Also, just like for residential, declining transaction volumes usually precede price declines.

I'm thinking the rising vacancy rates and changing cap rates will probably have a greater impact on pricing than volume will.

TBILISI, Georgia - The head of Georgia's national security council says Russian forces have taken the strategically key city of Gori.

Gori is on Georgia's main east-west highway, about 60 miles west of the capital Tbilisi. By taking the city, Russia has the potential to effectively cut the country in half.

Security Council head Alexander Lomaia said Monday that it was not immediately clear if Russian forces would try to advance on Tbilisi.

The seizure of Gori came as Russian forces also drove deep into Georgian territory in the country's western sector.

Russians really rubbing our nose and that of Georgia and NATO in it. Rub rub rub.

lol Veni, it really is different here in KC, we're thriving! Must be all the smart buyers!

It's a good thing crazy George is a half world away from the big red button..............

He'll soon be back and they need to take the button and all his other toys away from him before he destroys us all.

FFDIC thanks for the list. But there are quite a few much smaller banks that, in my view, are probably going under or are already under:

Bank of Lebo in Kansas
Hastings State Bank
Tier One
BankUnited
and others from the one star list on bankrate.com

I would look for banks with a Texas ratio of over, say, 50. 40 is the tipping point for Bove. I would be a bit less pessimistic.

All this is just speculation of course. No wish to alarm people.

Looks more and more like any money that comes out of leveraged positions like currencies and commodities is going to be targeted at deliberately squeezing out short positions.

Can't say that isn't exactly what I'd do in the same situation.

jess got me some srs at 80

Everybody was talking about picking that stuff up at 85 and 90 and 95 and 100...

SRS has been the ultimate pain trade.

Can anyone here provide a reasonable explanation for what is going on in the markets lately. Today with massive global instability, war in Georgia you would think gold and oil would rocket. I understand dollar strength but the rest of the market action seems totally irrational or something with a margin call hell where nothing makes sense...

Max writes:
What, no gold cliff-diving post? -42.05 (-4.87%). Ouch!
Max | Homepage | 08.11.08 - 1:42 pm | #

i did

mock turtle writes:
gold steep drop on the NY merc down $20/oz in half an hour.

-850 and lookout below below below below

imf sales, recession, and the threats by sen cantwell (dem WA) to bring legislation to further regulate oil futures and options trading, spell further downward pressure on gold.
mock turtle | 08.11.08 - 12:32 pm | #

i would add to the above logic that trichet has been jawboning for a stonger dollar by indicating ero rates would be decreased.

gold (and other PMs) facing big head winds for awhile...but not forever

Can anyone here provide a reasonable explanation for what is going on in the markets lately. Today with massive global instability, war in Georgia you would think gold and oil would rocket. I understand dollar strength but the rest of the market action seems totally irrational or something with a margin call hell where nothing makes sense...

For me it's always worked to think of it as a big poker game where everybody knows what the "obvious" thing to do is and deliberately moves against it.

So I'm only surprised when the market does what it's "supposed to". Which isn't very often these days.

I'm just curious...who is buying SRS and why ? Is it simply a matter of the hedge funds and big houses trying to squeeze every last remaining short out of RE plays ?

I don't know who's doing what, but wouldn't you deliberately squeeze out shorts if you could like if you were, say, liquidating huge long positions in Euros and oil and had lots of spare cash on your hand?

That way you could make money going up with the squeeze, and coming back down with shorts. Assuming you're a big enough player and the one in control.

Again, I don't know that somebody is doing this, but it would surprise me if at least somebody didn't try.

I know I would.

It's Kleptonomics 101.

Everybody sing together:

Maniiipulation time, Come O

To Canadian watching with popcorn: Considering your proximity to Mr. Putin's Russia, I think you should be more concerned with the Red Army than with red buttons...

Here are some more specifics on the Fed's loan officer survey and what it showed, for your review ...

• Residential mortgage credit was tougher to get all around. The Fed began breaking out tigthening/loosening figures for three sub-categories of mortgage -- prime, nontraditional, and subprime -- in Q2 2007. Some 74% of those surveyed this time around said they are tightening standards on prime mortgages, up from 62.3% in Q2 2008. A net 84.4% of those surveyed said they were cracking down on nontraditional financing, up from 75.6%, and a net 85.7% said they were tightening on subprime loans, up from 77.7% a quarter earlier.

The subprime and prime figures are records. The nontraditional number is just shy of the high (84.6% in Q1 2008). The previous record for the all-mortgage category was 32.7% in Q1 1991.

• The tightening trend is spilling over into commercial real estate. A net 80.7% of respondents said they were tightening standards on CRE loans. That was up from 78.6% a quarter earlier and the highest on record (Fed data goes back to 1990).
• Consumer credit figures tell a similar story. Some 66.6% of lenders said they were tightening standards on credit card borrowers, up from 32.4% a quarter earlier and the highest on record (The data in this category goes back to 1996). Fed figures show that 67.4% are also tightening standards on other consumer loans, up from 44.4% (another record).
• C&I customers can't catch a break either. Lastly, banks are tightening standards and raising the cost of the loans they do make for commercial and industrial customers. A net 57.6% of banks are tightening standards for large and medium sized borrowers, up from 55.4% a quarter earlier and the highest since Q1 2001. 80.8% said they were raising the spread over their cost of funds that they charge large and medium sized borrowers for access to money. That was up from 71% a quarter earlier and the most ever.

Yikes:

No bank in the survey eased credit terms for any type of loan in the past three months, and only one bank said it anticipated easing standards for consumers in the next 12 months.

Yet the Yen indicates a renewed orgy of borrowing on Wall Street even is the credit situation gets bleaker and bleaker on Main Street.

Again according to my reading this is exactly what happened in 1929 as money for car loans all but vanished even as orgy of margin borrowing was picking up steam on Wall Street.

somebody liked gold at 820 after the close of the new york merc

what it will do tomorrow i dont know

i've got georgia on my mind

but i dont predict the future...its hard enough to predict the past.

would be surprised to see gold go below 750 if everything is baked in (no more geopolitical chaos) and believe one year from now it is likely twice that...

if chaos reigns then gold 1500 is around the corner at a minimum

thats why i dont argue gold as a get rich investment...gold is an insurance policy

dont trust me on anything, i guess... but i just dont know

Well, maybe they have some assurances from China that they'll be there to assist with threats of a dollar/treasury dump if we start making noises about interfering.

If they've got China on their side they can probably rub rub rub all they want.

I have been thinking about this.

I think that this is going to be why Putin's war is seen as a missed blow, politically, unless he gets very ambitious with it.

Seen from a certain perspective -- and this is not a hard perspective to drift into when you are a mandarin running the world's largest country -- this is an ennobled, global propitiation of the rites of grain and soil. Every 4 years, a global festival of peace and sport, embraced with such schmaltzy gusto that even mighty Israel cannnot hold a candle to it.

Tell me they didn't all believe their hype. They're Chinese, historically, this sort of event can give birth to deities.

Then Vladimir had a war of imperial aggression as a counterpoint to the opening ritual.

That was a big whiz in the punch bowl there. I mean, I know they are "not Confucians" and all but it's really their cultural context. Disregard for the rituals, you just can't describe the sin, especially when it is fucking with the face of the Chinese in a way that shows no regard for the relationship. It isn't even that you're trying to offend them, it's that you didn't think of it. Major no-no.

Internally, it is wall-to-wall olympic-mania but the people managing it are looking for external validation, and they are falling out the headlines. The Marumushi newsmap doesn't even mention the olympics except in the context of murders and bombings.

Notably, Vlad went home immediately, like as if he was asked to leave. He departed into the ranks of mustache-twirling villainy. George is still there at the big kids' table. Don't ever underestimate the ability to offend someone Chinese for being uncouth. It is not endearing when you show up at their wedding drunk.

I hope that Vlad had everything gathered up that he needs to complete his plans, because he is assuming the role of the wolf in an unstable polypolar milieu. By doing this, he precipitated the birth of a policy of containment of his growing influence between China and America, so I hope that the immediate gains are worth the conversion to an adversarial context.