[update: 8:30 am PST. This horrifying graph was taken down one hour after i posted this.]
Bloomturd is still at it this morning with the lies about PE
By Daniela Silberstein,
"Cheaper Than Europe
Between March 9 and May 9, the S&P 500 surged 37 percent in the steepest two-month advance since the 1930s on signs the global recession is easing. The benchmark index for U.S. equities traded at 14.4 times the earnings of its companies at the end of last week. "
For some reason the web page above cannot be saved, fortunately I can screenshot.
[update: 8:30 am PST. The byline was changed to Rita Nazareth from Daniela Silberstein and all references to PE removed one hour later. Are they making these names up?]
WE CANNOT LIE OUR WAY TO PROSPERITY.
This isn't just spin, THIS IS MATH!
The PE of the SP 500 is not 15.4, it is nearly EIGHT times as high, at 122 according to Barron's (who just updated their data from PE 62.4 last week):
Barron's Market Lab Table - Barrons.com
Their sister site WSJ still has S&P 500 PE at 14.93.
Another Bloomberg distortion can be found by Lynn Thomasson on May 11 at the link below:
“Earnings Watch
The S&P 500 ended last week trading at 15.1 times its members’ reported earnings, according to Bloomberg data, the highest valuation since October.”
Furthermore, we cannot be so dull that we will continually buy the unattributed “better than expected” earnings drivel. Near as I can tell, when ever you see that phrase it means at least a 30% plunge in profit. Who comes up with these estimates and why are investors so happy they are always wrong?
Is the financial press employing ostriches or are reporters so terrified of losing their jobs that they will say and lie about anything, no matter how bold of blatant?
They are lying about math. It is an insult. PLEASE GOD help people add and give them the courage to believe the sums they total.
They are going to hurt people with these lies.
Here are these reporters e-mails. You have my permission to copy this rant and send it to them.
reptilian, I would guess that is most of their business right now. We went to Lowes the other evening and there were no lines in the main store and very few shoppers. I needed some miracle gro so I wandered back to the gardening center and there was a long line at check out and many people shopping...
Black Star Ranch (profile) wrote on Mon, 5/18/2009 - 12:51 am
.....a global problem was solved here last night. I found my plastic garden signs. All rows are now appropriately identified with all relevant data
Transparency reigns at BSR.
. . . Unless Moody's did the signage.
BSR:...- outside of a few missing points; "Mystery Squash", or "Mystery 'Maters", or "All of the Above Onions".
One of Britain’s most closely watched economic indicators has heavily overstated the quantity of high street sales over the past two years, the Office for National Statistics admitted on Friday.
Britain’s supplier of official statistics conceded that since the financial crisis began in August 2007, it has overstated the volume of retail sales growth by 56 per cent.
Many economists have been worried for some time that the published retail sales figures were too strong and have always received a furious response from the ONS.
George Washington bemoaned that it took a cartload of Continental Currency to pay for a cartload of supplies. When the government finally allowed them to be redeemed, it was at only 1/1000 of the printed value.
To summarize, we see that taxpayers are on the hook for Social Security and Medicare by these amounts: Social Security, 1.3% of GDP; Medicare part A, 2.8% of GDP; Medicare part B, 2.8% of GDP; and Medicare part D, 1.2% of GDP. This adds up to 8.1% of GDP. Thus federal income taxes for every taxpayer would have to rise by roughly 81% to pay all of the benefits promised by these programs under current law over and above the payroll tax.
funny I heard a "fact" on Bloomberg that , in regards to raising taxes on only the ones earning over 250K , that actually if you took everyone that earned over 250K and took 100% in taxes it would still not cover all the costs of the government promises.....wonder if this is true
Also heard a fact the only 20% of people polled, when asked, knew "how many millions are in a trillion?"
Just about everyone I know has grown some kind of garden this year. For some of course it is simply a "psychological" feel good mechanism. One guy is growing tomatoes and peppers on his patio, he's never bothered to do so before. He certainly can't feed himself with his yield but it makes him feel like he is doing something to help himself out. I put in a a small kitchen garden on my courtyard, I have peppers, herbs and tomatoes. It won't feed us if TSHTF but it will save us some money over the summer and well into fall here in Florida. That along with my overstuffed freezers and pantry would probably get us through a few months if supply chains break down.
Gresham's Law states that bad money drives out good money, and as a consequence it takes a bunch of bad money to get a meager amount of good money.
Confusing, but not really.
The Romans showed the way. way back when. I think they had the first bad money, a Denarius Alchemy Derivative.
The empire's money was copper, silver & gold. There were many denominations of copper coins, but strangely enough, only one denomination each of silver and gold coinage. The ratio was set @ 25 silver Denarii equaling 1 gold Aureus which lasted for hundreds of years. Like our current empire, Roman forts were far-flung and costly to maintain. The army had a long history of being paid for their efforts in silver Denarii, and the silver coins for several hundred years were of high fineness, (approx 95% purity) and as the accounts receivables weren't matching up with the accounts payables after the salad days were through, the debasement of the Denarius began, dropping down to 65% pure. The problem with debasing silver was you could only do baby-steps, for if you went too far in your efforts, and say, got to a 65% copper-35% silver mixture, the resulting coin would look more like copper, whoops~
Enter high technology...
Some wizard figured out how to silver-wash (a crude form of electroplating) copper coins, allowing the empire to produce Denarii with just a scintilla of silver in them, and the chimera ruse worked for awhile, but people got wise, and so began the great devaluation of the Denarius~
By about the middle of the 4th Century a.d., it took about 3,500 Denarii to equal 1 Aureus.
A more current example of Gresham's Law would be any Dime, Quarter or Half Dollar dated before 1965, consisting of 90% silver. Each of these denominations of which billions & billions were produced, now has almost 10x the face value in current bad money (copper-nickel coinage or paper money) in just silver content alone. When was the last time you received a pre-1965 silver coin in change?
Gresham's Law was in regards to metallic money, but in our world it's no so easy to decipher the good & the bad, as our money is more symbolism than anything else.
So how does one differentiate between and betwixt what exists now?
As ever more massive amounts of symbolism are churned out, the only thing it does is mix with previously thought of good money and dirty it, but can you tell the difference?
Pavel: Sure it can. But scrip won't get you very far if no one uses it.
That is why government mandates use of Federal Reserve Notes (FRN) to pay taxes and declares FRN as legal tender for transactions (artifical demand by fiat).
I think Lowes, HD, others have discovered 'recession economics'... in booms folks plan 'big projects' and then contract it out to 'renovation specialists' pay top dollar and don't sweat it... in busts they think small, do sweat equity and do it themselves. The old time vs money trade off - you never have a lot of both but usually have one or the other. Now it is 'time'.
Updating some research from Richard Vedder of Ohio University, we found that from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.
Did the greater prosperity in low-tax states happen by chance? Is it coincidence that the two highest tax-rate states in the nation, California and New York, have the biggest fiscal holes to repair? No. Dozens of academic studies -- old and new -- have found clear and irrefutable statistical evidence that high state and local taxes repel jobs and businesses.
I think all of this talk of backyard gardens is somewhat funny. Who among you have ever actually tended a backyard garden? You would know that yields are small, unpredictable, you do a lot of growing before you get any yield (better have other sources of food stored) and that you can't buy enough firepower at your local gardening store to keep pests at bay with any real success.
In the old days (when people lived off of the land, rather than in the matrix) we grew lots of corn and wheat and milled the stuff into foodstuffs that we could store - flour, corn meal, etc. We did a lot of canning for preservation, etc. Most people - particularly those in cities - just don't own big enough lots with enough diversification of soil type and room for rotation to grow enough food for this to work and support a family of 3 or 4.
Random thought: those "in the know" might be stockpiling fertilizer to later sell for food...
I've been thinking about post WW1 Germany a lot lately...
The infrastructure of Germany in 1919 was intact, but in economic tatters. Defeated in a multi-front war not so much by military action from the opposing side, but worn down from never-ending battles that went nowhere, fast.
What's the difference between Germany's war reparations and our debt reparations currently?
Germany's debt wasn't denominated in Marks, whereas our debt is almost all in Dollars.
We have the opportunity to welsh on most, if not all of our debt by simply buggering the buck. It's a very cowardly way to go about doing things, but it appears we've run out of options and it's full speed ahead, never mind the consequences, which are dire.
FD, I live in Florida, there is no "greater prosperity' here. Wages suck, services suck, attitudes suck, and UE is skyhigh...try again. Oh, and they had to go into special session in order to try and balance the budget, they are closing many schools just in our community to try and make ends meets...Please explain how prosperous we are here?
I liken us to a gambler that waltzed into Vegas with $10 million of borrowed money, lost it all except for a few thousand left over, and now we are playing 15 spot keno tickets in a mad attempt to recoup our losses.
The only difference being we have to pay for our own watered-down cocktails...
Rocky, I mentioned earlier for many is is more a psychological, feel good activity. At least they feel as if they are doing something...You are correct on the fighting pests and weather though. Not many could live off what they grow.
"I think all of this talk of backyard gardens is somewhat funny. Who among you have ever actually tended a backyard garden? You would know that yields are small, unpredictable, you do a lot of growing before you get any yield (better have other sources of food stored) and that you can't buy enough firepower at your local gardening store to keep pests at bay with any real success."
buy some roma tomato seeds and a bottle of neem oil and you will have all the tomatoes you want in july. probably won't even need the neem oil.
We have the opportunity to welsh on most, if not all of our debt by simply buggering the buck. It's a very cowardly way to go about doing things, but it appears we've run out of options and it's full speed ahead, never mind the consequences, which are dire.
There's no choice at this point but to default on a bunch of debt. The question is just whether we do it in a structured way with accountability or an unstructured way with no accountability.
I think at this point it is obvious which path we will choose.
I think all of this talk of backyard gardens is somewhat funny. Who among you have ever actually tended a backyard garden? You would know that yields are small, unpredictable, you do a lot of growing before you get any yield (better have other sources of food stored) and that you can't buy enough firepower at your local gardening store to keep pests at bay with any real success.
I have - it isn't so hard & yields are sky high if you know what you are doing & diversify. But it takes time & effort [more than money]... it is the effort part that is the buzz kill for most folks.
There's a lot of misunderstanding about hyperinflation, and perhaps it's best to look @ our neighbor to the south to see what happened when ruinous hyperinflation appeared for the first time in Mexico's history.
The period of time spanned from the late 1970's to the early 1990's, and the repercussions of it are very much evident.
When I was a teenager in the early to mid 1970's, the rate of exchange was a constant 12.5 Pesos to the Dollar... by 1992 it had reached over 10,000 Pesos to the Dollar.
Let's say you were Mexican middle-class, certainly a smaller one than ours, but say you had 100,000 Pesos savings in the bank in 1975?
1975 U.S. Dollar Value: $8,000
1992 U.S. Dollar Value $10
Savers got creamed, adios middle-class.
Can you imagine the prices of consumer goods going only upwards for 15 years, with prices being revised in markets on a constant basis, with wages not keeping up?
Growing up as a kid in L.A in the 1970's., there were certainly Mexican immigrants around, many of them 2nd & 3rd generation, but it seemed like immigrants tended to be seen only in the border states, and then came a hyperinflation spiral downwards, and corresponding with their time in financial hell, with heaven (stable U.S. economy) just above, the floodgates opened wide and a mass of humanity, "financial freedom fighters" made their way to the promissory note land.
The drug cartels?
Another by-product of hyperinflation. Marijuana, if held long-term (yeah, like that's gonna happen...) has proven to be an excellent investment~
When I was a kid, you could buy a 4 finger lid (a sandwich bag 4 fingers high full) for $20. The equivalent amount today of admittedly much better herb would set you back around $150.
So, put yourself in the position of being in a country that has little to offer the outside world (except for state controlled oil which was plunging in price down to $10 a barrel), when the only thing you've got left to sell, is drugs?
It certainly took awhile for violence to show it's dirty mug, but one could easily compare Al Capone's Chicago circa 1927, to goings on in Mexico presently.
Should hyperinflation hit us like it did Mexico, where will all the American Financial Freedom Fighters end up immigrating to?
IMO the policy choices point to a preference to unwind over-time, in an orderly fashion, a few bumps in the road on our way to devaluation, not too sudden.
IMHO I don't think just because this is the preference that we will in fact unwind quite how they want it to unwind.
"What's the difference between Germany's war reparations and our debt reparations currently?"
Currently (thanks to the WWII aftermath) the USD is the primary reserve currency of the world. Ostensibly, buggering the buck will, at least for a while, also bugger all the other currencies.
I somewhat agree, but can not deny that the rich do choose FL over other states, and maybe relative to CA and NV FL is good, BK rules are protective....
I agree with the above the bubble has hurtthe area, but worse than it was before the bubble, maybe the UE should be considerd in the scheme of things prebubble, maybe those UE are UE because their job was based on fantasy that lasted 7 years ....
Backyard gardening is a great way to pass the time when you don't have a job.
So is home improvement. I have tons of projects around the house which I already have the supplies for, but just no freaking TIME to do them, because I have to work six days a week.
In the old days (when people lived off of the land, rather than in the matrix) we grew lots of corn and wheat and milled the stuff into foodstuffs that we could store - flour, corn meal, etc. We did a lot of canning for preservation, etc. Most people - particularly those in cities - just don't own big enough lots with enough diversification of soil type and room for rotation to grow enough food for this to work and support a family of 3 or 4.
Also not true assuming you aren't talking about high rise living. Typical city lot if square foot gardened can produce a lot of the food a family of 3-4 would need - not the grains so much but many of the veggies, greens, root crops, etc. And as for fertilizer they have plenty of that too if they decide to quite flushing it down the toilet. That and composting... plus more recent developments like 'terra preta'. Have to take precautions regarding disease & parasite transmission with some of this stuff but the 'biomass' necessary for continued 'urban farming' is right there.
It's the back breaking work that turns out to be the big hurdle - It's what keeps me from going 'green acres'... I've done it before it really is a lot of work.
IMO the policy choices point to a preference to unwind over-time, in an orderly fashion, a few bumps in the road on our way to devaluation, not too sudden.
The problem is that in order for this process to really be "orderly" our bondholders have to be suicidal.
This may be why oil is already up almost 80% despite genuine oversupply concerns.
FD, I really don't care where the "rich" choose to live. They move here to retire and be warm. Last year was the first year that Florida actually lost more people than they gained so apparently the data you are using is older. We also have one of the worst education systems in the country. Churning out illiterates is their forte here. We do have a super high inmate population though, so we have that going for us down here.
Not sure where your coming from. There is a middle ground between the psychological aspects of a few container plants and plowing 40 acres. Square-foot gardening (yes, there's a learning curve...so what?) can yield enough to supplement the food for a family--especially the high-cost vitamin laden things like greens. Anybody growing corn with beans with squash can also supplement a reasonably complete protein/starch/fiber diet...plus canning to preserve for the winter, plus growing some berries and grapes which can also be preserved. A few 20x20 beds can be very productive. You compost your scraps. You compost your moron neighbor's leaves which they just want to bag up and have "taken away"...
For the mad-max scenario I'm not stockpiling fertilizer. Small metal cylinders neatly stocked and stockpiled however, yes. Bourbon as well.
Just threw the article out for comment. Not endorsing, easy off, we dont move there becaue we have kids and do not want o suffer them the education system. And my wife is an educator... Again, not my data, you'll have to se the article from where the data came from...
No problem FD, just wanted to point out their data might not be incredibly accurate from where I'm sitting. Good choice on the education/kids thing. My husband and I already decided should we ever have any we would homeschool or move.
Typical city lot if square foot gardened can produce a lot of the food a family of 3-4 would need - not the grains so much but many of the veggies, greens, root crops, etc. And as for fertilizer they have plenty of that too if they decide to quite flushing it down the toilet.
City lots also have pleasant things like lead contamination, arsenic and PCBs. What's especially nice is when municipalities bring in contaminated dirt from construction projects for use in community gardens.
swamp otis,
I must confess, I'm a bit amazed at my own reaction to your p/e posts. It is as if I did not want to invest the time to investigate because I've already proven to myself this rally is insane from four other point of reference. It turns my stomach to think I could spend more tedious hours working out numbers only to watch the market defy reality from another point of view.
I find your p/e claims interesting. I simply don't need additional ammunition to already agree with your conclusion.
However, I am trying to take our economy and the indicators in perspective. "what were the stats in 2000?" anything elese was built on a house of cards.
I mean i try and think of 2000 as zero on the line, similar to CS report using 1991 (i believe) as their 100 reference. What is an appropriate zero or 100 is anyones guess. But population is FL since 2002 could have been based on easy money and the purchases of second homes, or vacation homes.... maybe people are leaving because they have to. But maybe population is still above what would have been an acceptable annual increase had we not had the bubble....IMHO
FD, do you think the lower tax rates have anything to do with the abysmal education system here? I went to Public School in Massachusetts as a child. I received a top notch education and when I moved during my Junior year to the Chicago area, I was a full year and half ahead of what they were teaching. I spent the last year and half of HS twiddling my thumbs while they taught what I had learned as a Sophomore...
Granted, these guys are fanatics, but they produce so much produce that they sell their excess to an organic restaurant in the summer/ fall. They also have chickens/ducks/goats...all on .2 acres with a 1500sft house. I wish their photo gallery was online right now, but it won't open for me. They also have some videos up at YouTube here: YouTube - dervaes Channel
Honestly, they exhaust me just reading about everything they do, but it's not hard to raise some vegetables in a couple of raised beds that can cut down on your produce bills. We give away tomatoes and cucumbers to the neighbors and they give us apples. I'm thinking about taking out a decorative tree and replacing it with some kind of fruit tree. I'm considering adding a few more raised beds and expanding the garden since ahem I have a lot more time this summer to look after it. But right now, with the beds I have planted it takes very little time (more to check on bugs and weeds than anything else) to care for, I put it on an automated drip system about three years ago.
When I was a kid we had a 1/3 acre lot and grew corn and several types of melons and squashes and we still had room for a pool, patio, and lawn out back too.
Comrade Kristina (profile) wrote on Mon, 5/18/2009 - 7:04 am
FD, do you think the lower tax rates have anything to do with the abysmal education system here [Florida]? I went to Public School in Massachusetts as a child. I received a top notch education and when I moved during my Junior year to the Chicago area, I was a full year and half ahead of what they were teaching. I spent the last year and half of HS twiddling my thumbs while they taught what I had learned as a Sophomore...
Comrade Kristina do you think the high tax rates have anything to do with the abysmal education system here [California]?
I too went through the Massachusetts education system. My mom was director of competency compliance so her job was to see you learned the right stuff in high school. I'll tell her you are a satisfied customer.
Regards the prospects for Lowes/HD. dryfly is correct about substitution. When they talk about "big ticket items" they really mean high profit margin items. They sometimes also mean credit interest revenues. Truth is the only reason they are eeking out any profit is because their input costs are declining and they haven't yet been forced to cut customer prices.
RockyR (profile) wrote on Mon, 5/18/2009 - 9:34 am reply Ignore user I think all of this talk of backyard gardens is somewhat funny. Who among you have ever actually tended a backyard garden?
Umm, me? The yield's quite good as a supplemental food source. Ask anyone who lived through the Soviet Union. Also ask anyone who had to can entire basements full of mason jars.
You would know that yields are small, unpredictable, you do a lot of growing before you get any yield (better have other sources of food stored) and that you can't buy enough firepower at your local gardening store to keep pests at bay with any real success.
And that's why the human race died out millions of years ago. Abandon all hope and plan your mode of suicide.
If 90% of us die taking what measures we can, why should 99% percent of us die because we take no measures? That seems a bit lazy to me. Of course any sort of serious disaster will kill us like flies. Do you think we're simple? You do what you can and sometimes (perhaps in this case, mostly) it's not enough. Sorry if you want a bulletproof answer before you try anything, you'll never build anything. The problem is coming, sure as winter follows summer. You can work as hard as you can to achieve an answer, or you can be too smart to try.
Are you going to tell me something about historical 10% agricultural surplus? Because you might notice we are at the far end of history, and we have much greater diversity of plant stock, much greater base of knowledge, and oh, by the way, the keys to the secret of life. We're also not slaves / sharecroppers pretending to work so the Lord will pretend to pay us.
In the old days (when people lived off of the land, rather than in the matrix) we grew lots of corn and wheat and milled the stuff into foodstuffs that we could store - flour, corn meal, etc.
No wonder you think you'll starve to death as a farmer, you grew grains! That's strictly for professionals although things like SRI might change that.
We did a lot of canning for preservation, etc. Most people - particularly those in cities - just don't own big enough lots with enough diversification of soil type and room for rotation to grow enough food for this to work and support a family of 3 or 4.
How much is "support"? It's not like these people are going to live on individual isolated islands. They'll trade, they'll share, they'll supplement their diet with commercial foodstuffs when available.
Mal: City lots also have pleasant things like lead contamination, arsenic and PCBs.
Because nobody can test for those or haul in different soil?
What's especially nice is when municipalities bring in contaminated dirt from construction projects for use in community gardens.
And because some community somewhere did it, QED, it must be like that at yours.
Alas, how the human race's efforts are futile despite centuries piled upon centuries of agronomy and the ability to engineer new organisms. Better to eat a little lead and live than starve to death "healthy". Whatever the soil contamination may be, the certitude of death due to lack of caloric input really just turns the long term health impacts into rent on continued life.
It's not magic, but I think the grasshoppers that are looking down their noses at the ants struggling to do what they can mostly expect to be free riders.
I'm not saying you can't grow a ton of food on a city lot. I'm saying that most city (and suburban) dwellers have no idea what contaminants are in the dirt.
Dont think wrt lower taxes education, if you read the article NH has lower per child and no taxes and has fourth highest test scores...
"Those who disapprove of tax competition complain that lower state taxes only create a zero-sum competition where states "race to the bottom" and cut services to the poor as taxes fall to zero. They say that tax cutting inevitably means lower quality schools and police protection as lower tax rates mean starvation of public services.
They're wrong, and New Hampshire is our favorite illustration. The Live Free or Die State has no income or sales tax, yet it has high-quality schools and excellent public services. Students in New Hampshire public schools achieve the fourth-highest test scores in the nation -- even though the state spends about $1,000 a year less per resident on state and local government than the average state and, incredibly, $5,000 less per person than New York. And on the other side of the ledger, California in 2007 had the highest-paid classroom teachers in the nation, and yet the Golden State had the second-lowest test scores."
Since moving here in the DC MSA since summer 2004, wife and i have been renting. paid out 122-125K in rent. Would have of course, lost a lot more than that if we bought.
What we are doing as we look to buy is take comparable sales or sale of porperty we are interested in back in 2000-2002 years. We then add 4% appreciation yoy to that number and then that is what we consider a fair and equitable price, as most homes prior to the bubble appreciated 4% as a high end.
That number and the asking prices are getting much closer now. Thew delta is 10% on avg so people are wising up , realtors are becoming more realistic.... i dont know. But that is our rationale since it was 2000 when life was normal.
So i look at employement numbers the same way. While our UE numbers are high, the number employed across the various employment sectors is still above the numbers of 2000-2002 so the UE havent dug into the baseline real world numbers,
Of course that doesnt mean diddly poo tpo those that are UE....
RD, can't speak for Cali, never been there. I have lived in FL and MA and notice a striking disparity in education. Yes, you may relay that message, my education was indeed a gift of high quality in Massachusetts, although that was 25 years ago...
one last point:
"consider the fiasco of New Jersey. In the early 1960s, the state had no state income tax and no state sales tax. It was a rapidly growing state attracting people from everywhere and running budget surpluses. Today its income and sales taxes are among the highest in the nation yet it suffers from perpetual deficits and its schools rank among the worst in the nation -- much worse than those in New Hampshire. Most of the massive infusion of tax dollars over the past 40 years has simply enriched the public-employee unions in the Garden State. People are fleeing the state in droves."
mal (profile) wrote on Mon, 5/18/2009 - 10:15 am reply Ignore user Because nobody can test for those or haul in different soil?
That's bloody expensive for a poor urban mother of 3 who wants to start a garden.
Wow, but this was in the context of community gardens, wasn't it?
Imagine that, agricultural exptensions. Community garden programs. Localities providing basic capital goods support. Agricultural combines. It's as if, the human race has had to raise food for thousands of years to feed itself, and there are all these technologies here we can use.
Oh wait, let's move the goalposts over to here. Urban mother of 3; no community, no support mechanisms, no ability to share labor. Wow, must be hard on her, given that she's got three kids and is a member of a social species.
She'll live or die, depending on her efforts, not your smugness. Who cares if she'll more probably live or die! She would surely rather try than not! If you would not, then, make sure you fend off charity in your starvation.
You can argue all you want about PEs and how insane the U.S. market is.
But if you want a real sign of market insanity, look at what happened in India last night. Up 17%.
Emerging markets show the real insanity and speculation.
There's probably never, ever before been this much leveraged speculation and manipulation going on inside a severe, prolonged global economic downturn. Money is being pumped straight from govts. and central banks into stock markets. They don't even try to hide it any more.
Hmm, Zillow's Top 10 biggest cities of frog people, led by Vegas with an estimated 67% being underwater. Does this mean Lowe's has same stores that are performing at 71%-75% top pick up th slack?
If there's a war, it's not going to be conventional like all of the various proxy wars fought since 1945.
I'm looking for the new heroes to be somebody like a backcountry ranger in the Sierra Nevada, pulling down $16 an hour, employed for just 5 months a year, that has a patrol area of about 50 square miles, has to be EMT trained, incredibly well fit, and completely comfortable being in the wilderness.
I've been using a drip irrigation sysytem this year in Ca. Cuts the water bill to a fraction of prior years. Even if the garden fails, it instills in one an appreciation of the US capitalist system that provides well stocked grocery stores for all its citizens. The silver lining in this recession is it will give the younger generations who have not experienced want of any kind a more balanced perspective.
I just found this bit on productivity from the Dervaes link I posted earlier: The yard has over 350 varieties of edible and useful plants. The homestead's productive 1/10 acre organic garden now grows over 6,000 pounds (3 tons) of produce annually. This provides fresh vegetables and fruit for the family’s vegetarian diet and a source of income.</>
"There's probably never, ever before been this much leveraged speculation and manipulation going on inside a severe, prolonged global economic downturn. Money is being pumped straight from govts. and central banks into stock markets. They don't even try to hide it any more."
great let them buy all the stocks and trade amongst themselves. the governments are doing retail investors a favor by buying their earningless markets giving them an out. that is, they are doing a favor for the investors who are awake enough to understand that the value of any business is the present value of it's future earnings stream.
Re: "relative strength in smaller, outdoor projects"
I guess Home Depot will also cash in on the rush of people spraying weed killer. I would also imagine that WMT is stealing away small amounts of customers who are pinching pennies for jugs of Roundup. Huge weed market divided among many players!
Heroes are a topic I talk to my dad about a lot. One of the things he is still irate about is the soldiers who should have received recognition in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reasons were mostly petty, and some political. But mostly it is because the military is all volunteer. The war that is coming will be different, it will bring back the draft, and then we will have 'heroes' again. A volunteer army is mercenary, but we have to worship those that are chosen in a draft to ease public guilt.
AnonyMiss (profile) wrote on Mon, 5/18/2009 - 10:31 am The homestead's productive 1/10 acre organic garden now grows over 6,000 pounds (3 tons) of produce annually.
You really want to stay at an acre or less. The insane productivity of kitchen-yard agriculture doesn't persist beyond certain scales. You might be able to get up to 3 acres if you have a lot of hands but you'll be drifting toward good enough rather than maximizing yield.
I've had the best luck with fruit trees and berries. Our fruit purchases at the farmer's market go way down in the summer. I've also concentrated on things that are expensive to buy or that really suffer quaility wise if you try to buy commerically. I grow raspberries, have two apple trees, a plum tree, and an orange tree. All require virtually no work except for picking and a little pruning in the winter. The trees don't get any supplemental water (I live in the SF East Bay), and the raspberries get watered once a week unless it's crazy hot. We hardly had to buy oranges this winter, and this with each of the 4 of us eating one a day. Have more plums than we can eat, make applesauce for winter, and have a bowl of fresh raspberries almost every day.
....my, my, my.......I come here to get away from my garden, cows, chickens, weeding, watering, and pestilence, and I get THIS here? LOL.
"Who among you have ever actually tended a backyard garden?"
Rocky, In a word, yes. In a normal backyard, you can grow enough to feed a family of four easily. If you can get the city to go along, eggs help as well. The water cost used to be a challenge, but due to the Israeli's help in inventing drip-irrigation, water cost is minimal. In our case, we have a well or two (only because I'm a "Doomer"). In regards to growing limited selections, we trade stuff with other gardeners. Yesterday I traded 3-bell pepper plants for 3-garlic plants. Now I have garlic. Are we self-sufficient? Well, I haven't found a free source for the 3-gallons of gas & 1-gallon of diesel I use every week. As far as ALL dairy, eggs, chicken, beef, pork, veggies, starch, fruit for jams & my fav; peach pie, we're set. What about you?
Yes, Byz, I DO have emphysema. I'm hoping my running around the 5+ acres wheezing will keep me off oxygen a bit longer. Is it tough growing and tending? Yep - much harder than my past work. What would I change? I would have started earlier then an old man. I started it when I realized I might have to feed myself and family. I have very little income (less than poverty levels), and my happiest days are when I can drop off boxes and crates of tomatoes, peppers, cukes, eggs, and stuff to the 2-food pantries and the Sr. Center here in town. I don't pay squat for Fed taxes, but what I give back to the people who can use it - is fulfilling and needed.
I have less then an acre in veggies, herbs, & root stock. Next year with the grace of God I'll get my tractor running and grow twice as much. I love it.
I'm not saying you can't grow a ton of food on a city lot. I'm saying that most city (and suburban) dwellers have no idea what contaminants are in the dirt.
That's what the mustard seeds are for!!!
I'm not kidding, mustard plants do a great job pulling heavy metals and crap out of the soil the first year, you just have to weed it all out and then try and sterilize the soil before planting again.
Byzantine_Ruins (homepage, profile) wrote (in reply to...) on Mon, 5/18/2009 - 7:36 am
Oh, trust me, I will probably stay well under 100 feet, I'm not going for self sustainability as much as I do it for pleasure and good taste. If I need to grow more due to inflation factors, I do have room to expand.
I'm just amazed by people like the Dervaes', BSR, and Joanna who can produce so much with relatively small plots of land.
"The water cost used to be a challenge, but due to the Israeli's help in inventing drip-irrigation, water cost is minimal."
Backyard gardeners who use city water are indulging in nothing more than an expensive hobby. Drip irrigation and rain barrels help but there is significant set up cost. When the cost of soil, amendment, fertilizer, lime, seeds, tools, hoses, apparel, wood for boxes, poles, cages, and sweat labor are properly amortized most gardeners would be better off buying organic produce at Whole Paycheck (TM).
PS: I have been a backyard gardener for 20+ years.
Backyard gardeners who use city water are indulging in nothing more than an expensive hobby.
Even accepting your pricing model assertions, "expensive hobby" is a good model for the enterprise only as long as you think that it doesn't provide calories / nutrients along the margin of sustainability.
If you need to eat any of that food, then you are paying increased unit costs to pull the supply point down the chain to where you control it, rather than being subject to price / quantity rationing. In that case, the additional costs have significant utility because they are not providing you with pleasure, they are rent on the ability to self-supply in the absence of a reliable supply chain.
And that is only with the current model of capital / goods flows. As it becomes more popular / necessary and attracts more basic investment, you will see per-unit costs drop. Likewise, if there are quantity shortfalls, price rationing or pure rationing will skew the costs on the different strategies. Is pricing a survival strategy in the context of a non-survival environment correct?
Drip irrigation and rain barrels help but there is significant set up cost. When the cost of soil, amendment, fertilizer, lime, seeds, tools, hoses, apparel, wood for boxes, poles, cages, and sweat labor are properly amortized most gardeners would be better off buying organic produce at Whole Paycheck (TM).
Except that it makes you supply line dependent. That's the same argument -- comparative advantage -- on a larger scope, that was made to keep the neocolonial system in place, and countries with low capital development in their place as resource cows to be exploited. It's not profitable right now so no investment should take place, regardless of future yield.
I think your arguments are specious and tiger development is coming to the backyard.
Particularly, I think your list of capital goods is one that you can spend any amount of money on. If you are relentless in controlling costs for your gardening, most of it will come from scavenging or recycling. Or you could spend thousands. Are you optimizing for yield / monetary unit of inputs in your garden?
The reality is, people pull huge per-space-unit yields out of lots one acre in size or smaller, and they do it all the time, with very little in the way of costs.
Now, if you want to talk about soil exhaustion over multigenerational or even multi-decade time periods, that's valid, but a small plot is much more an expanse of growing medium than a farm that needs to be tended over long periods through natural processes to keep costs down. It's either going to be permaculture or a not-quite-synthetic medium.
Hi Everyone,
It's your dot dot dash EARNINGS ARE NEGATIVE guy,
Blogger: Page not found
[update: 8:30 am PST. This horrifying graph was taken down one hour after i posted this.]
Bloomturd is still at it this morning with the lies about PE
By Daniela Silberstein,
"Cheaper Than Europe
Between March 9 and May 9, the S&P 500 surged 37 percent in the steepest two-month advance since the 1930s on signs the global recession is easing. The benchmark index for U.S. equities traded at 14.4 times the earnings of its companies at the end of last week. "
U.S. Stocks Gain as Bank of America, Lowe’s Shares Advance - Bloomberg.com
For some reason the web page above cannot be saved, fortunately I can screenshot.
[update: 8:30 am PST. The byline was changed to Rita Nazareth from Daniela Silberstein and all references to PE removed one hour later. Are they making these names up?]
WE CANNOT LIE OUR WAY TO PROSPERITY.
This isn't just spin, THIS IS MATH!
The PE of the SP 500 is not 15.4, it is nearly EIGHT times as high, at 122 according to Barron's (who just updated their data from PE 62.4 last week):
Barron's Market Lab Table - Barrons.com
Their sister site WSJ still has S&P 500 PE at 14.93.
P/Es & Yields on Major Indexes - Markets Data Center - WSJ.com
P/Es & Yields on Major Indexes - Markets Data Center - WSJ.com
Another Bloomberg distortion can be found by Lynn Thomasson on May 11 at the link below:
“Earnings Watch
The S&P 500 ended last week trading at 15.1 times its members’ reported earnings, according to Bloomberg data, the highest valuation since October.”
U.S. Stocks Slide From Four-Month High on Earnings Valuations - Bloomberg.com
Is otis the only one watching the earnings watchers? Thankfully we still have access to unprocessed facts.
Ned Davis Research asserts the PE is even higher at 131.05:
http://comstockfunds.com/files/NLPP00000/414.pdf
Here's another chart:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/5-15-09-weekly-sp-w-p-e.gif
Not only is PE super duper high. It is about to turn negative.
If we will let these shills lie to us about MATH, then we deserve all the collapse and fascism we get.
YouTube - Kevin Bacon - Fraternity Paddle
YouTube - Kevin Bacon - Fraternity Paddle
Furthermore, we cannot be so dull that we will continually buy the unattributed “better than expected” earnings drivel. Near as I can tell, when ever you see that phrase it means at least a 30% plunge in profit. Who comes up with these estimates and why are investors so happy they are always wrong?
Is the financial press employing ostriches or are reporters so terrified of losing their jobs that they will say and lie about anything, no matter how bold of blatant?
They are lying about math. It is an insult. PLEASE GOD help people add and give them the courage to believe the sums they total.
They are going to hurt people with these lies.
Here are these reporters e-mails. You have my permission to copy this rant and send it to them.
dsilberstei2@bloomberg.net
lthomasson@bloomberg.net
MAATH!
A vein just blew out of my forehead and splattered blood all over my monitors.
Bloomturd, you owe me new monitors!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ug
Lowe's up 9% pre-market. Green shoots
"... bigger ticket projects continue to be postponed ... as spring arrived, we saw relative strength in smaller, outdoor projects."
Gardening projects?
Wait, Holy Crap, is that geitner with the paddle??
YouTube - Kevin Bacon - Fraternity Paddle
Intense pressure?
Tis but a flesh wound!
Yet Lowe's keeps on building as nothing has changed.
reptilian, I would guess that is most of their business right now. We went to Lowes the other evening and there were no lines in the main store and very few shoppers. I needed some miracle gro so I wandered back to the gardening center and there was a long line at check out and many people shopping...
.....exactly, reptilian and Kristina.........right on the nose - for HD as well here.
Comrade Kristina: those with more than two brain cells are making gardens
screw the new bath, the kitchen can wait, and the kid can just move out in lieu of another bedroom
Hey, Sonny--how's it in the tent?
Ya gotta eat, and maybe some are 'getting' it now. Wait til the trucks stop running...
I know where the gardens are and I have my camo paint and ninja suit ready for foraging runs.
BTW, BSR, what was your address?
Same on Merritt Island. But more shoppers in the main store of Home D
Off to Miami/Hialeah.
Well, they say they still have earnings!!!
Otis -everything is for the best in the Bloomberg world. Buy, baby, buy!
Pound to Rally After 20% Slump Makes British Real Estate a `Screaming Buy'
The pound’s 20 percent drop in the past year made Britain the first choice when Schroders Plc started buying real estate in Europe last month.
The Governator said that CA cannot print money but, "If I was in Washington, I would be printing money." (NPR)
Great plan, CA.
Black Star Ranch (profile) wrote on Mon, 5/18/2009 - 12:51 am
.....a global problem was solved here last night. I found my plastic garden signs. All rows are now appropriately identified with all relevant data
Transparency reigns at BSR.
. . . Unless Moody's did the signage.
BSR:...- outside of a few missing points; "Mystery Squash", or "Mystery 'Maters", or "All of the Above Onions".
Uh oh, Level 3 produce.
Sorry for the drive-by. How long before the BLS has to admit the same?
ONS gets sums wrong on retail sales
One of Britain’s most closely watched economic indicators has heavily overstated the quantity of high street sales over the past two years, the Office for National Statistics admitted on Friday.
Britain’s supplier of official statistics conceded that since the financial crisis began in August 2007, it has overstated the volume of retail sales growth by 56 per cent.
Many economists have been worried for some time that the published retail sales figures were too strong and have always received a furious response from the ONS.
Food for thought...
Cost to print a $100.00 Banknote = 10 Cents
1/1000th of face value
George Washington bemoaned that it took a cartload of Continental Currency to pay for a cartload of supplies. When the government finally allowed them to be redeemed, it was at only 1/1000 of the printed value.
"The Governator said that CA cannot print money "
Sure it can. But scrip won't get you very far if no one uses it.
lowes profit down 22% their stock up about 10% pre-market.
I'm going back to the swamp.
I can't live with the ostriches no more.
Taxes to rise 81%...
The 81% Tax Increase - Forbes.com
To summarize, we see that taxpayers are on the hook for Social Security and Medicare by these amounts: Social Security, 1.3% of GDP; Medicare part A, 2.8% of GDP; Medicare part B, 2.8% of GDP; and Medicare part D, 1.2% of GDP. This adds up to 8.1% of GDP. Thus federal income taxes for every taxpayer would have to rise by roughly 81% to pay all of the benefits promised by these programs under current law over and above the payroll tax.
funny I heard a "fact" on Bloomberg that , in regards to raising taxes on only the ones earning over 250K , that actually if you took everyone that earned over 250K and took 100% in taxes it would still not cover all the costs of the government promises.....wonder if this is true
Also heard a fact the only 20% of people polled, when asked, knew "how many millions are in a trillion?"
I know where the gardens are and I have my camo paint and ninja suit ready for foraging runs.
Anyone know where to get cheap IR cameras?
"George Washington bemoaned that it took a cartload of Continental Currency to pay for a cartload of supplies."
Old joke: What's the difference between the pound, the dollar and the ruble?
A pound of rubles equals one dollar.
Just about everyone I know has grown some kind of garden this year. For some of course it is simply a "psychological" feel good mechanism. One guy is growing tomatoes and peppers on his patio, he's never bothered to do so before. He certainly can't feed himself with his yield but it makes him feel like he is doing something to help himself out. I put in a a small kitchen garden on my courtyard, I have peppers, herbs and tomatoes. It won't feed us if TSHTF but it will save us some money over the summer and well into fall here in Florida. That along with my overstuffed freezers and pantry would probably get us through a few months if supply chains break down.
Especially with oil and other commodities blasting off to the moon while wages remain flat.
Thanks Ben!
ac, wages are only flat for those that are "lucky' enough to still have jobs...See, there's a green shoot for ya!
Gresham's Law: rethought
Gresham's Law states that bad money drives out good money, and as a consequence it takes a bunch of bad money to get a meager amount of good money.
Confusing, but not really.
The Romans showed the way. way back when. I think they had the first bad money, a Denarius Alchemy Derivative.
The empire's money was copper, silver & gold. There were many denominations of copper coins, but strangely enough, only one denomination each of silver and gold coinage. The ratio was set @ 25 silver Denarii equaling 1 gold Aureus which lasted for hundreds of years. Like our current empire, Roman forts were far-flung and costly to maintain. The army had a long history of being paid for their efforts in silver Denarii, and the silver coins for several hundred years were of high fineness, (approx 95% purity) and as the accounts receivables weren't matching up with the accounts payables after the salad days were through, the debasement of the Denarius began, dropping down to 65% pure. The problem with debasing silver was you could only do baby-steps, for if you went too far in your efforts, and say, got to a 65% copper-35% silver mixture, the resulting coin would look more like copper, whoops~
Enter high technology...
Some wizard figured out how to silver-wash (a crude form of electroplating) copper coins, allowing the empire to produce Denarii with just a scintilla of silver in them, and the chimera ruse worked for awhile, but people got wise, and so began the great devaluation of the Denarius~
By about the middle of the 4th Century a.d., it took about 3,500 Denarii to equal 1 Aureus.
A more current example of Gresham's Law would be any Dime, Quarter or Half Dollar dated before 1965, consisting of 90% silver. Each of these denominations of which billions & billions were produced, now has almost 10x the face value in current bad money (copper-nickel coinage or paper money) in just silver content alone. When was the last time you received a pre-1965 silver coin in change?
Gresham's Law was in regards to metallic money, but in our world it's no so easy to decipher the good & the bad, as our money is more symbolism than anything else.
So how does one differentiate between and betwixt what exists now?
As ever more massive amounts of symbolism are churned out, the only thing it does is mix with previously thought of good money and dirty it, but can you tell the difference?
I can't.
Pavel: Sure it can. But scrip won't get you very far if no one uses it.
That is why government mandates use of Federal Reserve Notes (FRN) to pay taxes and declares FRN as legal tender for transactions (artifical demand by fiat).
Is the SP 500 PE of 122.45 "better than expected ?"
Barron's Market Lab Table - Barrons.com
last week barron's had it at 64. where they expecting, infinity?
I think Lowes, HD, others have discovered 'recession economics'... in booms folks plan 'big projects' and then contract it out to 'renovation specialists' pay top dollar and don't sweat it... in busts they think small, do sweat equity and do it themselves. The old time vs money trade off - you never have a lot of both but usually have one or the other. Now it is 'time'.
Hray, all these gardens are cash not spent at wal-mart buying groceries.
Especially with oil and other commodities blasting off to the moon
Market Vectors Agribusiness (MOO)
MKT VECT AGRBSHS ETF Chart - Yahoo! Finance
Updating some research from Richard Vedder of Ohio University, we found that from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.
Did the greater prosperity in low-tax states happen by chance? Is it coincidence that the two highest tax-rate states in the nation, California and New York, have the biggest fiscal holes to repair? No. Dozens of academic studies -- old and new -- have found clear and irrefutable statistical evidence that high state and local taxes repel jobs and businesses.
Soak the Rich, Lose the Rich - WSJ.com
I think all of this talk of backyard gardens is somewhat funny. Who among you have ever actually tended a backyard garden? You would know that yields are small, unpredictable, you do a lot of growing before you get any yield (better have other sources of food stored) and that you can't buy enough firepower at your local gardening store to keep pests at bay with any real success.
In the old days (when people lived off of the land, rather than in the matrix) we grew lots of corn and wheat and milled the stuff into foodstuffs that we could store - flour, corn meal, etc. We did a lot of canning for preservation, etc. Most people - particularly those in cities - just don't own big enough lots with enough diversification of soil type and room for rotation to grow enough food for this to work and support a family of 3 or 4.
Random thought: those "in the know" might be stockpiling fertilizer to later sell for food...
/rambling off
I've been thinking about post WW1 Germany a lot lately...
The infrastructure of Germany in 1919 was intact, but in economic tatters. Defeated in a multi-front war not so much by military action from the opposing side, but worn down from never-ending battles that went nowhere, fast.
What's the difference between Germany's war reparations and our debt reparations currently?
Germany's debt wasn't denominated in Marks, whereas our debt is almost all in Dollars.
We have the opportunity to welsh on most, if not all of our debt by simply buggering the buck. It's a very cowardly way to go about doing things, but it appears we've run out of options and it's full speed ahead, never mind the consequences, which are dire.
Backyard gardening is a great way to pass the time when you don't have a job.
Gardening has one extremely important learning attribute that it passes to each and every gardner that tills the soil...
That attribute being patience.
Reserve-currency status internationalizes the normally domestic artificial demand by fiat.
FD, I live in Florida, there is no "greater prosperity' here. Wages suck, services suck, attitudes suck, and UE is skyhigh...try again. Oh, and they had to go into special session in order to try and balance the budget, they are closing many schools just in our community to try and make ends meets...Please explain how prosperous we are here?
never mind the consequences, which are dire.
relax, they don't have the moral certitude to do anything other than take it
Growing a cucumber is more productive than building a Chrysler.
I liken us to a gambler that waltzed into Vegas with $10 million of borrowed money, lost it all except for a few thousand left over, and now we are playing 15 spot keno tickets in a mad attempt to recoup our losses.
The only difference being we have to pay for our own watered-down cocktails...
Rocky, I mentioned earlier for many is is more a psychological, feel good activity. At least they feel as if they are doing something...You are correct on the fighting pests and weather though. Not many could live off what they grow.
"Growing a cucumber is more productive than building a Chrysler."
Hahaha! Amen.
Comrade Kristina,
But florida has hot teachers who sleep with their junior high students..
"I think all of this talk of backyard gardens is somewhat funny. Who among you have ever actually tended a backyard garden? You would know that yields are small, unpredictable, you do a lot of growing before you get any yield (better have other sources of food stored) and that you can't buy enough firepower at your local gardening store to keep pests at bay with any real success."
buy some roma tomato seeds and a bottle of neem oil and you will have all the tomatoes you want in july. probably won't even need the neem oil.
Florida was not far behind CA/NV in the housing bubble and FL inflicted itself with market-distorting property-tax rules that inhibit adjustment.
Not One Cent,
Ever try driving a cucumber to work?
We have the opportunity to welsh on most, if not all of our debt by simply buggering the buck. It's a very cowardly way to go about doing things, but it appears we've run out of options and it's full speed ahead, never mind the consequences, which are dire.
There's no choice at this point but to default on a bunch of debt. The question is just whether we do it in a structured way with accountability or an unstructured way with no accountability.
I think at this point it is obvious which path we will choose.
@traderwalt
Every try driving a Chrysler?
Lucifer,
FL teachers only do that to stimulate the kids.
ac,
or we can threaten to..
I think all of this talk of backyard gardens is somewhat funny. Who among you have ever actually tended a backyard garden? You would know that yields are small, unpredictable, you do a lot of growing before you get any yield (better have other sources of food stored) and that you can't buy enough firepower at your local gardening store to keep pests at bay with any real success.
I have - it isn't so hard & yields are sky high if you know what you are doing & diversify. But it takes time & effort [more than money]... it is the effort part that is the buzz kill for most folks.
LMAO @ Rocky R.....ouch.
RockyR,
Touche and no.
Hyperinflation down under, down Mexico way...
There's a lot of misunderstanding about hyperinflation, and perhaps it's best to look @ our neighbor to the south to see what happened when ruinous hyperinflation appeared for the first time in Mexico's history.
The period of time spanned from the late 1970's to the early 1990's, and the repercussions of it are very much evident.
When I was a teenager in the early to mid 1970's, the rate of exchange was a constant 12.5 Pesos to the Dollar... by 1992 it had reached over 10,000 Pesos to the Dollar.
Let's say you were Mexican middle-class, certainly a smaller one than ours, but say you had 100,000 Pesos savings in the bank in 1975?
1975 U.S. Dollar Value: $8,000
1992 U.S. Dollar Value $10
Savers got creamed, adios middle-class.
Can you imagine the prices of consumer goods going only upwards for 15 years, with prices being revised in markets on a constant basis, with wages not keeping up?
Growing up as a kid in L.A in the 1970's., there were certainly Mexican immigrants around, many of them 2nd & 3rd generation, but it seemed like immigrants tended to be seen only in the border states, and then came a hyperinflation spiral downwards, and corresponding with their time in financial hell, with heaven (stable U.S. economy) just above, the floodgates opened wide and a mass of humanity, "financial freedom fighters" made their way to the promissory note land.
The drug cartels?
Another by-product of hyperinflation. Marijuana, if held long-term (yeah, like that's gonna happen...) has proven to be an excellent investment~
When I was a kid, you could buy a 4 finger lid (a sandwich bag 4 fingers high full) for $20. The equivalent amount today of admittedly much better herb would set you back around $150.
So, put yourself in the position of being in a country that has little to offer the outside world (except for state controlled oil which was plunging in price down to $10 a barrel), when the only thing you've got left to sell, is drugs?
It certainly took awhile for violence to show it's dirty mug, but one could easily compare Al Capone's Chicago circa 1927, to goings on in Mexico presently.
Should hyperinflation hit us like it did Mexico, where will all the American Financial Freedom Fighters end up immigrating to?
dum luk,
I wish I had hot junior high teachers who slept with me..
Not One Cent, dont' get me started on the property taxes...I'm paying on 185K assessment. I'd be lucky to sell for 150K...
ac,
IMO the policy choices point to a preference to unwind over-time, in an orderly fashion, a few bumps in the road on our way to devaluation, not too sudden.
IMHO I don't think just because this is the preference that we will in fact unwind quite how they want it to unwind.
--bh
No, nor have I tried to eat a car, but the current automobile oversupply determines the relative value of competing activities.
"What's the difference between Germany's war reparations and our debt reparations currently?"
Currently (thanks to the WWII aftermath) the USD is the primary reserve currency of the world. Ostensibly, buggering the buck will, at least for a while, also bugger all the other currencies.
NateTG,
You are correct, it's a one-size fails all scenario.
Traderwalt, I read that health article and left a couple comments.
wow, not one comment on the earnings info i posted above?
this is the finance blog, right?
"The Governator said that CA cannot print money"
Spend it like you stole it!
Ck,
I somewhat agree, but can not deny that the rich do choose FL over other states, and maybe relative to CA and NV FL is good, BK rules are protective....
I agree with the above the bubble has hurtthe area, but worse than it was before the bubble, maybe the UE should be considerd in the scheme of things prebubble, maybe those UE are UE because their job was based on fantasy that lasted 7 years ....
Backyard gardening is a great way to pass the time when you don't have a job.
So is home improvement. I have tons of projects around the house which I already have the supplies for, but just no freaking TIME to do them, because I have to work six days a week.
Haha... I just saw what happened with India.
So their major stock index has almost DOUBLED since March?
What year is this again?
In the old days (when people lived off of the land, rather than in the matrix) we grew lots of corn and wheat and milled the stuff into foodstuffs that we could store - flour, corn meal, etc. We did a lot of canning for preservation, etc. Most people - particularly those in cities - just don't own big enough lots with enough diversification of soil type and room for rotation to grow enough food for this to work and support a family of 3 or 4.
Also not true assuming you aren't talking about high rise living. Typical city lot if square foot gardened can produce a lot of the food a family of 3-4 would need - not the grains so much but many of the veggies, greens, root crops, etc. And as for fertilizer they have plenty of that too if they decide to quite flushing it down the toilet. That and composting... plus more recent developments like 'terra preta'. Have to take precautions regarding disease & parasite transmission with some of this stuff but the 'biomass' necessary for continued 'urban farming' is right there.
It's the back breaking work that turns out to be the big hurdle - It's what keeps me from going 'green acres'... I've done it before it really is a lot of work.
IMO the policy choices point to a preference to unwind over-time, in an orderly fashion, a few bumps in the road on our way to devaluation, not too sudden.
The problem is that in order for this process to really be "orderly" our bondholders have to be suicidal.
This may be why oil is already up almost 80% despite genuine oversupply concerns.
FD, I really don't care where the "rich" choose to live. They move here to retire and be warm. Last year was the first year that Florida actually lost more people than they gained so apparently the data you are using is older. We also have one of the worst education systems in the country. Churning out illiterates is their forte here. We do have a super high inmate population though, so we have that going for us down here.
RockyR,
Not sure where your coming from. There is a middle ground between the psychological aspects of a few container plants and plowing 40 acres. Square-foot gardening (yes, there's a learning curve...so what?) can yield enough to supplement the food for a family--especially the high-cost vitamin laden things like greens. Anybody growing corn with beans with squash can also supplement a reasonably complete protein/starch/fiber diet...plus canning to preserve for the winter, plus growing some berries and grapes which can also be preserved. A few 20x20 beds can be very productive. You compost your scraps. You compost your moron neighbor's leaves which they just want to bag up and have "taken away"...
For the mad-max scenario I'm not stockpiling fertilizer. Small metal cylinders neatly stocked and stockpiled however, yes. Bourbon as well.
--bh
CK,
Just threw the article out for comment. Not endorsing, easy off, we dont move there becaue we have kids and do not want o suffer them the education system. And my wife is an educator... Again, not my data, you'll have to se the article from where the data came from...
No problem FD, just wanted to point out their data might not be incredibly accurate from where I'm sitting. Good choice on the education/kids thing. My husband and I already decided should we ever have any we would homeschool or move.
Typical city lot if square foot gardened can produce a lot of the food a family of 3-4 would need - not the grains so much but many of the veggies, greens, root crops, etc. And as for fertilizer they have plenty of that too if they decide to quite flushing it down the toilet.
City lots also have pleasant things like lead contamination, arsenic and PCBs. What's especially nice is when municipalities bring in contaminated dirt from construction projects for use in community gardens.
Not one cent,
I read your comments. I'm sure that we will have plenty of time to comment here on new health care proposals.
swamp otis,
I must confess, I'm a bit amazed at my own reaction to your p/e posts. It is as if I did not want to invest the time to investigate because I've already proven to myself this rally is insane from four other point of reference. It turns my stomach to think I could spend more tedious hours working out numbers only to watch the market defy reality from another point of view.
I find your p/e claims interesting. I simply don't need additional ammunition to already agree with your conclusion.
CK,
However, I am trying to take our economy and the indicators in perspective. "what were the stats in 2000?" anything elese was built on a house of cards.
I mean i try and think of 2000 as zero on the line, similar to CS report using 1991 (i believe) as their 100 reference. What is an appropriate zero or 100 is anyones guess. But population is FL since 2002 could have been based on easy money and the purchases of second homes, or vacation homes.... maybe people are leaving because they have to. But maybe population is still above what would have been an acceptable annual increase had we not had the bubble....IMHO
Same here dum luk, our entire financial system is a facade. I think everyone here already agrees with that statement...
in other news:
Strong sales of Spam, Dinty Moore stew and chili helped Hormel Foods Corp. post a 6% increase in first quarter sales in its grocery products unit.
FD, do you think the lower tax rates have anything to do with the abysmal education system here? I went to Public School in Massachusetts as a child. I received a top notch education and when I moved during my Junior year to the Chicago area, I was a full year and half ahead of what they were teaching. I spent the last year and half of HS twiddling my thumbs while they taught what I had learned as a Sophomore...
I suspect that a good many people are going to pay around $25 a pound for their carrot crop, when it's all said and done.
Dinty Moore stew and Alpo beef stew for dogs smells identical.
" I simply don't need additional ammunition to already agree with your conclusion"
Same for me.
The P/E ratio is interesting but it's a confirmation of market distortion, a symptom not a cause.
"I find your p/e claims interesting. I simply don't need additional ammunition to already agree with your conclusion."
thanks dum luk,
i was feeling invisible.
i'd like to point out that these are not claims but actual data.
and seriously, tell me that doesn't look like geitner spanking kevin bacon!
Mal and others who claim you can't grow a ton of food on a city lot, check out this site.
Path to Freedom Urban Homestead
Granted, these guys are fanatics, but they produce so much produce that they sell their excess to an organic restaurant in the summer/ fall. They also have chickens/ducks/goats...all on .2 acres with a 1500sft house. I wish their photo gallery was online right now, but it won't open for me. They also have some videos up at YouTube here: YouTube - dervaes Channel
Honestly, they exhaust me just reading about everything they do, but it's not hard to raise some vegetables in a couple of raised beds that can cut down on your produce bills. We give away tomatoes and cucumbers to the neighbors and they give us apples. I'm thinking about taking out a decorative tree and replacing it with some kind of fruit tree. I'm considering adding a few more raised beds and expanding the garden since ahem I have a lot more time this summer to look after it. But right now, with the beds I have planted it takes very little time (more to check on bugs and weeds than anything else) to care for, I put it on an automated drip system about three years ago.
When I was a kid we had a 1/3 acre lot and grew corn and several types of melons and squashes and we still had room for a pool, patio, and lawn out back too.
Cheers.
Backyard gardens in CA lose money. No water subsidy like the big boys get.
Comrade Kristina (profile) wrote on Mon, 5/18/2009 - 7:04 am
FD, do you think the lower tax rates have anything to do with the abysmal education system here [Florida]? I went to Public School in Massachusetts as a child. I received a top notch education and when I moved during my Junior year to the Chicago area, I was a full year and half ahead of what they were teaching. I spent the last year and half of HS twiddling my thumbs while they taught what I had learned as a Sophomore...
Comrade Kristina do you think the high tax rates have anything to do with the abysmal education system here [California]?
I too went through the Massachusetts education system. My mom was director of competency compliance so her job was to see you learned the right stuff in high school. I'll tell her you are a satisfied customer.
Regards the prospects for Lowes/HD. dryfly is correct about substitution. When they talk about "big ticket items" they really mean high profit margin items. They sometimes also mean credit interest revenues. Truth is the only reason they are eeking out any profit is because their input costs are declining and they haven't yet been forced to cut customer prices.
RockyR (profile) wrote on Mon, 5/18/2009 - 9:34 am reply Ignore user I think all of this talk of backyard gardens is somewhat funny. Who among you have ever actually tended a backyard garden?
Umm, me? The yield's quite good as a supplemental food source. Ask anyone who lived through the Soviet Union. Also ask anyone who had to can entire basements full of mason jars.
You would know that yields are small, unpredictable, you do a lot of growing before you get any yield (better have other sources of food stored) and that you can't buy enough firepower at your local gardening store to keep pests at bay with any real success.
And that's why the human race died out millions of years ago. Abandon all hope and plan your mode of suicide.
If 90% of us die taking what measures we can, why should 99% percent of us die because we take no measures? That seems a bit lazy to me. Of course any sort of serious disaster will kill us like flies. Do you think we're simple? You do what you can and sometimes (perhaps in this case, mostly) it's not enough. Sorry if you want a bulletproof answer before you try anything, you'll never build anything. The problem is coming, sure as winter follows summer. You can work as hard as you can to achieve an answer, or you can be too smart to try.
Are you going to tell me something about historical 10% agricultural surplus? Because you might notice we are at the far end of history, and we have much greater diversity of plant stock, much greater base of knowledge, and oh, by the way, the keys to the secret of life. We're also not slaves / sharecroppers pretending to work so the Lord will pretend to pay us.
In the old days (when people lived off of the land, rather than in the matrix) we grew lots of corn and wheat and milled the stuff into foodstuffs that we could store - flour, corn meal, etc.
No wonder you think you'll starve to death as a farmer, you grew grains! That's strictly for professionals although things like SRI might change that.
We did a lot of canning for preservation, etc. Most people - particularly those in cities - just don't own big enough lots with enough diversification of soil type and room for rotation to grow enough food for this to work and support a family of 3 or 4.
How much is "support"? It's not like these people are going to live on individual isolated islands. They'll trade, they'll share, they'll supplement their diet with commercial foodstuffs when available.
Mal:
City lots also have pleasant things like lead contamination, arsenic and PCBs.
Because nobody can test for those or haul in different soil?
What's especially nice is when municipalities bring in contaminated dirt from construction projects for use in community gardens.
And because some community somewhere did it, QED, it must be like that at yours.
Alas, how the human race's efforts are futile despite centuries piled upon centuries of agronomy and the ability to engineer new organisms. Better to eat a little lead and live than starve to death "healthy". Whatever the soil contamination may be, the certitude of death due to lack of caloric input really just turns the long term health impacts into rent on continued life.
It's not magic, but I think the grasshoppers that are looking down their noses at the ants struggling to do what they can mostly expect to be free riders.
you know we are all only six degrees of separation from kevin bacon so by extension that guy is spanking all of us!
I'm not saying you can't grow a ton of food on a city lot. I'm saying that most city (and suburban) dwellers have no idea what contaminants are in the dirt.
CK,
Dont think wrt lower taxes education, if you read the article NH has lower per child and no taxes and has fourth highest test scores...
"Those who disapprove of tax competition complain that lower state taxes only create a zero-sum competition where states "race to the bottom" and cut services to the poor as taxes fall to zero. They say that tax cutting inevitably means lower quality schools and police protection as lower tax rates mean starvation of public services.
They're wrong, and New Hampshire is our favorite illustration. The Live Free or Die State has no income or sales tax, yet it has high-quality schools and excellent public services. Students in New Hampshire public schools achieve the fourth-highest test scores in the nation -- even though the state spends about $1,000 a year less per resident on state and local government than the average state and, incredibly, $5,000 less per person than New York. And on the other side of the ledger, California in 2007 had the highest-paid classroom teachers in the nation, and yet the Golden State had the second-lowest test scores."
Not all of California is on metered water.
Because nobody can test for those or haul in different soil?
That's bloody expensive for a poor urban mother of 3 who wants to start a garden.
So, who will be our next heroes?
We worshipped money in the guise of Wall*Street & the take-home pay of overpaid athletes & Hollywood types, but that's so 2008, ain't it?
The new heroes have to not give a whit about money...
CK,
Since moving here in the DC MSA since summer 2004, wife and i have been renting. paid out 122-125K in rent. Would have of course, lost a lot more than that if we bought.
What we are doing as we look to buy is take comparable sales or sale of porperty we are interested in back in 2000-2002 years. We then add 4% appreciation yoy to that number and then that is what we consider a fair and equitable price, as most homes prior to the bubble appreciated 4% as a high end.
That number and the asking prices are getting much closer now. Thew delta is 10% on avg so people are wising up , realtors are becoming more realistic.... i dont know. But that is our rationale since it was 2000 when life was normal.
So i look at employement numbers the same way. While our UE numbers are high, the number employed across the various employment sectors is still above the numbers of 2000-2002 so the UE havent dug into the baseline real world numbers,
Of course that doesnt mean diddly poo tpo those that are UE....
RD, can't speak for Cali, never been there. I have lived in FL and MA and notice a striking disparity in education. Yes, you may relay that message, my education was indeed a gift of high quality in Massachusetts, although that was 25 years ago...
one last point:
"consider the fiasco of New Jersey. In the early 1960s, the state had no state income tax and no state sales tax. It was a rapidly growing state attracting people from everywhere and running budget surpluses. Today its income and sales taxes are among the highest in the nation yet it suffers from perpetual deficits and its schools rank among the worst in the nation -- much worse than those in New Hampshire. Most of the massive infusion of tax dollars over the past 40 years has simply enriched the public-employee unions in the Garden State. People are fleeing the state in droves."
AMF,
If there is war on the horizon, you know what the new 'heroes' will be.
mal (profile) wrote on Mon, 5/18/2009 - 10:15 am reply Ignore user Because nobody can test for those or haul in different soil?
That's bloody expensive for a poor urban mother of 3 who wants to start a garden.
Wow, but this was in the context of community gardens, wasn't it?
Imagine that, agricultural exptensions. Community garden programs. Localities providing basic capital goods support. Agricultural combines. It's as if, the human race has had to raise food for thousands of years to feed itself, and there are all these technologies here we can use.
Oh wait, let's move the goalposts over to here. Urban mother of 3; no community, no support mechanisms, no ability to share labor. Wow, must be hard on her, given that she's got three kids and is a member of a social species.
She'll live or die, depending on her efforts, not your smugness. Who cares if she'll more probably live or die! She would surely rather try than not! If you would not, then, make sure you fend off charity in your starvation.
You can argue all you want about PEs and how insane the U.S. market is.
But if you want a real sign of market insanity, look at what happened in India last night. Up 17%.
Emerging markets show the real insanity and speculation.
There's probably never, ever before been this much leveraged speculation and manipulation going on inside a severe, prolonged global economic downturn. Money is being pumped straight from govts. and central banks into stock markets. They don't even try to hide it any more.
Hmm, Zillow's Top 10 biggest cities of frog people, led by Vegas with an estimated 67% being underwater. Does this mean Lowe's has same stores that are performing at 71%-75% top pick up th slack?
House-Price-Drops-Leave-More-Underwater: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance
V777,
If there's a war, it's not going to be conventional like all of the various proxy wars fought since 1945.
I'm looking for the new heroes to be somebody like a backcountry ranger in the Sierra Nevada, pulling down $16 an hour, employed for just 5 months a year, that has a patrol area of about 50 square miles, has to be EMT trained, incredibly well fit, and completely comfortable being in the wilderness.
something like that...
I've been using a drip irrigation sysytem this year in Ca. Cuts the water bill to a fraction of prior years. Even if the garden fails, it instills in one an appreciation of the US capitalist system that provides well stocked grocery stores for all its citizens. The silver lining in this recession is it will give the younger generations who have not experienced want of any kind a more balanced perspective.
I just found this bit on productivity from the Dervaes link I posted earlier:
The yard has over 350 varieties of edible and useful plants. The homestead's productive 1/10 acre organic garden now grows over 6,000 pounds (3 tons) of produce annually. This provides fresh vegetables and fruit for the family’s vegetarian diet and a source of income.</>
"There's probably never, ever before been this much leveraged speculation and manipulation going on inside a severe, prolonged global economic downturn. Money is being pumped straight from govts. and central banks into stock markets. They don't even try to hide it any more."
great let them buy all the stocks and trade amongst themselves. the governments are doing retail investors a favor by buying their earningless markets giving them an out. that is, they are doing a favor for the investors who are awake enough to understand that the value of any business is the present value of it's future earnings stream.
Re: "relative strength in smaller, outdoor projects"
I guess Home Depot will also cash in on the rush of people spraying weed killer. I would also imagine that WMT is stealing away small amounts of customers who are pinching pennies for jugs of Roundup. Huge weed market divided among many players!
Heroes are a topic I talk to my dad about a lot. One of the things he is still irate about is the soldiers who should have received recognition in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reasons were mostly petty, and some political. But mostly it is because the military is all volunteer. The war that is coming will be different, it will bring back the draft, and then we will have 'heroes' again. A volunteer army is mercenary, but we have to worship those that are chosen in a draft to ease public guilt.
That's bloody expensive for a poor urban mother of 3 who wants to start a garden.
Christ, mal, lay off it. You're not going to convince anyone that gardening produces no food.
AnonyMiss (profile) wrote on Mon, 5/18/2009 - 10:31 am
The homestead's productive 1/10 acre organic garden now grows over 6,000 pounds (3 tons) of produce annually.
You really want to stay at an acre or less. The insane productivity of kitchen-yard agriculture doesn't persist beyond certain scales. You might be able to get up to 3 acres if you have a lot of hands but you'll be drifting toward good enough rather than maximizing yield.
I've had the best luck with fruit trees and berries. Our fruit purchases at the farmer's market go way down in the summer. I've also concentrated on things that are expensive to buy or that really suffer quaility wise if you try to buy commerically. I grow raspberries, have two apple trees, a plum tree, and an orange tree. All require virtually no work except for picking and a little pruning in the winter. The trees don't get any supplemental water (I live in the SF East Bay), and the raspberries get watered once a week unless it's crazy hot. We hardly had to buy oranges this winter, and this with each of the 4 of us eating one a day. Have more plums than we can eat, make applesauce for winter, and have a bowl of fresh raspberries almost every day.
....my, my, my.......I come here to get away from my garden, cows, chickens, weeding, watering, and pestilence, and I get THIS here? LOL.
"Who among you have ever actually tended a backyard garden?"
Rocky, In a word, yes. In a normal backyard, you can grow enough to feed a family of four easily. If you can get the city to go along, eggs help as well. The water cost used to be a challenge, but due to the Israeli's help in inventing drip-irrigation, water cost is minimal. In our case, we have a well or two (only because I'm a "Doomer"). In regards to growing limited selections, we trade stuff with other gardeners. Yesterday I traded 3-bell pepper plants for 3-garlic plants. Now I have garlic. Are we self-sufficient? Well, I haven't found a free source for the 3-gallons of gas & 1-gallon of diesel I use every week. As far as ALL dairy, eggs, chicken, beef, pork, veggies, starch, fruit for jams & my fav; peach pie, we're set. What about you?
As far as ALL dairy, eggs, chicken, beef, pork, veggies, starch, fruit for jams & my fav; peach pie, we're set. What about you?
And don't you have emphysema?
BSR - How many acres do you have total, and how many do you use for your subsistence needs?
Utah spends relatively lttle per student but see its performance ranking.
Yes, Byz, I DO have emphysema. I'm hoping my running around the 5+ acres wheezing will keep me off oxygen a bit longer. Is it tough growing and tending? Yep - much harder than my past work. What would I change? I would have started earlier then an old man. I started it when I realized I might have to feed myself and family. I have very little income (less than poverty levels), and my happiest days are when I can drop off boxes and crates of tomatoes, peppers, cukes, eggs, and stuff to the 2-food pantries and the Sr. Center here in town. I don't pay squat for Fed taxes, but what I give back to the people who can use it - is fulfilling and needed.
I have less then an acre in veggies, herbs, & root stock. Next year with the grace of God I'll get my tractor running and grow twice as much. I love it.
mal (profile) wrote on Mon, 5/18/2009 - 7:14 am
I'm not saying you can't grow a ton of food on a city lot. I'm saying that most city (and suburban) dwellers have no idea what contaminants are in the dirt.
That's what the mustard seeds are for!!!
I'm not kidding, mustard plants do a great job pulling heavy metals and crap out of the soil the first year, you just have to weed it all out and then try and sterilize the soil before planting again.
Byzantine_Ruins (homepage, profile) wrote (in reply to...) on Mon, 5/18/2009 - 7:36 am
Oh, trust me, I will probably stay well under 100 feet, I'm not going for self sustainability as much as I do it for pleasure and good taste. If I need to grow more due to inflation factors, I do have room to expand.
I'm just amazed by people like the Dervaes', BSR, and Joanna who can produce so much with relatively small plots of land.
"The water cost used to be a challenge, but due to the Israeli's help in inventing drip-irrigation, water cost is minimal."
Backyard gardeners who use city water are indulging in nothing more than an expensive hobby. Drip irrigation and rain barrels help but there is significant set up cost. When the cost of soil, amendment, fertilizer, lime, seeds, tools, hoses, apparel, wood for boxes, poles, cages, and sweat labor are properly amortized most gardeners would be better off buying organic produce at Whole Paycheck (TM).
PS: I have been a backyard gardener for 20+ years.
yuan....
......you might be right. I haven't had to deal with water, fertilizer, amendment, and other costs for a while.
I wouldn't know a "Whole Paycheck" if I saw one.....
FINANCIAL CRISIS FIXED ACCORDING OT EXPERTS???
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ajgUp7xQIn6c&refer=home
http://iamned.com/blog/
yuan (profile) wrote on Mon, 5/18/2009 - 11:19 am
Backyard gardeners who use city water are indulging in nothing more than an expensive hobby.
Even accepting your pricing model assertions, "expensive hobby" is a good model for the enterprise only as long as you think that it doesn't provide calories / nutrients along the margin of sustainability.
If you need to eat any of that food, then you are paying increased unit costs to pull the supply point down the chain to where you control it, rather than being subject to price / quantity rationing. In that case, the additional costs have significant utility because they are not providing you with pleasure, they are rent on the ability to self-supply in the absence of a reliable supply chain.
And that is only with the current model of capital / goods flows. As it becomes more popular / necessary and attracts more basic investment, you will see per-unit costs drop. Likewise, if there are quantity shortfalls, price rationing or pure rationing will skew the costs on the different strategies. Is pricing a survival strategy in the context of a non-survival environment correct?
Drip irrigation and rain barrels help but there is significant set up cost. When the cost of soil, amendment, fertilizer, lime, seeds, tools, hoses, apparel, wood for boxes, poles, cages, and sweat labor are properly amortized most gardeners would be better off buying organic produce at Whole Paycheck (TM).
Except that it makes you supply line dependent. That's the same argument -- comparative advantage -- on a larger scope, that was made to keep the neocolonial system in place, and countries with low capital development in their place as resource cows to be exploited. It's not profitable right now so no investment should take place, regardless of future yield.
I think your arguments are specious and tiger development is coming to the backyard.
Particularly, I think your list of capital goods is one that you can spend any amount of money on. If you are relentless in controlling costs for your gardening, most of it will come from scavenging or recycling. Or you could spend thousands. Are you optimizing for yield / monetary unit of inputs in your garden?
The reality is, people pull huge per-space-unit yields out of lots one acre in size or smaller, and they do it all the time, with very little in the way of costs.
Now, if you want to talk about soil exhaustion over multigenerational or even multi-decade time periods, that's valid, but a small plot is much more an expanse of growing medium than a farm that needs to be tended over long periods through natural processes to keep costs down. It's either going to be permaculture or a not-quite-synthetic medium.