I guess I should feel bad for feeling so good about what idiots all of these "smartest guys in the room" have been the last few years. I guess if i feel too bad I'll take some SRS profits and go get an ice cream or something, and that should help.
Greed is good occasionally. Chocolate ice cream is good always.
I like how Lehman is going to pay out some of the bonuses early and in 65% stock. Kind of like a going away bonus. For anyone who gets that stock, I hope they cash out early and avoid the rush.
Is there something wrong with my monitor? When I go to the McAllister Ranch website, I see green. But when I go to the Fortune article, I see deathly brown. It looks too dry for even cacti to live.
Someday, after the National Park Service buys all these ghost towns and preserves them as monuments to stupidity, I need to visit California again. Just to experience the history.
zoom out on that map and ask yourself, "got water?"
whenever i flyover that part of the country, after having flown over the east coast which is all green with lakes and rivers everywhere I can't help thinking "this won't last".
When I go to the McAllister Ranch website, I see green. But when I go to the Fortune article, I see deathly brown. It looks too dry for even cacti to live.
If you sprinkle enough water out there it gets green, but it takes a lot of water and only about two weeks to dry up and blow away. That clubhouse will stand for a long time without being usable. There are lots of derelict buildings that just don't collapse completely, almost, but not completely.
This project was on the books in the late 1980's, but the former developer went bust and it sat idle until Leh/Suncal came to the rescue...I wonder if they will meet the same fate?
crispy&cole, remember what happened to Bakersfield with the end of the S&L building boom? How many vacant or partially built steel structures stood around Bakersfield for a few years?
Now you have a nice country club in the middle of dry land - with the state having a drought. Seems like a perfect ending to the housing boom.
Best Wishes. (I added a link to the Bakersfield blog).
Just as an addendum, I'll bet that two or three sheriff's sales from now, when it comes back down below a million, some bugger buys it, scrapes it, plants a couple crops of broccoli, and makes out like a bandit.
The CV was always wonderful for vegetables and I'll bet if you remove all that club house garbage it would be good for veggies again. I only wonder if they sold off the water rights. If they did, then it's back to desert, I'm sorry to say. Without the water allotment, that land is garbage.
Nothing went wrong at Lehman. Ponzi finance always self-destructs in the end. That's a known outcome.
Lehman helped create wealth illusions via leverage and used that to transfer great amounts of wealth from those who invested in these illusions to those who created them.
Collapse was always inevitable.
What defines success or failure is how much the executives and star traders pocketed before the whole thing went bust.
Walk away with a fortune, and leave the shareholders, clients, and financial markets in ruins.
That was always the plan and the true measure of success in the finance culture we have today.
This is how they use money and resources.
And yet the economic orthodoxy says that we need to react to the collapse of these schemes by giving the same sort of people even more access to money through credit and investment so the can forumlate even bigger and better plans for profiting from social and economic destruction.
When people screw up or destroy things with the money they have and then lose it, we respond by giving them more money.
I can't think of a sufficiently derogatory word to describe the kind of thinking that formulates and promotes such a naive and demonstratably flawed policy.
Everytime the enemy starts running out of ammo we re-arm them because our policy assumes that this time they'll use it to do something good and productive.
That's how it works in the text books after all - the Utility Maximizing Automata that inhabit our fantasy world economy always do the most economically beneficial thing with the resources we give them.
In the real world we get shot in the head with the bullet we just gave them.
The problems we have cannot be solved by socially and culturally blind academics who've spent most of their life in an idealized envrionment working with idealized representations of the world we live in.
Dysart Commons LLC received a $14 million construction loan in March 2005. The loan was modified in October 2005 to $17 million, and the maturity date was reset from March 31, 2007, to Sept. 30, 2007. A balloon payment due at that time was not made by the borrowers, and attempts to renegotiate the loan were unsuccessful.
The borrowers "began fighting ... over which party controlled the premises and could negotiate with U.S. Bank," attorneys for U.S. Bank assert in court documents. "Upon information and belief, the borrowers are deadlocked and in a struggle for control over the premises and project."
Meanwhile, in OC/ SD, a small custom high-end contractor I know has now shuttered. Last 6 years, doing 4 jobs at a time. Now - from Huntington Beach to Laguna Beach to La Jolla, the wealthy clients he relied on have all pulled out of remodels, as they wait to see what happens.
When I hear people say George Bush is the worst president ever I inform them that he has been wildly successful. Possibly the most successful president ever. You just need to understand who he was working for. And if you think he did a bad job, it wasn't you.
AC for prez! Hell no son. I wouldn't wish that on you.
OT: If Trichet raises rates tomorrow he will have Itais, Greeks and Spaniards with ropes at his castle door. If B.B. has made a deal with the devil and forces others to raise rates, he's a one termer.
My guess is that the EU is on hold and gives cover for Bennie to cut again. This 'stuff' is co-ordinated.
Eventually we're going to have to reintroduce some sort of firewall between IBs and commercial banks, since repealing Glass-Steagall has worked out so wonderfully. Whatever benefits that have resulted from its repeal are far outweighed by the toxic sludge that has resulted, sludge that the taxpayers are inevitably going to pay for.
Would be a good time to speed-read through a copy of "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. Pulls together resource, population growth problems, to show how societies succeed .. or fail.
A couple of years ago, when I went to extreme West Phoenix (I think Peoria), and saw that god-awful energy-sucking sports stadium built in the middle of 'Taco Moderne' crapboxes, I though... "My god, they've built Teotihuacan!"
Re: The problems we have cannot be solved by socially and culturally blind academics who've spent most of their life in an idealized envrionment working with idealized representations of the world we live in.
The world of nepotism feeds of this cancer and then supplies more fuel in a never ending cycle of destruction!
you sound seriously pissed. As the mad newsman said, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."
OT: I'm pondering the R2K charts, spec 5 and 10 year versions. Given teh mess that we're in and that ADP shows job losses starting to hit small companies + probable financing drought, how lucky do I feel?
Sold off SKF for a nice profit and have done okay in RWM. Suck it up and go for TWM? Could be a hell of a ride.
crispy&cole writes: I wonder how long the half complete clubhouse will last.
Oh, you know how it is out in these deserts...with no water to warp joints or rot wallboard it'll stand for years and years, fading and cracking. Might get used for target practice. Kinda like the marina at Salton City (Google an aerial view of that town if you wanna know what stupid looks like 60 years later.)
I agree with a lot of what ac said, but in truth more than a few academics saw this disaster coming. The problem is academics don't get a seat on the Fed board or a regular spot on CNBC/ Fox Business/ Newshour or whatever if you aren't sufficiently "mainstream" -- as deemed by the bigwigs who decide such things.
A dear friend of mine owns a small organ building/tuning company with a lot of church contracts. He's started with squat and has built it nicely...his kids are like my own and one lives as much here as her own place.
I do feel ghoulish, but business is business - and as Dr Seuss said, "...business must grow!"
I think we have to look at the culture we fuel, in the form of rags like Fortune, which pump stories up and down and then sit back to profit from information brokers -- who fuel bubbles and then fuel crashes. Society goes along for the ride and now, with the subprime meltdown, nothing changes and no one is accountable, including Forbes, Fortune, Newsweek, Time, etc... this is all just a shock to everyone that after eight years of pumping horse shit, the bubble can't be pumped higher, so now we better talk about all the reasons we got here and then go to a search engine to find examples of what we knew 80+ years ago, i.e, as AC just said, "Ponzi finance always self-destructs in the end.".
And re prisons, I wonder how much $$ municipalities could rake in by giving away the naming rights. Think of the possibilities, e.g. the "Masterlock High Security Penitentiary."
If you get just of the beach (just far enough away that you loose the sea breeze) in South Carolina and start excavating for a large construction project, it will start to look like that. In fact in South Carolina it is more of a Sahara Desert-Beau Jest look with sand dunes and construction workers filling in for the French Foreign Legion by wearing skirting at the back of their hard hats to keep the sun off their necks.
Ac-Good stuff..That would be a craigslist favorite! CR it would be a cool feature if you had some kind of recommend feature that would allow visitors to nominate and the be able to view the favorites fast..Similar to this
Not too long ago these projects were all the rage on Ponzi Street. Reality is finally setting in.
But this stuff is in our back yard and it took years for the masses to see it. I find it impossible to believe the investment banks restrained themselves by keeping this within the boarders of the US. No, no, this is a model that was spread to all corners of the earth.
How long will it take before we start to recognize Bakersfields in the UK, Spain, Vietnam, Brazil, ...? And what will those write-downs look like?
I partially feel sorry for the rank and file at Lehman. They are getting shafted with nearly worthless stock options instead of cash bonuses that they can use. On the other hand, they should have seen this coming and jumped ship earlier.
If they can't afford regular bonuses, then they should just say so, instead of telling their staff, "Let them eat stock."
If you want to have real fun - do a Google Earth on it. They have street views right in front of the entrance - can even read the sign - can't seem to make a link for you but if you go to 15082 Panama Ln, Bakersfield, CA - VERY IMPRESSIVE... you can do a full 360 street view and wish you were home. Not.
The aerial view is extremely depressing - a bunch of moved dirt but almost no development.
Sounds like that came right out of the pages of Other People's Money by Nomi Prines. You ever read that book you would never buy another stock or financial product touted by Wall Street with support from DC. Take down Goldman Suks and the den of thieves would fall.
"Now Lehman finds itself stuck with all sorts of hard-to-sell assets and securities worth far less than what it has invested in them. For example, last October - with the credit crunch and real estate meltdown well underway - Lehman (in partnership with the Tishman Speyer real estate firm) paid $22.2 billion to do a leveraged buyout of Archstone, a big apartment developer"
You have inherited a mess. Your predecessor, fixated on emulating a former Republican icon from a far different economic era, chose to emphasize tax cuts for the rich and excessive consumption for all Americans.....
barely writes:
Asia's bucking the trend. What gives?
A breath of fresh air that says all is well. But, reality looms as oil prices make a) domestic production more expensive; b) shipping costs more expensive; c) lower demand for goods in NA and Europe.
Higher food and oil prices will soon come to roost in the emerging markets and sharp reallignments will happen. The huge trucker protest in Bangalor yesterday took many by surprize. More to come no doubt.
The Cdn market took it on the chin today as commodities took a dose of reality.
So, how can you place 30B with UK hedgies rumoured to be backed by russians...buy US assets!
y wealthy neighbors and I in Newport Beach should just look at it this way: weve had an eight-year lease extension on the high life. Now its time to give something back and I suspect we wont be working any less hard. That ol Laffer Curve has a certain logic to it, but it only makes sense at the upper margin. People did work less at confiscatory tax rates imposed pre-Thatcher/Reagan but once they got down to 50 percent or lower, it was all gravy promoting conspicuous consumption as opposed to higher productivity and overtime at the office. Gosh, now we dont even want those oversized trophy houses! The New York Times reports that the high-profile crowd now favors small ecologically certified LEED houses Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. My, what green eyes we have, Grandma!
Read "Collapse" and Diamond's others. I loved the part about the Easter Island heads. Archaeologists argued for years as to how they could have moved and erected huge stone statues without a single metal tool. "Visit from space, Europeans got there before Captain Cook, etc."
90 years later they thought maybe we should ask the locals (still eking it out even though their ancestors had cut down every tree). The locals promptly showed them, a little indignant as to why they had not been asked before. Who will be left standing to show future archeologists how to create a CDO cubed?
Billionaire Bill Gross, who manages bond outfit Pacific Investment Management Company said Tuesday that long and medium term U.S. Treasury yields have "bottomed" and that reflation will come with negative interest rates and the recent liquidity actions undertaken by the Fed. Gross also said he expects U.S. home prices to fall 10.0% by January 2009
Essentially, if I am reading McCulley correctly, he is arguing that because of an unusual "trade shock" from rapidly escalating energy costs, the Fed must employ negative real interest rates to avoid a "modern-day depression". I will continue to espouse the view that today's ridiculously low interest rates are part of the problem rather than the solution.
McCulley and others prefer to "monetize" the current oil price "shock" through ongoing artificially low interest rates, arguing that recent price effects are a temporary phenomenon. This short-term jump in inflation is said to be, in the words of Mr McCulley, "good inflation".
You born and bred American dopes are all the same.
You're programmed to reject the wisdom I offer because anything that might wake you up out of your stupor is a threat to your masters on Wall Street and Capitol Hill.
Keep telling yourself everything is just fine in your feeble American minds. Nothing can save America from the Greatest Depression that's coming after more than two years of unrestrained Bernankepanky.
Plus you Americans are weak. Not only have your minds atrophied but American men lack the physique to wear clothing that emphasizes (rather than hides) their masculine features. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than the inferiority complex of those who laugh at my skin tight attire and my exposed chest and arms. Apparently my rippling thighs and heaving chest make them feel better about their own flaccid hanging flesh. Sometimes I press my hefty sculted thighs into the flank or buttocks of an adversary that's making an especially absurd or tiresome argument.
This usually sends them into hysterics bringing about the end of the useless dialog.
One day I promise I will have an American for a pet. But I'm wating for them to get a bit smarter so I can teach them a few tricks like fetch and get them to sit on command.
I wanted to thank CR and Tanta for posting our article. This site is a daily must-read for me and I have learned much from both of your analyses--Tanta's uber-nerd is briliant--to say nothing of the wisdom in the comments.
I don't understand the lunacy of this project. All of my friends working in the "industry" in LA would never consider living beyond the Tejon Pass. There was never a market for this place among working people. Was the idea wealthy retirees? In Bakersfield?! Only New Yorkers could think that way.
There was a community like this in Austin, TX in 1985 after a big land bust...exactly one house, an iron skeleton for a clubhouse, and a single-wide for the pro shop. I actually loved the course, and the lumpen-proletariat could play on it for a few years. Now? completely built out, lovely clubhouse, and i can't play anymore.
Another example of Wall Street's lack of hands on real estate understanding.
There will be more.
I guess I should feel bad for feeling so good about what idiots all of these "smartest guys in the room" have been the last few years. I guess if i feel too bad I'll take some SRS profits and go get an ice cream or something, and that should help.
Greed is good occasionally. Chocolate ice cream is good always.
I feel thirsty just looking at the pics.
Can someone help me with the order of these events?
Peak Oil
Peak Coffee
Peak Water
I like how Lehman is going to pay out some of the bonuses early and in 65% stock. Kind of like a going away bonus. For anyone who gets that stock, I hope they cash out early and avoid the rush.
They can always use it as a backlot for shooting chinese westerns. Italians have got about as much money as we do.
Re: "McAllister is three-square miles of fenced-off, almost lunar landscape "
That is a big fence, and it must look really nice!
Bakersfield is a shithole end of story.
The central bank has set the yuan central parity rate at record 6.8529 to the dollar, according to the China Foreign Exchange Trading System.
Business finance news - currency market news - online UK currency markets - financial news - Interactive Investor
Bucky getting buggered
Is there something wrong with my monitor? When I go to the McAllister Ranch website, I see green. But when I go to the Fortune article, I see deathly brown. It looks too dry for even cacti to live.
MOT,
"I like how Lehman is going to pay out some of the bonuses early and in 65% stock."
If they hold it for a week or two and actually have certificates, they can use it as toilet paper. Be cheaper
Cheers,
I wonder how long the half complete clubhouse will last.
Crispy - nice website and origin of name. Now I know. Good work.
In case anyone wants an aerial view, here is a google maps view of the site. No idea how current, but it matches the story well.
crispy,
"I wonder how long the half complete clubhouse will last."
July heat wave? August heat wave? Lehman special agent setting fire to it next week?
We don't know Caped Crusader. Tune in same Bat Time, same Bat Channel.
Cheers,
Aren't the living dead called zombies? Is it likely the skin and muscles are already falling off the Lehman zombie body, even before being interred?
Is there any investment bank or brokerage that hasn't taken the zombie potion? (What about Chas. Schwab - is it safe?)
Where's Tanya?
Someday, after the National Park Service buys all these ghost towns and preserves them as monuments to stupidity, I need to visit California again. Just to experience the history.
zoom out on that map and ask yourself, "got water?"
whenever i flyover that part of the country, after having flown over the east coast which is all green with lakes and rivers everywhere I can't help thinking "this won't last".
A few stories on Lehmans "partner" Suncal(Irvine Company):
Bakersfield Bubble: Search results for Suncal
When I go to the McAllister Ranch website, I see green. But when I go to the Fortune article, I see deathly brown. It looks too dry for even cacti to live.
If you sprinkle enough water out there it gets green, but it takes a lot of water and only about two weeks to dry up and blow away. That clubhouse will stand for a long time without being usable. There are lots of derelict buildings that just don't collapse completely, almost, but not completely.
*not The Irvine Company, but a company in Irvine.
This project was on the books in the late 1980's, but the former developer went bust and it sat idle until Leh/Suncal came to the rescue...I wonder if they will meet the same fate?
I think they never saw peak oil comming... they've missed The End of Suburbia. They were so busy underwriting mortgage securities...
stdfs,
"derelict buildings that just don't collapse completely, almost, but not completely."
Harlem Building Collapse Prompts Metro-North Service Suspension Service Restored to Grand Central, Expect Delays - Gothamist
There ya go.
Cheers,
crispy&cole, remember what happened to Bakersfield with the end of the S&L building boom? How many vacant or partially built steel structures stood around Bakersfield for a few years?
Now you have a nice country club in the middle of dry land - with the state having a drought. Seems like a perfect ending to the housing boom.
Best Wishes. (I added a link to the Bakersfield blog).
La times firing 250:
Expired
There is nothing there. And people are going to pay $6/gallon to drive anywhere from there? Bye, Bye Lehman!!
Thanks CR
About the S&L bust several locals picked up the pieces for pennies on the dollar. 3 I know, are muli-millionaires now (10-50 mil NW)
It was luck, however, because these 3 were after several guys caught the falling knife
That will be the key this time around, have the patience of Job and you can do very well, or jump the gun and you will be part of the dead pool...
This is a little late, from an earlier thread, but still worth thinking about:
Why Invest in a Strip Mall if You Can Own a Prison?
- NY Times
Just as an addendum, I'll bet that two or three sheriff's sales from now, when it comes back down below a million, some bugger buys it, scrapes it, plants a couple crops of broccoli, and makes out like a bandit.
The CV was always wonderful for vegetables and I'll bet if you remove all that club house garbage it would be good for veggies again. I only wonder if they sold off the water rights. If they did, then it's back to desert, I'm sorry to say. Without the water allotment, that land is garbage.
Short tip,
Don't set Google search preferences to Elmer Fudd as a language!
Nothing went wrong at Lehman. Ponzi finance always self-destructs in the end. That's a known outcome.
Lehman helped create wealth illusions via leverage and used that to transfer great amounts of wealth from those who invested in these illusions to those who created them.
Collapse was always inevitable.
What defines success or failure is how much the executives and star traders pocketed before the whole thing went bust.
Walk away with a fortune, and leave the shareholders, clients, and financial markets in ruins.
That was always the plan and the true measure of success in the finance culture we have today.
This is how they use money and resources.
And yet the economic orthodoxy says that we need to react to the collapse of these schemes by giving the same sort of people even more access to money through credit and investment so the can forumlate even bigger and better plans for profiting from social and economic destruction.
When people screw up or destroy things with the money they have and then lose it, we respond by giving them more money.
I can't think of a sufficiently derogatory word to describe the kind of thinking that formulates and promotes such a naive and demonstratably flawed policy.
Everytime the enemy starts running out of ammo we re-arm them because our policy assumes that this time they'll use it to do something good and productive.
That's how it works in the text books after all - the Utility Maximizing Automata that inhabit our fantasy world economy always do the most economically beneficial thing with the resources we give them.
In the real world we get shot in the head with the bullet we just gave them.
The problems we have cannot be solved by socially and culturally blind academics who've spent most of their life in an idealized envrionment working with idealized representations of the world we live in.
This isn't economics.
This is war.
W. Valley strip mall to be sold for $17M in foreclosure
W. Valley strip mall to be sold for $17M in foreclosure - Phoenix Business Journal:
Dysart Commons LLC received a $14 million construction loan in March 2005. The loan was modified in October 2005 to $17 million, and the maturity date was reset from March 31, 2007, to Sept. 30, 2007. A balloon payment due at that time was not made by the borrowers, and attempts to renegotiate the loan were unsuccessful.
The borrowers "began fighting ... over which party controlled the premises and could negotiate with U.S. Bank," attorneys for U.S. Bank assert in court documents. "Upon information and belief, the borrowers are deadlocked and in a struggle for control over the premises and project."
what ac said.
ac sounds like he's channeling Jas.
Meanwhile, in OC/ SD, a small custom high-end contractor I know has now shuttered. Last 6 years, doing 4 jobs at a time. Now - from Huntington Beach to Laguna Beach to La Jolla, the wealthy clients he relied on have all pulled out of remodels, as they wait to see what happens.
ac,
Well said..
What else can I say.
Cheers,
Damn, ac. You should be a speech-writer. If you're not already.
Nice work AC
"This isn't economics. This is war."
When I hear people say George Bush is the worst president ever I inform them that he has been wildly successful. Possibly the most successful president ever. You just need to understand who he was working for. And if you think he did a bad job, it wasn't you.
AC for prez! Hell no son. I wouldn't wish that on you.
OT: If Trichet raises rates tomorrow he will have Itais, Greeks and Spaniards with ropes at his castle door. If B.B. has made a deal with the devil and forces others to raise rates, he's a one termer.
My guess is that the EU is on hold and gives cover for Bennie to cut again. This 'stuff' is co-ordinated.
God help us. It will be a bloody mess.
Eventually we're going to have to reintroduce some sort of firewall between IBs and commercial banks, since repealing Glass-Steagall has worked out so wonderfully. Whatever benefits that have resulted from its repeal are far outweighed by the toxic sludge that has resulted, sludge that the taxpayers are inevitably going to pay for.
Would be a good time to speed-read through a copy of "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. Pulls together resource, population growth problems, to show how societies succeed .. or fail.
A couple of years ago, when I went to extreme West Phoenix (I think Peoria), and saw that god-awful energy-sucking sports stadium built in the middle of 'Taco Moderne' crapboxes, I though... "My god, they've built Teotihuacan!"
Teotihuacan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lots to ponder in Diamond's book. A great read. I think Conjure Bag would enjoy it, too.
ac,
Bravo, 5 stars!!
Re: The problems we have cannot be solved by socially and culturally blind academics who've spent most of their life in an idealized envrionment working with idealized representations of the world we live in.
ac:
you sound seriously pissed. As the mad newsman said, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."
OT: I'm pondering the R2K charts, spec 5 and 10 year versions. Given teh mess that we're in and that ADP shows job losses starting to hit small companies + probable financing drought, how lucky do I feel?
Sold off SKF for a nice profit and have done okay in RWM. Suck it up and go for TWM? Could be a hell of a ride.
Hmmm...
crispy&cole writes: I wonder how long the half complete clubhouse will last.
Oh, you know how it is out in these deserts...with no water to warp joints or rot wallboard it'll stand for years and years, fading and cracking. Might get used for target practice. Kinda like the marina at Salton City (Google an aerial view of that town if you wanna know what stupid looks like 60 years later.)
I agree with a lot of what ac said, but in truth more than a few academics saw this disaster coming. The problem is academics don't get a seat on the Fed board or a regular spot on CNBC/ Fox Business/ Newshour or whatever if you aren't sufficiently "mainstream" -- as deemed by the bigwigs who decide such things.
McAllister Ranch? I remember it well.
The Saga of McAllister Ranch.
Reminds me of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald:
Who is gonna record it?
I don't think Gordon is still in the studio.
A dear friend of mine owns a small organ building/tuning company with a lot of church contracts. He's started with squat and has built it nicely...his kids are like my own and one lives as much here as her own place.
I do feel ghoulish, but business is business - and as Dr Seuss said, "...business must grow!"
At least I'm not dealing in margin.
I love the smell of napalm in the morning Asian markets
. And August Crude at 143.57.
I think we have to look at the culture we fuel, in the form of rags like Fortune, which pump stories up and down and then sit back to profit from information brokers -- who fuel bubbles and then fuel crashes. Society goes along for the ride and now, with the subprime meltdown, nothing changes and no one is accountable, including Forbes, Fortune, Newsweek, Time, etc... this is all just a shock to everyone that after eight years of pumping horse shit, the bubble can't be pumped higher, so now we better talk about all the reasons we got here and then go to a search engine to find examples of what we knew 80+ years ago, i.e, as AC just said, "Ponzi finance always self-destructs in the end.".
Krugman and Roubini both saw most of this coming from a mile away, but:
Paul Krugman is so damn sanctimonious and partisan that everyone but the Hillary supporters hates him.
Roubini has the demeanor of a mortician. I can't imagine him being happy about anything.
"if you aren't"
if they aren't
And re prisons, I wonder how much $$ municipalities could rake in by giving away the naming rights. Think of the possibilities, e.g. the "Masterlock High Security Penitentiary."
If you get just of the beach (just far enough away that you loose the sea breeze) in South Carolina and start excavating for a large construction project, it will start to look like that. In fact in South Carolina it is more of a Sahara Desert-Beau Jest look with sand dunes and construction workers filling in for the French Foreign Legion by wearing skirting at the back of their hard hats to keep the sun off their necks.
"God help us. It will be a bloody mess."
Ain't no God, your on your own.
Mess: Yes for most.
Blood: No, Americans should swarm the castle and drag the bastards on Wall Street and DC out in the streets and hang them all. Ain't gonna happen.
Google Earth, street view, has pictures of the Ranch at an early stage of development.
Misean,
Yah getting that thunder?
Asia's bucking the trend. What gives?
Ac-Good stuff..That would be a craigslist favorite! CR it would be a cool feature if you had some kind of recommend feature that would allow visitors to nominate and the be able to view the favorites fast..Similar to this
best-of-craigslist
Some damn funny stuff-take a look at 2nd and 4th on first page..
Not too long ago these projects were all the rage on Ponzi Street. Reality is finally setting in.
But this stuff is in our back yard and it took years for the masses to see it. I find it impossible to believe the investment banks restrained themselves by keeping this within the boarders of the US. No, no, this is a model that was spread to all corners of the earth.
How long will it take before we start to recognize Bakersfields in the UK, Spain, Vietnam, Brazil, ...? And what will those write-downs look like?
I partially feel sorry for the rank and file at Lehman. They are getting shafted with nearly worthless stock options instead of cash bonuses that they can use. On the other hand, they should have seen this coming and jumped ship earlier.
If they can't afford regular bonuses, then they should just say so, instead of telling their staff, "Let them eat stock."
If you want to have real fun - do a Google Earth on it. They have street views right in front of the entrance - can even read the sign - can't seem to make a link for you but if you go to 15082 Panama Ln, Bakersfield, CA - VERY IMPRESSIVE... you can do a full 360 street view and wish you were home. Not.
The aerial view is extremely depressing - a bunch of moved dirt but almost no development.
Anon above,
"There ain't no God, you're on your own."
Pascal would disagree. If you have ever used calc or Gausian Geomentry, blame it on the good monks of God. OK, it is the Western perception of God.
Do you feel lucky, punk?
I love the smell of napalm in the morning Asian markets
The East is Red.
This Bakersfield site would be good for Lethal Weapon 5 filming, or, in 5 years, The Road Warrior 3.
ac
Sounds like that came right out of the pages of Other People's Money by Nomi Prines. You ever read that book you would never buy another stock or financial product touted by Wall Street with support from DC. Take down Goldman Suks and the den of thieves would fall.
Ross,
Also of note is Gödel's ontological proof, a formalization of St. Anselm's ontological argument for God's existence.
Kona
What Kern county is good for
starting at min 3:45
YouTube -
"Now Lehman finds itself stuck with all sorts of hard-to-sell assets and securities worth far less than what it has invested in them. For example, last October - with the credit crunch and real estate meltdown well underway - Lehman (in partnership with the Tishman Speyer real estate firm) paid $22.2 billion to do a leveraged buyout of Archstone, a big apartment developer"
But eh, somebody made money....
AC and 12th Percentile - Bravo !
OT:
Dear President Obama:
PIMCO - Investment Outlook - July 2008 "Dear President Obama:"
Dear President Obama:
You have inherited a mess. Your predecessor, fixated on emulating a former Republican icon from a far different economic era, chose to emphasize tax cuts for the rich and excessive consumption for all Americans.....
barely writes:
Asia's bucking the trend. What gives?
A breath of fresh air that says all is well. But, reality looms as oil prices make a) domestic production more expensive; b) shipping costs more expensive; c) lower demand for goods in NA and Europe.
Higher food and oil prices will soon come to roost in the emerging markets and sharp reallignments will happen. The huge trucker protest in Bangalor yesterday took many by surprize. More to come no doubt.
The Cdn market took it on the chin today as commodities took a dose of reality.
So, how can you place 30B with UK hedgies rumoured to be backed by russians...buy US assets!
y wealthy neighbors and I in Newport Beach should just look at it this way: weve had an eight-year lease extension on the high life. Now its time to give something back and I suspect we wont be working any less hard. That ol Laffer Curve has a certain logic to it, but it only makes sense at the upper margin. People did work less at confiscatory tax rates imposed pre-Thatcher/Reagan but once they got down to 50 percent or lower, it was all gravy promoting conspicuous consumption as opposed to higher productivity and overtime at the office. Gosh, now we dont even want those oversized trophy houses! The New York Times reports that the high-profile crowd now favors small ecologically certified LEED houses Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. My, what green eyes we have, Grandma!
LOL! Channel Rendering Fea...O+July+2008.htm
Read "Collapse" and Diamond's others. I loved the part about the Easter Island heads. Archaeologists argued for years as to how they could have moved and erected huge stone statues without a single metal tool. "Visit from space, Europeans got there before Captain Cook, etc."
90 years later they thought maybe we should ask the locals (still eking it out even though their ancestors had cut down every tree). The locals promptly showed them, a little indignant as to why they had not been asked before. Who will be left standing to show future archeologists how to create a CDO cubed?
fresno almost got donald chump, er trump, to bail them out:
http://www.fresnobee.com/business/story/703147.html
Billionaire Bill Gross, who manages bond outfit Pacific Investment Management Company said Tuesday that long and medium term U.S. Treasury yields have "bottomed" and that reflation will come with negative interest rates and the recent liquidity actions undertaken by the Fed. Gross also said he expects U.S. home prices to fall 10.0% by January 2009
Follow the money.
What vaults and Swiss accounts
hold the unreported spoils.
I see a bubble in forensic finance.
CREDIT BUBBLE BULLETIN
Good inflation?
Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs
Essentially, if I am reading McCulley correctly, he is arguing that because of an unusual "trade shock" from rapidly escalating energy costs, the Fed must employ negative real interest rates to avoid a "modern-day depression". I will continue to espouse the view that today's ridiculously low interest rates are part of the problem rather than the solution.
McCulley and others prefer to "monetize" the current oil price "shock" through ongoing artificially low interest rates, arguing that recent price effects are a temporary phenomenon. This short-term jump in inflation is said to be, in the words of Mr McCulley, "good inflation".
Its time to click it off, and hope for the best tomorrow. With an early close, its gonna be interesting. good luck to all.
Close, edd, but too many lines; try this one:
The money is there-
It just moved from hand to hand,
Not one of ours, though.
ac sounds like he's channeling Jas.
You born and bred American dopes are all the same.
You're programmed to reject the wisdom I offer because anything that might wake you up out of your stupor is a threat to your masters on Wall Street and Capitol Hill.
Keep telling yourself everything is just fine in your feeble American minds. Nothing can save America from the Greatest Depression that's coming after more than two years of unrestrained Bernankepanky.
Plus you Americans are weak. Not only have your minds atrophied but American men lack the physique to wear clothing that emphasizes (rather than hides) their masculine features. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than the inferiority complex of those who laugh at my skin tight attire and my exposed chest and arms. Apparently my rippling thighs and heaving chest make them feel better about their own flaccid hanging flesh. Sometimes I press my hefty sculted thighs into the flank or buttocks of an adversary that's making an especially absurd or tiresome argument.
This usually sends them into hysterics bringing about the end of the useless dialog.
One day I promise I will have an American for a pet. But I'm wating for them to get a bit smarter so I can teach them a few tricks like fetch and get them to sit on command.
Bakersfield is just outside of hollywood's 90 mile circle of work. McAllister may be just inside.
Lehman is also hosedd on treasure coast(FL). I'm assuming they funded every local bubble developer.
"You born and bred American dopes are all the same."
That's more like it ac. Dig that Jas-funk fusion!
That was brilliant.
some more napalm :
BBC NEWS | Business | Oil price hits yet another record
BBC NEWS | Business | 'Bankruptcy' fear hits GM shares
here it is from the air:
Bing Maps
I wanted to thank CR and Tanta for posting our article. This site is a daily must-read for me and I have learned much from both of your analyses--Tanta's uber-nerd is briliant--to say nothing of the wisdom in the comments.
best,
Roddy Boyd
Fortune magazine
Wait, so Lehman Brothers' $64 Billion in Real Estate Assets includes an entire empty worthless subdivision and golf course, carried at full value?
And they have under $20 billion in shareholders' equity?
Look out below!
I don't understand the lunacy of this project. All of my friends working in the "industry" in LA would never consider living beyond the Tejon Pass. There was never a market for this place among working people. Was the idea wealthy retirees? In Bakersfield?! Only New Yorkers could think that way.
There was a community like this in Austin, TX in 1985 after a big land bust...exactly one house, an iron skeleton for a clubhouse, and a single-wide for the pro shop. I actually loved the course, and the lumpen-proletariat could play on it for a few years. Now? completely built out, lovely clubhouse, and i can't play anymore.
This too shall pass.