A Pile-Up Of Houses And Prices That Are Faltering
My Valley News reports from California. “There’s a flipside to the housing affordability ‘crisis’ in communities across California: rising values in the Inland Empire are giving many homeowners a reason to tap into their equity and spend money, according to local data released by the California Credit Union League. Some Inland Empire-based credit unions are experiencing this trend firsthand as homeowners were increasingly heading into Home Equity Lines of Credit (HELOCs), home equity loans (second mortgages) and cash-out refinance mortgages in second-quarter 2016 compared to the same period a year ago (and prior years before).”
“‘The local surge in home-equity lending and cash-out refis reflects a strong national trend in homeowners increasingly remodeling their homes and enhancing their properties,’ said Dwight Johnston, chief economist for the California Credit Union League. He said many neighborhoods across the Inland Empire have enjoyed rapid price appreciation, but some areas still have a relatively large percentage of homes that are underwater or have little equity.”
“‘As more of these homeowners see the light of day with values rising, we’ll see more of this remodeling trend,’ Johnston said. ‘Pulling out home equity seems to have legs and is here to stay.’”
The Real Deal on Florida. “The market giveth, and the market taketh away. After a relatively steady August, Miami-Dade County’s condo market fell into a deep slump last week, with sales volume halved from the week before and only four condos breaking the $1 million price barrier. Miami-Dade’s sales volume took a heavy hit last week, with only 75 units trading for a total of $24.4 million. For comparison, the previous week saw 195 units sell for $55 million. Average prices were $325,362 per unit and $266 per square foot.”
KTNV on Nevada. “Struggling homeowners fighting to save their homes got ripped off by the very people who were supposed to help. So says a scathing federal audit which found widespread abuse in Nevada’s Hardest Hit housing program. Contact 13 Chief Investigator Darcy Spears tells us how many millions were squandered. It’s a big figure and a bitter pill to swallow. $8.2 million in waste and abuse while support for homeowners essentially evaporated.”
“People like Cheryl Barber. ‘I jumped through all the hoops.’ Cheryl applied for help from the Hardest Hit Fund but got nothing because they claimed they couldn’t give her enough to bring her loan current. ‘It’s my home! It’s all I have. I lost my son two and a half years ago and that’s been a battle.’ There were country club lunches, employee bonuses, meals, gift cards, entertainment and travel–even a disc jockey–all while the number of homeowners who got help plummeted.”
“‘To see the crooks behind this and taking the money for parties and bonuses and a Mercedes Benz–it’s… I’m just flat out appalled. Flabbergasted,’ said Cheryl Barber.”
Bloomberg on Connecticut. “Barry Sternlicht, chairman and chief executive officer of Greenwich, Connecticut-based Starwood Capital Group, said the town may be the worst housing market in the U.S., and that he now officially lives in Florida. ‘You can’t give away a house in Greenwich,’ Sternlicht said Tuesday.”
“The town — about 30 miles northeast of midtown Manhattan and home to some of the country’s largest hedge funds — is seeing a pile-up of houses on the market and prices that are faltering as properties linger. Home sales in the second quarter fell 18 percent from a year earlier to 169 deals, according to appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate. At the same time, new listings surged 27 percent.”
“In Greenwich, the median home price fell 7.5 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier to $1.76 million, Miller Samuel and Douglas Elliman said. It remains among the costliest housing markets in the country. In June 2008, Sternlicht tried to sell his 5.8-acre Greenwich property, a gated estate with tennis and shuffleboard courts and a swimming pool. After multiple price cuts and one increase, the home was no longer listed for sale by early 2010.”
‘Miami-Dade County’s condo market fell into a deep slump last week, with sales volume halved from the week before and only four condos breaking the $1 million price barrier.’
Jeebus, I’ll have to try and find the numbers but I think there are a couple thousand listings in this price range.
Tennessee is hot right?
‘Northeast Tennessee’s housing market picked up the pace slightly in August compared to July’s closings slump. There were six more single-family home closings, and the year-over-year comparison as well as the year-to-date trend were double-digit gains. New pending sales also went up in the 11 county region. The year-over-year average sales price was down.’
‘Greeneville had positive year-over-year closings and average price gains, which was the only city market with such gains. The other six cities monitored by the Northeast Tennessee Association of Realtors’ (NETAR) Trends Report had mixed performances. Closings were up in the region’s two largest city markets, Johnson City and Kingsport, while average prices were down.’
‘Here is a look at this year’s August market conditions compared to last August:
-Greeneville closings increased 7.7%, and prices improved by 32.2%.
-Johnson City closings were up 65%, but the average price was down 23.6%
-Kingsport closings were up 19.6% while the average price dipped 11.4%.
-Bristol VA closings improved 7.1%, the average price was down 9.6%.
-Erwin/Unicoi closings were up 9.1%, and the average price was down 6.7%.
-Elizabethton closings were down 31.3% while prices increased by 13.3%.
-Bristol TN closings were down 7.4%, prices were down 3.8%.’
I found it, from a couple weeks ago:
‘The Miami housing market, and its luxury segment in particular, has been softening for the past year with high-end condos sitting on the market for twice as long as they did a year ago and sellers offering bigger discounts amid an increased supply. Additionally, sellers of high-end condos will continue to face stiff competition. Inventory is up 47.8% from last year, with 2,482 units worth $1 million or more waiting to change hands.’
http://thehousingbubbleblog.com/?p=9763
From above:
‘with sales volume halved from the week before and only four condos breaking the $1 million price barrier’
Sold 4, 2400 plus to go. There are some projects that have hundreds for sale. When a tower opens up huge numbers of units are instantly listed to flip. Dang Miami, it’s a bust over 1 million.
Surging inventory, cratering demand, falling prices.
Happy Americans…well non-loanowners
Falling prices means more good economic news.
“US Import Prices Tumble For 25th Month In A Row As China’s Deflationary Impulse Hits Fresh 6 Year Lows”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-14/us-import-prices-tumble-25th-month-row-chinas-deflationary-impulse-hits-fresh-6-year
Now, if we can just get mortgage rates down to zero, then everyone will be drinking free bubble up and eating that rainbow stew on the slopes of the big rock candy mountain.
Imagine a nail salon worker owning a $700K “crap shack” with a zero% loan, interest only (ha ha). Hey, it’s worked for years for the govt. Who says it can’t bring instant riches to us all…
And the HELOCs can all be interest only and zero %.
Why didn’t we think of that a century ago. We’ve conquered the fiscal first law of thermodynamics; now on to the perpetual motion machine and we’ll do it in the physical world too.
Dude you are thinking on the right track. There is lot of room for home prices to rise if mortgage rates go down to zero.
Look what happened with car prices. You show up , fog a mirror and drive off with a promise to make some payments.
Why zero? In Denmark, the bank pays you to take out a mortgage:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-upside-down-world-of-negative-interest-rates-1460643111
In other happy news, in addition to paying me less in interest than I could find under my sofa cushions, my bank has announced that it will stop waiving fees on everything ranging from safe deposit boxes to overdraft protection. Good times!
Ally pays 1%, no fees.
$700,000 @ 0% = $1,944/month.
Sweet.
So, what’s the consensus? Residential RE to tank nationwide by the end of 2016? Seems like the high end everywhere is already starting to slide quite a bit.
No way they are fully occupied. Just don’t check the Water/Electricity usage. LOL
America is so knee deep in fraud I doubt anyone even bothers getting their head out of a$$e$.
Is trump bad for the ponzi scheme?
He is not generous with his own money. There were only about five elected congressmen and presidents in the last 100 years who were not generous with OPM. One of those congressmen was Ron Paul.
What indications and philosophic principles does Drump have to make anyone think he will not be generous with other people’s money? Does he have a record of promoting Austrian economics?
People who follow Drump are blind.
Nobody follows Trump. Even his kids think he’s an obnoxious moron.
He’s what Ron Paul has never been able to achieve. Which is, he has the potential to shock the corrupt statists to its core…he’s in lack a better term a total rejection of reps and dems politics as usual.
Are there any downside to Trump? Sure just like any other president, my gut feeling is he will be co-opted and will be agent for the MIC, WS and business as usual. But WTF you have to lose if the choice is betn Hillary and Him?
ahead in OH
got whitey?
needs Pa ,which is 80% white
deplorables
A vote for Trump is throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of the oligarcy’s captured political elites.
Jeb Bush alone cost his oligarch donors $200 million, and the low-energy loser went down in flames. Ditto for Goldman Sach stooge Ted Cruz and Little Marco Rubio. Good riddance to all of them. Seeing Trump trounce those Wall Street water carriers and Establishment biatches made my day and threw a scare into the Establishment. While my political philosophy is mostly libertarian, no libertarian candidate has ever had remotely the same impact that Trump has had on upsetting the status quo.
The problem is that Trump will either become part of the oligarchy or ousted in one way or another.
If he wins, it will be oligarchy Trump the moment the inauguration ceremony ends.
And I would just like to say, for the record, what a walking piece of crap Mr. High Treason Yellowcake Fraud, Colon-blow Powell is.
‘Ford Motor Co Chief Executive Mark Fields said on Wednesday that all of the company’s small-car production would be leaving U.S. plants and heading to lower-cost Mexico.’
Yep. I believe every F150 is made in El Mexico….
The plant by my former home in VA was closed around 2005, I had a few friends who had to relocate or their parents found different jobs. My coworker had a 1999 F150 built in that Norfolk, VA plant. Sucha joke that Toyotas and Hondas are now built and designed here in the USA and yet people still insist on buying “American” products from GM and Ford.
Many GM and Ford dealerships now fly an obnoxiously large American flag out front, just like Wall Street draped itself in the flag after September 11.
Oh man, those 25′ tall flags or w/e are insane. The local VW dealer ironically has one. It looks like a billboard waving in the sky.
“…Wall Street draped itself in the flag after September 11.”
+1 Don’t forget the airlines… phuc’d their retired pilots, but lined up for a bail-out.
95% of ‘Muricans bent over for crony capitalism, so own this if you are an Obama Zombie, McCain Mutant, or Romney Retard.
I had friends that worked at the Norfolk Ford assembly plant as well. Quite a blow when it was closed down.
Ford: Found On the Road, Dead. Fix Or Repair Daily. A true “global” company, with its commie “Ford Foundation”.
Hey, Colon-blow, was it worth it, getting the Middle East blown to bits, not to mention all the service people dead and maimed? You must be so proud, you treasonous piece of crap. Trump is a national disgrace? Look in the mirror, you foul turd.
Powell was a pawn of the power elite, just like the rest of them. You think he was happy about being made to look like an idiot for going to the UN with photoshopped pictures of supposed WMD?
I think him and Condeeleza were unfortunate victims to the powers that be. Rice seemed like a highly intelligent woman in the wrong administration.
I think him and Condeeleza were unfortunate victims to the powers
No they were all WILLING participants.
No mercy..kill them all!
Oh, and yes, I absolutely think he was happy about going to the UN. He did it with great alacrity. I’ll never forget that yellow-cake speech, with his shifting around while he licked his lips.
How is it any of your business where I go to find a better return on my savings/capital?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E96lAHygeIU - 190k -
Power the old rotting sack of pus into the black hearse.
Agreed.
Ughhh I’m so tired of equity cash out boomers telling me real estate is a solid investment. I keep trying to say its not an investment its a place to live and data backs that up. The scorch the Earth gen just will never get it unless the market implodes.
They’ll be cutting their pills in half and eating cat food before you know it.
But still asking me how to setup their SMART TV. Which btw has been a good revenue stream for me. I decided why not go into business charging tech illiterate boomers to setup their tech and teach them? They can curse me after $50 fees…
You’ll be out of business just like that, once the EMP hits. And begging us to teach you how to forage for roots and berries.
Pull yourself up out of the gutter and cheer up my friend…. and remember….Nothing accelerates the economy, creates jobs and raises your standard of living like falling prices to dramatically lower and more affordable levels. Nothing.
Lol. Boomers know just as much about foraging as Bear Grylls. Puhhhhleeezeeee. If we all had to survive/hunt/forage, physically boomers wouldn’t stand a chance competing against me.
Youth is wasted on the young.
” boomers wouldn’t stand a chance competing against me.”
You probably have a nifty APP for that.
Not all of us boomers buy into this “scorch the earth” policy. I’m as sick about what is going on in this world as you are, and many of my boomer friends feel the same way I do (otherwise, they wouldn’t be my friends). Also, btw, I could outdo any of you millennials when it comes to tech. I don’t need to pay anyone to set up a thing for me. Your generation needs to get over itself.
…all the while their brand new fifth wheels and pusher diesels are towed away by the repo man and sold for scrap…
I call dibs on the lakehouse condo for 90% discount.
Even then, are the losses to depreciation alone worth it?
@Crushin no, no I suppose not, especially once you factor in HOA fees for the $5/hr landscapers.
Just factor the reality of $6k/yr depreciation, $5k taxes, $5k insurance.
Sounds like a money losing venture. Houses always are.
Yeah, it’s all tear down crap. The taxes are crushing anyways. There’s no value there.
The upshot is you might be able to score a sweet deal on a super slide RV and the roads and national forest campgrounds will no longer be as congested!
Can someone explain to me how a cartoon frog with a Mexican name is popular with white supremacists?
Hillary Clinton explains it all for you here:
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/feed/donald-trump-pepe-the-frog-and-white-supremacists-an-explainer/
Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.
lol@lola
I was listening to the radio this morning about Pepe the Frog. It is an overused meme appropriated by all kinds of groups. It needs to go away.
“I was listening to the radio this morning about Pepe the Frog.”
There’s your trouble, right there.
Another manifestation, not that more were needed, of our national descent into IDIOCRACY.
‘Pulling out home equity seems to have legs and is here to stay.’”
- definition of insanity.
Is it insane when you can use magical appreciation values to buy that 3rd condo you’ve been itching to buy and visit 10 weeks out of the year? Lol.
“‘As more of these homeowners see the light of day with values rising, we’ll see more of this remodeling trend,’ Johnston said. ‘Pulling out home equity seems to have legs and is here to stay.’”
MOAR GRANITE!!!
I think this new bubble will out live the last one by another year or so. I just don’t sense the cratering like I did in late ‘05 and early ‘06, YET.
But brah, what about a smart fridge upgrade and dual ovens? Gotta cook those Tyson chicken nuggets somewhere.
Gotta love those smart fridges with the embedded flatscreen! One fritz on the mother board and that thing is a $900 liability paperweight!
Pulling money out of a HELOC does not translate into home repairs or modifications.
And if it were thrown at the house it would be more good money thrown after bad.
“Improvements” are a 100% loss.
Very true, last time around several (well paid) coworkers did serial cashout refi’s then used the money to live beyond their means, buy very expensive toys, gamble, etc. and maybe put a small amount into home improvement….then when the bubble popped a few pulled a strategic default.
I’m expecting that this will be a major problem here in California when Bubble 2.0 inevitably pops…most saw someone pull this stunt and get away with it last time
Per latest guccifer hack dump, dems used subprime mortgages in red states to try and turn them blue. Wonder if there was special treatment in courts for the foreclosed in those red states to keep the people in those homes longer?
Funny how the Guccifer hacks are spilling the dirt on the DNC and circumventing the lapdog media’s blackout of the Democrats’ massive corruption, sleaze, and payola.
What magically changed for people who were foreclosed on 6 or 7 years ago who just now built a new home and are off on a week long vacation in Hawaii???
DEBT. FUELED. BINGE.
No way!
We were told over and over again that lending standards are (cough..cough) stringent these days. Difference without a distinction. People will believe any horse $hit.
90% of mortgages since 2008 are to subprime borrowers.
Where do the native born white kids work these days?
Did some travelling this summer in the land of sheeps and home of whales. Almost every place I used to see pimply face white kids working as back as 10 yrs ago are now occupied by blacks/latinos/asians/eastern europeans.
Are the whites too good for menial work? Don’t they have to eat? Are they flipping houses? What the F are they doing?
This is not a racialist comment…just an observation.
Are the whites too good for menial work? Don’t they have to eat? Are they flipping houses? What the F are they doing?
What ever is going on is probably the fault of the parents.
Irrelevant.
Sitting at home? I know in Virginia Beach at the oceanfront the owners prefer immigrants. They live like 14 to a 1 bedroom apartment. I’m sure they don’t complain when asked to work a few extra hours off the clock or break some OSHA / food safety rules.
Trust me. I know VA Beach and there aren’t any 14 people in a one bedroom apartment.
Try again.
Same for Busch Gardens in Williamsburg. Perfect illusion. Its European themed, so when youre in “Germany” you get served $15 Brats by “Johannes” and they probably pay them $9/hr for the 3-4 months of tourist season.
“I used to see pimply face white kids working as back as 10 yrs ago”
AMERICA ALONE: The End of the World As We Know It Paperback – April 7, 2008
The future and birth rates , in other words white people don’t have many kids so you’re not going to see them.
Southlake, TX Housing Prices Crater 6% yoy
http://www.zillow.com/southlake-tx/home-values/
What If Urban Sprawl Is the Only Realistic Way to Create Affordable Cities?
“Building sprawling suburbs is better at making cities affordable than building tall towers, according to research released Wednesday.
Environmentalists, urban planners and economists are pushing cities such as New York and San Francisco to build more housing to help combat rapidly rising rents and home prices that are crowding out the middle class. But trying to build upward in order to keep cities accessible to average families may be a losing battle, according to findings to be released Wednesday by BuildZoom, a website for contractors.
To be sure, there are many reasons to continue building up even if it is unlikely to offer a solution to rising housing costs. For cities like San Francisco that are bounded by hills and waters, there may be little other choice. For those like Atlanta and Houston that have sprawled for decades, commute times and pollution offer incentives to curb outward growth. The cost of driving long distances also partly offsets the benefits of cheaper housing from sprawl.
The findings ultimately seem to offer two unappealing scenarios: a future in which cities continue to eat into the neighboring countryside and commute times and pollution rises, or one in which home prices in some cities will become out of reach for more people.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/09/14/what-if-urban-sprawl-is-the-only-realistic-way-to-create-affordable-cities/
Live where you wish. I’d rather live in an urban neighborhood (not downtown) with walkable amenities that was built as part of the original city grid of radial streetcar lines 100 years ago.
I went to a relatively new retail development this morning, River Point at Sheridan, and almost got lost trying to navigate all the traffic circles and barriers between parking lots just to get from Chik-Fil-A to Target.
Related article, What’s Wrong With America’s Dream of City Living:
“In more recent years, an emerging preference for city living—along with concerns about the environmental sustainability of growing urban footprints—has boosted demand for housing near urban cores. But there’s not enough to go around, and the demand drives up costs and forces many workers to choose between long commutes and less-appealing jobs in cheaper markets. The lack of affordable housing in the strongest local economies has led economists to complain that housing costs are robbing the U.S. economy of billions in lost productivity.
There’s a logical solution to this problem, which is to build more housing close to city centers—erecting small apartment buildings on land now reserved for single-family houses, and building larger apartment buildings close to downtowns. But if building denser housing stock is such a no-brainer, why aren’t the biggest cities doing it?”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-14/the-american-dream-of-city-living-is-built-on-a-prayer
I helped a friend on a job site last week. The GC bought this tiny house on a single lot, built a duplex of 3BR units facing the street next to it (each with a 2 car garage behind) and another 2BR house on the lot directly behind the original house. Not much yard for kids, dogs, garden, etc, but one of the most compactly filled lots I’ve ever seen. This about 3 miles due south of downtown Denver.
This is the whole exurb thing that reared it’s ugly head in the first housing bubble. I think it started with a David Brooks article in the NYT in 2004. (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/09/opinion/take-a-ride-to-exurbia.html)
Nothing but “drive till you qualify,” though urban planners never saw it like that. Downtown lifestyles for everyone! Urban sprawl! When actually, it’s not that top cities are expanding by choice, it’s that opportunities in smaller cities and towns are shrinking and have been for many years. Instead of many smaller centers of employment and community, we now have rings of poverty circling mega-cities just like the second and third world.
The mega-apartment blocks in places like Livermore may not be slums (yet) like the ring around Mexico City, but the density looks about the same. That kind of density existing 2+ hours in traffic outside of the city center is the definition of disfunction.
“Planet of Slums” by Mike Davis is a great book on the subject, if a bit out of date by now. Still, there’s a table in the first chapter of mega-city growth from 1950 to 2004. In 50 years, Mexico City’s population exploded 10-fold from 2.9 million to 22.1 million, and 5 to 10-fold is about the average for mega-cities across the developing world.
Odd how the explosion of a small number of huge cities ringed with increasing poverty perfectly parallels the rise of globalism and the divorce between local production and local consumption.
It’s also hard to build vertical in SF when all the usable land is land fills. That Millennium Tower luxury condo has sunk some 14″, and the building designers had planned for max sink rate of 16″ for the LIFE of the building.
You are correct about the suburban sprawl/retail spaces. Its so lame, up here in Mass the “outdoor mall” concept is spreading around so all the towns are getting the same “upscale” shopping plazas were it all surrounds a central parking section and is filled with slightly higher level clothing stores and food.
LOL…right on time, the Washington Post, Marketwatch, and MSM are reporting on the quickest median wage gains since before the recession!
Middle Class America Booming>
So middle class wages ’surged’ 5.2% in 2014-2015. Didn’t Obamacare recently jack up premiums anywhere from 25-35% YMMV by state? Didn’t rent rise 3-5% YoY in most metro areas?
Wall Street Journal subscriber paywall article reports cost for an employee family health insurance plan just topped $18,000 a year, even with the increasing trend toward high deductible plans.
“The average deductible, the amount workers pay for health care before insurance kicks in, jumped 13 percent to $1,221 this year for individual plans, according to a report published Wednesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust. About 50 percent of employees are in plans that have deductibles of at least $1,000 for individual coverage, up from 45 percent in 2015.
Rising deductibles have entered the spotlight recently because they push more of the costs and responsibilities of getting treatment onto consumers. Mylan NV’s prices for EpiPen allergy shots gained public attention as mounting deductibles forced increasing numbers of patients to pay the device’s full cost, more than $600 for a pair.
“Deductibles are difficult for people because the full cost can sometimes be hard to pay,” said Gary Claxton, who oversees the Kaiser survey. “It can be a lot of money when you have things that you need or your kids need.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-14/workers-up-front-health-costs-keep-rising-kaiser-study-says
retired fed workers can have kids from multiple marriages covered past age 27 !
What about coverage for kids of the kids?
Or what about coverage for kids of the kids kids?
How’s that hope n’ change working out for you, ‘Murica?
Yesterday, The Crushin’ Russian posted statistics indicating that many other things have been getting a lot cheaper.
Irrelevant
Now you’re calling your irrelevant buddy irrelevant.
wages almost as high as 2006
if you skip the inflation discounting
=10 years lost
They don’t ignore inflation.
This article reads mostly like a puff piece but reluctantly includes debt as a factor behind its reasoning.
Why More Women Than Ever Are Putting Off Retirement:
“Older Americans are nearing retirement with increasingly concerning levels of debt,” wrote Annamaria Lusardi of George Washington University and Olivia Mitchell of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in a forthcoming paper. Older women today, they found, are more indebted and “financially fragile” than older women were in the past.
Borrowers from 50 to 80 saw debt loads rise about 60 percent from 2003 to 2015, even as younger borrowers’ debt loads fell somewhat. Two-thirds of people 65 to 74 have debt, and people 65 and older are the fastest-growing group of bankruptcy filers. And women with debt—particularly mortgage debt—are more likely to end up working at age 65, Lusardi and Mitchell found.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-14/why-more-women-than-ever-are-putting-off-retirement
More reason why grossly inflated housing prices at fixed levels and rigged housing markets are a bad idea gone haywire.
It’s probably wise to shed all debt by 50. By then, if you haven’t lived a healthy lifestyle you have to start shoveling money into the mighty medical complex.
California The Most Impoverished State In The US
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_poverty_rate
(geography adjusted)
Also has the highest emigration rate of any state.
highest illegal immigration rate.
highest drop out rate.
highest poverty rate.
highest drug addiction rate.
highest aids tranmission rate.
That’s quite a record to be proud of California.
My father left in the early 80s and never looked back. Ever.
It’s a shame because a lot of the states farm country is hard working blue collar conservative folk, but the whack jobs in SF and LA make the most noise.
These are metrics of success for the collectivist Comrades of Proven Worth (D) who are running California into the ground.
Gloom Descends on Luxury-Goods Industry:
“The warnings show that macro and geopolitical uncertainties put near-term volume growth in question,” said Zuzanna Pusz, an analyst at Berenberg. “The challenges facing the luxury industry are not over yet.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-14/richemont-hermes-slump-as-gloom-deepens-for-luxury-goods-makers
“This sucker could go down” — George W. Bush
crushing.housing.losses.
Will the real child poverty rate please stand up?
“Still, not all the news is good. There’s one number in the “report card” that always shocks. It’s the child poverty rate: the share of those younger than 18 living in households with incomes beneath the official poverty line ($24,257 for a family of four). The child poverty rate for 2015 was 19.7 percent.
This is a horrifying figure, if believable. A fifth of the nation’s children are growing up in households that, at best, are living hand-to-mouth. The poverty rate for children is the highest of all age groups. By contrast, the poverty rate for people 65 and older is only 8.8 percent. If children had the same poverty rate, only 1 in 11 would be poor, not 1 in 5.”
The article continues with a list of assorted taxpayer funded freebies and estimates “that the true child poverty rate is probably between 5 percent and 10 percent”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/will-the-real-child-poverty-rate-please-stand-up/2016/09/14/f613e4e8-7a93-11e6-bd86-b7bbd53d2b5d_story.html?utm_term=.a56ee296efa2
Cloward-Piven is real.
Another fentanyl article:
“Eleven law enforcement officers in Hartford, Conn., were taken to a hospital for possible exposure to heroin and fentanyl after the drugs’ raw powder became airborne during a major narcotics bust, police said.
Deputy Chief Brian Foley of the Hartford Police Department said that when the officers raided a residence Tuesday evening, suspects were in the process of packaging the drugs for street sales. He said the powder may have blown into the air when the tactical team entered or the suspects may have swept it from the table in a panic, but officers had to move through a “cloud of dust in the air” during the raid.
“Just touching fentanyl or accidentally inhaling the substance during enforcement activity or field testing the substance can result in absorption through the skin, and that is one of the biggest dangers with fentanyl. The onset of adverse health effects, such as disorientation, coughing, sedation, respiratory distress or cardiac arrest is very rapid and profound, usually occurring within minutes of exposure.”
The DEA issued an alert last year identifying fentanyl “as a threat to public health and safety.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/09/14/eleven-swat-officers-treated-for-exposure-to-fentanyl-and-heroin-in-drug-raid/?utm_term=.3f2d38b8efa9
Give me a break from this hype! Fentanyl is short acting and as any opioid can be reversed by a Narcan nasal spray.
“The average sale price for a house in Northeast Ohio was up 7.1 percent in August, when compared with a year before. Listing-service data released this week shows that the average sale price for a condo was 6.4 percent higher than in August 2015.
Prices softened slightly from July, according to a report from the Northern Ohio Regional Multiple Listing Service. But the annual figures show an upward trend that’s beneficial for sellers but vexing for buyers, even in region that consistently ranks among the nation’s most affordable places to purchase a home.
The average sale price for a house here was $159,491 in August, up from $148,979 a year before, based on listing-service data spanning 18 counties. Condos sold for an average of $135,808 last month. Across Northeast Ohio, homes tracked by the listing service changed hands for as little as $1,000 and as much as $2 million.”
http://realestate.cleveland.com/realestate-news/2016/09/cleveland-area_house_prices_up.html#incart_river_home
$159,491?
You could afford to raise a family and save for retirement at that price.
If people totaled up how much interest/depreciation they lost in houses, cars and crap they put on credit, I’d bet they’d really be pissed!
Some friends I grew up with live in suburban Akron in a modest but nice for its area house. Even with raising 3 kids they’ve never had to worry about money in the past decade.
You couldn’t do that in Denver on less than a $200,000 household income, median income here is less than $60,000.
Article by real journalists about real journalists:
“The American public’s trust in the media in 2016 has fallen to its lowest point since at least 1972, according to a new Gallup poll released Wednesday.
Thirty-two percent of the respondents in Gallup’s most recent national poll said that they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the mass media, an eight percentage-point drop compared to 2015. It’s the lowest point in Gallup’s polling history, which began asking respondents whether they had trust and confidence in the media in 1972.
Public trust in the media fell among respondents who identified as Democrats, Republicans and independents, but the decline in trust in the media was most pronounced among Republicans, whose confidence in the media dropped from 32 percent in 2015 to 14 percent in 2016.”
http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/09/public-confidence-in-media-falls-to-all-time-low-in-2016-228168
“Hundreds of homeless people live in Las Vegas flood channels – the city’s literal underbelly. They include full-time wage workers, panhandlers and self-described hustlers.
They say there’s no better place to be homeless than the Strip. Tourists drop money on the ground. Gamblers give winnings away, or leave slot machines loaded with credits. Sometimes people nod off at gaming machines, allowing men like Nattrour to withdraw cash vouchers on the sly.
Yet there’s an obvious dark side to trolling Las Vegas for cash – round-the-clock access to gambling, drinking and drugs.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/14/las-vegas-homeless-tunnel-dwellers-gambling-addiction
I hate to insert data into the discussion about cash-out refinances (and their growth), but this link has GREAT data:
http://www.freddiemac.com/finance/refi_archives.html
Unfortunately the data for Q2 probably won’t be out for another couple of weeks, but Q1 data is interesting if you want to compare what was happening at the first part of this year vs. the bubble.
Absent updated information that might show these numbers changing, the things that make me less concerned that we are heading back toward bubble-era lending/borrowing activity:
1. In Q1 2016, 40% of refinance loans increased the loan amount by 5% or more. Average increase in loan amount was 10% (including the 60% that were 5% or less). This was a total cash out of about $16 Billion. This compares to Q1 2006, where 86% of refi’s took out 5% or more, the average increase in the loan amount was 29%, and $81B was cash out. Q1’s metrics look a lot more like the mid to late-90’s than the bubble years.
2. Broadly, in 2015, it was estimated that $65 Billion was pulled out through refinances. The average from 2010 through 2015 was $58B per year…2002-2007 AVERAGED $250 Billion per year.
3. In Q1 2016, 41% of people who refinanced from a 30-year mortgage went into a 15 or 20-year. This compares to an average of 16% from 2005-2008, and is still higher than the 34% average from 1994-2004. People don’t seem so stretched on payments that they are trying to stretch out amortization as much as the bubble years, and seem more interested in paying down debt than having the lowest payment than before.
4. Almost no one is going from a 30-year loan to a short term ARM (about 1%), vs. about 5% during the bubble.
Q2 will be much more timely information, but unless there is a greater than doubling of cash out as compared to Q1, the refinance activity isn’t even close to the bubble years, or increasing at a rate that is all that concerning.
Warmist Warming Wednesday:
“We mostly can’t see it around us, and too few of us seem to care — but nonetheless, scientists are increasingly convinced that the world is barreling towards what has been called a “sixth mass extinction” event. Simply put, species are going extinct at a rate that far exceeds what you would expect to see naturally, as a result of a major perturbation to the system.
In this case, the perturbation is us, rather than, say, an asteroid. As such, you might expect to see some patterns to extinctions that reflect our particular way of causing ecological destruction. And indeed, a new study published Wednesday in Science magazine confirms this. For the world’s oceans, it finds, threats of extinction aren’t apportioned equally among all species — rather, the larger ones, in terms of body size and mass, are uniquely imperiled right now.
From sharks to whales, giant clams, sea turtles, and tuna, the disproportionate threat to larger marine organisms reflects the “unique human propensity to cull the largest members of a population,” the authors write.
“What to us was surprising was that we did not see a similar kind of pattern in any of the previous mass extinction events that we studied,” said geoscientist Jonathan Payne of Stanford University, the study’s lead author. “So that indicated that there really is no good ecological analogue…this pattern has not happened before in the half billion years of the animal fossil record.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/09/14/what-the-sixth-extinction-will-look-like-in-the-oceans-the-largest-species-die-off-first/?utm_term=.fab647828ad6
“These losses in the ocean are paralleling what humans did to land animals some 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, when we wiped out around half of the big-bodied mammal species on Earth, like mammoths, mastodons, saber-tooth cats and the like,” said Anthony Barnosky
I wonder what mastodon tasted like?
More US jobs headed for Mexico. Bill Clinton moved millions of American manufacturing jobs to Mexico, and Obama is preparing to redouble the shafting of US workers with TPP. And yet idiot union workers vote in lockstep for Democrats who are screwing them blind. You can’t fix stupid.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ford-to-shift-us-small-car-production-to-mexico-2016-09-14
Bummer dude. I had a 2016 Focus hatchback rental with a few thousand miles on it over extended Memorial Day weekend and we put a thousand miles on that with only 2-1/2 tanks of gas. Fun to drive in the mountains for a cheap, small car.
“More US jobs headed for Mexico.”
Thanks Obama
PS
Colin Powell should give Hillary quite a boost with his hacked emails.
Powell wrote in 2015, “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris.”
Craigslist R & R post tipping hat to the Bits Bucket:
“But I like to think of myself as being in the 1% group of the homeless population. Because I kept fighting. I never begged for nothing. I never took hand outs. I never sacrificed my principles of my Christian Faith. But I clawed my way back out of that hell.
No one would hire me. I have had more then fifty interviews in the three and a half years I was homeless. I cleaned up at McDonald’s before interviews. But I admit I was still filthy and I smelled horrible. I was so embarrassed one time a manager took me into a small office to talk because he loved my resume that I emailed him. He shut the door and went to sit at his desk. Seriously, as soon as he sat down, he stood right back up and said, lets just go back to the production area and we can talk there and look around. His eyes were watering, and I dashed to open and exit the door before he blew chunks on me. After a brief couple minutes. I never heard from him again.
People spit at me. Threw things at me as they drove by. Kicked me in the face and knocked out my two front top teeth when they came home drunk and found me sleeping in the alley between the dumpster and their house where I was trying to find shelter from the wind and snow. People called the cops on me non stop for sitting in front of their house. In the 3 and a half years I had the cops run my drivers license 4 times a week.”
https://denver.craigslist.org/rnr/5713581254.html
Ignorant, feckless Venezuelans voted for socialism because it promised them benefits someone else would have to pay for. Now they are reaping what they voted for. Watch and learn, Democrats. Watch and learn.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/09/14/interim-dnc-chair-warns-not-to-look-at-new-hack-could-have-malware/
Venezuelans take to the street to demand food. BWHAAHAHAAHA! Starve, you sheeple. You wanted socialism and collectivism; now you’ve got it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJApHJAkGG8
Odd, I don’t recall the MSM mentioning the corrupting influence of corporate payola.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/14/corporate-cash-john-doe-files-scott-walker-wisconsin
From two years ago but still relevant.
25 Reasons You Should NEVER Live In Denver:
http://blog.estately.com/2014/10/25-reasons-you-should-never-live-in-denver/
Alice Cooper — Public Animal #9:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qfUtG2JieE
Are you listening? Maybe not. That’s just how the struggle goes in this MF:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rogvlB2SP4k