Paying the piper--the US spends much more than any other country on health care and on its defense department (Israel might spend more per capita, but it receives money from overseas to balance that out). As the world shrinks and trade barriers fall, those costs either shrink, or we become second tier.

Well, the market liked that news. 40 point turn-around.

Does it every seem to phase people that, the only reason we have any housing price stability is because its being artificially propped up? Everyone one is hurting, and they act like oh we are moving up again. Seriously, if this is what the recovery feels / looks like, Lets head back to the recession.

Daily Job Cuts - Layoff News , Job Layoffs 2009 , Bankruptcy, Store closings and other Business Economy News

Checking from Boston metwest 450K+. Despite what you may be hearing (boston.com/Warren), there is no increase in valuations in this segment. If anything, I've seen more price declines in the last month than I've seen in a while.

I suspect that the boston.com/Warren numbers are highly influenced by a change in mix---higher priced houses are moving after price cuts. The fact that sales increased over 2009 matches fits with this theory (higher priced houses are selling now...).

At the end of the day, my realtor contacts are telling me that the market is challenging above $450K. They cite a lack of buyers at those levels; they do not cite "fence-sitters".

Flat will be good in a few months when the homebuyer credit and MBS purchases are gone. Yes, they'll be gone on schedule.

Cinco-X wrote:

Standard and Poors still use the Commodore 64 for their web server?
TRS-80 (aka Trash 80) w/ 8" floppy's

Ahhh, no wonder they had all those AAA++ MBS......

Where are you ZeroMan?

In mid-New york, about hour from the city. Its always been a decent area, get alot of people from the city, that move away to go up north. And its incredible how bad everything looks around here.

Rob Dawg wrote:

If they go to the trouble of seasonally adjusting I wish they'd take the next step and introduce government adjustments so y-o-y accounts for things like $8k price supports.

C'mon, Rob.....you mean something like "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but, etc., etc.?.......it won't happen in THIS lifetime.

Oh, OK. I thought you were in MetWest Boston. I was going to say, "20% of houses on a street for sale is pretty rare." In general the market is dead here. Not a lot of inventory, not a lot of sales, prices grinding lower at a rate of about 5% per year.

Yeah, I suspect it is a change of mix. But I don't know NH; it could be that you are seeing the effect of lower priced homes gaining in value (that does appear to be happening to some degree).

I stand by what I know best: upper tier houses in MetWest Boston are declining in value.

(noob braces himself for the impending consumer confidence number)

Whoa, apparently it was bad.

Another day when market participants need neck braces...

Here Noob,

Consumer confidence falls 11 points

Consumer confidence sinks to 46 in February

Check this out...

Daughter of Texas suicide pilot calls dad a hero - report - NYPOST.com

"The daughter of the man who carried out a suicide plane attack against the IRS in Texas last week said she considered her father a hero for standing up to "the system," but also said the attack that killed a government worker and injured 12 was "inappropriate" and "wrong," ABC News reported Monday."

Standing up to the system rarely works out, and if you do decide to do it, it is probably best to go ahead and off yourself while doing it. If the guy would have lived, I doubt she would be singing the same tune.

Anyway, there is this old saying, something about death and taxes.

Okay, anyway, here from NHAR press release:

The positive momentum felt in the New Hampshire housing market during the second half of 2009 continued into January 2010, with the state’s residential home sales ahead of January 2009 by 16.5 percent. This time, there is additional good news on the price side as well, as the median price of residential homes increased by 7.5 percent over the same period last year – the first month-over-month median price increase in 26 months and the largest such jump in 52 months.

New Hampshire Association of Realtors - New Hampshire Realtor Resources - Real Estate News

noob goldberg (profile) wrote (in reply to...) on Tue, 2/23/2010 - 11:01 am replyIgnore userEric wrote:

Mr. Market hated it, whatever it is.

46, when consensus was 55.

• Uh oh! How can that be spun? may run wild for a while

OT, but how come natural gas stocks have stayed strong while natural gas prices have tanked?

Ben's running low on bullets, or the market would go up on economic bad news.

OT: FDICs list is longer than surferdude's?
FDIC: Number of troubled banks rises to 702 - MarketWatch

Lobbyist Ben Dover wrote:

BSR,
Stereo!

And both channels in high fidelity. [promises to exchange secret greetings at the next meeting]

dr munch wrote:

OT, but how come natural gas stocks have stayed strong while natural gas prices have tanked?

Infrastructure, regulatory, franchise plays.

noob goldberg wrote:

46, when consensus was 55.

9pt drop in CC results in an immediate 65pt drop in the DOW. Huge spike in volume too; biggest mid-day bump in more than a week-

The race to the bottom to be the last man standing is like a chess match between two drunk grand masters.

'I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.'

Time and chance being that ancient metaphor for the

Juvenal Delinquent wrote:

55, 46 or fight

Doesn't appear to be much fighting today.

But the day is young. Timmy's just finishing his cappuccino

Mike_ wrote:

Like what if consumers are only confident that they will be eating cat food before the year ends.

You got cat food? Did you bring enough for the rest of the commentariat?

Seriously, sentiment could be that low because of the stupid snowstorm. Nothingburger.

......pay attention to these “mood ring” surveys.

LOL.....do they still have those things?

Confidence in the PPT Cruiser is vastly more important than what the hoi ploy thinks is important...

Up 10%.....Home Equity here I come!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Austrian Masters' Wisdom

Mises Daily: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 by David Stockman
David Stockman
Reagan Budget Director David Stockman

[Excerpted from Minyanville.com.]

My proposition today is that we're in a fiscal calamity caused by the further, and perhaps final, triumph of politics. Admittedly, I issued this very same forecast awhile back — 23 years ago to be exact. But I'm not reluctant to try again. Having read Grant's continuously since 1988, I've learned there's no shame whatsoever in being early — even often!

The Triumph of Politics was published early, mainly in the unflattering sense that I'd not completed my homework. I was hip to statist fiscal and regulatory evils, but had only dimly grasped the Austrian masters' wisdom on money; that is, in printing money backed by nothing, central banks inherently threaten prosperity. So today I'll add the proposition that fiscal decay is the inevitable stepchild of the very monetary rot that the Austrians — Mises, Hayek, Rothbard — so deplored. (More)

Elimination of the mortgage interest deduction for couples making over 250K might hurt sales as well, dontcha think?

anything that hurts sales brings lower prices, no? Good for buyers. All those who would like to see an end to the MID should be cheering.

This Bread Is Mine

Mises Daily: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 by Robert LeFevre

[Chapter 9 of This Bread Is Mine]

We must return to Adam Smith.

This great economist and father of the modern theory of free markets propounded an error which has haunted us ever since.

Smith's "labor theory of value" was mistaken. However, David Ricardo accepted it and elaborated it. As elaborated by Ricardo, the labor theory of value was still further developed by Karl Marx. Thus, we have a socialist theory of economic value resultant from a doubly compounded error. This error has become the moral fulcrum on which the political socialist lever rests.

What Smith was getting at, and what most individualists would agree with, is the moral certainty that the laborer is entitled to the full product of his own labor. Indeed, earlier in this essay that has been listed as a basic right of every human being.
Getting All That You Earn

The "surplus value" theory of Marx is derived from the "labor theory of value" of Smith and Ricardo. Briefly, the theory can be explained thusly: It is evident that natural resources do not prepare themselves for the use of man. Human energy and tools must be applied to the resources before they can be converted into usable form and transported to places where a demand for them exists.

One does not pay money to natural resources. Nor does one pay money to tools. It may be an essential to pay the person who owns the resources or the tools. But essentially, all money passes from one human hand into another human hand. And the passage relates to the amount of labor performed by the human energy supplied in each case.

Thus, one does not buy logs or lumber for building; one purchases the labor that has gone into the felling of the trees, the milling of the lumber. What are the logs worth while they are still trees? Fundamentally, they are worth whatever it costs to convert them. And here is Marx: If more than that basic cost of labor is included in the purchase price, the element of profit or "surplus value" appears. If you must pay a lumberman five dollars to fell a tree, trim it, saw it into usable lengths and thicknesses, and then deliver it, the tree is worth five dollars, no more, no less.

Superficially, this is reasonable enough — reasonable, that is, if this were a world in which hand tools were all that could ever be employed, land could never be privately owned, and our wants were such simple things as log houses. (More)

Mortgage REITs Are Downsizing - Getting Technical - M. Kahn - Barrons.com

Hoocoudanode....

Isn't it about time for us to be Slumdogged?

Isn't it about time for us to be Slumdogged?

Naw, GLD is down $0.94

DJIA continues down with some major spikes accompanying strong downward moves; any chance this is program trading related?

Memphis, Tenn. : 10 Cities for Real Estate Steals - US News & World Report

Eric wrote:

any chance this is program trading related?

Is there any other kind of trading these days?

I presume that the trading done by folks here on CR is not program trading-

I presume that the trading done by folks here on CR is not program trading-

I even use my own crayons for charts.

do we want a housing market advantageous to buyers or sellers? If you view the MID as gov't interference with the market, you should be for its elimination.

barfly wrote:

If you view the MID as gov't interference with the market, you should be for its elimination.

It is a price support, and furthermore, it results in a more complicated tax code, and I've heard the primary benefit is to folks with more expensive homes......

dum luk wrote:

I presume that the trading done by folks here on CR is not program trading-

I even use my own crayons for charts.

Speaking of crayons check out the short interest in Radian which is up 10% on news that it won't be profitable for a long time: RDN: Options for Radian Group, Inc. - Yahoo! Finance
Over 10k May $2.50s? Somebody knows something.

CCI is the worst idea of an indicator there could be. Bring back MIB (Money in the Bank) as a real source of healthy consumer information.

....the mortgage interest deduction is many things - for reasons of social engineering being one of the more abhorrent.

It is a good indicator that you are not in a consumer debt ridden economy, CCI is part of the faux economy that is destroying us.

Black Star Ranch wrote:

....the mortgage interest deduction is many things - for reasons of social engineering being one of the more abhorrent.

I say bring it on. We rich will just form LLCs and lease back our own houses. Rob Dawg Predialian Manse LLC with holdings consisting of a single dawghouse. I'll still enjoy all the deductions and maybe even some favorable depreciation and management expense writeoffs. The poor will be stuck with those mortgage interest payments that aren't deductible. Suckers.

timmay the forehead is on the hotline to Lord Bankfiend, who is obviously shouting as timmay is holding the phone some distance from his ear:

Dad I meant to cook the CCI number, but I forgot to set the timer on the oven. If my undersecretary would get confirmed by the Senate . . .

(more shouting)

I know you paid top dollar for Barack and the congress . . .

(more shouting)

But Dad, I did the interview in Vogue . . .

(more shouting)

I'm going to have to model in Cosmopolitan like that guy from Massachusetts?

....lets see........I buy a cow outright for $1,000...............or, I buy it on payments of $50 a month, get to deduct the interest I pay on my beef until it's paid off or eaten? So the longer I take to eat my cow, the bigger the deduction?........can we do it with kids as well, maybe?.........how about as long as they stay at home?......

Lobbyist Ben Dover wrote:

Bring back MIB (Money in the Bank)

It's still zero (or less).

noob goldberg wrote:

46, when consensus was 55.

Where do these guys get their consensus? From smoking ??

Anyone know of an alternate source to get the raw data?- The S&P site has been down all morning. Very curious to see how NYC fared.

Thanks.

Inverted Hammer of Thor (profile) @ 10:51 am

Where do you factor in the fact that the renter's landlord can deduct his mortgage interest as a business expense?

On another tack: I spoke with a broker friend of mine (CRE and RRE) over the week-end and he said his company was profitable in 2009 because of the first time buyer credit. I expressed concern for his 2010 and he said "Wait and see. They won't extend it now, because too many people would that wait for further price declines. But, 4 to 6 weeks before the credit expires, they will extend it." Inside information? Wishful thinking? Wild ass guess? I don't know.