Nemo is generously letting other people be first these days...

Field report #2. Many downtown Dallas bank branches and restaurants closing. I've only been here 2.5 months, already noticeable.

Oh and the top end of residential real estate is tanking.

TJ, I shopped on Rodeo in the mid 90s. Generally I hate the overpriced stuff, but they started making some good deals. Well, assuming you actually wanted what they were selling. It wasn't like going to the Garment District on Saturday morning, but it was better than Nordstrom or Macy's.

Followup to California thread

reasons why we still like living in the Bay Area

very hard to find a bad restaurant. We can basically walk into any hole in the wall restaurant and have a good experience.
Still a good base as we are in software and biotech industries
weather is great
plenty other interracial couples
great biking
a lot of interesting people
that 26 year old long haired guy in jeans could be worth 25 million so better give him decent service versus the east coast you are what you wear mentality.

Plenty of troubles here but it still works for us.

"Fifth Avenue between 42nd Street and 49th Street, the stretch just south of Saks Fifth Avenue, has a vacancy rate of 15.3 percent, according to the brokerage Cushman & Wakefield."
hmm, that stretch below Saks has always been a bit down market...
....
Houston St, they've tried to develop that street for years even by building a garden in the median...
still sucks, none of the bldgs are cast iron classics...
And Broadway in SoHo was nothing more a pimped up garment district...
with the exception of Dean and DeLuca and the few buildings surrounding
it and a block down on Spring around the corner Balthasar that whole street
was bs...

sportsfan (profile) wrote on Mon, 7/20/2009 - 9:30 pm
reply ignore user
poic, all great reasons not to live in NYC.

I used to live in Toronto which is Canada's version of NYC.

Boy what a blast from the past walking into a high end antique shop last time we were in there wearing jeans. I forgot what the East coast is like versus here.

Actually downtown SF can be the same way but not the rest of the Bay Area.

If 6.5% is the highest since the 90s, then they, like most other areas, are in for a rude awakening. I foresee 30% of all retail, disappearing. The majority of people's spending habits have changed - their mindset has closed up re: unnecessary expenditures.

Actually downtown SF can be the same way but not the rest of the Bay Area.

SF is the most East Coast city I've been to on the West Coast. Nowhere else is even close.

poic,
my experience in SF is that you never are able to rub shoulders with the rich and powerful... which
you can do much easier in NYC
granted that experience is from the late 70s, early 80s...
I found SF far more stratified...
don't get me wrong I really loved SF but after 2 years in NYC
I went back for the summer and found it boringly provincial!

t"hat 26 year old long haired guy in jeans could be worth 25 million so better give him decent service versus the east coast you are what you wear mentality."
guess you don't know Manhattan very well, try downtown... that guy next to you may be worth 100 million
and dressed like a bum

SF is SF. know any east coast cities which are 40% asian and 30% gay?

sportsfan (profile) wrote on Mon, 7/20/2009 - 9:42 pm
reply ignore user
Actually downtown SF can be the same way but not the rest of the Bay Area.
SF is the most East Coast city I've been to on the West Coast. Nowhere else is even close.

I got really pissed off getting the East Coast attitude in an art gallery in downtown SF a few years ago. Being the infantile male that I am I let a humungous loud gut bomb as I was opening the door and calmy walked out. My wife is normally uptight but almost peed from laughing so hard.

BSR, I was just looking at the TV listings and I see that the Discovery Channel has a shown on at 10 called "When We Left Earth 40th Anniversary Special." Ordinarily, that would sound like a boring show, but I'm going to watch it mostly because I've been hearing all day how billions (with a 'b') of people were watching it live.

I never did see the first time people landed on the moon, or what happened at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, or at Woodstock the next year, or whatever other unusual events happened during my 1 year, 11 months, 29 days in country.

Yeah, I doubled up. Real liberal of me, huh?

Actually, there's a lesson there that applies to today's soldiers doing multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. When your country is at war and you are in uniform, there is no other place to be. Be thankful you got the chance to be where the action was.

Goodnight, all.

Same thing is happening all over CA.

Torrance California

Shopping center at Hawthorne and Lomita has lost its bank, upstairs offices (tutoring and, IIRC, a CPA), bye bye to the dry cleaner, and a few other small shops. But the dentist is still there!

Seriously, drive down Hawthorne from Rosecrans to RPV and count the empty storefronts.

If we're still talking the California thread... I think the new budget will send the state's and Calpers bond rating to junk. The state is already at BBB (S&P). BBB- is the lowest investment grade. I think we'll be at CCC (or less) within six months. Calpers is on review (per link in last thread), for downgrade from AAA. What happens when it breaks through A?

Ghad, I'm really curious to know what the job migration is from NYC, LA, SF, etc.

But retail is dying. We decided to eat out tonight on the way home from daycare (both of us were tired). Zero wait at a choice of restaurants (we were indecisive so we drove by more than one). We decided to try a new restaurant that we thought was only so-so. But the kids meal was perfect for our daughter. Sigh... I guess so-so it is. We started dinner at 6:15 pm. When we left (at about 7:15 pm), the restaurant never went more than 2/3rds full. Hmmm.... This is at the 'new' part of Del Amo (ok, its 30 months old now...).

Got Popcorn?
Neil

more total in nyc and west hollywood, but not even close when it comes to percentage. SF wins! Wins just as easily in the no-kids dept, too.

Not too worry....growing business vacancies are just part of the "jobless" recovery. Sorry, but as part of a family where both wage earners have lost their jobs, I think I can speak for the unemployed. To sing the praises of a jobless "recovery", is like being one of the lucky ones who gets a lifeboat while the Titanic is sinking and then cheering loudly at your good fortune while others flail in the water and drown. They should show a little respect, and just sail off quietly into the night.

Polyanna what's plan B?

when it comes to NYC I will not give an inch, no way, no how!
still is the greatest city in world (only Paris can give it a run for the money..)

this blog is so West Coast leaning... CR posts something about Manhattan and by the fourth
commenter it's back to talking about CA RE... jeez!
'hey, enough about you NYC, what about me, Cali?"

they sit around in studies and discuss over tea.

Hmmm.

So SF isn't the gay capital, aftr all.

My grandfather managed the Museum of the City of New York in the 30s I'd love to do autumns in NYC when I'm older, it is a great town.

broward,
the cultural capitol of America is New York, period. always has been!
you can't be the 'gay capitol' w/o a cultural power base behind it!
even Rolling Stone understood that SF was in the words of it's
publisher a 'cultural backwater' and moved to NYC

So I'm in NYC and I'm meeting my point of contact for this banking contract. We're working together for two or three days, I finally bring my team in, doing stuff, this and that and then he comes by....

"Who exactly is in charge here?", he asks.

"I am?", I ask back.

"You are? How come you don't got a suit?", he asks again.

"Do I need one?", I ask back.

"Well, sort of, if you want anyone to respect you".

"even Rolling Stone understood"

i think Jan just found it easier to score coke at 5 AM in NYC than SF circa 1974 and that's 90% of what was going on there

Reading through that last thread on CA was some bunch of doom predictions. You don't think societal breakdown will result in some riots followed by massive crackdowns and looters being shot? And then people will think twice about looting/rioting. Or else it spawns more looting/rioting with more of them being shot. Once people realize the looters are "bad people" they will stop caring.

Asshole breaks my window once; shame on him; asshole breaks my windows twice and he's not severely punished... shame on me.

chicago dude,

Fresh fruit in california has no equals....No city has same selection and quality.....

no comparison...

Hollywood,
no... there was plenty of blow in SF when I was there in '77.
CBGBs and Max's Kansas City and so much else was taking off...

Re: this CIT deal. I actually own 10 of those bonds, bought them last week when I thought they would get bailed out.

Why the hell would I tender for less than face 30 days before they expire? If I don't get paid back at face, it is a default, plain and simple.

And if they just raised all this money, they aren't going to default, are they?

Something just doesn't seem right. You know what they say about playing poker and not knowing who the sucker is...

I haven't tracked Google for awhile.

Try checking their traffic graph on Alexa.com or QuantCast.com.

broward,
21 years ago I came in the Corp. Bond Research at Salomon and my MD
gave me the 'look', he said, "shirt IBM... hair I don't know?"
granted I had a bit of a Don Johnson thing going on... (translates: get it cut son)
EDIT
flip side, I interviewed for a job in a law office in Beverly Hills late '80
and the partner who interviewed me was dressed in tennis whites.

broward

i'll take a look

Con Dao,
Currently time is 10 pm on the west coast and 1 am on east coast (actually 10:30 and 1:30). I doubt many people from the east are on CR around that time...

I just know it as much more of a 9-5 town than nyc.

I was at the Presidio on '79 and returned to SF in '99 for JavaOne.
I could not believe the difference.

SF went from the Summer of Love to the The Matrix in 20 years, everybody turned into Agent Smith.

ghostfacedinvestah,
Because those bondholders don't care about CIT, they care about making sure the stock market continues to go up for another 4 weeks; so they buy a number of cheaply priced August calls and "bail out" CIT which gooses the market to hit their strike prices...

i spent my teen-age years living in and around NYC, and back then i thought it was the center of the earth...

leaving to go to college in a place that was dairy farm country

married after college my wife and i set out for the pacific north west and built our home in the foothills of the cascades

upon returning to NYC for the first time many years later i was repulsed by the noise, smell, congestion, dizzying pace and wall to wall concrete of the place

for no amount of love or money would i return to live in one of the major US metropolitan areas

i understand and respect that others may crave "life in the big city"

dont get me wrong, i believe there are many livable cities around the country

but megalopolis...no thanks

"Ghost they did get 30b in assets did they not? Seems like a win-win if you ask me assuming they can get 10c on the dollar. Plus 10% a year the longer it drags on."

Yeah, I think the key is the bondholders who extended the credit got well priced new debt, and were willing to take 82.5 cents on the dollar on the old debt in exchange.

Because these bondholders got this deal, they had to offer it to all existing bondholders as per the bond convenants. But there is no obligation (or probably expectation) of other bondholders to take it.

i wonder if alphabet city real estate will end up with squatters again in 20 years?

who knows.

Forget '92, it wasn't this vacant even in the 70's. Good luck to all the Koreans, sheikhs, and assorted oligarchs trying to cash in on your absentee trophies. Commercial rent control will make you eat any federal inflation. If you want to live here and vote, we don't care what you look like, who you sleep with, or what TV show you hosted and whose bed you broke. What part of "concrete jungle" sounds like "suburban conformity" anyway? I'm sure Des Moines has plenty of fine tourist attractions.

As my elderly mother recently put it, "I'm not getting out of the City alive". Enjoy.

Save The Robots rings a bell, but a very fuzzy bell.

I've been trying to get her and her husband to move for 10 years. They could have lived really well had she sold her co-op bought in '68, but thought they'd be bored.

my neighbor in Indiana now well into his '80s
was our town surgeon... did very well financially
but regrets that he ever left NYC (was from Jersey...
and did his residency at Roosevelt Hos), he is so bored
that all he does is travel in his Winnebago or drink like a
fish...
EDIT
I currency...
Lucky Strike opened in Aug 89 and I was there on day 3 and
really never left... my loft was on Spring...
wow, the Continental! that place was blow city!
as for Pyramid, opened in early '82 and I spent the
next 5 years there, but always has the trannys dancing
on the bar...

I currency...
no wife, just a pure Khmer Rouge g/f that may or may not make it to the States,
she'd be a superstar in the City...
Warhol would have loved her...
last night she wanted to to machete some guy... not joking... if she couldn't beat him
with her kick boxing and karate ...
as I have said before her father who is 61 was a higher up in the KR, he's now the most
powerful judge in the second largest city of Battambang...
he trained his daughters well, her older sis had 5 years of karate and can whip her..
I now understand the Khmer Rouge soul... it's something medieval,
Pol Pot just channeled it...

Sounds like a dangerous catch...

DCD: sounds like my kind of girl... does she take care of you?

Headed to "work", see you later.

area was fabulous if you went in with some famous athletes and did not have to wait in line. loved it. robert duvall played the great santini in the movie

a must see

the key to Area was having the 'right look' or else go with a hot babe who didn't look bridge and tunnel
... first time there I was with this fine looking woman from Milan, I said to get in you need the right look,
and she said, 'don't worry' and wore this silver beaded hood from the '20s (her mom was the publisher of
Interni magazine in Italy...
and on another occassion I took my brothers fiancee
from Indiana and boy did she have the wrong look!

Duke of Con Dao

yeah you are right about artists and NYC

no wonder everybody from itzhak pearlman to bob dylan to jimi hendrix seem to find their way to the big apple and stay for a while

and actors and painters too

i would never argue against NYC being the "most happenin" place around

excellent food too..all nationalities

just not my kinda place anymore but i respect the fact that many love new york

the "kiss" certainly was not bashful about "projecting force"

Just posted the condo/home sales for the San Fernando Valley for anyone interested:

Effective Demand: San Fernando Valley June 2009 sales report

Effective Demand,
Looks like a bottom! However it appears we'll have another peak for the summer followed by cliff diving back into the 90s on prices; it seems like the price-sales balance looks a bit off... 2003 prices at... my gosh is that something like late 90s sales levels?

ghostfaceinvestah writes: "You know what they say about playing poker and not knowing who the sucker is..."

Hold up a mirror in front of your face and say: "Hello, Sucker!"

"Looks like what really did them in was a lack of lobbying."

......pretty much the same affliction the public has.......

Futures just went super kermit

Yeah, I'd go super-kermit, too, if a TARP guy suggested $23 trillion in bailouts.

the looseness of the FedGov Slots will continue until they can't - the looting has already started in earnest. We, the little people, are but a pimple on their ass.

Remember back in the good old days, when we used to wonder if we'd ever see INDU go down limit?

noticed nothing of any substance

No, i have no money on it, it's just passive entertainment.
I'm curious about how long they can do half-baked patches & fakework that last for ever-shorter periods.
I figure this one is good for another quarter.

In a last-ditch attempt to save one's postability, here's a neat site, ht, oildrum.

Futures cascade graphs, oil, gas, etc.,:

Energy Futures

LOL.........no thanx, I barely have enough left over every year for US!......Morning, HomeG

........hehehehe...........Obama would be the one to go after States Rights, Mom, apple pie and the NRA. That will be pretty. I think you'll find the number of people approaching the bar looking for the "new sheriff in town" might increase.

"KO and CAT shooting the lights out."

Dow Jones futures just jumped 50 points in the last 10 minutes. (Thanks, Eric)

Did Larry just admit that the profits were, in fact; bailout funds?

Well, bailout funds, and proceeds from one-time sales of crown jewels and such.

I just finished Michael Lewis' piece on AIG in Vanity Fair. I'm probably the last person to realize this, but the Treasury didn't just bail out GS and others which were on the other side of AIG's CDOs. The Treasury could have paid off these obligation at a slight or deep discount and perhaps have lent GS and the other CDO buyers the rest. Paying off 100 cents on the dollar was the gift that allowed to GS and the others to get out of the hole they put themselves in, and immediately return to profitability. Clearly Paulson represented GS and not the Treasury or the American people in this transaction. No one represented us here.

Lots o clarity there.

It's clearly good!

Caterpillar... who are they selling to? china?

dr munch...clearly a glass half empty kind of guy

If Joe Kernan lost four fingers on his right hand in a chain saw accident, the CNBC headline would be "Kernan news awesome, finger saved".

dr munch...clearly a glass half empty kind of guy

I mean, seriously..... revenue wasn't ZERO.... that's a green shoot, right?

.72 vs .22 is a clear beat. to whom are they selling CONSTRUCTION equipment?

We can't keep going to China and borrowing money, and it just might be China that says 700K for a GS employee and we loaned you money to bail this company out., and this is how you try to repay us. It's not the bankers that bought the China bangles, the the 6.2 million thats out of jobs and can no longer go to Walmart.

Understand that I'm 100% in cash, so I have no dog in this hunt ... but, to me, this has the feel of a market that's inevitably bound for 1,000.

I said the same thing about gold on this board 1-1/2 years ago when it broke out of its $850-900 range to the upside, and for the same two reasons:

(1) Round numbers make good headlines (which pull in the small-time investors);
(2) There will always be someone out there who cares more about placing a bid at a round number than he cares about being right.

Remember how quickly gold turned tail once it top-ticked slightly above $1K? I'd be surprised if we didn't see almost an identical rerun with the S&P right here with a peak at 1020, 1030, something like that before retracing the same path downwards (and remember, within six months of its initial foray into four figures, gold was back down near $700).

Fundamentals don't matter in these situations, IMO.

Fundamentals don't matter in these situations, IMO.

Mook +10^6

Im with you energyecon...this is a great time to have a drunken run with the bulls, but have that itchy trigger ready on the sell button for afterwards. The underlying trend in all these earnings reports have been the same. Stabilization is the theme, profits did better, revenue is down, sales picked up in some odd fashion, and dont in any way look sustainable, so guidance is often crap.

These earnings reports are the definition of an L shape at best, and when they disappoint, we'll see that it is really a staircase, going down. Watch your step when leaving the economy....

Inflation will be....contained.

Bernanke Says Fed ‘Confident’ of Ability to Stem Inflation
By Scott Lanman

July 21 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Federal Reserve is “confident” of its ability to stem inflation after what’s likely to be an “extended period” for policies aimed at restarting lending, Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said.
Bernanke Says Fed ‘Confident’ of Ability to Stem Inflation - Bloomberg.com

/Fundamentals don't matter in these situations, IMO./

Except they do. Seed-corn feasts and investment-cannabolism are not revenue postive events.

The masses starve and people end up with fewer fingers and toes.

--bh

The important question is what is going to happen to all the Mall lawyers?

volker,

Do not dispair. CA is the land of bad sequels, each one worse than the last.

--bh

LA Times version on Cali budget

snip

/It is also unclear how long the proposal would keep the state's budget balanced. The plan is full of expense deferrals, one-time measures and assumptions that invite a deficit to reemerge.

The governor and lawmakers assumed the privatization of the State Compensation Insurance Fund would generate $1 billion, for example, but few, if any, experts believe such a sale is possible this year. And the plan would save $1.2 billion by waiting until a new fiscal year begins before sending out one scheduled batch of paychecks to state workers, a clear accounting scheme.

Further, finance officials say the continued plunge of tax revenues could bring on another shortfall before year's end./