Sorry about the light posting since late last week. I was out cavorting about the Peninsula over the weekend, and am in Moses Lake for work today (and therefore away from the Internet most of the day).
I’ll be working on a post during the ride back to Seattle, and hope to post it when I get back (between 5:00 and 6:00). Stay tuned…
For now, consider this an open thread. How about that stock market?
There was a piece in yesterday’s Oregonian discussing fraudulent appraisals and questioning whether the Portland market was widely over-appraised. There’s a link at Clint8200’s Portland blog (see right sidebar here).
Best wishes to all!
Mac
Stocks are way down, but that just makes it a buyer’s market right? The DJIA has been going down an average of about 1.766 percent a week since the peak. At this rate we’ll be at DOW 9292 by the end of the year.
Check out these special alert headlines on CNBC and CNN.
My significant other noted that the stock market started tanking only after I started watching Jim Cramer on a regular basis. There must be a correletaion. So, in the interest of saving the world economy, I have stopped watching Jim Cramer.
You can thank me later.
Speaking of Cramer, I caught him on TV today as I was flipping the channels. It’s the same show where he freaked out a few days ago, and he even made light of it. He said flat out that right now it’s a terrible time to buy a house. I don ‘t think he likes Bernanke very much.
Is that where you buy a TV station, add a few new shows and then quickly sell it for a profit?
Hah! Good one.
I just saw a segment on CNBC’s Realty Check that profiled Seattle as the one place in the country where real estate is still booming. They had the standard Matthew Gardner interview, and his prediction is that Seattle prices won’t fall, even though the market is slowing even here. The analogy he gave was someone doing 85 on the freeway then slowing to 60. It feels like you’re slowing much more than you are, but you’re really just back to doing the speed limit.
Whew! I’m glad that’s over with! Guess you can shut the blog down now, Tim. Nice knowing you guys. I’m off to buy a house before we hit 85 again!
That’s still almost a 30% decline. I wonder if he meant it that way.
I doubt it. The tone of the interview was along the lines of “Move along, nothing to see here. The pink ponies are doing fine.”
I got the update on a buddy who is a mortgage broker last night – more of a friend of a friend. I knew he did lots of sub-prime and no-doc loans. I remember asking these guys two months ago how he was doing. They assured me he was “writing loans left and right” and that “all this media stuff was overblown”
Fast forward to this week – I asked why he hadn’t shown up for beer’s lately. The response: “he’s reeling, can’t do any business. All his lenders have dissappeared.”
This is in Issaquah, FWIW
Maybe he meant a decline in the rate of appreciation. So we go from 16% down 11.2%. We can already tell that that definitely isn’t true because we’re already below 11% and during the hot selling season to boot.
Yeah, everyone is always dissing Congress for bailing out the little folk for doing stupid things like taking out over-priced mortgages on over-priced homes.
But when the central bank bails out the Wall Street (greedy) speculators by pumping in billions of dollars … no one bats an eye.
I do not hear one republican or libertarian sayin it ain’t right … hmmm
Goldman Sachs pumps in another billion or so … prop up those junk hedge funds …
Gee. Doing 85? In Seattle? Has he ever driven on our roads? Maybe he meant 85 kph.
It seems like in the world of dumb analogies, comparing housing to driving in Seattle only works if you want to point out how one accident can cause the entire freeway in both directions to grind to a halt, and how one freeway shutting down affects the rest of the roads as well.
Come to think of it, the Seattle housing market is just like driving down the freeway. =D
If that Reality Check show can convince the rest of the country that Seattle is the only place in the world where real estate only goes up then it could attract a very large number of FB’s would would cause that assertion to hold for a much longer period of time.
Hmmm …a couple comments:
1) The Fed didn’t bail out anybody. They pumped $39 billion into the market, but it was a 3 day loan. It was pumped in Friday and most was paid back on Monday.
2) Do not buy stocks right now. The recent market drops were based on bad loans (in CDOs, etc) and liquidity problems, but I don’t think they have priced in a recession yet. For example, the PEs are starting to look good, but the forward earnings number used for calculation in based on the current PEAK earnings. If (ok, when) the recession hits, these PEs are gonna spike again after recalculation.
3) Keep your money in cash, or if you have balls you can short the market. I currently own SRPIX, QID, SDS, TWM, HSGFX (plus some Berkshire-Hathaway and Commodities). The first 4 are shorts and HSGFX is Hussman, who does very well in bear markets (but is less volatile than shorts).
4) Don’t bother trying to diversify into global, emerging markets or most commodities. During the first leg down 3 weeks ago I tracked all these …and they all got sucked down with the broader market. I think gold even dropped.
5) Housing could end in a death spiral taking consumer spending down with it. This could lead into a nasty recession considering there has been $8 trillion in new wealth created by the housing bubble …which could evaporate similar to the NASDAQ bubble.
Anyway, do your own research and analysis, but be very careful. I think we are a long way from a bottom in stocks or housing.
The analogy he gave was someone doing 85 on the freeway then slowing to 60. It feels like you’re slowing much more than you are, but you’re really just back to doing the speed limit.
I CAN’T DRIVE…. FIFTY-FIVE!!!!!!!!
deejayoh, that’s interesting that you had that discussion with your broker friend. Just today I was on the phone with a friend in LA, who for the last three years has been told by a broker at his gym to NOT buy real estate, because fundementals were so skewed. The broker told my friend today that the mortgage business is completely done. Finished. Kaput. He told my buddy that numerous loans he could have gotten as recently as two weeks ago are done. He’s repositioning his company to help banks sell REOs. While he had no comment about Seattle, he thinks prices in LA will drop 60%.
Ah! So what he was saying was the rapid appreciation was illegal. That actually makes a lot of sense.
I also saw that exchange on cnbc about seattle, and right after that how the US is likened to Rome and “is it possible the US is in the same position”…
… before the fall…
The Rome comparison came from the head of the GAO!
The article is here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/80fa0a2c-49ef-11dc-9ffe-0000779fd2ac.html