Real Estate Market / Inflation / Recession / Depression

[Bob from down south]

Originally Posted by POhdNcrzy

I think if the powers that be try to raise taxes they are really going to radicalize and politically-mobilize the population. Aren't most working people feeling like taxes are already about at the maximum amount that they can emotionally and financially manage?

Massive tax hikes are the unavoidable consequence of the more than $1 trillion thrown into the abyss by the government already. These tax hikes are already a fact, no matter which poor dumb b**tard wins.
[mod cut]
I wonder if someday there might be a night in the USA when bank executives are found swinging by their necks in the town square, when proprietors of payday loan parlors are found lifeless in the back room with their eyes bulging and a sock full of worthless paper money crammed down their throats...

OK, maybe not, but a guy can dream, can't he?

[POhdNcrzy]

Jazz, I agree that gov't tinkering with gas prices would be difficult to "get right". While I am a bit of a closet socialist, I concur that the free market is the least risky and probably the best way to determine prices of whatever.

However, I think the run-up in fuel prices should have been seen as an emergency situation requiring immediate and bold government intervention.

Look at all the tinkering the gov't is trying to do now, nationalizing all the banks, etc. Does anybody think this will have good results? The dumbest, most inefficient government in the world trying to run Wall Street by itself? Well, the damage has already been done, unfortunately. And no, the results are definitely not gonna be good.

Time to start praying, folks....

[jazzlover]

Another great article on MSN by Bill Fleckenstein, who has pretty much made all the right calls on the economic mess we are now in ( Economy sinks as we save bankers - MSN Money ).



There are a couple of paragraphs in this article especially applicable to Colorado's funny-money real estate and construction-dominated economy--complete with superfluous trophy second homes, condos, and over-priced real estate.

In the past expansion, economic growth was almost entirely about real estate. Gross-domestic-product growth, excluding mortgage-equity extraction, was almost nonexistent. In addition, when you consider that 30% to 40% of all jobs were real-estate-oriented, it's clear how hollow the economy is liable to be going forward . . .

Considering the capital destruction and the credit contraction now under way, I have a hard time seeing where the new jobs will come from to handle all the layoffs that are going to take place. Given that lots of marginal businesses have survived on consumers' wild spending, many of them will not make it as folks retrench aggressively. That's on top of all the carnage in anything related to real estate or finance.

And, this:

I'm sure there will be other ideas about how best to help create jobs, but one "solution" that's no solution at all is trying to put a floor under home prices. The problem is, home prices in America are still too high, relative to average income, and the average income is going down. So, trying to "stabilize" home prices is (a) impossible and (b) a complete waste of money.

Fleckenstein finishes by using a baseball analogy. He states that, if the financial crisis may be in the 8th inning according to some, the main near-collapse coming in the general economy is still taking batting practice. Sadly, Colorado's economy has been tied far too much to the same speculative insanity that is now coming home to haunt much of the US. We're going to suffer--plenty--here before this is all done--probably the biggest economic debacle in Colorado since the Silver Panic of 1893.

[Bob from down south]

A little anecdotal observation on return from a nice trip to Chicago for a family event. My diesel car got close to 50 mpg on the trip...spent less than $100 for a round trip from Colorado Springs to Chicago.

Truck traffic on I-80 and I-70 is down significantly. I was able to set the cruise control and cruise unmolested for hours on stretches of road that once were full of semis. Big rig sections of rest stops that once were impossible to park in after ~9 PM were only half full. If the number of empty flatbeds is indicative of the amount of unproductive deadhead movement, even less product is moving than the anemic truck traffic would suggest right now.

I have a friend who's an advertising executive for one of the big phone books. He's lost close to 50% of his regular ads for the next edition.

I have another friend that has a business selling gifts--things like Christmas wine/cheese baskets and other holiday business niceties. Her business is down close to 75% this season, after more than a decade of steady year-over-year growth.

I think Fleck's a smart guy. The catastrophe in the credit markets has been reduced from a train wreck to more of a 120-car freeway pileup...but the real news now is the vicious spiral unfolding in the real economy as the effects of mass layoffs and emergency deleveraging of family balance sheets feeds on itself.

My candidate for President didn't win. And I didn't vote for McCain, either. I voted for Ron Paul, the only candidate in the field that has a clue about the true causal origin of this disaster. Neither of the mainstream candidates has a viable solution to this crisis. Reportedly, in the search for Paulson's replacement as SecTreasury the Obama camp is considering Timothy Geithner, President of the New York Fed and one of the Wall Street robber barons deeply involved in bringing us the current chocolate mess. Yeah, we'll get lots of change that way!

I am truly convinced that Obama is going to be hating life as he is faced with the inescapable realities of this s***storm. Maybe people will be dancing a jig for him a year from now while they're standing in a long unemployment (or soup) line, but I tend to doubt it.

[Sockeye]

Shucks, Bob, I was hoping for some accountability with someone like Paul Volker. Thats what we've become as a nation though - land of the unaccountable. And to rub salt in the wound, I expect a tidal wave of inflation after these bank "rescues", somewhere around springtime.

[Bideshi]

Unemployment reached 25% in the Great Depression. We may well see that level again.

[Bob from down south]

Originally Posted by Bideshi

Unemployment reached 25% in the Great Depression. We may well see that level again.

Unemployment reported using the U6 metric is already over 11%. The headline stats were altered during the Clinton administration...misses things like people who have given up and stopped looking for work, and underemployment (people forced to work less than full time)

John Williams' Shadowstats website is an excellent resource for understanding how the gov't sugar coats the s*** sammitch we're all eating.

ShadowStats

[Mike from back east]

Originally Posted by Bob from down south

Unemployment reported using the U6 metric is already over 11%. The headline stats were altered during the Clinton administration...misses things like people who have given up and stopped looking for work, and underemployment (people forced to work less than full time)

John Williams' Shadowstats website is an excellent resource for understanding how the gov't sugar coats the s*** sammitch we're all eating.

ShadowStats

Bold emphasis added by me. I said the said thing over a year ago as the bolded material, that the "official' rate is not the metric we grew up with and as in all data, the devil is in the details of what gets counted and what does NOT get counted. See post #6 in: Is the real estate market showing any sign of picking up?

Here's a portion of that posting as it relates to employment data:
JOB STATS
Job and unemployment statistics are lagging indicators. Job stats are often a bit misleading, too. For example, if a well-paid software specialist is let go and then has to work at waiting tables or doing part time work to make ends meet, the job stats don’t change, the stats still show him/her as being employed, though the salary takes a big hit, and with obvious impact to consumer spending. Currently, there are about 4.5 million people working part time because they cannot find full time work. This stat is up 10% in the last year (remember, I wrote this 1 Oct 07). Further, if you do not “look” for work for more than 4 weeks, you simply fall out of the job stats altogether. Job stats are again skewed in that tiny companies with only 1-4 employees are not in the stats at all. The undocumented workers are not being counted, either as employed or unemployed persons.

[Bideshi]

And the guy now waiting tables was lucky to keep working at all. Those service jobs will also dry up as the economy tanks and there are less and less working people to be "serviced". The alternative to a good paying job with benefits is not flipping burgers if nobody is buying burgers. I remember being surprised during the '70s recession at how many taxi drivers had Master's degrees. This is going to be much worse than the '70s recession.

[CosmicWizard]

Bideshi wrote:

This is going to be much worse than the '70s recession.

Maybe! Maybe Not! We'll see!