Edit: It will be interesting if things actually stop here. To my mind, this is an interlude before another sharp drop later this year or early next year as unemployment picks up and people hunker down even more.
Much of the increase was due to higher gas prices.
Without the ytd (5 month) gasoline sales increases, the numbers would be even uglier. Rising gas/oil prices against falling petroleum demand are not signs of a recovery.
The headline numbers are propaganda fuel these days. False CONfidence is not a sound basis for investing.
The "good news' is the cliff diving may have stopped.
As we start heading into Q3, the YoY metrics will be in reference to Lehman 08, so almost everything will look better. the new normal starts making sense.
Maybe the cliff diving is over, but no green shoots ....
Ahh, maybe we are finally on the bottom part of that "L" now!
Maybe, but probably not. With the two prior pigs on residential real estate and unemployment suggests a lot of pressure on consumer spending. Ten percent year over year is huge, though.
Takes more dollars to buy gas. This is not leveling.
We still have not "recorded" the effects of idled plants on secondary and tertiary businesses, state and city furlough. This is the bounce of the body as it hits an overhang on its way down to the canyon bottom.
With UE going to peak over 10% maybe to 15% Real Retail sales can be off 20% or more from the peak IMO
CR
In my minority opinion this is not a normal recession. This is a recession caused solely by the decline in assets not a slowdown in a particular sector. Asset declines led the downturn and things will not improve until we the declines stop and trend higher.
It looks like today is the future that all those HELOCs was borrowed against. Strangely, as it turns out everybody isn't rich by now. And where's my robot maid and flying car while we're at ti.
Not that I believe in crap like "resistance," but getting back to 2000 levels seems like a decent resting point.
And talk about spending: $130million for Ronaldo this morning? Sheesh. Maybe Spain ain't in such bad shape after all.
Dirk van Dijk (profile) wrote on Thu, 6/11/2009 - 9:16 am comrade mike, yeah and all that ammo is getting used up by right wing crazies shooting Dr's and turning museums into the OK Corral
Thanks Dirk, love you too. Remind me to call you a "LIEberal DemocRAT" for no reason some time.
Edit: No seriously. Your country almost got taken over by a right wing tyrant. You almost spent the short rest of your life in a gulag run by KBR. Were you gonna throw flowers at them when they came for you?
How quickly we forget when it's convenient for our politics.
I do not believe the cliff diving is over. What we see is the consumer unable to buy. What happens next is changed behavior taking hold and people becoming increasingly unwilling to spend. There's also another dynamic preparing to start. Expect a huge wave of retail consolidations; employment, number of outlets and square feet. Employment effects are obvious but there's a large body of work that says fewer outlets and smaller stores work against consumer spending as well. Did you ever wonder why the mall concept is so prevalent? Now, knock out a few stores and the entire mall suffers much more than the loss of those stores as a percentage of sales would suggest.
Got up early and watched the 5 am local news -- Monterey Bay, big ag area for produce (lettuce, artichokes, asparagus etc.) and fruit (berries, apples). Demand is down, prices are down, farmers are giving up leased fields.
A lot of what we produce around here are luxury crops or value-added (organic veggies, bagged prewashed lettuce). Not the sort of thing supermarket shoppers just have to have in Iowa. But it's still scary.
A lot of small businesses are going to get wiped out before the year is out.
I own a retail business and a strip shopping center. Between what I see every day and talking to my tenants the consumer is VERY careful with their $$'s. Business is still double digit down and everyone is burning cash/credit. The weak and some not so weak players will flame out (if they haven't already) well before things turnaround meaningfully. A plateau at this level will doom many so I suspect this is just another ledge to slip off of on the way down.
Also unseasonable weather, school holidays shifted to June, the NBA playoffs kept people home, the lack of a "must-have-items", delaying of tax filings and the declining performance of mothers going into Mothers Day also contributed.
Not just a retail consolidation. Think about the number of large and mid-size law firms and still the big 4 accounting firms. There is room at the very high-wage spectrum for attrition via merger and consolidation.
Initially these M&As will require legal and accounting expertise which will be good in the short term, but the number of clients left at the end will be reduced and make it difficult to maintain the current number of firms without like consolidation and further employment reduction.
I also see further room for attritioning out more engineers in the private sector. There really isn't that much money in the R&D space for government to support the current levels.
Bob Dobbs (homepage, profile) wrote on Thu, 6/11/2009 - 6:23 am
Got up early and watched the 5 am local news -- Monterey Bay, big ag area for produce (lettuce, artichokes, asparagus etc.) and fruit (berries, apples). Demand is down, prices are down, farmers are giving up leased fields.
Same here in Ventura County. With some old time families sitting on cost basis from the 1890s the idea of leasing at current market rates doesn't work anymore for tenant farming. I notice also a national draw down of corn and soy reserves. We could see any nascent recovery choked by a spike in retail food prices.
Agreed with the "if this is a plateau it's just a stairstep" crowd. Just too much leverage, too many debt piles based on optimistic future income stream projections.
I was at a major telecomms trade show this week. It was absolutely devastated. Attendance down by more than 50%. The organizers didn't even try to soft-pedal it, it was so bad. It was scheduled for 300 bucks / single day floor pass, and ended up having free floor admission to anyone who was interested to generate traffic.
comrade mike, yeah and all that ammo is getting used up by right wing crazies shooting Dr's and turning museums into the OK Corral
Please!...be more afraid of your neighbor than guns...people kill people, Just like animals attack other animals to eat, guns are just like any other tool in your shed.....ever point a nail gun and shoot?...no difference...Its called personal responsibility.
That nut job could have walked in the museum with a blow torch and burned the place down...would we ban blow torches?
El Lurko (profile) wrote on Thu, 6/11/2009 - 8:17 am
Not that I believe in crap like "resistance," but getting back to 2000 levels seems like a decent resting point.
Resistance is futile, or.. something... Seriously though, "resistance" is not that crazy of a concept, but it is a term of convenience, not hard science. In an arbitrarily-defined and relativistic system of measure, it's a behavioral reality that people tend to look to the past to anticipate future behavior. Rationally of course, we realize that the market price has no 'memory', it is simply a number, but if enough people expect that the future will be like the past, they'll look to previous peaks and valleys (the emotional "highs" and "lows") of the market price absent education in analysis, and lacking more sophisticated tools like MACD or various moving averages. Even with such tools, an inexperienced investor under stress will fall back to the same behavior and reliance upon expectations of "resistance".
Let me add that consumers smell 'blood in the water'.
I was watching NBC monday and they were doing a story on a chrysler dealership going out. Interviewing the owner he commented that many of the shoppers wanted 50% off of MSRP (and no, he couldn't sell at that price).
I've heard the same info. Basically, other dealerships are buying at a less steep discount, maybe 20-30% of MSRP. Which points out to me we're in for another leg down when those dealerships still cannot sell to a consumer who either does not want to buy a car, or cannot afford to do so.
Again, I think the aesthetic preference of wave after wave (gradualism) has been chosen over ripping the band-aid off.
I think the most informative charts that you use are the multiple-bar charts for monthly home sales - they display both monthly and yearly change at a glance and also show how long-term trends are developing.
Carlomagno (profile) wrote on Thu, 6/11/2009 - 8:41 am
Why would 9/11 lead to a spike in retail sles? Hoarding of food, guns and ammo?
Try to reassert the old paradigm... aka maybe if we keep doing what we were doing before, reality won't actually change. Trauma, first response: denial.
"Post a chart on the retail sales of ammo. The stuff is flying off the shelf"
Yeah, it's exploding off the shelf. But the consumer spending is suffering from recent economic wounds. And auto sales are pretty much shot for the time being...
NateTG (profile) wrote (in reply to...) on Thu, 6/11/2009 - 9:42 am I think it's a deliberate attempt to reduce shocks, which does make some sense.
My disagreement with this as a policy is that I think there are unaccounted frictional costs in applying the braking force, both in terms of the policy psychology established and the raw cost of resources expended. I don't think there's any argument that there should have been a mechanism in place to provide a graceful wind down, but I followed the careful lack of development of a mechanism for mega-bank wind down for years, and given the choice between a swift liquidation and the current tar baby, I don't think there's any question the liquidation will retrospectively be proven to be the better choice.
CR, we are at the plateau for a month or so; then, when California and the other states are forced to cut spending (c'mon July 28th!), the next leg down begins.
Would that all sources of statistics supply error estimates as the Census Bureau does (see numbers with * in the snippet which give the 90% confidence range).
We see that for month-to-month Advance Estimates, the potential error exceeds the absolute value of the change. Not something to stake your fortune on.
By the way, the new transmatch railfax is out, and there are some positive upticks in the 4 week rolls. Gotta run to a gig so no analysis but in short, it's not the horrifying collapse that last week hinted might be winding up.
Well, just looking at retail in LA, it seems like there's still so much overcapacity the system is chugging through. Go clothes shopping at the Beverly Center, for instance: everything is heavily discounted. No one could raise prices if they wanted to, because half a block away the same, dumbass shirt is available in nine colors. So it sits until someone, buyer or seller, gives in. And if neither do, the story just gets repeated 9 weeks later at Loemann's down the street. Repeat that story for any consumer good. Holy deflationary forces.
I've heard the same info. Basically, other dealerships are buying at a less steep discount, maybe 20-30% of MSRP. Which points out to me we're in for another leg down when those dealerships still cannot sell to a consumer who either does not want to buy a car, or cannot afford to do so.
Just as there is crazy amount of debt, there is a crazy amount of auto inventory. And the cash for clunkers program is horrible. The one thing the industry has going for it, though, is current auto mileage is very high (as reported by CR) and repairs are very costly. I don't think that's going to be a significant mitigating factor.
Another problem I foresee is the supply chain issue. Dryfly touched on this a while back about how some companies he deals with were not necessarily using the lowest cost vendor in order to keep the supply chain alive. I deal primarily with 3 vendors - they are the only ones that have truck delivery to my store. And lately their loads have been light to say the least. The largest (Buffet owned firm) delivered yesterday and the truck was about as empty as I have ever seen it - and I'm only about halfway through his route. If my suppliers go down then I'm up a creek NO MATTER HOW WELL I'VE PLANNED.
I've heard the same info. Basically, other dealerships are buying at a less steep discount, maybe 20-30% of MSRP. Which points out to me we're in for another leg down when those dealerships still cannot sell to a consumer who either does not want to buy a car, or cannot afford to do so.
Just as there is crazy amount of debt, there is a crazy amount of auto inventory. And the cash for clunkers program is horrible. The one thing the industry has going for it, though, is current auto mileage is very high (as reported by CR) and repairs are very costly. I don't think that's going to be a significant mitigating factor.
Being "incentivized" with our own stolen tax dollars to buy cars from a company we largely own so that it stays afloat will be great fun. Take advantage of our offer or not - your taxes will pay for it, citizen. And to think, folks used to complain about the military-industrial complex being rife with opportunity for moral hazard and cronyism.
Auto repairs generally not that high. $500 mo. car payments equal $6K a year compared to repairs plus you have higher insurance, license fees and sales tax. The longer you drive the old one the more you save.
The spike after 9/11 was due to a huge uptick in auto sales- the companies instituted 0% financing in combination with increased rebates. A lot of auto demand was pulled forward for that quarter.
"The "good news' is the cliff diving may have stopped."
Now it is time for some cliffhanger bribing. Threaten the guy below you that he must give his golden wedding ring or else..you will drop him. And when that sucker gives you the ring, drop him right away. Use that ring to bribe the guy above you to pull you up
OK. I think it's fair to say that we need to start defining the difference between a bear market rally and a bull market. The bear thesis is breaking down, hard.
Invitation to press conference
When: 18.00 hrs Geneva time, Thursday 11 June 2009
Where: Executive Board room, WHO headquarters
Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) will hold a press conference at 18:00 hrs Geneva time, Thursday, 11 June 2009 on influenza A(H1N1) in the Executive Board room at the WHO headquarters. WHO | Invitation to press conference
OK. I think it's fair to say that we need to start defining the difference between a bear market rally and a bull market. The bear thesis is breaking down, hard.
LOL just when you thought you seen everything this morning
CR: I'm no doomsayer, but to say that retail sales have now "bottomed at a much lower level" is a bit Panglossian, no?
Real retail sales are, at this moment, off less than 15% from their all-time peak.
Do you - does anyone on this board - honestly believe that this country at its debt-fueled, McMansion-loving peak was only 15% overstored? That consumers spent only 15% over their heads? That Americans were only buying 15% too many cars, clothes, household appliances, and other stuff?
I suppose it's possible, but I don't think it likely.
Do you - does anyone on this board - honestly believe that this country at its debt-fueled, McMansion-loving peak was only 15% overstored? That consumers spent only 15% over their heads? That Americans were only buying 15% too many cars, clothes, household appliances, and other stuff?
and it's breaking down how? Statements don't mean shit.....Please "educate" all of us how it's breaking down. Just because said market goes up doesn't cut it.
Mook no we're not near bottom, but IMHO it's likely that the decline in retail sales will be LESS than the decline in mortgage wealth. To the extant that the money was spent on mortgages (moving up to a bigger house, or making payments on the old one) or financial stuff like bonds, it's dissapearance won't impact retail to the same degree.
I can't see how we're "at bottom" yet. There are several events which need to fully pan out.
- Contraction of the car industry, we haven't see the end of the shakeout, even with the creation of Government motors there will be more job losses
- Teaser rate mortgages that are about to recast or reset in the next 2+ years. There will be more foreclosures
- Oil will be both a drag on the economy and is starting to look like a commodity bubble
- The REIT sector hasn't imploded yet
I could be completely and wildly wrong.. but the real bottom will be Q4-2010.
Don't short this market yet. The SPX may keep rallying for another 3 months or 3 years? who knows. pimple faced Geithner & bernanke run the show. Thay are sleezy, yes, but the stock market loves free money. wait till the distribution sets in. then short. We could see the SPX at 1200 -1300 b4 we get a nice bear market again.
as this recovery cycle begins, it really is not useful to compare retail numbers year over year. Let's plot a trend line instead for the past 3-6 months to see where we are going next...
Oh, First.
Edit: It will be interesting if things actually stop here. To my mind, this is an interlude before another sharp drop later this year or early next year as unemployment picks up and people hunker down even more.
good morning!
Five weekends in may.
June will be lower than may.
cr writes: "...maybe the cliff diving is over..."
Waiting a turn of the tide?
Good morning all. Yes black dog, retail is still weak in Q2. The "good news' is the cliff diving may have stopped. That is not much good news
best to all
Much of the increase was due to higher gas prices.
Without the ytd (5 month) gasoline sales increases, the numbers would be even uglier. Rising gas/oil prices against falling petroleum demand are not signs of a recovery.
The headline numbers are propaganda fuel these days. False CONfidence is not a sound basis for investing.
As always, the devil is in the details.
Maybe the cliff diving is over, but no green shoots ....
Ahh, maybe we are finally on the bottom part of that "L" now!
Wal Mart stopped giving montly sales info. Are they removed from both May numbers?
Thanks for the YoY numbers. Bloomberg didn't mention those, spent 5 minutes pushing the 0.5 increase.
I'm sure all the former Chrysler dealers will be out shopping this weekend, spending all the money they got liquidating their new car inventory.
Maybe it isn't an L. Could be a stairway.
The "good news' is the cliff diving may have stopped.
As we start heading into Q3, the YoY metrics will be in reference to Lehman 08, so almost everything will look better. the new normal starts making sense.
on the Real Monthly Retail Sales there was an interesting spike back in
2001... how soon we forget, that was an anomaly due to the 9/11 attack...
or was the cause Bush telling us if we stopped shopping the terrorists have won?
Maybe the cliff diving is over, but no green shoots ....
Ahh, maybe we are finally on the bottom part of that "L" now!
Maybe, but probably not. With the two prior pigs on residential real estate and unemployment suggests a lot of pressure on consumer spending. Ten percent year over year is huge, though.
Post a chart on the retail sales of ammo. The stuff is flying off the shelf.
Takes more dollars to buy gas. This is not leveling.
We still have not "recorded" the effects of idled plants on secondary and tertiary businesses, state and city furlough. This is the bounce of the body as it hits an overhang on its way down to the canyon bottom.
--bh
With UE going to peak over 10% maybe to 15% Real Retail sales can be off 20% or more from the peak IMO
CR
In my minority opinion this is not a normal recession. This is a recession caused solely by the decline in assets not a slowdown in a particular sector. Asset declines led the downturn and things will not improve until we the declines stop and trend higher.
comrade mike, yeah and all that ammo is getting used up by right wing crazies shooting Dr's and turning museums into the OK Corral
It looks like today is the future that all those HELOCs was borrowed against. Strangely, as it turns out everybody isn't rich by now. And where's my robot maid and flying car while we're at ti.
Not that I believe in crap like "resistance," but getting back to 2000 levels seems like a decent resting point.
And talk about spending: $130million for Ronaldo this morning? Sheesh. Maybe Spain ain't in such bad shape after all.
Dirk van Dijk (profile) wrote on Thu, 6/11/2009 - 9:16 am
comrade mike, yeah and all that ammo is getting used up by right wing crazies shooting Dr's and turning museums into the OK Corral
Thanks Dirk, love you too. Remind me to call you a "LIEberal DemocRAT" for no reason some time.
Edit: No seriously. Your country almost got taken over by a right wing tyrant. You almost spent the short rest of your life in a gulag run by KBR. Were you gonna throw flowers at them when they came for you?
How quickly we forget when it's convenient for our politics.
http://www.a-human-right.com/predict2_s.jpg
I do not believe the cliff diving is over. What we see is the consumer unable to buy. What happens next is changed behavior taking hold and people becoming increasingly unwilling to spend. There's also another dynamic preparing to start. Expect a huge wave of retail consolidations; employment, number of outlets and square feet. Employment effects are obvious but there's a large body of work that says fewer outlets and smaller stores work against consumer spending as well. Did you ever wonder why the mall concept is so prevalent? Now, knock out a few stores and the entire mall suffers much more than the loss of those stores as a percentage of sales would suggest.
Sales would have been even higher, but it was a late May this year.
Got up early and watched the 5 am local news -- Monterey Bay, big ag area for produce (lettuce, artichokes, asparagus etc.) and fruit (berries, apples). Demand is down, prices are down, farmers are giving up leased fields.
A lot of what we produce around here are luxury crops or value-added (organic veggies, bagged prewashed lettuce). Not the sort of thing supermarket shoppers just have to have in Iowa. But it's still scary.
A lot of small businesses are going to get wiped out before the year is out.
I own a retail business and a strip shopping center. Between what I see every day and talking to my tenants the consumer is VERY careful with their $$'s. Business is still double digit down and everyone is burning cash/credit. The weak and some not so weak players will flame out (if they haven't already) well before things turnaround meaningfully. A plateau at this level will doom many so I suspect this is just another ledge to slip off of on the way down.
Yancey LOL
Also unseasonable weather, school holidays shifted to June, the NBA playoffs kept people home, the lack of a "must-have-items", delaying of tax filings and the declining performance of mothers going into Mothers Day also contributed.
Dawg,
I agree i think the CRE and the RE ARM's will hit at the same time and throw a huge sprial downward...
Rob Dawg,
Not just a retail consolidation. Think about the number of large and mid-size law firms and still the big 4 accounting firms. There is room at the very high-wage spectrum for attrition via merger and consolidation.
Initially these M&As will require legal and accounting expertise which will be good in the short term, but the number of clients left at the end will be reduced and make it difficult to maintain the current number of firms without like consolidation and further employment reduction.
I also see further room for attritioning out more engineers in the private sector. There really isn't that much money in the R&D space for government to support the current levels.
--bh
Bob Dobbs (homepage, profile) wrote on Thu, 6/11/2009 - 6:23 am
Got up early and watched the 5 am local news -- Monterey Bay, big ag area for produce (lettuce, artichokes, asparagus etc.) and fruit (berries, apples). Demand is down, prices are down, farmers are giving up leased fields.
Same here in Ventura County. With some old time families sitting on cost basis from the 1890s the idea of leasing at current market rates doesn't work anymore for tenant farming. I notice also a national draw down of corn and soy reserves. We could see any nascent recovery choked by a spike in retail food prices.
Agreed with the "if this is a plateau it's just a stairstep" crowd. Just too much leverage, too many debt piles based on optimistic future income stream projections.
I was at a major telecomms trade show this week. It was absolutely devastated. Attendance down by more than 50%. The organizers didn't even try to soft-pedal it, it was so bad. It was scheduled for 300 bucks / single day floor pass, and ended up having free floor admission to anyone who was interested to generate traffic.
Dirk van Dijk
comrade mike, yeah and all that ammo is getting used up by right wing crazies shooting Dr's and turning museums into the OK Corral
Please!...be more afraid of your neighbor than guns...people kill people, Just like animals attack other animals to eat, guns are just like any other tool in your shed.....ever point a nail gun and shoot?...no difference...Its called personal responsibility.
That nut job could have walked in the museum with a blow torch and burned the place down...would we ban blow torches?
Spare me.
El Lurko (profile) wrote on Thu, 6/11/2009 - 8:17 am
Not that I believe in crap like "resistance," but getting back to 2000 levels seems like a decent resting point.
Resistance is futile, or.. something... Seriously though, "resistance" is not that crazy of a concept, but it is a term of convenience, not hard science. In an arbitrarily-defined and relativistic system of measure, it's a behavioral reality that people tend to look to the past to anticipate future behavior. Rationally of course, we realize that the market price has no 'memory', it is simply a number, but if enough people expect that the future will be like the past, they'll look to previous peaks and valleys (the emotional "highs" and "lows") of the market price absent education in analysis, and lacking more sophisticated tools like MACD or various moving averages. Even with such tools, an inexperienced investor under stress will fall back to the same behavior and reliance upon expectations of "resistance".
Let me add that consumers smell 'blood in the water'.
I was watching NBC monday and they were doing a story on a chrysler dealership going out. Interviewing the owner he commented that many of the shoppers wanted 50% off of MSRP (and no, he couldn't sell at that price).
black dog,
I've heard the same info. Basically, other dealerships are buying at a less steep discount, maybe 20-30% of MSRP. Which points out to me we're in for another leg down when those dealerships still cannot sell to a consumer who either does not want to buy a car, or cannot afford to do so.
Again, I think the aesthetic preference of wave after wave (gradualism) has been chosen over ripping the band-aid off.
--bh
Strip out gas and autos and the MoM change is +0.1
Why would 9/11 lead to a spike in retail sles? Hoarding of food, guns and ammo?
"Again, I think the aesthetic preference of wave after wave (gradualism) has been chosen over ripping the band-aid off."
I think it's a deliberate attempt to reduce shocks, which does make some sense.
I think the most informative charts that you use are the multiple-bar charts for monthly home sales - they display both monthly and yearly change at a glance and also show how long-term trends are developing.
Why would 9/11 lead to a spike in retail sles? Hoarding of food, guns and ammo?
Leader Bush told the sheeple to shop, they did
Interesting S. Suess
Carlomagno (profile) wrote on Thu, 6/11/2009 - 8:41 am
Why would 9/11 lead to a spike in retail sles? Hoarding of food, guns and ammo?
Try to reassert the old paradigm... aka maybe if we keep doing what we were doing before, reality won't actually change. Trauma, first response: denial.
"Post a chart on the retail sales of ammo. The stuff is flying off the shelf"
Yeah, it's exploding off the shelf. But the consumer spending is suffering from recent economic wounds. And auto sales are pretty much shot for the time being...
NateTG (profile) wrote (in reply to...) on Thu, 6/11/2009 - 9:42 am
I think it's a deliberate attempt to reduce shocks, which does make some sense.
My disagreement with this as a policy is that I think there are unaccounted frictional costs in applying the braking force, both in terms of the policy psychology established and the raw cost of resources expended. I don't think there's any argument that there should have been a mechanism in place to provide a graceful wind down, but I followed the careful lack of development of a mechanism for mega-bank wind down for years, and given the choice between a swift liquidation and the current tar baby, I don't think there's any question the liquidation will retrospectively be proven to be the better choice.
CR, we are at the plateau for a month or so; then, when California and the other states are forced to cut spending (c'mon July 28th!), the next leg down begins.
This Greater Depression is just getting started.
Would that all sources of statistics supply error estimates as the Census Bureau does (see numbers with * in the snippet which give the 90% confidence range).
We see that for month-to-month Advance Estimates, the potential error exceeds the absolute value of the change. Not something to stake your fortune on.
By the way, the new transmatch railfax is out, and there are some positive upticks in the 4 week rolls. Gotta run to a gig so no analysis but in short, it's not the horrifying collapse that last week hinted might be winding up.
Railfax Report - North American Rail Freight Traffic Carloading Report
I solved the California budget crisis, just upload this code to the central machine in LA:
while(true) {
float wLevel = measureCalifornianWhiningLevel(); //in decibels
if(wLevel < 90.0 ) {
//do nothing.
}
else if(wLevel <= 95.0 ) {
showCuteDancingHamstersOnTv();
}
else if(wLevel <= 100.0 ) {
showMoreCuteDancingHamstersOnTv();
showArrhnorldOnTv();
}
else if(wLevel <= 110.0 ) {
printMoneyAndSendItToCal(5000000000); //5 billion
showMoreArrhnorldOnTv();
showCuteDancingHamstersOnTv();
}
else if(wLevel < 120.0 ) {
printMoneyAndSendItToCal(50000000000); //50 billion
showArrhnorldOnTvAllTheTime();
showCuteDancingHamstersOnTv();
}
else if(wLevel >= 120.0 ) {
System.cutAllPowerFromCalExceptBanks();
System.sendAllAvailableDrones();
System.everybodyRichToTheChopper();
System.initiateOperationPANAMA();//panama welcomes you rich guy.
System.getWhoIsYourDaddy("9ewrk33").sendAllMoneyToAccount("943021502-213");
releaseDancingHamsters();
releaseArrhnold();
System.getWhoIsYourDaddy("9ewrk33").wipeoutEvidence();
System.getWhoIsYourDaddy("9ewrk33").initiateJetPlanePickUpMeFromSecLoc1();
System.getWhoIsYourRealDaddy("luckynumberseven").initiateSkynet();
}
if(wLevel <100.0 ) {
sleepForDays(30 ) ;
}
else {
sleepForDays(5) ;
}
}
Do we have a 30 year auction today?
timmyone++
"double plus good"
Well, just looking at retail in LA, it seems like there's still so much overcapacity the system is chugging through. Go clothes shopping at the Beverly Center, for instance: everything is heavily discounted. No one could raise prices if they wanted to, because half a block away the same, dumbass shirt is available in nine colors. So it sits until someone, buyer or seller, gives in. And if neither do, the story just gets repeated 9 weeks later at Loemann's down the street. Repeat that story for any consumer good. Holy deflationary forces.
timmyone (profile) wrote on Thu, 6/11/2009 - 8:56 am
else if(wLevel <= 100.0 ) {
showMoreCuteDancingHamstersOnTv();
showArrhnorldOnTv();
}
If they have to show ArrhnorldOnTv, my vote is for Running Man. The most useful in terms of future preparedness.
I've heard the same info. Basically, other dealerships are buying at a less steep discount, maybe 20-30% of MSRP. Which points out to me we're in for another leg down when those dealerships still cannot sell to a consumer who either does not want to buy a car, or cannot afford to do so.
Just as there is crazy amount of debt, there is a crazy amount of auto inventory. And the cash for clunkers program is horrible. The one thing the industry has going for it, though, is current auto mileage is very high (as reported by CR) and repairs are very costly. I don't think that's going to be a significant mitigating factor.
Home Loans: Now You Can Find Out Who Owns Yours
Home Loans: Now You Can Find Out Who Owns Yours - CNBC
One of the things that I keep wondering about, and that nobody is openly discussing is whether there's a way to gainfully reduce capacity.
Another problem I foresee is the supply chain issue. Dryfly touched on this a while back about how some companies he deals with were not necessarily using the lowest cost vendor in order to keep the supply chain alive. I deal primarily with 3 vendors - they are the only ones that have truck delivery to my store. And lately their loads have been light to say the least. The largest (Buffet owned firm) delivered yesterday and the truck was about as empty as I have ever seen it - and I'm only about halfway through his route. If my suppliers go down then I'm up a creek NO MATTER HOW WELL I'VE PLANNED.
rb (profile) wrote on Thu, 6/11/2009 - 9:02 am
I've heard the same info. Basically, other dealerships are buying at a less steep discount, maybe 20-30% of MSRP. Which points out to me we're in for another leg down when those dealerships still cannot sell to a consumer who either does not want to buy a car, or cannot afford to do so.
Just as there is crazy amount of debt, there is a crazy amount of auto inventory. And the cash for clunkers program is horrible. The one thing the industry has going for it, though, is current auto mileage is very high (as reported by CR) and repairs are very costly. I don't think that's going to be a significant mitigating factor.
Being "incentivized" with our own stolen tax dollars to buy cars from a company we largely own so that it stays afloat will be great fun. Take advantage of our offer or not - your taxes will pay for it, citizen. And to think, folks used to complain about the military-industrial complex being rife with opportunity for moral hazard and cronyism.
Auto repairs generally not that high. $500 mo. car payments equal $6K a year compared to repairs plus you have higher insurance, license fees and sales tax. The longer you drive the old one the more you save.
"......yeah and all that ammo is getting used up by right wing crazies shooting Dr's and turning museums into the OK Corral"
....C'mon, Dirk - Most times you sound most intelligent.
The spike after 9/11 was due to a huge uptick in auto sales- the companies instituted 0% financing in combination with increased rebates. A lot of auto demand was pulled forward for that quarter.
Isn't the whole credit binge this country has been on that story writ large? An immense amount of demand brought forward...
"so what if you can't afford it, kid. You can f*****g finance it!" -Ruthless People
This Greater Depression is just getting started.
Yes, rising rates == declining house prices == more banking failures, lower tax revenues, lower ATM.
That's a big difference with respect to Japan.
"The "good news' is the cliff diving may have stopped."
Now it is time for some cliffhanger bribing. Threaten the guy below you that he must give his golden wedding ring or else..you will drop him. And when that sucker gives you the ring, drop him right away. Use that ring to bribe the guy above you to pull you up
OK. I think it's fair to say that we need to start defining the difference between a bear market rally and a bull market. The bear thesis is breaking down, hard.
Was there a business inventory data release this morning? Yahoo Finance has it listed for 10 am EST today but I have not seen any info yet...
"One of the things that I keep wondering about, and that nobody is openly discussing is whether there's a way to gainfully reduce capacity."
Capacity of what? Gainful to whom?
he commented that many of the shoppers wanted 50% off of MSRP (and no, he couldn't sell at that price).
To paraphrase Yoda: "There is no could or couldn't, there is only has to or doesn't have to."
Invitation to press conference
When: 18.00 hrs Geneva time, Thursday 11 June 2009
Where: Executive Board room, WHO headquarters
Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) will hold a press conference at 18:00 hrs Geneva time, Thursday, 11 June 2009 on influenza A(H1N1) in the Executive Board room at the WHO headquarters.
WHO | Invitation to press conference
OK. I think it's fair to say that we need to start defining the difference between a bear market rally and a bull market. The bear thesis is breaking down, hard.
LOL just when you thought you seen everything this morning
CR I can very clearly see the green shoots - you just have to make the chart full screen on a 17 inch monitor.
CR: I'm no doomsayer, but to say that retail sales have now "bottomed at a much lower level" is a bit Panglossian, no?
Real retail sales are, at this moment, off less than 15% from their all-time peak.
Do you - does anyone on this board - honestly believe that this country at its debt-fueled, McMansion-loving peak was only 15% overstored? That consumers spent only 15% over their heads? That Americans were only buying 15% too many cars, clothes, household appliances, and other stuff?
I suppose it's possible, but I don't think it likely.
Mook (profile) wrote on Thu, 6/11/2009 - 9:29 am
Do you - does anyone on this board - honestly believe that this country at its debt-fueled, McMansion-loving peak was only 15% overstored? That consumers spent only 15% over their heads? That Americans were only buying 15% too many cars, clothes, household appliances, and other stuff?
When pigs fly.
"I solved the California budget crisis, just upload this code to the central machine in LA:"
Timmyone, very funny. Needed a laugh this AM thanks.
On Topic: "Much of the increase was due to higher gas prices."
Anyone know what the numbers would be if gas prices were backed out?
rocky-
and it's breaking down how? Statements don't mean shit.....Please "educate" all of us how it's breaking down. Just because said market goes up doesn't cut it.
Ciao
MS
timmyone--funny!
Mook no we're not near bottom, but IMHO it's likely that the decline in retail sales will be LESS than the decline in mortgage wealth. To the extant that the money was spent on mortgages (moving up to a bigger house, or making payments on the old one) or financial stuff like bonds, it's dissapearance won't impact retail to the same degree.
Byz_Ruins
interesting info about telecom....
were or are you in that biz?
I can't see how we're "at bottom" yet. There are several events which need to fully pan out.
- Contraction of the car industry, we haven't see the end of the shakeout, even with the creation of Government motors there will be more job losses
- Teaser rate mortgages that are about to recast or reset in the next 2+ years. There will be more foreclosures
- Oil will be both a drag on the economy and is starting to look like a commodity bubble
- The REIT sector hasn't imploded yet
I could be completely and wildly wrong.. but the real bottom will be Q4-2010.
associated securitization conduits to the woodshed, and making it inevitable that Geithner adjusts the requirements for CMBS TALF part v
good articles ...finance & economics
Don't short this market yet. The SPX may keep rallying for another 3 months or 3 years? who knows. pimple faced Geithner & bernanke run the show. Thay are sleezy, yes, but the stock market loves free money. wait till the distribution sets in. then short. We could see the SPX at 1200 -1300 b4 we get a nice bear market again.
as this recovery cycle begins, it really is not useful to compare retail numbers year over year. Let's plot a trend line instead for the past 3-6 months to see where we are going next...
Initial Claims Down, Retail Up, Foreclosures Fall