Close the fuckers down……
You have to love the word “hubris”. It fits everything we know about the gang that runs our financial-government system. (our gang is so important we don’t know what to do with out them)
Shooting works.
Yes, of course every country needs a basic financial system to function effectively with letters of credit, deposits, and check writing facilities, etc. But as you move beyond that it is worth remembering that every valued job created by financial complexity is paid for by the rest of the real economy, and talent is displaced from real production, as symbolized by all of the nuclear physicists on prop trading desks. Viewed from the perspective of the long-term well-being of the whole economy, the drastic expansion of the U.S. financial system as a percentage of total GDP in the last 20 years has been a drain on the health and cost structure of the balance of the real economy. To illustrate this point, in 1965 the financial sector of the economy took up 3% of the GDP pie. The 1960s were probably the high water mark (or one of them) of America’s capitalism. They clearly had adequate financial tools. Innovation could obviously have occurred continuously in all aspects of finance, without necessarily moving its share of the economy materially over 3%. Yet by 2007 the share had risen to 7.5% of GDP!The financial world was reaching into the GDP pie and taking an unnecessary extra 4%. Every year! This extra rent is enough to lower the savings and investment potential of the rest of the economy. And it shows. As mentioned earlier, the growth rate of the GDP had been 3.5% a year for a hundred years. It had proven to be remarkably robust. Even the Great Depression bounced off it, and soon GDP growth was back on the original trend as if the Depression had never occurred. But after 1965, the growth of the non-financial slice, formerly 3.4%, slowed to 3.2%. After 1982 it dropped to 3.1% and after 2000 fell to well under 3%, all measured to the end of 2007, before the recent troubles. These are big declines. It is as if a runner has a growing and already heavy blood sucker on him that is, not surprisingly, slowing him down. In the short term, I realize that job creation in the financialindustry looked like a growth driver, as did the surge in financial profits (which we now realize were ludicrously overstated). But in the long term, like a sugar high, thisstimulus was temporary and unhealthy.
The Stock market is a fairy tale…..
We make very little now. We sell Chinese trinkets and Jap cars to one another. Our children belong to the state and are fat, dumb, and ignorant of the way the world works. Our safety net is being bankrupted by fast buck artist and their whores in the political system. The elites buy Manhattan penthouses and complain about the lousy service they get from the cities.
No one seems to have a clue how to fix the rot.
keeping our heads down and saving our cash, ramping up our credit, and preparing for inflation to march on in the near future, is a the only protection we have. Big booms lead to big bust, lead back to big booms. Once the government gets to printing money in fear not much else they can do but ride it out.
Expect a repeat of the 2003-2007 in houses and stocks as all these gangsters ramp up and reinflate the bubble. Then we’ll see an even bigger bust….. about the same same time we boomers retire in droves and sell our assets to eat.
I’m going to have a business on the side to tide me over. Why give the fuckers my tax money?
How about you?
Don’t American Workers Win?The fact that companies based in America are raking in profits from sales abroad is good for American workers, right?
No.
Gross points out that American workers don’t benefit because a lot of the goods sold abroad by American multinationals are made abroad:
If companies participated in foreign markets primarily by exporting U.S.-made goods, this shift would be good news for the U.S. economy and workers. But that’s not how it works. In fact, in the months after the global credit meltdown, U.S. exports plummeted. They bottomed in April, at $120.6 billion, and though they have been rising, the August 2009 total is still 20 percent below the August 2008 total. Globalization is changing the way we do business. It’s not a matter of U.S. companies exporting goods—burgers, soda, cars, software—made in the United States to Beijing but rather, making goods overseas and selling them overseas…
Ain’t welfare wonderful……
These people would have to get real jobs instead of selling “real” estate. But as long as the gov can print money and the crooks can bribe the rulers this is what we get. pretty soon we all have to get in on the action just to survive.
This is what happens when empires collapse. A slow drawn out fizzle as every con artist gets in the action. Pretty soon they’ll have to give everybody gas money and food stamps until they get run out of town.
Probably not in our lifetime. So kick back and watch or jump in and get yours.
Save some cash, pay your debts off, and apply for more and more loans until your credit is around 800. A few thousand at a time from local credit unions and small banks consolidating any loans you have into one payment.
Make timely payments and pay them off over the next couple of years until you can buy anything you want unsecured. Using limited liability companies, for instance, you can buy and sell real estate with no personal exposure.
Better yet, I suggest buying used mobile homes and selling them on time to working stiffs for the price of rent. For example, paying $5000 cash, borrowed at $90 a month or so, and reselling for $10,000 at 10% interest, payments of $320 a month, for 3 years for a profit of $6500.
Of course, if you get into the middle of the used mobile market, say $30,000, at 10%, the payments to your new buyer, would be $500 a month for 7 years. Paying $10,000 or so, including repairs, you make $42000 in payments minus $ 10,000 equals $32,000 total profit after 7 years.
My landlord sold me the one I have currently for $20,000 furnished, $500 a month for 3 years. I’m betting he paid less than 10 for it and remodeled it.
He’s 84. Including the one he’s living in, He’s done it 5 more times in the last 2 years that I know of.
Did I tell you he’s 84!!! His wife helps him.
She’s 86!!!
Depending on your finances and guts, there’s room to make plenty of money in the Depression.
Considering everyone needs to live somewhere used mobiles are available everywhere without the hassles and expense of real estate . Also, no banks or finance companies loan on these anymore. The rip off artists got in then out because they couldn’t sell the loans on the secondary market. Depreciating assets in inflationary times lose their profitability after several years which means we sell for 2 or 3 times our cost and collect the payments personally. With out big overhead we can out do most banks and finance companies in this niche. I can hire everything done under the table at half the cost and with complete anonymity. Not so with Bank of America. Putting it simply, it’s the income stream that counts with me not reselling the paper.
Anyways, why sell the loans? Collect the payments and hope your buyers move out and gives you a chance to resell every 2 or 3 years. Collect down payments to make any repairs and live off the interest. After all, banks have been doing it for centuries. And as for the buyer?
Beats living in your car.
After all owning the roof over your head is better than renting or sleeping under a bridge, right? Just don’t remind them that in this world you can’t really own anything but must make a payment to someone or other for the rest of your lives.
Home sales hit 26-year high in September | Philadelphia Inquirer | 10/24/2009
Motivated first-time buyers racing toward the Nov. 30 deadline for an $8,000 tax credit propelled sales of previously owned homes in September to the highest monthly gain in 26 years.Sales rose 9.2 percent over the same month in 2008 and 9.4 percent from August, the National Association of Realtors reported yesterday.
Since February, more than 340,000 qualified first-time buyers have taken advantage of the credit, which is retroactive to Jan. 1.
Recognizing how critical the tax credit has been to a market on life support since the end of the national real estate boom in 2006, the housing industry has been pressuring Congress to extend it for another year and make it available to all buyers except investors and second-home purchasers.
“We are hopeful the tax credit will be extended and possibly expanded to more buyers, at least through the middle of next year, because the rising sales momentum needs to continue for a few additional quarters, until we reach a point of a self-sustaining recovery,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the Realtors’ group.
Economists agree that continuing the tax credit – estimated to cost the government an additional $1 billion – is key to a housing recovery, now forecast for the second half of 2010.
The Realtors’ group report “raises almost as many questions as it answers,” said Joel L. Naroff of Naroff Economic Advisers in Bucks County. “Clearly, the housing market is in much better shape than six months ago, when demand hit rock bottom. But aid from government incentives is disappearing, and how much demand will fall is somewhat unclear.”
Unless the tax credit is both extended and expanded, economist Patrick Newport of IHS Global Insight said, sales will take a hit and “house prices, which have stabilized recently, will start falling again.”
Newport says he expects the credit also will have boosted new-home sales when the September data are released by the Commerce Department on Wednesday.
Why is anyone surprised……
The government owns your kids, …..just try to discipline them.
They get taken away. Read what happened to this poor bastard.
7 Year Old Boy Removed from Father and Placed in State Custody Over mistaken Order of Hard Lemonade
By
Phil Leggiere
on April 29, 2008 5:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (93) | TrackBacks (2)
U of Michigan professor unfamiliar with Mike’s Hard Lemonade orders his son a lemonade at baseball game. After boy is discovered by a security guard sipping the bottle police and child protective services remove boy to foster home.Detroit Free-Press reports:
If you watch much television, you’ve probably heard of a product called Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
And if you ask Christopher Ratte and his wife how they lost custody of their 7-year-old son, the short version is that nobody in the Ratte family watches much television.
The way police and child protection workers figure it, Ratte should have known that what a Comerica Park vendor handed over when Ratte ordered a lemonade for his boy three Saturdays ago contained alcohol, and Ratte’s ignorance justified placing young Leo in foster care until his dad got up to speed on the commercial beverage industry.
Even if, in hindsight, that decision seems a bit, um, idiotic.
Ratte is a tenured professor of classical archaeology at the University of Michigan, which means that, on a given day, he’s more likely to be excavating ancient burial sites in Turkey than watching “Dancing with the Stars” — or even the History Channel, for that matter.
The 47-year-old academic says he wasn’t even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114.
“I’d never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it,” Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. “And it’s certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old.”
But it wasn’t until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo’s hand.
“You know this is an alcoholic beverage?” the guard asked the professor.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.
Mistake or child neglect?An hour later, Ratte was being interviewed by a Detroit police officer at Children’s Hospital, where a physician at the Comerica Park clinic had dispatched Leo — by ambulance! — after a cursory exam.
Leo betrayed no symptoms of inebriation. But the physician and a police officer from the Comerica substation suggested the ER visit after the boy admitted he was feeling a little nauseated.
The Comerica cop estimated that Leo had drunk about 12 ounces of the hard lemonade, which is 5% alcohol. But an ER resident who drew Leo’s blood less than 90 minutes after he and his father were escorted from their seats detected no trace of alcohol.
“Completely normal appearing,” the resident wrote in his report, “… he is cleared to go home.”
But it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte’s wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.
Crooks still in charge……
Until Obamama rounds up the bad guys and jails them it will be business as usual. The economy will phase in and out recession until we run out of foreign suckers to prop up the deficit spending.
No change so far. No change in sight. And no change allowed.
The Coming Economic Depression: Historic Collapse of Consumer Credit
Note: A chart example of what else we are up against: A Return of OIL Prices
Banks, given trillions stolen from the taxpayer, are using their ill-gotten fiat to speculate in markets using quant computers and insider information, neither of which the taxpayer has access. Nor do they have access to national level politicians, their contributions simply are not as large. Thus, the banks hoard their trillions while cutting off lines of credit to the very taxpayers who bailed them out. What lines are not cut are charged 30% or more, rates that the Godfather could only dream of.
The consumer knows that credit is tighter than it was before. I’ve been saying all along that total money and credit are contracting, that the world of derivatives and leverage is contracting despite our government’s best efforts to flood the system with money. While it’s difficult to see the overall shape of the shadow banking world, clues can be found when digging. Again, I point to the OCC reports showing that JPM notional derivatives have shrunk by some $10 TRILLION in the past two years despite acquisitions. The OCC reports overall growth in derivatives, but that is only because investment banks, speculators like Goldman Sachs, applied for and were granted status as a commercial bank (to gain access to taxpayer money).
So, we have the money supply increasing, governme
Just in time…….
Since we can’t afford to retire anyways, might as well come up with a justification. right? If we become welfare recipients who’s going to pay for all those government handouts. After all we have millions of deadbeats depending on us. Hell, the government has millions getting ready to draw “guaranteed “payoffs.
BBC NEWS | Health | Complete retirement ‘bad for you’
Giving up work completely on retirement could be bad for your health, US research suggests.The study of 12,189 people found retirees who take on temporary or part-time work have fewer major diseases, and function better day to day.
The findings were significant even after considering people’s physical and mental health before retirement.
The University of Maryland study appears in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.
The researchers examined data on 12,189 people, who were aged 51-61 at the beginning of the study.
All the evidence suggests that if your mental wellbeing is depleted it will affect you physically
Professor Cary Cooper
University of LancasterThe participants were interviewed every two years over a six-year period beginning in 1992 about their health, finances, employment history and work or retirement life.
The researchers registered only medical conditions which had been clinically diagnosed, and took account of factors such as sex, education level and financial wealth
Ta da…..
Broke dicks don’t need loans. They need to clear the decks and start over. Many of us have done it and have done just fine. House expense, as I and anyone who has sold real estate will tell you, is very easy to formulate:
3 times your yearly salary with payments totaling about 25 % of your monthly gross for your mortgage payment. Such as if you make 4000 a month you can afford 1000 a month.
Which means you can afford a house for around 150,000-175,000. Same with everyone else in the market. If average household income is 50,000 then the average family can afford a new home built for 150,000.
Not 300,000, 500,000, or 2222 million for God’s sake. This is econ 101 in every college that I know of.
Since speculation generated by “free” money handed out by the Fed leads to “gambling” which leads to bankruptcy which leads to enormous poverty which leads to desperate solutions which always leads to …
Guns!
The Warning Shot Fired Yesterday – The Market Ticker
Yes, this means interest rates will rise to a market rate.We have spent more than two years trying to avoid recognition of fundamental mathematical facts – average home prices cannot exceed 3x average incomes, and on balance home prices cannot rise faster than income over long periods of time.
Mean-reversion isn’t a suggestion, it is a mathematical reality. As a homeowner with a fully-paid-off house, bought with cash, I certainly would prefer my home to have a value closer to 2005’s price than 1995’s.
But what I prefer has nothing to do with what is mathematically sustainable or what can be supported by the broader economy, and my personal desire to be able to “flip” my house or use phantom “wealth” to extract a lifestyle I cannot afford does not and cannot change the reality of what stability in the economy, on balance, requires over the intermediate and longer term.
Property prices must contract to sustainable values. If this causes banks to fail, so be it. If this causes consumer bankruptcies for those who used their homes as ATM machines, so be it. If this causes me to lose half of the “value” in my home, so be it.
I believe The Fed sent a message to Congress yesterday in recognition that the wall is fast approaching at 120mph: do the right thing and do it now – or else.
Pretty obvious to me…..
As I ave beeen saying for years, Big foot, UFO’s, Gnomes, Fairies, et al don’t make “sense.” Thousands of sightings suggests that we are over run with literally thousands of bizarre entities.
Which means everybody is lying, drugged, nuts, or a practical joker .
Or telling the truth as they see it. I’m betting many are only reporting the facts as they see them. They just don’t make sense. Maybe this guy is on to something.
The Heavy Stuff » Blog Archive » Gnomes – A Sustainable Population?
Gnomes – A Sustainable Population?One of the purposes of my posts on The Heavy Stuff (THS) is to provoke thought and critical thinking on any number of `issues’ of esoterica. And, in that regard, today’s post beckons the examination of the ludicrous – to be applied to what others would say is an `explanation’ of a viable sustainable `Bigfoot’ population out there `in the American Woodland’.
Yes, I know I’m already making enemies with a certain segment of my regular `heavy stuff’ readership by being a curmudgeon by doubting `first person’ accounts by `credible’ folks of all persuasions. BUT, I’m not doubting those accounts for one second – let me explain. You see, I think `Bigfoots’ in nearly all or perhaps all situations – are `temporary entities’.
To me, one must favor the overwhelming evidence that not one creature has ever been found dead or brought fourth alive – EVER. Nor have any `artifacts’ of this creature. Not even scat. Not in the last 10 years, not in the last 50 years, not in the last 500 years – not EVER. Never ever.
It’s something that those who have seen the creatures with their own two eyes will have to live with
Got my first credit card offer in over 6 months…….
$39 yearly fee and variable rate, of course. So I threw it in the garbage and went to the credit union and borrowed two thousand on my free and clear car.
4.4 %.
On a 9 year old car as collateral. I also Have a free and clear truck if I need more money.
Took 10 minutes and had the money in my savings account to tide us over while Patti is on leave for her surgery. If I ever get desperate I can borrow on my free and clear mobile home.
Maybe 20 grand at 200 a month. Might be able to buy another and resell on contract like my landlord does.
Beats working for Walmart. Having a credit union on your side means:
FUCK THESE BANK GANGSTERS.
The Coming Economic Depression: Insiders, Banks, Credit Card Companies Do Not Believe in a Recovery
Direct mail credit card offers peaked in Q3 of 2006 with approximately 2.1 billion being sent out. In Q3 of 2009 only 391 million have been sent out. In other words, credit card companies definitely don’t believe in the recovery and they certainly don’t believe in the American consumer. On top of this drop, credit card companies are now jacking up fees on good standing customers, adding annual fees for inactivity, and basically acting like your local loan shark. At times they are even charging 79.99 percent interest rates that would make Tony Soprano blush. If we really look at the data, the economy is doing anything but recovering. Actually, it is recovering but for those on Wall Street and the banks. The average American is merely subsidizing their party. By the way, the banks are largely the reason for the decade long housing bubble.
If you really want to see how much insiders believe in this rally, let us look at some details from last week. Insiders for the week with data from Thomson Reuters bought 8.2 million dollars worth of stock during last week. How much was sold? 184 million dollars. This pattern has been occurring the entire rally. Now wouldn’t you think insiders would have a better sense of the true nature of this economic recovery?
O.k the fat guy wins….
William Shatner on Gun Control – It’s How Well You Aim the Gun
