- On 21 May 2013
in
So Nice Being Sold Down The River,
Bellingham Bill said:
Fine if you want to lower overall total immigration and/or make the total wait time longer, then do so for all, but don't let illegals come in
yeah, my position is if you hire an illegal alien, they get your citizenship and you get theirs.
- On 21 May 2013
in
I don't understand Paul Krugman,
Bellingham Bill said:
Walmart raised the standard of living of it's customer or they would not have shopped there
sure, that's the rightwing economics theology.
and it's true in the short-term, individual shoppers are initially better off shopping at walmart than local retailers.
problem comes in the macro, as more and more of the wealth flows of the economy leave the paycheck level -- both the shopper's local economy and the global working wage economy -- and accumulate with capital -- "the 1%" to lack a better term.
That's been the story of 1970 to now and entirely why things are so fucked now.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GINIALLRH
But through service differential more jobs should have been created and less menial ones
Less money circulating in the paycheck economy means less demand. The middle quintiles have their wages beaten out of them via the high economic rents in energy, medical care, and housing.
There are some jobs being provided in these sectors -- 200,000 in oil:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CES1021100001
14M in health care:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CES6562000101
but household expenses in just these two fields works out to over $200,000 per job in these industries, giving an scale of the flow going to the capital ownership and not the labor factor.
The only monopoly is through crony capitalism
"Crony capitalism" is just a thought-terminating cliche, something stupid people say when they don't really understand (or want to understand) reality.
Monopoly is a feature of any unregulated market. Power begets power.
See Microsoft for how that worked, 1980-now. No "cronyism" required.
- On 21 May 2013
in
I don't understand Paul Krugman,
Bellingham Bill said:
(cont'd)
Retail isn't the monopoly game. Hell manufacturing isn't the monopoly game:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MANEMP
This is the monopoly game:
- On 21 May 2013
in
I don't understand Paul Krugman,
Bellingham Bill said:
This is a monopoly game that never ends.
there's a reason Monopoly was designed as a land buying game and not a retail selling game.
but to address your point more directly, when retail productivity was less efficient much more money stayed within the paycheck economy, even though we had less stuff to show for it.
Walmarts suck billions of out local communities -- which is why 5 or whatever of the richest people in the US are Walmart heirs -- but it is true that Amazon is taking this productivity to a another level:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USTRADE
shows retail employment is at late 1990s levels.
Don't look for any job growth in transportation and warehousing, either:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CES4300000001
real retail wages have risen 40c/hr since 2011:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=iDa
but are still far below 2006 levels.
- On 21 May 2013
in
Is real estate bubble 2 showing some strain?,
Bellingham Bill said:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNU00000060
is another important graph to understand.
- On 21 May 2013
in
Is real estate bubble 2 showing some strain?,
Bellingham Bill said:
is an interesting chart. Doesn't count immigration, but it should.
"So if the problem in 2007 was super saturated supply of housing"
demand for housing is unbounded, everyone would like a better place to live, or a 2nd, 3rd, 4th . . .
Housing -- outside of desert crapholes -- wasn't really 'saturated' in 2007, it's just that flow of suicide lending was reaching the end of the line, and the macro economy good-times the $6T+ housing stimulus was creating was collapsing with bubble home prices, since they were interlinked -- good times pushed up home prices, and rising home prices gave us more good times!
- On 21 May 2013
in
I don't understand Paul Krugman,
Bellingham Bill said:
the banks are lending to anyone with good credit. The banks lent me over a million dollars.
- On 21 May 2013
in
Best real estate within drive from bay area?,
Bellingham Bill said:
I'm driving from the valley to Santa Cruz tomorrow actually. I have two hour+ podcasts that I want to listen to so the time in the car is rather irrelevant, I'd be sitting here at home if I wasn't on the road, so no big diff.
Wouldn't want to make the drive every day, but with an EV I could easily do it weekly. ($4/gallon gas makes 300 mile round-trips not as fun as they used to be)
- On 21 May 2013
in
Best real estate within drive from bay area?,
Bellingham Bill said:
I would recommend the Santa Cruz mountains as well. Of course I'm biased :)
+1. That's where I want to end up. Friend has a place with horse-property neighbors. Looks like my idea of heaven, actually -- sandy horse corrals, pine trees, hills, ocean view, tons of sun, cool, clean ocean air, beach 15 minutes away.
- On 21 May 2013
in
Best real estate within drive from bay area?,
Bellingham Bill said:
I can fly within 20 minutes
If you can afford a Citation I'd just buy place close to work!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Sky_Park_Airport
is in Fresno and is apparently hanging in there even tho there's infill all around it now (50 years ago there was nothing but fig trees for 5-10 miles round).
2.5hr commute to S.J. if 101 isn't packed up.
50 minutes in the air to SJC at 125kts, 119 statute miles.
Getting a Tesla sounds like a better deal. It could do the 150mi trip easily.
Leaf can't make it quite yet. - On 21 May 2013
in
Is real estate bubble 2 showing some strain?,
Bellingham Bill said:
ut I meant what happened in 2004-2007 that turned a bull market into a soon-to-be-crashed one?
Prices 2002-2003 were rising thanks to the 1995-2000 interest rate regime being replaced by Greenspan's stimulus rates:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MORTG
shows rates fell from ~7.5% to ~5% from 2000-2003. This prompted an immense move up in home prices in response.
By 2004, this upward momentum was continued by flippers, speculators buying the boom, and the introduction of new suicide lending practices -- 80/20, zero down, stated income, interest-only and negative amortization loans, etc.
This suicide lending -- mortgages that could only be repaid by refinancing or continued appreciation -- kept the market going up and moving 2005-2007.
But in Feb 2007 the sketchiest 2-year IO loans started failing, and the bad news borrowers continued to be smoked out of their loans as YOY appreciation failed to arrive the summer of 2007.
The entire global economy was fed by the $6T influx of new money into the US mortgage market between 2000 and 2008:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/HHMSDODNS?cid=32256
this was a $1T/yr redistributionary flow from the world's savers to the US home-owning consumer (most people), and created the actual recovery out of the 'jobless recovery' of 2002-2003, as consumers refi'd consumer credit cards into their mortgages and otherwise pulled money out of their homes.
This was trillions of free money hitting the US economy!
But it was built on flim-flam suicide lending and thus could not last, and when it crashed it took out ALL of the flim-flam household finances with it.
The Casey Serin story broke in late 2006:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_Serin
and I realized if that loser could borrow $2M from 5+ banks, he was just the first cockroach and the entire market price level was being set by the greatest fools like him.
- On 21 May 2013
in
Is real estate bubble 2 showing some strain?,
Bellingham Bill said:
it was probably obvious to homebuyers too but they didn't care because banks were giving them billions without regard to repayment ability.
"if a corporation with hundreds of billions of dollars of assets is willing to give me $x00,000, who am I to say no?"
'course, FIRE was moving these loans off to bag-holders, but to understand that required specialist knowledge. Something I only picked up in the 2004-2005 period from blogs. At my 20th H.S. anniversary dinner I remember talking about this very dynamic wrt the housing bubble, and that was summer 2005
- On 20 May 2013
in
I don't understand Paul Krugman,
Bellingham Bill said:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=iBX
kinda interesting.
blue is jobs, more or less
red is age 25-54 population, which actually has gone down as there were more people born in the late 50s than the early 1980s . . .
My xls of US births by year shows there were 42M births 1955-64 and ~35M 1975-1984.
The baby boom echo was starting to arrive in the late 1980s (remember 'thirtysomething'?)
1973-75 was actually the post-boomer low point at ~3.2M, births rose continuously YOY until 1991, which matched an average baby boom year from the 1950s (4.1M).
- On 19 May 2013 in U.S. budget deficit falling rapidly, Bellingham Bill said:
- On 19 May 2013
in
Ground report from Cupertino,
Bellingham Bill said:
point of reference:
Apple's R&D costs are 10X what they were 10 years ago.
They have a headcount of 25,000 or so in the valley AFAICT.
10 years ago GOOG had $1.5B in revenue, 2012 was $50B.
If you're looking in the fortress, you're competing with these people (plus many of the tens of thousands of cashed-out veterans)
I have a retired friend who was priced out of the fortress even though he was sitting on 20+ years of AAPL accumulation.
He had the money for a refurbed postwar shack, but got much, much more value finding a place over the hill. 2+ acres, tons of trees, ocean view, no neighbors. Well, one, but they're a ~10 minute hike away.
- On 18 May 2013
in
I don't understand Paul Krugman,
Bellingham Bill said:
I'm not advocating a gold standard, but when he compares the Euro to a gold standard, I can't help but ask myself this:
Actually PK's point was that the Euro is a de-facto gold standard for the individual countries on it, neither Greece nor Italy can print euros like they printed their former national currencies.
This is what PK said at 1:45:
"If you're a country like Portugal or Greece . . ."
By that measure, isn't the relationship of the USA to its states, the same as the Eurozone to its countries?
Isn't the USA on a "gold standard" right now too?
No, since we have a more unified national government. Again, that is Krugman's point, that Europe has a monetary union without (strong-enough) a political union.
From the perspective of Sacramento, the USD is equivalent to a gold standard, but they've got around that in the past by printing warrants, LOL.
- On 17 May 2013
in
Obama administration seizes 2 months of phone records of A.P. journalists,
Bellingham Bill said:
forget it iwog, it's Chinatown.
- On 17 May 2013
in
Would shorter amortizations make the housing market safer?,
Bellingham Bill said:
Actually, cash or f.u. would make the housing market safer.
for the 1%
- On 16 May 2013
in
Obama administration seizes 2 months of phone records of A.P. journalists,
Bellingham Bill said:
here is nothing in the constitution that gives the press any immunity whatsoever.
other that "penumbras"
- On 12 May 2013
in
The spectacular failure of Austrian economics,
Bellingham Bill said:
Policing mortgage origination at that time would have resulted in preventing minorities from joining the real estate boom.
Bullshit. The market moved up massively (and crashed massively) in lily-white sundown communities.
The administration encouraged minority to buy homes in 2005 just like the previous administration encouraged minorities to buy stocks in 1998. Politicians are usually behind the curve.
Not bullshit.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/karl-rove-architect-of-the-minority-mortgage-meltdown
and a prime driver of the mistake.
Homeowners vote Republican, so Rove saw a need to create more homeowners.
- On 12 May 2013
in
The spectacular failure of Austrian economics,
Bellingham Bill said:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a9qUgYWKwSWI&refer=home
- On 12 May 2013
in
krugman-in-wonderland - Chutzpah Economics,
Bellingham Bill said:
Left and right has no meaning to basic math, which just is.
Basic math says one out of twenty people are clearing out of THREE AGI dollars now.
http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2012
Corporate profits are highest on record while labor's share of the wealth is falling:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=im9
if your ideology doesn't incorporate a willingness to see these as problems, your ideology is faulty.
The core imbalance in our economy is all the money flowing up the pyramid.
The eurosocialists solve this issue by taxing the shit out of rich people.
If I had my way, I'd focus on taxing incomes that come without concomitant new wealth creation -- we find these incomes mostly in land.
That may or may not be sufficient to restore long-run balance to the system, I suspect not.
At any rate it's certainly a necessary first step.
Austrian thought utterly fails in this department.
- On 11 May 2013
in
krugman-in-wonderland - Chutzpah Economics,
Bellingham Bill said:
"I'm not sure what Krugman means by claiming that the world is in "austerity" when national governments across the globe have accelerated spending and especially borrowing"
borrowing if it's just from the 1% -- people who should be taxed a lot more -- is not stimulative and neither here nor there.
US government spending has not accelerated at all.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FYONET
"Governments as a whole create little economic wealth, and instead are huge consumers of wealth"
bullshit, plus governments perform the critical task of redistributing wealth from those who have it to those who do not.
Austrians willfully misunderstand this basic feature of reality, that without redistribution the rich would end up owning everything, since interest never sleeps, and money is power.
Feature not a bug for them I assume.
" Krugman's hostility toward private enterprise"
bullshit. Krugman is a neoliberal, WELL to the right of me.
"This did not keep Progressives from claiming [Reagan and Bush (both)] were running "austere" governments."
The Republican presidents since maybe Lincoln have served the interests of Capital at the direct expense and power of Labor.
They made life suck more for the 99% and non-country club republicans.
"My favorite line on this came during one of the Dukakis-Bush debates when Dukakis declared, "There are three million homeless people in America, and a third of them are Vietnam veterans."
"I quickly checked some sources and found that about 4.25 million people served in that war, so Dukakis wanted us to believe that nearly a quarter of Vietnam vets were on the streets."
What Dukakis actually said:
"Estimates of the homeless range from a low of 250,000 by the Government to around three million, including working families and their children. "
My work is done here, I could continue fisking this dishonest idiot, but I fail to see the point.
- On 11 May 2013
in
Tiny house mag,
Bellingham Bill said:
Tiny House is *so* me.
It'd be fun to put together a "housing kit" that fits in a 40' container.
Not that I want to live in a 40' container, but I'd like all of my worldly possessions to fit in one, including my housing.
I lack the scientific (philosophy of language) terminology to express this next thought well, but housing has been "reified" or whatever as such a fixed and permanent part of our very existences that we forget that it's really just another good.
I house-sit for a friend occasionally, and his Viking kitchen costs more than my car. Utterly ridiculous!
Now, I think Winnebago et al don't do all that great a job of making small spaces livable. The Japanese have some very interesting high-end technology, plus they've had centuries of practice of living in small spaces . . .
- On 11 May 2013
in
The spectacular failure of Austrian economics,
Bellingham Bill said:
How can you blame interest rates as being a more important factor in the housing bubble and crash than free money given to people without credit and jobs???
Low interest rates started the bull market in real estate. Billions of fraudulent dollars dumped into the market finished it.
Housing didn't zoom well past unaffordability via the interest rate drops:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=ilO
blue is case shiller, red is 30 year mortgage rate, showing interest rates were 5.5% to ~6.5% 2003-2009.
What the Fed noticed in 2005-2006 that their attempt at softly restraining borrowing wasn't working.
This was because the Bush Administration had decided to no longer police loan mortgage origination, and the Fed was either clueless about it or complicit in the Market-knows-best deregulation.
Interest-only and negative-amortization became the market drivers in 2005, as idiots got into the last call before the crash.
"By 2005, interest-only mortgages had risen to 31% of all new mortgages, up from less than 10% in 2002"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Housing-Boom-Bust-Revised/dp/0465019862
That ideological Austrian clowns don't understand this basic feature of reality is another strike against them, like they need any more.