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Here is your open thread for Monday December 31st, 2012. You may post random links and off-topic discussions here. Also, if you have an idea or a topic you’d like to see covered in an article, please make it known.
Be sure to also check out the forums, and get your word in the user-driven discussions there!
NOTICE: If you have comments to make about politics or economics that do not somehow directly relate to Seattle-area real estate, they may be posted in the current Politics & Economics Open Thread. If you post such comments here, they will be moved there.
Happy New Year everyone!
It’s been a rather boring year in real estate, with the biggest news being the lack of inventory, and its secondary impact (multiple offers). There was also Bain v. MERS, which seemed important at first, but for some reason hasn’t had much of an impact, particularly compared to what’s occurred in Oregon. Prices have been more or less flat.
Hopefully 2013 will be more exciting. I don’t envy Tim having to come up with daily posts, but do thank him for his efforts.
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Happy New to You.
Why not discuss the impact of terrible coal proposal upon property values?
Seems more than pertinent and directly impacts Western States + Puget Sound environment. We’ve only a short time remaining to voice opinion…
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Someone, possibly the site owner, just posted this color coded map of median incomes. It needs a little tweaking as I noted in The Redfin Forum as to the blue of water vs the color of the highest income…and the greens being a little hard to distinguish one from another. But still pretty interesting.
http://www.richblockspoorblocks.com/
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By ARDELL @ 3:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/46891763/page/11
Here is another series of slides… The top disparity in the country is listed as my former place of residence… I lived on the poor side…
Worse the Westchester County and the Bronx, I used to live close to that area as well.
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RE: Howard @ 4 – There are still dwindling pockets of old Italian neighborhoods in the Bronx, but it is now heavily Caribbean and South American.
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kary you don’t really understand budgets or what is going on. Deficits are not stimulus. we have a deficit because of the bush tax cuts, unfunded wars and a crappy economy.
government spending has always been at a certain level. the reason we have deificit is because tax revenue collapsed because of the economy. that is the only reason. that is not a reason to cut spending. cutting spending during a deleveraging doesn’t work anyways. it just makes the problem worse! just look at Europe.
even with all that bush did but didn’t pay for we still had a deficit of $200 billion in 2007. no huge policies were enacted that suddenly gave us a $1.4 trillion deficit. we had an economy that collapsed so tax revenue plunged and we had to spend on food stamps, unemployment insurance and etc.
you just want to cut to cut. that is not responsible. deficits don’t matter during a deleveraging.
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By ARDELL @ 3:
Doesn’t show the south of I-90 thing very well either..
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RE: ARDELL @ 3 –
Now we Need a Chart That Matters
Of the household incomes in Seattle….who are renting and in the real estate market? A strong real estate market isn’t based on richer transplants [there's just as many, or more of 'em, leaving as coming] with previous old wealth; its based on first time home buyers….the first domino.
Hades, will I retire in the Seattle area? I’m thinking stealth now, live in a luxury RV….move south in winter and north in summer….its too small for the Y Gen kids(s) to move in with me too :-)
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RE: Howard @ 7 –
Not sure how accurate it is. Shows WA Median Income as $51,000 to $64,000 and Nevada median Income $52,000 to $63,000. That’s Statewide. Shows New York State as $49,000 to $52,000 and California as $53,000 to $67,000. Florida $43,000 to $51,000.
Not as much of a variance from State to State as I would expect. Maybe I’m picking the wrong States.
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RE: Howard @ 7 –
I think I figured it out. You have to click on it more to bring up the data. Renton came up $39,000 compared to Medina at $175,000. If you just look at the colors in bulk it doesn’t look right, but if you click on the map the specifics look more accurate.
I don’t think people like the name of the site, but the median income data is handy.
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By pfft @ 6:
The first paragraph is largely correct, although I’d point out that wars are typically unfunded. I’d also point out that in 2008 President Obama campaigned on expanding the war in Afghanistan, and did just that, so I don’t see how he gets let off the hook for that.
If you believe the second paragraph, you’re in denial. Yes and expanded economy is the main thing that would help (tax increases would need to be huge), but it’s not the only reason. But the economy would be much stronger without President Obama, so again I don’t see why he gets let off the hook.
BTW, I really don’t understand why the Republicans were fighting the cutoff at $250k. If they really believe that taxes hurt the economy, they should just let President Obama get his way and then blame him when things fall apart.
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“…history does suggest that at the end of empires, and the accompanying sea change of social organization, there are often remarkable extremes in human behaviour. The almost frenetic preoccupation and stubborn adherence to the Nazi ideology in the latter stages of the war, when it was obvious to any rational observer that they had failed, is illustrative of that point.
I had been particularly struck in my reading some time ago with the ‘wolf packs’ of Nazis who had raged through Berlin, rounding up old men and boys who had not joined the Volkssturm and hanging them, even while the Russians were shelling the Reichstag. It never made sense to me until today.
“The radio announced that Hitler had come out of his safe bomb-proof bunker to talk with the fourteen to sixteen year old boys who had ‘volunteered’ for the ‘honor’ to be accepted into the SS and to die for their Fuhrer in the defense of Berlin. What a cruel lie! These boys did not volunteer, but had no choice, because boys who were found hiding were hanged as traitors by the SS as a warning that, ‘he who was not brave enough to fight had to die.’
When trees were not available, people were strung up on lamp posts. They were hanging everywhere, military and civilian, men and women, ordinary citizens who had been executed by a small group of fanatics. It appeared that the Nazis did not want the people to survive because a lost war, by their rationale, was obviously the fault of all of us. We had not sacrificed enough and therefore, we had forfeited our right to live, as only the government was without guilt.” – Dorothea von Schwanenfluegel, Eyewitness account, Fall of Berlin 1945
This is an almost perfect illustration of the credibility trap. One cannot allow the illusion to falter, even a little, to the bitter end. And as the fraud fades, the force intensifies, becoming almost rabid in its deflection of guilt. Because that illusion has become the center of a hollowed people’s being, their raison d’être, a mythological justification for their existence.
If the ideology had been a lie, then they are not heroes and gods on earth, but monsters and criminals, and their life has been self-serving and meaningless, without significance and honor. And that is the credibility trap. It is the impulse for the leaders to keep doubling down in the hope of a win, until exhaustion and collapse.
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” – John Harrington
How else can one explain the irrational, self-destructive policy impulse? This is why they are metaphorically hanging Greeks and Spaniards and Irish in Europe, as tribute to an unsustainable and corrupt Euro monetary arrangement, with its puppet governments run by the banks.
And this is the US financial system and the American policy discussions today. First they come for the powerless and the weak, whether it contributes anything substantial to the broader resolution of the problems or not. The madness serves none but itself.
“A credibility trap is a condition wherein the financial, political and informational functions of a society have been compromised by corruption and fraud, so that the leadership cannot effectively reform, or even honestly address, the problems ot that system without impairing and implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure, including themselves.
The status quo tolerates the corruption and the fraud because they have profited at least indirectly from it, and would like to continue to do so. Even the impulse to reform within the power structure is susceptible to various forms of soft blackmail and coercion by the system that maintains and rewards.
And so a failed policy and its support system become self-sustaining, long after it is seen by objective observers to have failed. In its failure it is counterproductive, and an impediment to recovery in the real economy. Admitting failure is not an option for the thought leaders who receive their power from that system.
The continuity of the structural hierarchy must therefore be maintained at all costs, even to the point of becoming a painfully obvious hypocrisy.
The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.”
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2012/12/empires-of-illusion-and-credibility-trap.html
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RE: Blurtman @ 12 –
“The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.”
Of course. But when?
No politician in power will EVER vote austerity on himself. They always want someone else to take the blame, so they vote to increase spending and hope the train wreck happens after they’re long gone.
The US will “go Greece” but not for a long time. Watch out when Japan or UK interest rates go to 6% and their economy crashes. When it happens here housing will fall another 30%. Don’t be the sucker who loses his or her life savings.
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