[bsrsharma]

Seattle-relo:

Since many of us may have to face this, I am trying to understand the situation:

1. Is she not well? Since you say she is only 60, hence can’t get Social security/medicare. I am wondering how you are planning for healthcare? As an aside, if she is in good health, might it be a good idea for her to get some employment to get some health insurance. That will also ease the cash flow. It will help her a lot if she can complete the minimum credits for social security since she has such a long retirement to face.

2. Since big bucks (i.e. losses) are involved in home selling/buying in these unstable times, (a) Why can’t she continue to live in AZ (b) How about renting out AZ home and renting a small apartment here. The cash flows may be closer to match.

[bsrsharma]

1/2 the town

= 3 families; Probably a rich farmer and his two sons, all in a village of 24 people!

[bsrsharma]

Suddenly it seems fashionable to blame Greenspan for all ills of the nation. It seems like yet another instance of the modern American pandemic of Blame Someone Else For My Troubles. Greenspan was NOT a President, Leader of Congress etc. He was just a Central Banker. His job description, to put it simply, is to ensure that people continue to believe that little green pieces of paper are valuable. In that he succeeded very well between 1986-2006 or so. No body asked his permission before waging wars, declaring tax cuts etc., He is not a financial adviser for anybody.

1. He is not responsible for Congress and President passing budgets with deficits

2. He is not responsible for causing trade deficits.

3. He is not responsible for people borrowing beyond their ability to pay.

4. He is not responsible for people speculating in assets and losing.

etc., etc.,

His main achievement is, even though there were major financial shocks, even though people engaged in bad behaviour like 1..4, he convinced most people to believe that the little pieces of green paper are worth hanging on to. Nobody used the phrase “American Peso” to describe U.S. $.

[bsrsharma]

Both Naples & Valley Park are very small hamlets. Just a couple of folks are very rich skewing the statistics. The towns that merit attention are Huntsville & Broken Arrow. Some one moving there can seriously improve their standard of living, at least statistically!.

[bsrsharma]

I saw a little of the documentary. But Saving Private Ryan felt more authentic than this!

[bsrsharma]

Same City?

 

…it's a good place — generic and very middle class America. Mission Gorge is the kind of main street that you'd find in almost every newer town in America. Nothing wrong with that. I don't think the level of college education of the Santee population is very high. Let's not even talk advance degree. Santee is mostly trade workers, military, et al. White or off-white population that is Republican and anti-immigrant but don't hesitate to employ the Mexicans on their landscape projects.

 

 Santee is a dump, loaded up with a lot of illegals and migrant bums with a generous srinking of white trash. Kids are mostly out of control and obnoxious. I wouldn't live there if the house came free.

[bsrsharma]

U.S. Census Bureau data. My guess is, it is probably before taxes to avoid the problem you mentioned.

[bsrsharma]

really too bad for GM

Really? They have 65 days inventory. They can afford to squeeze out some costs.

[bsrsharma]

Try http://n-b-r.stores.yahoo.net/bookx.html

This http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/WSDownload.html is a polemical look at wall street; but it is free to download!

This is another free tutorial http://precision-info.com/lc/index.cgi?c=980872265

[bsrsharma]

Wile E Coyote moment

partypup has some serious company from NYT economist Paul Krugman. He published this analysis last year:

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/04/krugman_will_th.html

He revisited the topic recently in a NYT Op-Ed

September 20, 2007, 11:26 pm
Is This the Wile E. Coyote Moment?

Lots of buzz suddenly about the possibility of a sharp fall in the dollar. The Canadian dollar is back at parity with the greenback; there are rumors that the Saudis are planning to diversify into euros, and maybe even that the Chinese might break the dollar peg. A nice summary at Barry Ritholtz’s blog The Big Picture.

I could say that I saw this coming; the problem is that I’ve been seeing it coming for several years, and it keeps not arriving (and I don’t know if this is really it, even now.) The argument I and others have made is that the U.S. trade deficit is, fundamentally, not sustainable in the long run, which means that sooner or later the dollar has to decline a lot. But international investors have been buying U.S. bonds at real interest rates barely higher than those offered in euros or yen — in effect, they’ve been betting that the dollar won’t ever decline.

So, according to the story, one of these days there will be a Wile E. Coyote moment for the dollar: the moment when the cartoon character, who has run off a cliff, looks down and realizes that he’s standing on thin air – and plunges. In this case, investors suddenly realize that Stein’s Law applies — “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop” – and they realize they need to get out of dollars, causing the currency to plunge. Maybe the dollar’s Wile E. Coyote moment has arrived – although, again, I’ve been wrong about this so far.

Much more about all this in a thoroughly incomprehensible paper I recently published in the European journal Economic Policy. Don’t bother clicking if you hate funny diagrams and Greek letters.

[bsrsharma]

FormerSD: The $ index (assuming it is tied to exchange rate of a weighted basket of currencies) is a function of many variables. Approximately,

$ index = f(FFR, Federal budget deficit, Trade deficit, ….)

So, it can’t be compared with just FFR. If you want to do a more complex analysis, involve Federal budget deficit & Balance of trade deficit and run a multivariate regression

[bsrsharma]

Sellers are getting desperate

Comment by BobR

2007-09-21 14:35:00

This is off-topic but I MUST share it with everyone. There’s a web board on the Big Island of Hawaii, and this is a new thread:

Aloha to all,

If I could just ask a favor of all of my Kona Web friends.

We have a contract on a home in Kona that is going to fall thru if our mainland home doesn't sell soon. Since I believe in the power of prayer, I am asking all of you to say a prayer for me, that my mainland home sells really soon. I have reduced the price by $60,000 and spent $50,000 in a total remodel so it's like new. Sales are just really slow.

If you could just say a quick prayer, to God or Buddah or Pele or to whom ever you pray to. I truly believe in the power of all of your prayers to help me get my house sold so I can move to the BI. It has been 12 years of saving for me and now it’s sooo close. Mahalo to you all!

Response 1:

Good luck- I will be thinking positive thoughts. Having been through something like that, and paying mortgage on a house (waiting for it to sell in a slow market) while paying high rent for almost 18 months (the rent was actually a few hundred more then the mortgage), I know the stress it can put you under. Our income certainly was not enough to cover us — in fact, it qualified us for public assistance *without* the double mortgage/rent. That was over 4 years ago, and we are still in the hole BIG time.

Response 2:

Aloha Carol:

My prayers are to Godwith you . We too have a mainland home that we had up for sale in 2006. Escrow fell out at the last minute and for a year we have been paying two mortgages, utilities, gardener etc hoping that it would sell. When our financial hole got deeper, I traveled back to California and hired a property manager and our house is now rented..praise be to heaven’s intervention. I interviewed several managers before hiring this one and they seem to be worth their salt. We had remodeled as well and were hesitant to put our lovely and well loved home on the rental block. But there are many people mainland side who are now renting their homes that could not sell during this slump. Something to consider as it helps pay the mortgage. When this slump subsides, and it will as history has shown, values will climb back up and selling can be reconsidered. Or perhaps maybe we were meant to keep the home. Who knows what lies in the future.

Anyway, Good luck to you and we pray divine intervention in your case.

[bsrsharma]

Are you saying there are nice parts in Inglewood? That is surprising to me. I worked for a year in Culver City and the received wisdom I got was to never set foot in Inglewood, even accidentally. A close friend told me that even the Inglewood police advice outsiders (considering to live in Inglewood) that the place is too dangerous to live.

http://www.cityofinglewood.org/depts/police/detective/wanted_suspects_n_request_for_information.asp

[bsrsharma]

Partypup: I don’t dispute your portrayal of the events to come – just the velocity of change. US is a continental nation with a fifth of global GDP. How can any event just collapse it into Haiti or Bolivia like status in a short time? There are international linkages in trade, finance, politics, military, human etc. that prevent your free fall scenario. What I mean is, if US just vanishes from the face of the earth (in the present form) lot more people than Americans will be hurt severely. That is a powerful resistance to your total loss scenario. All you have said may happen – just gradually over 20 to 30 year period. In fact, I think the retirement of baby boomers will be much more destructive, economically, than what we are seeing now. Look at how “Great Britain” became U.K. a century back. That is our model, not the Soviet Union to Russia collapse.

[bsrsharma]

Even after 100% drop, I wonder why anyone wants to live there. You are safer in a cardboard box on the fast lane of 405.

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