The Housing Bubble

A cold blob in the North Atlantic ocean. Caused by…wait for it….global warming!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/24/why-some-scientists-are-worried-about-a-cold-blob-in-the-north-atlantic-ocean/

No one wants to face the fact that there’s too many people. Waaayy too many people. And they’re on the move, they’re on the march!

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

More than double since 1959. 3 billion to over 7 billion. Over 7 billion today. And look where it is happening. China, India, Mexico. Ugh.

Lysenkoism. Mock, discredit, punish, jail or execute any dissenter from the party line.

It worked for Stalin.

I think we’ll need to see much higher construction numbers first.

Higher and higher rents are a symptom of too little supply of shelter relative to those who want to live in that shelter. It isn’t a stretch to assume that at least part of higher home prices is due to supply issues.

(and cue HA and his 25MM empty home tripe)

I don’t have much faith in Zero Hedge…but that particular article was from CH Smith from the Of Two Minds blog. He called the last bubble pop early and quite accurately much like the HBB, between the two I was convinced it would happen a year or two before hand (and sold my place in early 2007 as a result)

I’m still loving the irony here. The establishment Republicans need every dollar they can raise. And yet, every dollar they they DO raise can be treated as another coffin nail. To wit:

Bush: I raised $100 million.
Trump: Oh look, Bush sold himself for $100 million.
Rubio: Good evening, donors, I’ve raised $75 million but I still need more.
Trump: Gettin’ pricey, aren’t we, Marco? You must be offering the EXtra happy ending.

And Carly/Jeb/Cruz/Huck want back in with ground troops!? Duh!

“Graveyard of Empires.”

250 billion eyeballs aren’t worth a nickel more than 150 billion if the resulting conversion rate of a sale that produces a net profit is zero.

I still haven’t bought that $500 light fixture yet.

Most of the monetary value of social networking is as a platform for the sharing economy (uber, airbnb).

All of this stuff about billions of eyeballs is incoherent. American business spends vast sums of money on advertising, much of that on websites and apps and whatnot. Some corporations who own the server farms are must be making money on that. Google tried to create something to compete with Facebook. It didn’t achieve much.

Just imagine how big the Wall Street dip would be if QE4 weren’t just around the corner!

While devaluing every dollar in your wallet and checking account. Savers must be punished….

Marketwatch dot com
Market Snapshot
U.S. stocks end at lowest level since August plunge; biotechs extend rout
By Sue Chang and Mark DeCambre
Published: Sept 28, 2015 5:29 p.m. ET
Nasdaq sinks 3% on biotech slump
Bloomberg
A reading on core inflation may offer clues to China’s impact on the U.S. economy.

U.S. stocks finished Monday at their lowest levels since late August as concerns about slowing economic growth in China and mixed domestic economic data unnerved investors.

A selloff in biotech stocks added to downbeat sentiment.
…

Marketwatch dot com
Opinion: Bull market in stocks will resume when we’re older and wiser
By Mark Hulbert
Published: Sept 29, 2015 5:15 a.m. ET
Younger people have to learn that equities aren’t always the best investments

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (MarketWatch) — This bull market’s long-term health desperately depends on investors first becoming older and wiser about what’s realistic.

Unfortunately, we’re not there yet, despite the stock market’s recent turmoil. It’s a particularly bad long-term omen that there have been so many cries of anguish over the recent report that Treasury bills have beaten both stocks and bonds so far this year.

This isn’t to deny that it’s been a long time since this was the case — more than 20 years, in fact. But the last two-plus decades are the exception rather than the historical rule. Over the past two centuries, according to data I obtained from the Wharton School’s Jeremy Siegel, T-bills have outperformed both stocks and government bonds in an average of more than one of every five calendar years.

Bull markets’ long-term health is dependent on investors knowing this historical fact and appreciating what it teaches us about risk. One way of viewing bear markets’ function is to educate successive younger generations to this risk and to re-educate older generations who have forgotten it.

It is interesting to note in this regard that the 2008-2009 bear market only partially succeeded in educating people. That’s because bonds soared during that equity debacle, seducing investors into the false sense of security that they will be OK as long as they diversify their portfolio between stocks and bonds.

As you can see from the chart above, this assumption is not infrequently wrong.

But won’t stocks and bond investors come out ahead of Treasury bills if they hold on long enough? Yes, provided the future is like the past and — an even bigger if — you hold on the for the very long term. Even when we expand our focus to 10-year holding periods, as you can see from the chart, T-bills still have beaten both equities and fixed income more than one of every 10 times.

We can only hope that 2015 doesn’t represent the beginning of another similar 10-year period. The last such period in U.S. history was the decade from 1973 through 1982, so in terms of historical norms we’re overdue.

One of the more hilarious descriptions of the role historical memory plays in the market cycle appears in the investment classic “The Money Game,” pseudonymously written by Adam Smith. He described how the market oscillates between two different sentiment environments depending on whether historical memory helps or gets in the way.

On the one hand, he wrote, there are so-called “kids markets” in which those making the most money are too young to remember the last bear market. At the other extreme are periods when it’s crucial to remember that the markets can go down just as easily as go up.

Smith described a friend of his called The Great Winfield who was exploiting a kids’ market by only hiring investment managers who were not yet 30 years of age: “The strength of my kids is that they are too young to remember anything bad, and they are making so much money that they feel invincible. Now, you know, and I know, that one day the orchestra will stop playing and the wind will rattle through the broken window panes, and the anticipation of this freezes [the rest of] us” who are old enough to remember.

The market’s recent weakness and extraordinary volatility has been particularly hard on the current generation of “kids,” who are quickly becoming older and wiser. It is perhaps little solace to them today, but they are setting up the preconditions of the bull market’s next long-term move.
…

Marketwatch dot com
Market Pulse
Goldman Sachs slashes S&P 500 price and earnings forecasts
By Sara Sjolin
Published: Sept 29, 2015 7:18 a.m. ET

Citing a slower pace of growth for the U.S. and China, Goldman Sachs has lowered its S&P 500 earnings and price forecasts. In a note dated Sept. 28, but released on Tuesday, strategists led by Goldman’s chief U.S. equity strategist, cut the S&P 500 year-end target to 2,000 from 2,100. “‘Flat is the new up,’ will be the investor refrain for 2016,” said David Kostin in the note. “Our baseline forecast is that the U.S. economy will grow at a modest pace, earnings will rise, and the S&P 500 index will climb slowly while the [price-to-earnings] multiple declines as interest rates rise,” he said. The investment bank also cut its 2015 S&P 500 earnings-per-share forecast to $109 from $114, representing a 3% year-over-year decline in earnings. For 2016, Goldman sees the S&P climbing 5% to 2,100, with earnings per share for the benchmark coming in at $120, down from the previous forecast of $126.
…

Warmists gonna warm.

Article about muslim terrists in Bangladesh (population 160+ million) reports that “the crusader coalition” is not safe. And when their country drowns because of warmism, all those brown muslim Acts Of Love™ are coming here, LOLZ.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSL3N11Z2QM20150929

Disappointed who?

I would like to see a little lower year on year price growth (1-2% would feel better than 5%). But prices easing a bit is better IMHO than them accelerating upward.

http://www.infowars.com/feinstein-youre-not-a-real-journalist-unless-you-draw-a-salary/

And remember, ZeroHedge bad, Breibart bad, Infowars bad, and New York Times Washington Post CNN NPR Huffington Post doubleplusgood real journalists.

But now there’s a fly in the ointment - while the thinking 5% have always distrusted the media, now more of the non-thinking 95% are becoming distrustful as well.

There’s very little trust in any institutions at this point - government, business, education, religion, political parties.

Teenager says the pair had regular, unprotected sex and that the abuse had left him “scarred for life”

Fifty times? Hehe. This kid is trying to milk the school system. He’ll probably grow up to be a shyster lawyer.

“In the U.S. and Britain, the percentage of citizens owning stocks or houses is well down from the late 1980s.”

How can fewer people in the U.S. be stock owners, given how 401-K’s have been supplanting pension plans?

Anyone looking for a gently-used trailer from an oil-roughneck man camp?

As the migrant workers leave, their castoffs pile up in scrap yards such as TJ’s Autobody & Salvage outside Alexander, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of Williston. More than 400 discarded vehicles crowd its lot, including souped-up pickup trucks and an RV with rotting potatoes and a dead mouse in the sink.

“I wake up and RVs are in my driveway,” said owner Tom Novak. “It’s insane; there are empty campers everywhere.”

We were pitched on a large number of developments up in shale country.

We were always too concerned about the market being entirely tied to oil, and that the boom would ultimately end.

I can’t tell you how happy I am that we passed on the investments.

Glencore’s CDSs say otherwise.

Yes, but consumer confidence is up, proving, yet again, that our national slouch into IDIOCRACY continues apace.

All the while - there are 4 more in Chicago - dead - who won’t be buying homes in the future.

I’m guessing that those homies were never gonna buy a home.

And yet again, they don’t break out the results by major.

Instead, it’s all touchy-feely crap like mentors who foster hopes and dreams, and having professors that care about you. This must be code for sleeping your way into a job.

The only useful metric was “worked on a project that took longer than a semester to complete.” That’s almost certainly code for engineering.

“Was College Worth It?”

Absolutely. It is better to have an engineering degree and no job than it is to be employed without it.

I’m glad that loophole was closed without needing to go through congress.

Because it never would have made it through.

+1

There are no bronze medals in the Victim Olympics™, everybody wins a gold, LOLZ.

The fact that the Oligopoly media has it out for Trump and is directing so much venom his way is all the reason I need to vote for him. Go Trump!

Who’s pushing hardest for a rate increase? the Big Banks. They want rates to go up because they make more money off of the spread. So here we have a representative of the 0.1% going public to increase pressure on the Fed to raise.

Fed Rate Hike: Top Five Banks Stand To See $10 Billion Windfall

Rule number one of shootin’:

Aim gun away from your own body.

Can anyone offer predictions for when the Republican war on low income women’s access to reproductive health care will end?

Saved.

Since 9/30/2015

R = 1
D = 0

Your engagement with enragement is causing your derangement.

It can take a lot longer to pay off the divorce.

That’s a lot if money to pay for a princess day

What’s stopping you? You rent, so you can supposedly move out tomorrow, you can earn near-minimum wage pretty much anywhere, and surely your supply of tindr girls in the nearby vicinity has run out by now and it’s time to plug in a new zip code.

Seriously, WHAT’S STOPPING YOU?

Dipped below it, and then recovered at the close above, just barely . . .

I’m guessing that VW isn’t the only automaker who cheated with deisels. What will be interesting is if they cheated in Europe as well. About half the cars on the road over there are diesels. I think that the EU will look the other way, otherwise their auto industry will be wiped out. And this could affect the Big 3 as well. GM owns Opel and Vauxhall, Ford has a large presence in the EU and Chrysler is owned by Fiat.

ft dot com > Markets >
Capital Markets
Last updated: September 29, 2015 8:55 pm
Equities on course for worst quarter since 2011
Nicole Bullock and Robin Wigglesworth in New York

A Barclays Plc trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., on Friday, Jan. 2, 2015. U.S. stock-index futures climbed, indicating the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index will rebound after posting its first December drop since 2007. Photographer: Jin Lee/Bloomberg
©Bloomberg

US and global equities are heading for their worst quarterly performance since 2011, with investors rattled by China’s economic slowdown, uncertainty over Federal Reserve policy and growing pessimism about corporate earnings.

Adding to investors’ unease, the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday warned that corporate failures were likely to jump in the developing world, after a borrowing binge in the past decade.

With an array of sectors slumping since the start of July, beyond those directly influenced by the rout in commodity prices, the global equity bull run of recent years is now facing a major challenge.

The S&P 500 has fallen 8.5 per cent, the biggest decline since the third quarter of 2011. Previously high-flying sectors that led the market earlier this year, notably biotech and healthcare stocks, have fallen appreciably in recent weeks.

“The question now is — are investors ready for the first down year since 2011 . . . and the worst year since the ‘bad days’ of 2008,” said Howard Silverblatt, analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices.
…

Gee, I wouldn’t think that you would be a fan of that show.