Shopping at Amazon?
Wait! If you click on the Amazon banner link at the top of the page first, HCN will get a percentage of anything you purchase for 24 hours!
Open predictions
Our local book authors
User login
Who's online
There are currently 39 members and 182 guests online.
Currently online
- TJ and The Bear
- REBear
- Mr Slippery
- gruntled
- sporkfed
- Mike in Long Island
- km4
- 1 currency now -yogi
- josap
- DCRogers
- steelhead
- dreamer
- lineup32
- Tom Stone
- merchants of fear
- curious
- HomeGnome
- Substace Over Form
- wafdof
- CitizenPither
- aleister perdurabo
- RATM
- poic
- tg
- Boinga
- fried
- Basel Too
- Comrade Kristina
- Antipodes
- robj
- Rajesh
- RayOnTheFarm
- RainyDay
- prairiedog
- FlatSpin2011
- fudge_hend
- JP
- REBear
- kratovil1
Recent Recommendations
They really should make a sequel to "Repo Man".
John Wayne was a ....I installed two way mirrors in his pad in Brentwood, and he come to the door in a dress.
COME ON, KERMIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Life is like a plate of shrimp...
The CA water police are fining people $600 for using water at the wrong time or day--and brown lawns detract from curbside appeal.
dow goes kermit
But didn't Rob Dawg say there was no drought in California, and if only we didn't grow cotton, everything would be jake?
Krugman: If we wait to see whether round one did the trick, round two won’t have much chance of doing a lot of good before late 2010 or beyond.
We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
Spray 'em green; there's a whole industry for it, now.
Just got back from Cleveland where a friend is doing the repair, cleaning and maintenance of vacant houses.
Making money and said he's got hundreds of empty houses to keep up.
The food stamp printing industry is booming too. Green shoots!
Random thought - Dennis Kneale gets paid to be stupid by GE. Your TARP money at work.
The CA water police are fining people $600 for using water at the wrong time or day--and brown lawns detract from curbside appeal.
It's about time we stop dumping our precious water on fucking cookie cutter lawns while paving over the most productive agricultural land in the world for shitboxes designed for maximal FHA loan disbursement.
We humans truly do shit where we eat.
Let's get some rock lawns, victory gardens, black tarp, drip irrigation, take the wheels off your escalade and use it as a greenhouse, withdraw your children from lacrosse club and fashion their sticks into a crude plow. Fill your pool as a raincatch reservoir, pound the sheetrock in your neighbor's abandoned house for gypsum to soften your newly turned clay soil. Rend your clothes, smear your faces in the ash of unchecked wildfires in the countryside, as the state, flaccid, lacks the resources or manpower to fight them. Sell fried chicken to the huddled masses out of the back of a salvaged postal van. Break down the doors of the abandoned bank down town and house refugees or distribute food.
Amen, Hoops
"As the U.S. foreclosure crisis grinds on, the detailed work of processing, repairing and selling thousands of homes repossessed by banks is real estate's new gold"
Who wrote this? Huell Howser?
It is not clear to me how forecloses in CA, NV and FL are creating jobs in CO, TX and OH.
Sell fried chicken to the huddled masses out of the back of a salvaged postal van. Hoops
change we can believe in
CA drought? Don't tell the rice farmers, who grow rice in what was once virtually desert. California Rice Commission - Environment
Thanks for the excuse to post this:
Repo Man Nailed in the Taint By Michael Jackson Impersonator While Nabbing Delorean
BTW the impatient should FF to about 1:50.
There's always gold somewhere in real estate's sales bag. I'd bet the kids of real estate folks who fail/flunk social studies are told by their parents that the kids are stellar performers. Self-delusion on a scale that is impossible to overstate.
some investor guy (profile) wrote on Mon, 7/6/2009 - 6:36 pm
CA drought? Don't tell the rice farmers, who grow rice in what was once virtually desert. http://www.calrice.org/a_balance_sheet/chap1.htm
When is CA monsoon season?
Hmmm...interesting tidbit on troubled assets at my flipper's institution:
The following table presents information concerning impaired
loans as of March 31, 2009 2008
Impaired loans with related allowance $6,745 $4,250
Impaired loans with no related allowance $32,505 $4,574
Total impaired loans $39,250 $8,824
Allowance on impaired loans $3,985 $1,698
Now I think I know why Mr. Bank Trustee was a little cranky...
RE: house with 135 offers. . . The bubble mindset is still alive and well in coastal CA. People still "snapping up" all the "bargains", many still planning on flipping 'em. People believe this is the bottom, and a "once in a lifetime opportunity". The high end is dead, but very few are willng/able to lower prices. Those that do sell pretty quickly. Many still plan/believe that housing leading to riches. :-/
Hoops: Sell fried chicken to the huddled masses out of the back of a salvaged postal van.
Almost correct: "Sell fried "tree chicken" (aka as squirrel).....
The world’s flattest, driest and most vulnerable inhabited continent is gravely low on water. The “Mighty Murray”—Australia’s Mississippi—is on the verge of collapse: in places, children can hop over it. National production of rice has fallen from a million tons annually to 21,000 tons last year, contributing to soaring global food prices. Cotton and citrus are also crashing. The problem is now creeping into the cities. Earlier this year, the national water commissioner announced that, as of 2010, he could no longer guarantee security of supply of water for critical use to Adelaide, says Flannery, author of the acclaimed book The Weather Makers. “That’s Australia’s fifth-largest city.” Two years ago, the prime minister urged Aussies to “pray for rain—literally, and without any irony.”
Water fights - Environment - Macleans.ca
Australia is a preview of what's in store for us...
Everyone wants their sunny Sun Belt.
They want their 24/7 air conditioning and their unlimited water use too.
Everyone loves ponies.
Hoops, if the lawyer thing doesn't work out you may have a future as a slam poet.
Some investor guy,
On top of the water issue is burning the fields in Fall...because of rice stalk fungus, they burn.... It creates silica that mess up the lungs bad..used to live in roseville and prevailing winds took rice smoke my way...it was enough to make you move...i did...They only burned on high wind forecast days..sometime the forecast didn't come in right
the Sac. valley would like the pomona fairgrounds in the 70's during summer...
Hoops-I vote you in as EPA chief....Moreno Vally, Perris, Sun City etc with lawns is like planting grass in the mojave desert....
albrt (profile) wrote on Mon, 7/6/2009 - 6:42 pm
Hoops, if the lawyer thing doesn't work out you may have a future as a slam poet.
My favorite slam poet is Matlock.
They want their 24/7 air conditioning too...
How else do you keep a walking corpse from rotting?
135 offers. Just goes to show that the speculative/greedy spirit is alive and well, and that many folks really have learned next to nothing from this fiasco.
Put it on a plate son, you'll enjoy it more.
More Public Finance BS, from the WSJ:
Public Pensions Cook the Books
"Public employee pension plans are plagued by overgenerous benefits, chronic underfunding, and now trillion dollar stock-market losses. Based on their preferred accounting methods -- which discount future liabilities based on high but uncertain returns projected for investments -- these plans are underfunded nationally by around $310 billion."
"The Montana Public Employees' Retirement Board and the Montana Teachers' Retirement System declare in a recent solicitation for actuarial services that "If the Primary Actuary or the Actuarial Firm supports [market valuation] for public pension plans, their proposal may be disqualified from further consideration.""
So if they're doing this Montana, imagine what California's books really look like.
Yikes!
Put it on a plate son, you'll enjoy it more.
+100
Pensions have been marking to fantasy to avoid triggering consequences that apply to underfunded plans. You should see "we are well capitalized" mailings.
"Public employee pension plans are plagued by overgenerous benefits, chronic underfunding, and now trillion dollar stock-market losses. Based on their preferred accounting methods -- which discount future liabilities based on high but uncertain returns projected for investments -- these plans are underfunded nationally by around $310 billion."
If this graph is any indicator, those losses could have a while to go.
I wonder how many pension fund managers bother to look at basic measures of valuation like that.
Hoop,
You can also use autos as food dehydrators, as long as they've still got intact windows, anyway.
An even better Alex Cox film than "Repo Man" is the amazing "Walker".
Check it out...
Pensions have been marking to fantasy to avoid triggering consequences that apply to underfunded plans.
For the public sector, it would mean increased taxes, layoffs, increased contributions, and decreased benefits. In many states, it's 4 out of 4.
Meg Whitman, a potential candidate for Cali Governator 2.0, stakes out some positions as reported in the Wapo.
"Whitman, a Roman candle of facts and ideas, insists, "We do not have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem of epic proportions." Twenty-five percent of California's revenue comes from income taxes paid by the 144,000 richest taxpayers, so "if one of them leaves, it's a really bad thing." Lots have left. Some never really arrive. Pierre Omidyar, after founding eBay in San Jose, resided in Nevada, which has no income tax."
Her assertion that 36,000 taxpayers account for 25% of California's tax revenue, if true, is just frightening. It's not that hard for people with that kind of income to buy a nice place in Tahoe and kiss off the California revenuers. The potential consequences are huge.
sm_...that sounds like it jives with what Ive heard, regarding the state's revenue take and its dependence on high income. Which means, contrary to her belief, that is DOES have a revenue problem.
have we reached peak doom, yet?
Pensions mistook the stock bubble for a matching fund.
There was a definite local peak in March sometime.
Meg Whitman is another failure waiting to occur. CA highest marginal income tax rate kicks in at approximately $40000 income.
I'd love to be one of the 144,000.
Other booming businesses sectors:
From recent NYT magazine article :
“In most states, it’s one-third property tax, one-third sales tax and one-third income tax,” Feinstein said. “It’s 55 percent income tax in California. And 45 percent of that comes from the top brackets.”
I dont know how she comes up with this figure....it does equate to about 25% from the top brackets, whatever that means. Whitman is saying that 25% of ALL revenue, not 25% of income tax revenue, comes from the top 144k households.
These fit together, but its not enough to make much sense of things.
What she is saying is, please dont take away the super rich, like me, or this state is forked.
GDD9000 writes;
"Which means, contrary to her belief, that is DOES have a revenue problem."
At the very least, an enormous potential revenue problem.
The problem in Cali is that the distribution of taxation is completely skewed to high-volatility sources. After the dot.bomb, cap gain taxes went way down, but the state did not cut spending to match revenue, and in fact continues to grow spending faster than the rate of inflation.
Cali has had net outmigration (ignoring illegal immigration) for five years now. Is anyone really surprised?
I wrote a couple of installments on my story of doom, woe, and venison.
sample:
Tommy told us what was mostly the truth. I think he shaded a few small bits, and I think I knew why. What he told us about what was small town politics as played out in the absence of any organized, an armed authority to put a stop to it. The only thing that was keeping events from getting really ugly was a few frayed threads of morality and civil responsibility left from years past. That, and the possibility what was happening, as far as the local and state government was temporary. They didn't want to push to hard as no one wanted to explain to Homeland Security how so and so ended up dead. Or probably worse; who was collecting, and pocketing tax money
site: American Apocalypse
Whitman's staying right on the dogma by saying it's all a spending problem, when it's in part a tax mix problem, like Feinstein implies. In hard time, sales tax and income tax -- which California relies on too heavily -- crash first and hardest.
And even then it's not just a spending issue -- it's a tax cut issue, too. It's way, way easier to cut taxes in California than it is to raise them. Cutting taxes takes a simple majority, everybody likes it, and you get reelected. Raising taxes takes a 2/3 majority, everybody hates it, and you don't get reelected. So we've had tax cut after tax cut in an environment where politicians won't and can't raise taxes. Car registration cut. Special "incentives" to industry, free trade zones (and whether these pay off or not depend on who you talk to.)
And yes we've got to ream out the public safety pension plans statewide and locally -- actually, we'll have no choice eventually. And the prisons, another untouchable. I'd say privatize them when possible; we had something like that some years back for the minimum security prisoners, and it apparently worked well. But the guards' union didn't like it, sooo...
And the initiative system has to be changed so special interests can't essentially slip billions of dollars of future liabilities past the budget process.
Isn't 144,000 the number of unconditional elected?(those predestined to reach Salvation)
Does that mean that those144,000 taxpayers in CA are actually the unconditional elect?
Have they all been concentrated in CA just prior to reaching Salvation?
Or is being in CA already being in heaven??
Well if you pin your tax income on revenue which is easy to avoid vs property taxes which is stationary (can't move that chunk of land very easily), is it a wonder that we have a revenue problem? Now there is a hoocoodanode moment
With consumer deleveraging and credit crunch - we cannot have any quick recovery - L is best case scenario. Speculative stock buying and PPT euphoria is no substitute for anything.
Credit is falling so much - private credit decreased by $1.8 Trillion is the first quarter, consumer credit by $90.7 billion (annualized). Household net worth down by $13.87 trillion.
There is no trigger for recovery - new technology, new markets, demographics, new ideas. Green is just a boondoggle and BRICs can only do so much. JPM and GS etc are just trying to create another bubble - it suits their ends not yours.
hat tip to Blogger: Blog not found
From Yahoo's market update::
"Shares found some support, however, from a report showing that activity in the services industry rose in June to its best level in nine month."
'scuse me?
... didn't the services sector really contract, but at a slower rate than previously?
Do people end up beating the stock market over the long term by buying out real estate to rent?
I know this is a vague question. I'm more sort of wondering out loud.
Bob Dobbs;
It's both a desert topping AND a floor wax.
50% of state revenues go to education, and Cali is either 48th or 49th in results.
Guys like me who pay big taxes (although I'm far from being one of the 144,000) can't see the return on investment. But I do know that if you spend more than you take in and you're on the verge of BK, the only responsible thing to do is to cut spending until you figure out how to fix your income problem. Especially given the unhealthy business climate that pretty much everyone agrees is part of the problem, you don't chase the remaining taxpayers out of the state just because you can't balance your budget.
This reminds me a bit of the Sarkozy statement over the weekend: He complained about "social dumping", but that's just BS. If you want to have your cake and eat it too, you had better have several large herds of ponies that poop gold bricks to back up your preferences.
Wow, here's a good one. Just logged in to look at my checking account, and there is a link on the home page for my bank stating "Think Cash is King, think again" Click on the link and the article that pops up talks about how fear is making people cash out investments and how this is a bad idea. Have to take the losses and wait out the game with a 'long term' investment strategy. Ends with more trite be a 'smart investor' and wait out the bad news so you can be on top when things turn around......all this did was make me panic and wonder how safe my bank is.
Vonbek777 - which bank?
Burn, it is USAA. I really like them, so this took me by surprise.
Wow, watch kermit go. Quite a pump going on here in the last few minutes.
Is Kasler correct in saying : "Now the economy is pulling down housing" ?
"Burn, it is USAA..."
Isn't that the refrain from a Bruce Springsteen hit?
spinmeisters worked so hard today. A+ for effort. A- for achievement. Unless of course they push SP5oo past 900 in the next five minutes. Go PPT, it's your birthday!
Another day belongs to the second derivative. Go Green, Go! Green shoots...scores!
Thin volume. Somebody is playing games. Again
Another day of taking the profits off the table at the closing bell - thanks kermit >; )
Vonbek,
I'm with USAA too for checking, credit card and insurance. Great company.
I think that bit of advertising masquerading as investment advice was from their Mutual Fund group, not the banking side. I've never been very impressed with their investment or mortgage products. But I do love them for straight banking and insurance.
"Life is like a plate of shrimp..."
One bad one and you're in a long term relationship with your toilet.
I have heard of a V-shaped recovery, a L-shaped recovery, how about a slash-shaped recovery ()?
Oh, wait, that would mean no recovery in sight. Can't have that. Nevermind.
This is the narrowest stick save I have seen in months. The PPT must have run low on ammo and are forced to concentrate their fire.
Vonbeck did you get the USAA letter on florida insurance? No more insuring homes in Florida, the insurance that exists and stays but no moving and then geting new, or no new policies...
no cigar for 900. Nice try though.
Chainsaw,
I agree, it just was a bit jarring. Somebody needs to reign the adverts in, I reread it again and it is definitely a jab for their mutual funds.
Fiduciary, I am in Texas, but my parents are in Florida, and they are mad as heck. They are trying to build on to their house and USAA hasn't been clear on whether this will cancel their current policy.
ac, that link to the video of the kid getting his car repo'd is really disturbing, on so many levels. I'm surprised nobody commented on it. We're raising a pretty incompetent generation to take over for us.
Incompetent raising the super incompetent.
Can anyone explain more than 50% drop-off in housing inventory, in some areas? SFH inventory in Sacramento peaked at 6000 in Oct/Nov 2007 and appears to have fallen at a uniform rate, now down to 2900. Similarly, Tracy inventory for SFH peaked at about 2100 in Aug 2007 and its now down to about 500. Also, Antioch SFH inventory peaked at 1200 also in Oct/Nov 2007 and has been falling, now down to about 280. Gilroy SFH inventory has dropped from a peak of about 470 to currently around 260. Assuming these numbers are correct, it appears that excess inventory is being absorbed although it is not clear who's buying ...
Wasserman is the local Realtor shill for the CAR and developer interests in Sacramento. One day RE sales are "improving", the next day they are "slow". He really has no local credibility. And, by the way, the stock price of his newspaper, The Sacramento Bee is down below fifty cents (yes, I said 50 cents). The National Enquirer has more credibility.