The Housing Bubble

Is euro stimulus on the way?

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” — George Orwell

Are the sheeple finally waking up and refusing to be herded into the Oligopoly’s incorporated neoliberal plantation?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-21/our-europe-dying-german-youth-blast-merkels-multicultural-utopia

Time to buy Canadian oil trusts, yet?

Did you caucus for Trump, yet?

Lower housing costs?

Lower property taxes?

No - another government ponzi scheme.

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There’s Some Hope for First-Time Home Buyers
Bloomberg - Prashant Gopal, Heather Perlberg - 1/22/2016

First-time homebuyers are finally jumping into the U.S. property market.

Need proof? Look at the mortgage market’s fastest-growing segment: loans with low down payments insured by the Federal Housing Administration.

Originations of FHA-backed mortgages, used predominately by first-time buyers, were up 54 percent in September from a year earlier, according to the most recent data from CoreLogic Inc. By December, the FHA insured 22 percent of all loan originations, up from 17 percent a year earlier, according to data compiled by Ellie Mae Inc.

President Barack Obama’s administration, in January 2015, reduced mortgage-insurance premiums for FHA loans. That lowered the cost of getting a home loan and brought in at least 75,000 new borrowers with credit scores of less than 680, according to a November report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The FHA estimates that borrowers save $900 a year on average as a result of the lower premium. The move made FHA-backed mortgages more competitive with other loans that have low-down-payment options, said Guy Cecala, publisher of the newsletter Inside Mortgage Finance. While mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have an option for borrowers to put down as little as 3 percent, they require private insurance with risk-adjusted premiums based on credit scores, debt-to-income ratios and other factors.

1. Now you know why obama wants to import as many muslims as possible. They will vote and support democrats for generations.

2. The destruction of the middle class, begun under obama, will be complete if Hillary wins. We will turn into a 3rd world cesspool. With a thin crust of uber wealthy and the masses of poor. Seperated by high wall with broken glass.

3. In the future, the best job for anyone to aspire to is to work for the government.

————————

Only Six People Greet Hillary at Texas Airport, She Ignores Them
Truth Revolt | 21 Jan 16 | Tiffany Gabbay

Democrat frontrunner Hillary Clinton is not the warm and fuzzy type. In fact, she often treats her supporters with what can only be described as thinly veiled contempt. You would think the former Secretary of State would show more appreciation to her followers, particularly in Texas, where her fan-base is small.

KFDM reports that during a fundraising stop in Beaumont, Texas Wednesday, the Democrat presidential candidate was greeted by a mere six people. Rather than show warmth and gratitude, however, she chose to ignore them.

No chance. Hillary’s motorcade sped from airport without so much as an obligatory hand-wave:

Meanwhile, 12 News Now reports Clinton was in West Beaumont to attend a fundraiser organized by Pakistani businessman Tahir Javed.

The news station reports the campaign collected about $500,000, making it one of the top five private fundraisers Clinton has had in this country.

Many of the Pakistanis at the event were pleased with Clinton’s vocal support of the Muslim religion, 12 News Now reports.

Bill had no losses in the stock market from 2008-2015. Is it voluntaryist to reap profits from a market propped up by central bankers and fiat money?

Fortunately less than 5 percent of those gains are at risk of being lost when the Bitcoin ATM just stops working.

It will be interesting to see what effect the seasonal rise in oil prices (due to taking facilities offline - and the switch to summer grades) will have on the mindset of the market.

Could be that we’ve already seen the short-term low.

Same with the stock market. Wednesday was the interesting day…the markets that day certainly acted as if a short-term low occurred.

Graham on choosing between Trump and Cruz: ‘It’s like being shot or poisoned’

Washington (CNN)—Sen. Lindsey Graham did not mince words Thursday about choosing between Donald Trump or Sen. Ted Cruz, comparing it to a choice between poisoning or being shot.

“It’s like being shot or poisoned,” the South Carolina Republican said. “What does it really matter?”

Graham was asked which of the two presidential candidates he preferred Thursday after going on a rant about both of them at a Capitol Hill press conference. He attached the real estate mogul and the Texas senator to Democratic presidential hopeful Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“Donald Trump I think is the most unprepared person I’ve ever met to be commander in chief. And when it comes to Sen. Cruz, he’s exhibited behavior in his time in the Senate that make it impossible for me to believe that he could bring this country together,” Graham said.

He added that when it comes to the three men: “If the past is any indication of the future … I think America would be in trouble if any of them got to be president of the United States.”

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/21/politics/lindsey-graham-donald-trump-ted-cruz-poison-or-shot/index.html

Against Trump
The Editors
The National Review

“Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strongman overtones.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430137/donald-trump-conservative-movement-menace

Only in Florida.

West Palm Beach man decapitates dog to ‘cleanse himself’

Government + health care = votes of the FSA

That is why.

—————————

Why Is There No Uber For Health Care?
01/21/2016 - IBD

Health Care: Ask anyone why health costs are so high, and one of the answers is likely to be “technology.” But why does technology add costs in health care when it lowers costs everywhere else?

‘Why isn’t there an Uber of health care?” That’s the question that Manhattan Institute health care expert Avik Roy asks in the opening of a must-read paper, “Health Care 2.0: Ushering In Medicine’s Digital Revolution.”

“Why can’t we deploy, in health care, the same forces that are improving quality and lowering costs in virtually every other sector of the economy?”

Here’s a typical explanation: “Medical advances can help us get well, avoid disease and delay death, but they also drive up spending,” says an NPR report. “Patients and doctors often demand the newest treatments, even if there is little or no evidence that they are better.”

In any other context, such a statement would be ludicrous. Why would any consumer demand a more expensive product if they had no idea whether it would work?

Roy correctly points to a huge, if largely unrecognized, problem in health care — the rise of third-party payments. The reason patients demand the latest technology, no matter the cost, is that they aren’t paying the bills — an insurance company or the government is.

The clearest trend in health care is that steady increase in third-party payments. Government data show that in 1960, insurers and governments paid about half the nation’s health care bills. Today, that figure is 89%. By 2024, it’s expected to hit 90%.

This trend is driven almost entirely by bad tax law — which provides an unlimited tax exemption for employer-provided health insurance — and government policy, which is increasingly subsidizing insurance or paying bills directly.

With so few cost-conscious consumers out there, there’s little incentive to create cost-saving products and services. At the same time, providers can charge far more than they would otherwise, knowing the direct consumer is largely indifferent to the price.

Roy points to a 20-year-old treatment for multiple sclerosis, Avonex. It costs six times today what it did in 1996, “despite the fact that over the intervening two decades, new drugs have emerged (that are) significantly more effective.” That would never happen in a functional marketplace.

They only failed because there was too little socialism…

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With Democrats In Charge The Result Is Racism,Rape,Riots,And Poison Water
Breitbart.com | January 22, 2016 | John Nolte

Pop quiz: Who almost exclusively has run Hollywood, America’s university system, and almost every big urban city in America, and done so for decades? The answer is more complicated than “Democrats.” Most of the people who run these institutions and communities are so much more than Democrats. They are leftists — hardcore, government-loving, Alinsky-worshipping, central planning, community-organizing leftists.

And yet, when they enjoy free rein for decades, take a hard look at the utopia these utopians create.

Let’s start with Hollywood, which is about as hard-left as any institution in the country. What we have here is a community run by leftists currently embroiled in a huge race scandal. For two years in a row, only white actors have been nominated for performance Oscars. Where leftists have enjoyed unchallenged rule for decades, 40 out of 40 acting nominations have gone to Whitey.

According to the left-wing mainstream media, there is a rape crisis rampaging though America’s university system. If you choose to believe the studies and reports, campus rape is a full-blown epidemic. How is this possible when for decades hardcore leftists have enjoyed unchallenged rule over America’s higher education system. There are exceptions, of course, like Liberty University, where there is no rape cris– oh, wait, Liberty is run by conservative Christians.

On top of all that rape, according to the leftists who for decades have run the American university system, there is a major racism problem at the very same American university system Leftists… have… run… for… decades…

Leftists take over Hollywood and the result is racism.

Leftists take over the college campus and the result is racism and rape.

And I’m just getting started.

The city of Flint, Michigan, has been imploding since the 1980’s. Now, due to mismanagement by city officials, the water is poisoned with lead. In every way imaginable, the city is an arm-pit. But how is that possible when Utopian-Democrats have run the city unchallenged for years? How is that possible when in 2006, Flint was voted the 10th most liberal city in America?

According to our left-wing media, armed, racist government-employees (police officers) who are employed by Democrats (mayors) in cities run for decades by Democrats, are gunning down innocent black people: Chicago, Baltimore, Ferguson (which is run by the St. Louis county), and in some of those cases, riots follow.

The youth black unemployment rate is an astonishing 21%. Don’t most of these young people live in Liberal Utopias?

Bought a used car? Meh.

Pay a grossly inflated price for a rapidly depreciating house doubling your monthly shelter costs and saddling yourself with a lifetime of debt?

Priceless.

Lesson? Don’t be a DebtDonkey.

http://goo.gl/jXiSsk

BREAKING NEWS
Three weeks into new year, more than 200 people shot in Chicago
Deanese Williams-Harris and Alexandra Chachkevitch
Three men were killed and seven other people were wounded in Chicago on Thursday through early Friday as the number of shooting victims in the city passed 200 three weeks into the new year.

Chicago police, Cook County sheriff’s office team up in gang fight

Existing-Home Sales Surge Back in December

WASHINGTON (January 22, 2016) — Existing-home sales snapped back solidly in December as more buyers reached the market before the end of the year, and the delayed closings resulting from the rollout of the Know Before You Owe initiative pushed a portion of November’s would-be transactions into last month’s figure, according to the National Association of Realtors®. Led by the South and West, all four major regions saw large increases in December.

Total existing-home sales1, which are completed transactions that include single-family homes, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops, ascended 14.7 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.46 million in December from 4.76 million in November. After last month’s turnaround (the largest monthly increase ever recorded), sales are now 7.7 percent above a year ago.

Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, says December’s robust bounce back caps off the best year of existing sales (5.26 million) since 2006 (6.48 million). “While the carryover of November’s delayed transactions into December contributed greatly to the sharp increase, the overall pace taken together indicates sales these last two months maintained the healthy level of activity seen in most of 2015,” he said. “Additionally, the prospect of higher mortgage rates in coming months and warm November and December weather allowed more homes to close before the end of the year.”

The median existing-home price2 for all housing types in December was $224,100, up 7.6 percent from December 2014 ($208,200). Last month’s price increase marks the 46th consecutive month of year-over-year gains.

Total housing inventory3 at the end of December dropped 12.3 percent to 1.79 million existing homes available for sale, and is now 3.8 percent lower than a year ago (1.86 million). Unsold inventory is at a 3.9-month supply at the current sales pace, down from 5.1 months in November and the lowest since January 2005 (3.6 months).

“Although some growth is expected, the housing market will struggle in 2016 to replicate last year’s 7 percent increase in sales,” adds Yun. “In addition to insufficient supply levels, the overall pace of sales this year will be constricted by tepid economic expansion, rising mortgage rates and decreasing demand for buying in oil-producing metro areas.”

http://www.realtor.org/news-releases/2016/01/existing-home-sales-surge-back-in-december

One of the problems when you become successful is that jealousy and envy inevitably follow. There are people — I categorize them as life’s losers — who get their sense of accomplishment and achievement from trying to stop others.

Yikes - maybe this company should be renamed Slumpberger?

Schlumberger Ltd - 10,000 job cuts

Amnesty says Kurds waging campaign to uproot Arabs in north Iraq

ERBIL, IRAQ

Kurdish forces have bulldozed, blown up and burned down thousands of Arab homes across northern Iraq in what may constitute a war crime, human rights watchdog Amnesty International said in a report published on Wednesday.

Amnesty said it found evidence of a “concerted campaign” by the Kurds to uproot Arab communities in revenge for their perceived support of Islamic State, which seized control of about one third of Iraq in the summer of 2014.

Kurdish peshmerga forces have since driven the insurgents back in the north of Iraq with the help of air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition, expanding their control to include ethnically mixed territories they claim as their own.

“KRG (Kurdistan Regional Government) forces appear to be spearheading a concerted campaign to forcibly displace Arab communities by destroying entire villages in areas they have recaptured from IS (Islamic State) in northern Iraq,” Amnesty’s Donatella Rovera said.

“The forced displacement of civilians and the deliberate destruction of homes and property without military justification, may amount to war crimes.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-amnesty-iraq-idUSKCN0UY0JE

Uh oh, Putin: Nobody seems to trust your currency

Russia has fallen victim to two of the classic blunders. The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia—oops—but only slightly less well-known is this: never think an oil-exporting business can substitute for having an actual economy.

Double oops.

The latest news is that Russia’s ruble is free-falling again. It’s dropped 12 percent since the start of the year, and as much as 5 percent on Thursday alone, before rallying a bit up to 83 per dollar. It climbed further Friday as oil had a good day. Even then, though, it’s still lower than it was a little over a year ago when a run on the ruble forced the government to jack up interest rates to prevent people from losing all faith in the currency. In other words, yesterday’s panic-driven fear has become today’s grim reality.

The simple story, as I’ve mentioned, is that Russia doesn’t have much of an economy other than its oil-exporting business, which is to say that it doesn’t have much of an economy at all anymore. China’s slowdown means that there isn’t as much demand for the black stuff, but, more importantly, there’s just a glut of it. Between the shale revolution, Saudi Arabia’s refusal to turn off any of its taps, and Iran’s nuclear sanctions being lifted, the International Energy Agency estimates that the oil market is oversupplied by 1.5 million barrels-a-day. The result, at least for now, has been a 75 percent drop in the price of oil the last 18 months, down to $30-a-barrel. That’s so low that some shale producers should start going out of business, at which point supply should come down and prices go up— well, except for two problems. The first is that so many shale drillers borrowed so much money that they can’t afford to stop drilling, and the second is that, even if they do, it’s pretty easy for them to turn their wells off or on as needed. That means that, at worst, they’ll be forced into hibernation and come out of it as soon as prices bounce back up to, say, $60-a-barrel, setting a ceiling there.

So even if things get better, they’ll still be bad for Russia. Consider this: its economy shrank 3.7 percent in 2015, and the International Monetary Fund expects it to contract another 1 percent this year based on the now-generous assumption that oil will average $42-a-barrel. And its budget doesn’t look any better. Oil revenues, after all, make up half of the government’s revenues. So even its just-announced 10 percent cut in spending might not be enough since that was based on the hope that oil will rebound to $50-a-barrel. It doesn’t help, of course, that the state-controlled bank VEB might need as big as an $18 billion bailout. How can you tell things are getting serious? Well, other than the fact that Russian oligarchs aren’t buying nearly as much high-end art in London anymore? Try this: Russia’s top officials have said it might be forced to cut its oil production to try to prop up the price, conceding defeat—and market share—in its cold war with Saudi Arabia.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/22/uh-oh-putin-nobody-seems-to-trust-your-currency/

Schlumberger to Cut 10,000 Jobs
Energy industry layoffs have moved into six figures, a number bolstered by the decision of Schlumberger to cut 10,000 people.

Lower prices are great for the economy, unless you sell stuff

Dark Money review: Nazi oil, the Koch brothers and a rightwing revolution

Lots of American industrialists have skeletons in the family closet. Charles and David Koch, however, are in a league of their own.

The father of these famous rightwing billionaires was Fred Koch, who started his fortune with $500,000 received from Stalin for his assistance constructing 15 oil refineries in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. A couple of years later, his company, Winkler-Koch, helped the Nazis complete their third-largest oil refinery. The facility produced hundreds of thousands of gallons of high-octane fuel for the Luftwaffe, until it was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1944.

In 1938, the patriarch wrote that “the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy and Japan”. To make sure his children got the right ideas, he hired a German nanny. The nanny was such a fervent Nazi that when France fell in 1940, she resigned and returned to Germany. After that, Fred became the main disciplinarian, whipping his children with belts and tree branches.

These are just a handful of the many bombshells exploded in the pages of Dark Money, Jane Mayer’s indispensable new history “of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right” in the US.

A veteran investigative reporter and a staff writer for the New Yorker, Mayer has combined her own research with the work of scores of other investigators, to describe how the Kochs and fellow billionaires like Richard Scaife have spent hundreds of millions to “move their political ideas from the fringe to the center of American political life”.

Twenty years after collaborating with the Nazis, Fred Koch had lost none of his taste for extremism. In 1958, he was one of the 11 original members of the John Birch Society, an organization which accused scores of prominent Americans, including President Dwight Eisenhower, of communist sympathies.

In 1960, Koch wrote: “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America.” He strongly supported the movement to impeach chief justice Earl Warren, after the supreme court voted to desegregate public schools in Brown v Board of Education. His sons became Birchers too, although Charles was more enamored of “antigovernment economic writers” than communist conspiracies.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/17/dark-money-review-nazi-oil-the-koch-brothers-and-a-rightwing-revolution

Trump v Sanders

http://drudgereport.com/nosp.htm

will brains win?

Only bigger and bigger government with higher and higher taxes and more and more regulations can save us!

the best. political ad. ever.

For Trump. Raise your hand if you want a 33% increase in your taxes to pay for illegals and refugees….

“They’ve all come to look for America” and found a huge, expensive and inefficient bureaucracy….

——————–

Sanders Makes a Rare Pitch: More Taxes for More Government
New York Times - 1/22/2016

Senator Bernie Sanders’s health care plan is advancing a notion that has long been out of fashion in American politics: that the federal government should provide a new, expensive service to most Americans, and that it should levy significantly higher taxes on most Americans to provide that service.

His campaign estimates that his plan to cover all Americans with a zero-deductible, zero-co-pay health plan will add $1.38 trillion a year to government spending. There are reasons to think that estimate is optimistically low, but even if it’s correct it’s still a lot of money: Paying for it would require increasing federal tax receipts by about a third, and Mr. Sanders has a plan to do so.

From the WSJ (full article behind paywall).

http://www.wsj.com/articles/investing-in-2016-the-only-winning-move-is-not-to-play-the-game-1453485940

“The world’s central banks can’t save us anymore. That was the message from some of the world’s most prominent investors at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Friday.”

“There isn’t an existential worry about financial assets. It’s just that they are priced too high.”

“A shift in sentiment seemed to be taking hold. Annual growth of the old order—3% to 4% for the U.S. and other Western economies, is far away. Absent structural changes led by governments, there was little reason to be cheered.”

“There may be a paradigm shift we have to accept with demographics in Europe: It’s not that bad to have zero-percent inflation. We were preoccupied with 2% inflation, but just because it’s been that way for 40 to 50 years doesn’t mean it has to remain that way.”

“We plan our future with the Japanese environment in mind. That is our base scenario.”

Worth reading, if you have a sub.

This is a good one.

How an obscure adviser to Pat Buchanan predicted the wild Trump campaign in 1996

http://theweek.com/articles/599577/how-obscure-adviser-pat-buchanan-predicted-wild-trump-campaign-1996

key excerpts:

Imagine giving this advice to a Republican presidential candidate: What if you stopped calling yourself a conservative and instead just promised to make America great again?

What if you dropped all this leftover 19th-century piety about the free market and promised to fight the elites who were selling out American jobs? What if you just stopped talking about reforming Medicare and Social Security and instead said that the elites were failing to deliver better health care at a reasonable price? What if, instead of vainly talking about restoring the place of religion in society — something that appeals only to a narrow slice of Middle America — you simply promised to restore the Middle American core — the economic and cultural losers of globalization — to their rightful place in America? What if you said you would restore them as the chief clients of the American state under your watch, being mindful of their interests when regulating the economy or negotiating trade deals?

also:

What so frightens the conservative movement about Trump’s success is that he reveals just how thin the support for their ideas really is. His campaign is a rebuke to their institutions. It says the Republican Party doesn’t need all these think tanks, all this supposed policy expertise. It says look at these people calling themselves libertarians and conservatives, the ones in tassel-loafers and bow ties. Have they made you more free? Have their endless policy papers and studies and books conserved anything for you? These people are worthless. They are defunct. You don’t need them, and you’re better off without them.

Well played TXchik.

Not bad for one week!

This is the end game for the socialist utopia the Pineapples and their ilk have in store for ‘Murica, once they have their permanent Democrat supermajority.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-22/what-death-nation-looks-venezuela-prepares-720-hyperinflation

Syrian woman schools neocon war-monger John McCain at town hall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MAQBMNPf7M

The sea was angry today my friends, like a NOAA spokesman refusing to turn over internal communications surrounding a recent climate change study that overturned the previous settled science that showed there had been no “global warming” since January 1997.

we need more currency in the system so stocks and homes go up in price.

realtors are liars

I guess Trump is making quite a splash in Davos?

Is your support for Trump driven more by fear or by hatred?