Discredited NAR mouthpiece Lawrence Yun paid Seattle a visit on Friday to spout some more of his trademark wish-based forecasting. The Puget Sound Business Journal and the P-I both had brief write-ups of his presentation.
From Aubrey Cohen’s write-up in the P-I:
“We believe that the home prices have already fallen to what could be justifiable,” economist Lawrence Yun said, noting that mortgage payments for a typical household buying a typical house last year were back to 1998 levels, as a percentage of income.
“One may even argue that home prices are underpriced,” he said, because that calculation was based on higher interest rates than current rates.
This statement is so bizarre and nonsensical it’s hardly even worth refuting. As a number of readers pointed out over in the forums, Yun appears to be using national stats for income and home prices, which causes income to be skewed high by the cities (where home ownership levels are lower) and home prices to be skewed low by the rural regions.
Here in the Seattle area, the affordability index—which is calculated using local home prices and local incomes—is still well below its historical level. As I explained in Bottom-Calling: Affordability Index Forecast, home prices will have to fall roughly 40% from their peak to get us back in line with a level that “could be justifiable.” As of January, prices had fallen just over 20% from the peak. So we’re about halfway there.
(Aubrey Cohen, Seattle P-I, 02.27.2009)
(Kirsten Grind, Puget Sound Business Journal, 02.27.2009)
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RE: 98115_Renter @ 91 –
“The market is cratering because like housing, it has been overvalued for a long time. The fundamentals are bad, earnings are bad, P/E ratios are still high. That is why the market is cratering.”
I wouldn’t say we’re disagreeing, just looking at different aspects of the same thing. Right now it happens to be the weight of Treasury issuance that is finally forcing recognition of the facts you mention, among others. It’s like having a gigantic, poorly-built sand castle that finally collapses after adding one grain of sand too many. That last grain might be the trigger, but the whole thing was an accident waiting to happen anyway.
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“What I refuse to do is attempt to convince someone that there is a magic elixir out there that will save us from our own gross stupidity, greed, laziness. There isn’t. There never has been, and never will be.”
Yep. It’s like drinking 21 shots and then asking how you can avoid the hangover. The mainstream derides this as “crime and punishment economics”. Unfortunately, reality is impervious to epithets.
“What, exactly, would a mature person propose for this crisis? Would the actions of our Treasury Dept and Federal Reserve be in order? Those policies are geared to keep rich bankers in Beth Page, rather than Bainbridge solvent, at the expense of middle-class people in Islip and Everett.”
Yep. If you are not a white collar criminal who is gaming the system, then Obama (or, more to the point, Bernanke and Geithner) is no more your friend than Bush was.
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RE: EconE @ 90 – RE: Eleua @ 62 –
The velocity of debt is also in the middle between consumer and product. Wal Mart is the perfect example, but it is everywhere. Wal mart issues a credit card with bonus points. The Wal Mart shopper uses the card to buy stuff. Wal Mart stocks it’s shelves with credit and pays employees by borrowing.
The consumer with the credit card is making payments, or as Wal Mart hopes, minimum payments. The consumer over the course of a year pays four times the price of the goods through inteerest and penalties.
The smart consumer is religiously making payments on time and only paying twice the price of goods while the bad consumer is running up high balances, late penalties and higher interest.
In theory though we are only talking about the price of goods. The price of goods is driven down by volume. The manufacturer may make a little bit from his accounts recievable balance but that may only bring up the price of goods, out the door, to fair market value.
If the consumer buys directly from the manufacturer for cash the price of the goods may be a little more but much cheaper than buying on credit.
The problem is the people in the middle. It’s thier jobs that every one is trying to perserve. The credit market creates profits and jobs.
Real Estate began working the same way. lower interest meant higher prices. Yun is using the same argument. Interest is less, so payments are less so Real Estate is more affordable. The value of Real Estate is still far below the price but the payments become more attractive.
We can’t allow banks, and lending institutions to continue with debt velocity theories.
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RE: Eleua @ 97 –
Sorry for the delayed response, I have more to do than sit in front of the computer all day.
You really don’t get it.
The reason I, and others, attack you is because of your FOX NEWS style attack on the liberalism. Lighten up. You’re not some grand master “teaching people what is” and what’s not. Many people on the Seattle Bubble have called it from the get go, me included. You’re not the only one that gets it. People on both the left and the right get it. That’s why we read blogs like the Seattle Bubble. Look back at some of the comments I’ve made concerning the Dow. Last year people had no end of insults for me when I said the Dow would be trading below 8000 before the end of 2008.
How about this?
If you stop your derogatory comments about the left, I wouldn’t say things that I would really enjoy saying about the right.
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RE: Eleua @ 58 –
I’ve asked the same question for over a year now. Banks keep saying they are losing money. Hedge Funds, Insurance Companies are all talking about losing money. The auto industry I truly believe is losing money, but the others that trade in paper profits don’t lose money, the money needs to end up some place.
I always ask if it may be lost in the couch or something.
There was an article in the London Times that did talk about cash reserves being very high. I do believe that there is cash hoarded and that it is accounted for, it’s simply being with held. In my opinion it’s like an extortion plot.
Sorry to disagree but the government is dumping in money and that is becoming a problem. Those people who were holding all the cards last year are being by passed and being asked to account for money they already took.
I do agree that money will find it’s highest and best use so the extortion plot may be collapsing along with the financial system as we knew it.
This time around there is money out there it’s just under utilized.
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P.S.
The ass end of a bull is a joke.
As in goodbye bull market, or kiss the good times goodbye.
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“There was an article in the London Times that did talk about cash reserves being very high. I do believe that there is cash hoarded and that it is accounted for, it’s simply being with held. In my opinion it’s like an extortion plot.”
We’ve been here before, or at least someplace that rhymes with it:
http://www.mises.org/mysteryofbanking/mysteryofbanking.pdf
‘The Fed tried frantically to inflate after the 1929 crash, including massive open market purchases and heavy loans to banks. These attempts succeeded in driving interest rates down, but they foundered on the rock of massive distrust of the banks. Furthermore, bank fears of runs as well as bankruptcies by their borrowers led them to pile up excess reserves in a manner not seen before or since the 1930s.’
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/historyofmoney.pdf
‘[T]he inflationary policies of Hoover and [Federal Reserve Board Governor Eugene] Meyer proved to be counterproductive. American citizens lost confidence in the banks and demanded cash – Federal Reserve notes – for their deposits (currency in circulation rising by $122 million by the end of July), while foreigners lost confidence in the dollar and demanded gold (the gold stock in the United States falling by $380 million in this period). In addition, the banks, for the first time, did not fully lend out their new reserves, and accumulated excess reserves – these excess reserves rising to 10 percent of total reserves by mid-year. A common explanation claims that business, during a depression, lowered its demand for loans, so that pumping new reserves into the banks was only “pushing on a string.” But this popular view overlooks the fact that banks can always use their excess reserves to buy existing securities; they don’t have to wait for new loan requests. Why didn’t they do so? Because the banks were whipsawed between two forces. On the one hand, bank failures had increased dramatically during the depression. Whereas during the 1920s, in a typical year 700 banks failed, with deposits totaling $170 million, since the depression struck, 17,000 banks had been failing per year, with a total of $1.08 billion in deposits. This increase in bank failures could give any bank pause, especially since all the banks knew in their hearts that, as fractional reserve banks, none of them could withstand determined and massive runs upon them by their depositors. Second, just at a time when bank loans were becoming risky, the cheap-money policy of the Fed had driven down interest returns from bank loans, thus weakening banks’ incentive to bear risk. Hence the piling up of excess reserves. The more that Hoover and the Fed tried to inflate, the more worried the market and the public became about the dollar, the more gold flowed out of the banks, and the more deposits were redeemed for cash.’
Meanwhile, this just in from the Privatize the Profits and Socialize the Losses department:
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2009/03/jp-morgan-made-5-billion-in-profit-on.html
“JP Morgan Made $5 Billion in Profit on $88 Trillion in Unregulated Derivatives Speculation
There is no justification for a commercial bank, with regulated depositors’ funds insured by the government, should be speculating on a level this great.
One also has to wonder who actually ‘lost’ in those derivatives bets that JP Morgan made, who the counterparties were. How many losses were taken by AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman?
Who is really being bailed out here? Aren’t we paying for JP Morgan’s “winnings?”
If they speculate and lose, who pays for that? We do.
What is a bank doing gambling in unregulated over-the-counter derivatives involving commodities and financial instruments worth $89 Trillion?
Getting paid by the public whether they win or lose it appears.
When a single player with deep pockets and government guarantees is placing bets in markets on a scale that dwarfs the Gross Domestic Product of United States that is the very definition of moral hazard.
Until the Obama Administration takes strong steps to bring back Glass-Steagall, and put hard limits on the banks there will be no reform and no recovery.
We are 48 days into this Administration. We have see little or no systemic reform. Just a continuation of crony capitalism under Bernanke, Summers and Geithner.”
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By Eleua @ 97:
There are different levels of stupidity. At the consumer level it is staggering, and to be expected. What I didn’t expect was the stupidity at the highest levels of some of the biggest financial corporations. I read a story on how those in the risk control section (or whatever it was called) of WAMU felt marginalized and ignored, but it goes well beyond that one entity or even a few entities. Just taking one example, unemployment levels were not that bad when things started to really fall apart in September. What kind of assumptions were these companies making when they bet the wrong way on multi-billion dollar bets? They literally bet the continued financial viability of their companies on unemployment never again going above 7%. What kind of a bet is that?
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RE: old ballard @ 104 –
You got it from the start. Good. Many people did not, even after they were presented with the facts on an almost daily basis.
I find most of the economic ignorance to be on the political Left, but certainly not all of it. I find that Lefties have the greatest spread between what they actually know versus what they think they know, so they make the best object lessons for others to observe. Calling out the Lefties makes the debate last long enough for 3rd parties to see the folly of that view of economics.
The hard part of the past few years was that most of the Lefties thought the economy was hollow because of who was in the White House. Now that MAObama is steering the ship of state into the ditch at warp speed, it is tougher for them to see what Barry, Harry, and Nan are doing will only make the problem worse, as most Lefties have ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE how credit origination works or how the government funds itself.
I’m not letting up on my snarky style nor my pokes at the Statists. The Statist-Lefties are responsible for the root policy that created this mess (getting something for nothing and the democratization of credit). If you don’t like it, then turn the channel.
I don’t come here to hear myself bloviate or to take victory laps. I come here to spread the knowledge that others passed on to me. They took time to educate me and I am returning the favor, as I can never possibly repay them.
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They treat economics like some goofy, New Age religion, rather than a science that can be studied and predicted.
Economics is not, in fact, a science. In fact, *this* kind of thinking is really what’s at the root of the credit blowup.
British scientist Lord Kelvin (whose name is associated with the temperature scale tied to absolute zero) once famously said that it wasn’t possible to understand something without quantifying it. Fair enough. Quantification is necessary for understanding–but by itself it is NOT sufficient.
Economics, more than any other field, is about the numbers and the numbers alone. It’s so easy to be seduced by numbers because they are powerful and descriptive–but they do NOT tell the whole story, not by a long shot. (I can’t believe anyone would take seriously a field where the physical environment and the natural world are regarded as “externalities”. Anyone with half a brain knows that Mother Nature bats last, each and every time, and it’s sheer foolishness to pretend otherwise.)
The tunnel vision around numbers is even worse in economics because those numbers most frequently represent dollars, generally in service of making rich people richer. We all know that saw about a man purposefully not understanding something if his paycheck depends on him not understanding it.
As a result economics as a field is incomplete, backward-looking, insular, self-serving, and (as we are seeing in full color these days) divorced from reality in some serious ways.
No one will dispute that up and down the line the financial “professionals” at the heart of this mess–investors, bankers, rating agencies, etc, etc,– had maximum profit as their primary motivation (meet Mr. Market). And you better believe they had numbers (Mr. Math, if you will) to justify and back up their every decision. There is *no way* that transactions that large would go forward without it.
Every Tom, Dick, and Harry with two brain cells to rub together knew that the hinky chocolate from the last few years would come to grief. But the finance professionals? The whole generation of econ grads from the Reagan era forward? Alan freaking Greenspan?
Paulson and Bernanke are stooges like the rest of them, but what the hell can we do? It’s easy to say “Let the banks fail”, but if you think for 3 seconds about what would happen to the economy if every consumer in America suddenly, urgently were driven to proceed by cash only because banks are totally untrustworthy…Good luck with that.
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RE: Kary L. Krismer @ 108 –
KLK,
I agree. The irresponsible risks taken by the captains of industry were simply criminal.
My 11yo daughter understands this. Why can’t someone with all that experience understand it?
Killinger should be sued off the face of the earth for how he ran WM and how he flat-out lied to his shareholders.
The local media should have pounded him over and over again until WM came clean with their books.
Funny thing for all those that think I enjoy this…We are approaching the levels in our financial markets that are starting to make me nervous. It’s not my investments that worry me, but the collapse of society with a gun-grabbing, free-speech squashing Marxist running the government.
It’s worse than we think.
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RE: Angie @ 110 –
Your post is one of the best examples of what is wrong with our financial education. Why is it, if economics isn’t a science, that people could predict this outcome and give the reasons why?
Lucky guess? Sold to you.
You are correct in one area – people were paid to believe in the New Age religion of economic pink ponies. Yes, that is correct.
Should the banks fail? They are already insolvent. How long do you wish to hide this sausage? The reason there is no confidence is that money isn’t buying what DC and NY are selling. They know that the solution is institutionalized fraud to paper over the previous institutionalized fraud, that was created to bolster the political fortunes of those selling “something for nothing.”
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Eleua -
Yes, please keep squabbling about the Lefties on the internet. Its just what the upper class wants you proles doing. Anything to keep your mind in the gutter and you thinking your friend is your enemy. Remember all those scorching rants and screeds about the hatred felt between the various founding fathers who had minute policy differences in the grand scheme of things, and how that led to their inability to throw out the King? Neither do I…
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By Eleua @ 111:
Eleua. You may have been right on calling the downturn in the Seattle Real Estate market. Congratulations.
But do you cant really think Mccain/Gramm/Whitman would be doing better than Obama/Volker/Buffett cleaning up this mess? Really?
So if you are here to “spread the knowledge that others passed on to me”, do us all a favor and quit the Limbaugh/Hannity impersonation and stick to RE.
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b,
Read your history. The FFs were very concerned about big-gov Statists, Monarchists, and others that seek to subjugate others through the power of government.
Nice try.
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RE: Hugh Dominic @ 114 –
McCain is a Statist and only knows what the bankers tell him. Check out his campaign contributors and voting record.
My description of MAObama you cite is completely, 100% accurate.
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We need at least one intelligent post today. Where is Deejayoh?
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Hey Eleua,
Speaking of returning favors and WaMu, I can’t thank you enough for your post way back about WaMu and its booking of back-capitalized interest as income. At that point WaMu was still flying high. I did some more research on that and what I learned allowed me to short the living hell out of those crooks.
One only had to spend 15 minutes with their annual report to see the writing on the wall.
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It’s very simple, it makes no sense to me why this discussion goes on and on.
Credit is a fabrication. It mimics a money supply by allowing goods to be bought sold and traded with the promise of being paid for in the future.
Real Estate is the same. We promise to pay in the future with future dollars, we hope those are inflated dollars thirty years from now. If those are deflated dollars at least we have an amortized loan that is at a fixed rate.
The future is here and the dollars are stuck because the people holding the dollars refuse to pay the debt that is owed. They are refusing to let go of the money they have in reserve.
Along with millions of other people the banks, lenders, and investors are hoping thier cash will be able to buy “investments” for cheap, for cash, and resell for a profit.
It makes no difference if it’s foreclosures, cheap stocks, classic cars, or businesses, the future is here today, debts need to be paid and the cash in reserves has already been spoken for.
If banks refuse to pay thier debts why should any one else? Why pay on a mortgage and give banks more money to hoard. Why pay consumer credit accounts? FICO? What’s that going to look like for millions of Americans in a few more years?
It’s over. Banks need to settle with consumers for whatever they can get and move on. There is plenty to do, plenty of money to be made legitately, they just need to pay thier debts, collect what they can, and move on.
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RE: David Losh @ 119 – RE: wreckingbull @ 118 –
No problem. Glad it worked out for you.
I find it amazing that major shareholders couldn’t see it for what it was.
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Just a note to those whom have been personally offended by my or others’ posts at times on this site.
Ted Kazinki’s message was laced with bitterness, prejudice, and hatred, but that doesn’t mean the core of the content wasn’t meaningful and that it didn’t deserve being discussed and debated. If you get too lost in the content meant to personally harm you, you’ll miss 100% of the meaningful content.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
Prejudice insults are thought by many to be a very childish way of making one’s point. But don’t give up on a train of thought just because the thinker has experienced some adversity along the way causing him to not personally like you.
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Should I change my name to The UNIBLOGGER?
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RE: Eleua @ 122 – Only if you enjoy meeting FBI agents. ;-)
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Good to see ya around, Eleua.
What is it with the Left’s fascination with Hannity and Fox News? And why is it that’s the first thing they reference when they’re losing the argument? Lots of diversion, little substance relevant to the discussion at hand.
We are so screwed. Much like we’ve watched California and Nevada to get an idea where our housing market might be headed, we can now watch Europe to see where the USA is headed. Euro banks are even more leveraged than ours, their housing inflation is just as bad, and their governments are using all the socialist/statist approaches to fixing the problem. We already know how this will play out for them, but maybe we can learn a few lessons along the way and apply them to our situation.
If our economy were a house, the foundation is cracked and sagging, the framing is rotten, the plumbing leaks, and the termites are getting ready to finish what’s left. And who will fix it? Like our government, the contractors are all either corrupt or incompetent, so the mess will get much worse, and the bills higher, before anything ever gets fixed.
Time to reset. Burn the house down, clean up the land, and start over. I relish the day when the government’s checks bounce, because then and only then will the people demand change, accountability, honesty, and most important, that the government serve the people and no one else.
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By Jonness @ 121:
Um, that still doesn’t change the fact that he was the Unibomber.
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By Eleua @ 109:
It’s posts like these that prove that you are an ideological hack, rather than the economist you pretend to be. Perhaps you have no intention of actual persuasion, but if you do you have miserably failed by spouting talk-radio style discourse. It seems to me as if your primary intent is to offend and prove your point without any consideration for opposing views.
People here say you were right in the past, and perhaps you were. It doesn’t change the fact that you are a small, childish person with no actual intent to educate as you claim.
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The dog that yelps is the one that got hit by the rock.
I’m not an economist. That’s my point. A basic working knowledge of how markets and money work, added with a grasp of relevant history (not filtered by the Lefties) is all you needed to have seen this for what it was.
People have been blinded by getting something for nothing. History shows that always ends in tears.
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Hey Eleua it wasn’t the lefties running things for the previous 8 years how about getting a clue — is that a fact or not — a direct answer would be appreciated.
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Eleua –
I guess my point did not register with you, but thats to be expected when your concern is with “Lefties”. It is times like these that I question your rational judgement, even though I agree (and have here and on TF for a long time) with many of your calls. Blathering about Lefties or Neocons or Righties or Fundies is a nice game for the proles to play, and an easy trap to fall into. Bread and circuses, and you fight against the bread but go full bore into the circus…
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Eleua @ 110
Your post is one of the best examples of what is wrong with our financial education. Why is it, if economics isn’t a science, that people could predict this outcome and give the reasons why?
Aside from Roubini, name the economists who did. Alan “I was wrong” Greenspan, who had enough economic cred to run the Fed, didn’t.
If economics were a real science, this situation would never have happened. There are enough parallels to what happened in the 30s that the people who run the financial show should have seen what was coming and headed it off at the pass.
Sadly “Mr. Market” got the best of them and they couldn’t see beyond the next quarter’s profits. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
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By Angie @ 130:
As to the first point, does that mean that predicting the weather isn’t a “real science” since they’re often wrong? Both predicting weather and dealing with the economy involve too many variables and too little information.
As to the second point, what parallels are you seeing? Were there a lot of mortgage backed securities in the 1930s? Did energy prices rise significantly prior to the downturn?
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There were plenty of people who foresaw what was coming, many of them have been getting rich shorting the market. Nassim Taleb comes to mind. As far as having accurate preductions goes, I would give the prize to Bob Prechter. He is the ONLY one that I know of who had almost every particular of the crisis nailed down (particularly his calls for deflation).
There are SCADS of bubble bloggers (Tim included) who realized the economy was completely bonkers. Heck, even I was sufficiently concerned that I sold my house years ago.
One important point to keep in mind is that while there are MANY people who foresaw what was coming, none of those individuals are ever likely to be let into the hallowed halls of power, and given authority at places like a central bank.
The reality is that anyone who is alarmist, or unduly pessimistic will NEVER make it politics. It’s those who are good at getting along, and not ruffling feathers, who will wind up in positions of authority.
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Kary–weather prediction clearly has come a lot farther than economics in the last 50 years. Go read Cliff Mass’ blog for starters. You’ll love it.
As to parallels to the runup to the GD–I invite you to read a little more widely, those parallels are being widely discussed. Remember that the regulatory framework that was erected in the wake of the GD was dismantled since the Reagan Era and, surprise surprise, we find that they actually served a useful purpose after all.
Sniglet, I will take your point about pessimists not being popular. However many of the “halls of power” are in financial institutions, regulatory bodies, and the like, that specifically have to do with money, and an economics background is a prereq.
Finally, as a followup to my comments regarding whether economics is a science: Like Eleua, I am not an economist. However, unlike Eleua, I am a scientist, and have a very clear understanding of what is and isn’t “real science”. By and large, economics ain’t it.
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“Both predicting weather and dealing with the economy involve too many variables and too little information.”
And very little accountability for those forecasters who are mostly wrong.
The difference I see is that weather forecasters aren’t in a position to profit from their predictions.
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By Ira sacharoff @ 134:
And many of them are a lot better looking!
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RE: Eleua @ 127 –
Eleua, we all like the content and comments – keep it coming.
Just try to lay off the “hard Leftie” and “MAOBama” stuff.
As one of the main contributors to this blog (and somone who guest posts here regularly) I would hope you would do your part to focus on the topics at hand and avoid blatant partisan distractions.
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RE: what goes up must come down @ 128 –
Your post is EXACTLY what I am talking about – EXACTLY.
People see the economy through the prism of their own politics and economic bias. Back in the previous Administration, it was easy to get Lefties to see the economy for the hollow shell it was, unless they were buying trendy real estate with money they couldn’t possibly pay back. On the other side, I was kicked off more than one “conservative” call-in radio show for trying to explain the bubble in the face of “record home ownership” under a GOP Administration.
Now that their Savior is in the White House, suddenly the economic fix is this stupid spending bill. All problems are STILL Bush’s problems, as they will until the economy turns around. If it doesn’t bottom until 2018, with a Republican in their second term, the Lefties will say that the recovery is due to MAObama policies.
Statist Republicans do the same thing.
If you are going to play “it’s their fault due to proximity in DC” game, then ask yourself when the markets peaked. What changed in DC at that time?
Yup. Pelosilini got the Speaker’s Gavel.
It’s been all downhill since then.
(Isn’t the blame game fun)
Look at the Leftie goodie-goodie programs that seek to give money to people for doing nothing. The CRA, FNM, FRE, and all this leverage is a direct result of Leftie programs. Look at Obamessiah’s campaign contributor list (the ones that he publishes).
That’s my issue. MAObama can’t fix the problem because he is doing the same thing that caused it in the first place, just faster.
Sometimes I think he is trying to crash the markets to blame it on his predecessor and hide his failings of being a disciple of Keynesian/Statist policies.
Back in the day, I was blaming Bush for trying to stoke an unsustainable bubble and saying that there is nothing behind the 2003-7 economy.
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RE: Eleua @ 137 –
Now it’s just boring.
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RE: 98115_Renter @ 138 –
Bored? You must be off your meds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cqr-OcJ_CI
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RE: Eleua @ 139 –
Eleua, while this is Tim’s blog, it is still a community. You seem to ignore the fact that there is a diversity of opinion and sensibility within all communities, and communicating within a community requires respect and a maturity that you seem to lack.
The Tim has requested on multiple occasions that partisan rhetoric be carried on in the blame game forum, yet you seem intent on carrying on your ridicule worthy blather. If you had any sense of history you would not be equating our current leaders to the likes of Mao or Mussolini, but you seem to lack that as well. You have a clear need for attention…why not start your own blog (you probably have one already) where you can spew your bile?
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Good to see Eleua back in action and come out swinging.
I am about a big a liberal as they come and I have a hard time disagreeing with most of what Eleua is saying (I think he is giving way too much of a pass for the conservatives like Greenspan who had a huge hand in this debacle).
In fact. what Eleua is proposing is the Swedish/RTC model of “nationalizing” the banks that Republicans are up in arms about.
What is really funny about what is going on is that US LOVES to give out advice to others, but it won’t follow its own advice when faced with the same situation. For decades, IMF and US has adviced failing economies with troubled banks that they need to liquidate the bad banks and manage the orderly selloff of the assets.
And this is EXACTLY what we need to do today to make sure that we don’t repeat the same mistake that Japan made with their “lost decade” (which US economists readily brought up as an exampe of what NOT to do). Just bleeding things out like what we are doing right now is not really helping anyone and it is just going to drag this recession out over multiple years.
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Eleua et al,
just curious: Are there any governments now or in the past, foreign or domestic who did things the right way?
Seems like state intervention usually screws things up, at the same time “free markets’ have big problems too, especially those countries that just a few years ago were hailed as economic miracles, and now are worse off than anybody.
I don’t have an opinion here, just looking for perspective.
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By gameboy @ 141:
I appreciate your mature and logical discussion, but I fail to see why you encourage Eleua’s immature, self-serving rants that clearly impede rational discourse.
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RE: gameboy @ 141 –
It’s one thing to disagree. It’s quite another thing to make stuff up.
I have hated Greenspan since the mid-90s, and have thought he was the worst CB in our history. I also am against nationalization of banks via the Swedish, or any other model.
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RE: Ira sacharoff @ 142 –
We have been on a state-driven economy since the Progressive Era of US politics. This is what happens when the state tries to drive the economy.
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RE: 98115_Renter @ 143 –
What have you contributed to this community, other than whining if someone doesn’t genuflect to your Leftist God?
Yes, I have disrespectful terms for most prominent US politicians. MAObama is my favorite and it is very accurate. I threw that out in the larger point of what is happening in the bond market, and the usual suspects on SB zeroed in on it, rather than discuss the broader points.
If you can be so easily derailed, I feel sorry for you Guess what? it is still legal to criticize politicians in the US, and If I overstep my bounds on this forum, I will apologize to The Tim.
You can see my criticism of both parties in my comments, and while I personally do not care for McCain (McStain if it makes you feel better), I have respect for a guy that wore his country’s uniform and faced hostile fire, whereas I loathe someone that travels comfortably in the company of people who have unapologetically advocated for the systematic extermination of 12% of the US population for doing nothing more than disagreeing with them.
Why did you and Angie zero in on my offhanded political throwaways and still ignore the bulk of what many on this thread are discussing?
You don’t see me whining about Mikal’s comments to me. He does that every time I show up, yet I still manage to function. I use a disrespectful term for someone you probably have never met, and you can’t let it go.
Don’t you have a Prius to plaster with stickers you buy at Pike Place Market, or something?
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“whereas I loathe someone that travels comfortably in the company of people who have unapologetically advocated for the systematic extermination of 12% of the US population for doing nothing more than disagreeing with them.”
Please explain.
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Ira,
Obama is friends with Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, both Chicago professors and intellectuals. Obama started his career with them by their introductions.
Dohrn and Ayers were members of the Weather Underground, a radical US based terrorist organization with roots in RYM and SDS. They spent their time blowing up high profile US landmarks, killing cops, and that sort of thing. They were part of the WU central committee and were essentially the brains behind the operations.
The WU was infiltrated by the FBI who reported back in 1982 that the WU central committee were plotting for the overthrow of the US government and what the society would be like when the WU remade it. They were asked what they would do with those people that didn’t subscribe to “the new way of thinking” and their response was that these people would have to be eliminated and it might number up to 25 million.
This is in keeping with similar organizations in other countries that did try reeducation camps and ultimately extermination camps. Marxists don’t change because they live on one side of a border. Their motives and actions descend from the same source.
Fortunately, it never came to that in the US, but Cambodia, Korea, USSR, China, etc were not so lucky.
Obama obviously knew of their connections and how they, to this day, are unapologetic about their actions, yet he maintained a friendship with them until he was launched into the national spotlight, where that would be a bit of a problem.
Imagine what the MSM would have done if Tim McVeigh, rather than being executed, was given a teaching job at some university, or DoD contractor, and was hanging out with the ex-husband of Sarah Paliin’s third cousin in Alaska? We wouldn’t have heard the end of it.
Imagine what would have been said if Sarah Palin started her political career in the living room of Tim McVeigh.
Google Larry Grathwohl and see for yourself. The video is chilling. That video was made in 1982, which was when MAObama was 20 years old. It isn’t a hit piece.
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“Don’t you have a Prius to plaster with stickers you buy at Pike Place Market, or something?”
Heh, I actually do sometimes drive a sticker-plastered Prius (it’s the girlfriend’s car however). I should add a Ron Paul sticker to really confuse people.
I stopped getting worked up about political arguments years ago. It’s just two flavors of statism. Trying to argue against THAT usually doesn’t even get you an angry response, just an uncomprehending stare. (“No one can be told what the Matrix is….”) Occasionally it’s fun to bewilder Republicans by telling them that the Bush gang made Lenin look like Theodore Roosevelt.
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Eleua-
I respect your thoughts and while I may disagree with some of your thinking you make a good argument in your own way. Just my personal thoughts and feel free to call me a political name and disagree. I love to look at things from more than one angle!
What does a persons political alignment have to do with the discussion? Yes we can point fingers at the “lefties” or we can say “W. did it” but isn’t it “we the people” that decided to elect the people in their current and previous positions? So we can really only blame “we the people” for the mess. In the end we are our own executioner. (Yes, I realize our election system is a flawed one.)
As a teacher I believe we should have mandatory economics classes. Classes about our economy and the world economy on the micro and macro level and how they really work. Would be great wouldn’t it? But how can we afford more teachers for those specializations when education is in shambles and does not have enough funding to keep operations running. I guess that is up to “we the people.”
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Market’s up today (lighter Treasury issuance schedule this week…), I guess the PTB thought it was a good day to let out another little bit of the truth…
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=alsJZqIFuN3k
‘March 4 (Bloomberg) — Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said the fund it uses to protect customer deposits at U.S. banks could dry up amid a surge in bank failures, as she responded to an industry outcry against new fees approved by the agency.
“Without these assessments, the deposit insurance fund could become insolvent this year,” Bair wrote in a March 2 letter to the industry. U.S. community banks plan to flood the FDIC with about 5,000 letters in protest of the fees, according to a trade group.’
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RE: Eleua @ 148 -This is where you become delusional. His connnections with them at best are serving on similar education boards. There were several high profile republicans on those boards as well. Did the republican party get alot of secret support from people that blew up buildings. You should change your name to Mccarthy.
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RE: CostcoMike @ 150 –
You will get no argument from me on what you posted. At the end of the day, we the people get the .gov we deserve. We are too lazy, stupid, and greedy to tell the statists of both flavors to get bent, so we end up with what we have.
I never liked Bush after April of 2001, and while I think MAObama is worse, Bush was a disaster. You can read it in my other writings.
Why do I ping on the Lefties? Because they are unapologetic statists, and that is the problem. We expect the .gov to bail us out of all our boo boos, and that comes from the Left. Getting something for nothing is decidedly Leftist.
Also, statism is responsible for most of the human misery of the past 100 years, of which, open, avowed Leftist statism accounts for almost all of it.
For the purposes of discussing economics, I like Lefties because they have a great combination of pride, lack of knowledge, and fundamentally flawed thinking that makes them good object lessons for those watching the debate. With right wingers, we come to agreement too quickly to make the point, as people on the right tend to be better informed, favor free markets, have more open minds, etc.
Sorting through the idea that the economy is defacto good/bad depending on who is in the WH is just madness. I am a conservative, but thought Bush was a disaster, and had no troubles getting Lefties to agree with me on the outset, but once we delved into the problem, their eyes glaze over and they are on to their next DU talking point.
The problem today is that suddenly Republicans ‘get it.’ Why? The White House is why.
I’m an anti-statist, on most issues. I believe that the cultural Left is the religious expression of Statism whose underlying premise is that .gov can perfect man’s condition. That was true of Woody Wilson (the worst POTUS in our history), and every other statist that has followed in his mold.
I’d really rather discuss the capital markets, our debt, how the .gov funds itself, and how we rebuild than discuss partisan politics. The problem is that politics is part of all those components, and the Lefties are very, very squeamish about tolerating anything that could possibly be construed as dissent. You see that in almost all Leftist dominated institutions, and they can’t even stand when there is any threat to their monopoly over the public discourse.
Now, if you don’t mind, I have my interpretive dance and abstract poetry class to get to.
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Mikal,
He started his career at a function hosted by those two demons. Keep in mind that we know this as a fact. What don’t we know?
If I were to run for State Senate, and had my coming out party at the home of the Green River Killer, what would that say about me?
Would I serve on a board that had Gary Ridgeway as a member?
After a while, you have to quit dismissing things as coincidence and see it for what it is.
Cognitive dissonance is tough. You can work through it.
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I’m neither a “leftie” or a “rightie”…however, I would think (hope?) that if a “leftie” and a “rightie” found themselves alone with each other in a mutually dangerous situation, that their ideological differences would take a back seat to the situation at hand.
Lefty, righty, centrist…you’re all welcome at my dinner table.
WRT Economists. What exactly IS an Economist?
I have a degree in Economics. I’d consider myself an “amateur” economist…or even a “hobbyist” of sorts.
Similar to Angie, I also feel that Economics is more of an art than a science….and my school (at the time) was the only one that offered a BS in Econ, rather than a BA. I was the guy sitting in the back of the class that challenged the mathematical “science” part with “artful” questions. It didn’t make me very popular with some teachers, as I was able to turn some of their mathematical based theories on their respective heads when looking at it from a non-number perspective. Even using the governments “Minitab” program (and fiddling with the numbers a bit) showed me the math portion of my education was imperfect.
However, it wasn’t necessarily my background in economics that allowed me to see what was coming. It was based more on simple math. The Econ background just helped me to understand the interconnectedness of everything and how it would spread from industry to industry.
So what or who is a “real” economist?
I personally don’t think that anybody that works as an economist on behalf of a corporation is a true economist as there is going to be bias. Even though the job title may be “Economist”, they seem to be more “Marketing Consultants” (no, not the kind that do the print ads or commercials)
A true economist IMO is someone who doesn’t work for ANYBODY where they are using their knowledge to sell a certain product for that “anybody”. Who did Roubini work for? Nobody. He was a teacher. That gave him the “outside looking in” perspective that allowed him to separate his own interests/hopes/fears from the situation.
So…finally…what’s an Economist?
To me it is an artist that can’t draw, play an instrument, sing or dance, but is good at math. I’d be willing to bet that they are probably a bit on the eccentric side, aren’t very popular at cocktail parties…but still are useful provided that you know that they aren’t spinning things on behalf of their own corporate master. You know…like Learah and Yun.
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Eleua – “Now, if you don’t mind, I have my interpretive dance and abstract poetry class to get to.”
While I have a hard time believing that you truly are going to these classes it put a hilarious picture of a man with the head of your avatar in a leotard. And I can admit from experience that interpretive dance is not by any means easy.
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By Eleua @ 144:
But you have proposed this as a possible solution:
“My idea would be to force the debt out and default it. Make the bank (shareholders) take their zeroes, force the bond holders to take their haircuts, and hold out the banks as an example of what not to do. What good banks are left would receive the capital. Those with savings would be able to be rewarded.”
Sounds pretty much like what Sweden did…
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Ok kids, changing topics slightly:
What I would like to know is where all the money went. Almost unlimited credit created huge amounts of inventory of every imaginable good from homes to cars. Now we are suffering from high inventory which is driving prices down plus no more credit to buy all that crap. Question though is, was this all just dollars on paper that never actually had any value? I would argue not. For the longest time we had massive amounts of influx of money just looking for a place to land. One of the main causes for the housing bubble was that investors were desparately looking for places to park their money.
Where did all that money go? I’m happy to agree that a lof of wealth was simply destroyed but the initial massive amounts of moneys that were real still exist but where? And more importantly, where are they going? Don’t be fooled to believe that everyone in the world is poorer now.
Inquiring minds would like to know where the next buble is building.
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I could do without all the political mudslinging. This thread pretty much has me only reading the forums the last few days. You have a valuable message, Eleua, but the namecalling and antagonism really detracts from it IMO. I pretty much just started skipping your posts.
FYI. For anyone that is too young to know, Eleua’s avatar is from here: Quiet Riot – Metal Health
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RE: Hinten @ 158 –
That is the question: Where did the money go?
Eula, that’s the question, where’s the money, Dollars, Euros and Yuan?
I’ll answer because you don’t know. You’re busy with the conspiracy theories. What is surprising to me is the number of people who have gone along with this rant about nothing.
Cash reserves have been building for years. The aticipation was that as these bubbles burst it was best to have equity shares in real property. Banks are holding real estate and are forced to hold reserves against the mortgages.
It went way beyond that as people borrowed more and paid more for goods and services. We did have hyper inflation and no one cared. How much is a tomatoe? Cars, boats, TVs, houses, food, oil, everything went up in price beyond any ones comprehension. Corporations put cash aside faster than they could haul it in.
Governments have tons of cash by having huge tax wind falls. Government had problems spending cash fast enough.
Now what? The cash is out of circulation so the money stops coming in. The consumer has been bled dry. Governments and global corporations are holding the cards. The money funnelled up to the exremely wealthy.
The very wealthy are only interested in making more money. Politics are a way of passing legislation to make more money. Left, Right, or moderate, makes no difference.
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Hinten,
The money was destroyed by deflation. Money is created by lending and destroyed by default and repayment. Interest saps the productivity. The situation we now find ourselves is natural at the end of a huge, non productive debt binge. Transferring payments from the productive to the non-productive is at the core of this, but there I go again, being all political.
LHR,
My name calling. Interesting.
“Wingnuts are out in force.”
“Think tank is in an outhouse storage.”
I didn’t really get political until #61, which was in response to #56. All I did was have a disrespectful term for His Most Merciful and Divine Benevolence (#28), which is normal for me when I refer to just about any prominent politician.
Get over it. I don’t come by here very often, but when I do, there are three things I can count on.
1 Mikal will sling an insult at me for just showing up.
2. Angie will blame everything on the Republicans, free market (and now math).
3. 98115 will get into a nod-fest with Angie.
I get that many of you are Lefties. So what? I live around the very same and find them to be a great example of what went wrong with the housing boom. Remember a few years back when Lefties were congratulating themselves on being part of the “creative class” and how that justifies their views on real estate appreciation? Merely proposing that Seattle was not special was enough to get them all in a huff. I think that is why SB developed the Pink Pony mascot.
One thing is for sure, they can’t handle dissent, and they won’t stick to an issue beyond the standard DU talking point.
My point (that I have made over and over again) is that BOTH SIDES tend to view the viability of the economy and the validity of political policy endeavors through the prism of who has power in DC. Guess who holds every lever of power in DC? That’s right. Guess where my criticism is aimed? Good guess.
When Bush was POTUS, I criticized him just as fiercely. Of course, back then it was justified as Bush was the direct spawn of Satan taken from the DNA of Hitler, Gehngis Kahn, and the starting line for the 1979 Philadelphia Flyers. When I criticize the Messiah, I’m just being mean, racist, homophobic, environmentally insensitive, sexist, abusing children, and threatening the arts.
Like I said before, I’d rather talk about the capital markets and how that is going to weigh on us as we go forward. The biggest threat to the capital markets is the egregious government borrowing for purposes of political spoils of war, encouraging sloth, social engineering, and the like.
Guess who is doing it?
Anyone who thinks I’m just being a blind Republican and not seeing my own party doing the same thing is delusional. I don’t update my blog often, but when I did in September/October, I spent plenty of time talking about the folly of this when Bush/Paulson, (or as I like to call them, Excreta Cerebelli Maximus and Skeletor) were running things.
Good grief. So I have a disparaging attitude toward politicians. I learned from the best over the past 8 years.
Get a life.
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Hinten,
The next bubble was in US debt, and it appears to be topping and coming down. The .gov/FED were chasing everyone into US debt to keep the ability for Congress to continue to fund itself.
That’s why Pelosilini was so adamant about passing the TARP. She was worried that if the bond market cracked, the Congress would have its funding source cut off. The money went to the Primary Dealers so they could continue to wholesale US debt and keep the Welfare State and Project for the New American Century going.
Picture what the world looks like if the bond market crashes and Congress can’t borrow money for any duration at less than 10%.
What happens to all the DoD contractors that can’t get funding for their projects? What happens to those employees? What happens if there are no welfare checks, social security or medicare? The Grey Geezers will turn off Judge Judy and start pestering their Congressman. Half the hospitals close within a year after they go BK rendering emergency services to those with no money.
What happens to commerce and industry when they can’t borrow for less than 15% for prime? What happens when all those 4.5% mortgages can’t be refied for less than 20% Who makes their payments? What happens to every bank in the US?
The reality is that the bond market is going to crack anyway.
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What you are talking about are the dollars that were fake right from the beginning because they only existed on paper because of overleveraged banks and financial institutions. I am talking about the ‘real’ dollars that we watched as they came flooding into this country before the leveraging even started. We had trillions of actual investment dollars coming into the country, and from within the country, looking for good places to invest. Some of those ‘real’ dollars have been destroyed. BUT some of them were pulled out and moved somewhere else.
Where?
There are many, many people and institutions that are sitting on cash, have the money in other countries, or have it invested in zero percent government bonds. Those people are just itching to pull the trigger and invest their money again.
I said this before on this board many moons ago. Just wait until the foreign (and some local) investors start buying up real estate again for pennies for the dollar. Or, back to my original question, what are they going to buy? They will not sit on investments, no matter how secure they are, for 0% losing against inflation for a long time.
Eleua – I really don’t give a chocolate about your political leanings. At least not on this board, on this topic. I will say that by denouncing politicians and presidents in this context, you are giving them way too much credit for the little impact that they can actually have on the economy, up or down.
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Okay, you guys have finally given me the motivation to bring back the Open Threads. I’m not going to shut down the comments on this thread, but the off-topic conversations have gotten pretty out of hand lately.
In the future, please restrict your off-topic comments to the open threads. The latest open thread will be linked at the top of the main page.
Thank you.
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Eleua,
Note that *I* didn’t say any of those thing about you. And note that I said *you* have valuable message that is getting diluted by your attitude. You are most certainly not the only one here calling names, but I think *your* message is getting the most diluted because you actually have one worth my time.
For the record, I am neither a “leftie” or a “rightie”, and I don’t have to be to think the politics gets in the way of your message. But I also see that you’ve made up your mind and will continue to rant instead of discuss. That’s certainly your perogative. But if you’re *really* trying to educate, your methodology is doing you a great disservice by turning off those who might otherwise listen. Like me.
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RE: The Tim @ 164 –
This thread has everything to do with the topic. You chose an economist to project an opinion, Yun. The economics of what has happened is open to interpritation. As distasteful as these rantings are they are on the topic of the economy.
I say that the economics of cash have eneded up in Real Estate holdings, the Eleaubomber is trying to make some obscure point about how ploitcs have deflated the cash away. He has missed the inflationary period we just went through, I guess by being over on Bainbridge Island.
It makes no difference you are two posts away from here so why care now?
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“Keep in mind that this expansion via .gov borrowing is money that it is inhaling out of the private capital markets. That money is not free to seek its own level and drive industrial output.”
The gov. then takes a portion of the money and pumps it back into the economy in the form of stimulus. Thus, this can’t be thought of as completely burying the cash under the mattress. It’s a trade, because at this point, the private capital markets are looking for any kind of mattress in which to safely stash the cash. Thus, the money would not be driving industrial output anyways. The government bond mattress allows a small amount of the money to circulate at the cost of massively increased U.S. debt obligations. The hit to velocity is still sizable, but not as sizable as if the money were hidden in a safe. This begs the question, is mortgaging our future worth slight and temporary support to velocity?
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“Should I change my name to The UNIBLOGGER?”
Nah, you’re not even a fraction as bitter as him. I say, keep on keeping on with the colorful metaphors mixed into your messages. “Sticks and stones can break your bones, but names can never hurt you.”
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“Um, that still doesn’t change the fact that he was the Unibomber”
Perhaps your IQ being less than 170 doesn’t allow you to understand his message. Our opinons on the matter pale in comparison to those 250 years from now.
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“I have respect for a guy that wore his country’s uniform and faced hostile fire”
Yes, but the possibility exists that he would have been much better off if he had saved his neural networks and jumped the boarder. Why? Because he would have never been brainwashed into becoming a mindless nationalist. Although my opinion is probably unpopular, I believe it’s much better to be a free thinker than a brainwashed mindless nationalist. Thus, you have to be very careful when you side with the majority opinion when seeking creature comforts. The brain sends out axons to hook up to dendrites, and if you never have new experiences that repattern the damage, you’re stuck spouting someone else’s opinion forever without really ever having contemplated the alternatives.
See what I mean about most people injecting a little bitterness into their logic here and there?
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By Jonness @ 169:
Very mature. I feel like I am in elementary school.
You’re wrong about me not understanding. I understand his message. I understand Mohamed Atta’s message too, that doesn’t change the fact that they are/were terrorists.
Don’t you have a militia meeting to go to or a federal building to bomb?
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“You’re wrong about me not understanding. I understand his message. I understand Mohamed Atta’s message too, that doesn’t change the fact that they are/were terrorists.”
Uhh…how many innocent civilians died in your war in Iraq? We declared that war because they had weapons of mass destruction that could harm U.S. children. How many of those were confiscated after spending a trillion tax dollars?
I’m pretty certain you haven’t a clue as to the meaning of Kazinski’s message. And I’m absolutely certain I don’t understand it either.
Does the fact that Hitler murdered 6 million Jews and slaughtered a million Gypsies change the truth in his brilliant observations about you and I? “What good fortune for governments that people do not think.”
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Jonness,
Regarding the stimulus…
That presumes that it is stimulus, rather than the spoils of political war, which this clearly was.
If the .gov is taking money from peoples’ mattresses and injecting it into businesses that create jobs, you can make an argument for that action. I would say that if the .gov does that, it is putting money into a risk endeavor that has a below market ROI for such risk. That is fundamentally the problem we are now facing. FNM/FRE are essentially the very same thing, but by a different mechanism.
If you want to get the money from under the mattress, the interest rates need to be raised (by the market), and that will entice the money out from hiding. As long as we have rising risk, with falling or stagnant interest rates, the velocity will continue to drop.
Thanks for the intelligent discussion point.
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