not the employer, who enjoys the effect of the EIC, at least for the csse of minimum wage occupation.

Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion.

—
There are many likely effects of climate change: positive and negative, economic and ecological, humanitarian and financial. And if you aggregate them all, the overall effect is positive today

To be precise, Prof Tol calculated that climate change would be beneficial up to 2.2˚C of warming from 2009 (when he wrote his paper). This means approximately 3˚C from pre-industrial levels, since about 0.8˚C of warming has happened in the last 150 years.

—

Overall, Prof Tol finds that climate change in the past century improved human welfare. By how much? He calculates by 1.4 per cent of global economic output, rising to 1.5 per cent by 2025. For some people, this means the difference between survival and starvation.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9057151/carry-on-warming/

Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a study Thursday claiming there’s no hiatus in global warming. But new satellite-derived temperature measurements show there’s been no global warming for 18 years and six months.

——

The difference between Monckton’s data and NOAA’s data is that satellites measure the lowest few miles of the atmosphere, temperature measurements from government scientists rely on thousands of weather stations, buoys and ships across the world’s surface.

Both satellites and surface temperature readings, however, showed prolonged periods without statistically significant warming trends — 15 years for surface temperatures and more than 18 years for satellites.

Scientists have already pushed back against NOAA’s new study. The news site Mashable interviewed about a dozen climate scientists not involved in the study, and nearly all of them said “the study does not support the authors’ conclusion that the so-called warming pause never happened.”

http://dailycaller.com/2015/06/04/satellite-data-shows-no-global-warming-for-nearly-19-years/

what if there’s really no global warming, and it would be good for all of us to have? shouldn’t we then strive to get some global warming?

If you live in Siberia.

no, for the whole world.. you don’t seem to be able to read very well, so concentrate on this part.

“Overall, Prof Tol finds that climate change in the past century improved human welfare. By how much? He calculates by 1.4 per cent of global economic output, rising to 1.5 per cent by 2025. For some people, this means the difference between survival and starvation.”

so you don’t care if people starve? what kind of a lib are you?

warming facts:

2014 was the world’s hottest year on record, surpassing the previous record set in 2010, tied with 2005.

The Montana Glacier National Park has only 25 glaciers left from the 150 that were there in the year 1910.

Melting ice caps have caused sea levels in the north to rise. For the first time in hundreds of years, ships can pass through the fabled Northwest Passage above North America.

Among climate scientists, 97 percent agree that human-caused climate change is happening here and now. The sooner we act to slow the rate of climate change, the lower the risk and cost for future generations.

The world lost about 16 percent of all coral reefs in 1998, the second hottest year on record.

Climate change costs the U.S. over $100 billion each year.

Thirty-seven percent of Americans believe that global warming is a hoax, and 64 percent don’t believe that climate change will seriously affect their way of life.

“Among climate scientists, 97 percent agree that human-caused climate change is happening here and now.”

‘97% Of Climate Scientists Agree’ Is 100% Wrong

Alex Epstein ,
Jan 6, 2015

Here are two questions to ask anyone who pulls the 97% trick.

1. What exactly do the climate scientists agree on?

Usually, the person will have a very vague answer like “climate change is real.”

Which raises the question: What is that supposed to mean? That climate changes? That we have some impact? That we have a large impact? That we have a catastrophically large impact? That we have such a catastrophic impact that we shouldn’t use fossil fuels?

If you look at the literature, the specific meaning of the 97% claim is: 97 percent of climate scientists agree that there is a global warming trend and that human beings are the main cause–that is, that we are over 50% responsible. The warming is a whopping 0.8 degrees over the past 150 years, a warming that has tapered off to essentially nothing in the last decade and a half.

Because the actual 97% claim doesn’t even remotely justify their policies, catastrophists like President Obama and John Kerry take what we could generously call creative liberties in repeating this claim.

http://www.forbes.com/…/2015/01/06/97-of-climate-scientists-agree-is-100-wrong/ - 103k -

“What exactly do the climate scientists agree on?”

“97 percent of climate scientists agree that there is a global warming trend and that human beings are the main cause–that is, that we are over 50% responsible.”

Not sure where the confusion is.

“Not sure where the confusion is.”

Me either.

“The warming is a whopping 0.8 degrees over the past 150 years, a warming that has tapered off to essentially nothing in the last decade and a half.”

The Global Warming / Climate Change Scam

Written by Leigh Haugen, guest post on 03 October 2014.

Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change is simply the greatest scam in world history. The Big Green industry driven by the incessant UN/IPCC quest for money and power has become one of the most corrupt criminal enterprises the world has ever seen – all courtesy of the climate change scam.

It’s not about pollution or saving the environment anymore. Look at all of the major players, UN/IPCC, US/NASA/NOAA, EPA, Wall Street, virtually every major environmental group, 3rd world countries, wind, solar, biofuels (Rothschilds, Rockefellers, JP Morgan, Lazard Freres, Schoellkopf, Kuhn-Loeb, Warburgs, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs http://tinyurl.com/36xedyg)…etc, every single one of them has gone ‘all in’ on the climate change scam and misappropriated hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer funding around the world.

http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/the-global-warming-climate-change-scam.html - 91k -

A worldwide conspiracy of pretty much all (97%) scientists concerned, in all countries, in all types of institutions and universities, under all types of political systems.

Occam says…No way!

The Warmists need more warming for sure.

Ship of fools: global warmists ice-bound in the Antarctic

Climate change and media bias.

The majority of the mainstream journalists have become staunch advocates of the global warming hypothesis. Their reporting clearly favours reports from the warmists while they gleefully parrot warmist jibes at skeptics; phrases such as “deniers”.

Australia’s ABC is one of the leaders of the pack.

In November 2013 the ABC ran a two-part report in which it eagerly presented Professor Chris Turney’s Antarctic expedition as a serious scientific quest to prove how global warming was damaging Antarctica. Back then it couldn’t mention climate change enough.

But in a delicious irony, the ship load of warmist scientists and journalists were trapped by ice as they tried to prove global warming was melting Antarctica.

Suddenly the ABCs reporting changed.

What was astonishing was that not once in their reports did the ABC mention “global warming” or “climate change” or even “climate scientists”. It did everything humanly possible to cover up the most embarrassing PR disaster in years for the global warming movement.

With Turney’s ship of warmist scientists and journalists embarrassingly stuck in ice for more than a week - the ABC’s 7.30 filed a report which no longer sold Turney’s team as “one of the largest Australian science expeditions to Antarctic” on a mission to “answer questions about … climate change”.

This time it sold them as merely “tourists” and a few unspecified scientists. This time it did not mention “climate change” once. Indeed, Turney, who the ABC in November identified as a professor from the Climate Change Research Centre of the University of NSW, was this time identified merely as “expedition leader”. Not once did 7.30 last night report the real story and the real joke - that a ship carrying warmist scientists and journalists, plus a Greens politician, was trapped in thick ice that those on board had insisted was melting away.

Let there be no doubt, the mission was to document and record scientific changes in Antarctica and to broadcast that to the world. Most scientific missions don’t have a dedicated media team, but this one named a staff of five journalists. There is a journalist and a documentary maker from the Guardian as well as a senior producer from the Science Unit at the BBC world service. If they’d discovered less sea ice, fewer penguins, or big cracks, we know the images would be all over the mass media and it would be evidence for “climate change”.

But when the MV Akademik Shokalskiy trapped by thick sea ice, the mission apparently decided to call it a tourist boat. The BBC now tell us the mission was “to follow the route explorer Douglas Mawson travelled a century ago”. Don’t mention the climate.

Most other mainstream media also stuck with story of “tourists” ice-bound in the Antarctic.

australian-news.net/articles/view.php?id=178 - 13k -

Rescue of trapped climate-change researchers from ice and blizzard finally succeeds

posted at 10:01 am on January 2, 2014
by Ed Morrissey

A long-awaited rescue of passengers from a Russian research ship trapped in Antarctic ice for more than a week finally went ahead Thursday morning, with a helicopter safely ferrying all 52 researchers and tourists to a nearby vessel, expedition leaders said.

The helicopter was originally going to airlift the passengers to a Chinese icebreaker, the Snow Dragon, with a barge then ferrying them to an Australian vessel. But sea ice was preventing a barge from reaching the Snow Dragon, and the Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s Rescue Coordination Centre, which is overseeing the rescue, said the operation would consequently be delayed.

A last-minute change in plans allowed the rescue to go ahead, however. Those rescued were instead flown to an ice floe next to the Australian icebreaker the Aurora Australis, and then taken by a small boat to the Australian ship, expedition leader Chris Turney said.

“We’ve made it to the Aurora Australis safe & sound,” Turney posted on his Twitter account hours after the operation began. He thanked the Chinese and the Australians for coming to the rescue of the Russian ship MV Akademik Shokalski, which has been stuck in the ice since Christmas Eve.

The nine-day crisis unfolded a bit like a Monty Python sketch. A Chinese ship attempted to rescue the MV Akademik Shokalskiy, only to get stopped by the ice as well. A third ship arrived, but could not reach the stranded researchers, either. The rescuers finally used a helicopter when researchers were able to build a crude heliport on the ice that surrounded them, but a barge brought in to move them outside the ice couldn’t reach the Chinese vessel intended for their transport — so the helicopter landed on another ice floe near an Australian ship that arrived.

Oddly, the CNN reports seem to be missing something fairly important to understand the reason why the researchers were out in the Antarctic seas in the first place:

At least the word “climate” appears once in their web report, although not as an explanation. It doesn’t appear at all in the CBS report. The Associated Press report similarly avoids this key data point. Scott Johnson called this expedition the “ship of fools,” and perhaps that can be applied to these reports on the denouement, too.

hotair.com/…/01/02/rescue-of-trapped-climate-change-researchers-finally-succeeds/ - 174k -

gawd that is sooo funny.

the warmists believe their own propaganda and it nearly kills them. they went sailing off like they were searching for an ice cube.

weren’t they afraid the rescue helicopter might break through the ‘thin’ ice when it landed? very careless of them.