[bubba99]

The FED buys the debt with newly created dollars. This is inflationary, but because they stopped reporting M3, we really don’t know how much of this goes on. When the FED buys debt with new dollars, almost everyone is happy. The debt is paid, the fed get the interest, the only losers are holders of old dollars.

The value of the dollar vs the euro has been dropping about 10% per year since 2002. Those who hold dollar debt at 5% are losing 10% on the exchange rate each year for a net loss of 5%. I wonder how long people will keep lending us money at a loss.

[bubba99]

What I haven’t seen in this thread surprises me. No mention of N. Korea, and Iran and the bomb. While we have had all of our attention and resources in Iraq and Afghanistan, N. Korea has developed the bomb. IAEC has found Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) in an Iran dump site. This means they probably have a heavy water reactor that can develop a couple of bombs per year and our Intel groups completely missed it. Next year they are adding 3000 centrifuges which can add another 2 or 3 bombs per year. Who do you think they will use them on?

Not Israel because they want Palestine back for the Palestinians – that leave us. It is a small leap from the fission bomb to a Thermo-nuclear bomb with un-imaginable devastation.

Back in 1956 the US tested a device with the “Apache” design. It was a 3-part bomb expected to yield 700 kilotons of energy. The actual yield was 1.85 megatons. I mention this bomb because in 1956 it was cutting edge, and one of the first to overcome the need for liquid hydrogen to create the fusion process with very stable 6LiDeterorid. The first bomb was 40 feet long and 10 feet wide, the Apache was small enough to fit in a car trunk 3 ft x 6 ft. This was all very secret 50 years ago, and now the techniques are “well known” anyone could build this bomb if they had access to Plutonium or HEU. 1.85 megatons are enough to crater the greater San Diego area. Make no mistake they are coming, and we are not prepared. One device can destroy everyone and everything we hold dear.

This group of supposed hawks has been asleep at the helm, while our real threats have moved fifty years ahead in nuclear technology.

[bubba99]

You missed the point of the quote. It was not to endorse god, but to put limits on what to expect from government. Remember JFK also said “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”. There are many of us who believe and live that altruism. There is not a man nor woman who I work with at DHS who would not willing give up everything to protect America and the people we love.

[bubba99]

The issue was never to stop or not to stop Hussein and his two sons, but how. A quick decapitation of the govt, and military would have done it. Completely dismantling the whole government and army was a mistake. “Stay the course is a mistake.”

I just don’t get how supposed patriots can justify the killing of 100,000’s of people with “Our intentions were good”. Tell it to the families of the dead. They don’t care if it was a terrorist or Bush and company; their loved ones are gone. Our actions in Iraq have made the United States the bad guy. We have raped and tortured innocents, we are holding hundreds without charges nor access to hapeus corpus, we have kidnapped and “Extraordinarily Renditioned” too many people to claim the moral high ground any more.

It will take years for our men and women in uniform to live down this disaster, and they are the ones who will pay the price. Any backwater country can now ignore the Geneva Convention for treatment of prisoners because the U.S. did. Abu Grabe is not an isolated case of a few soldiers going wild, it is part of a system of interrogation that is totally disregards any human dignity and seeks to generate information at any cost – be it good Intel or bad. Torture anyone long enough and they will start talking about something.

[bubba99]

powayseller,

I got the Euro bonds from my regular broker at Morgan Stanley. Any of the big brokerages can provide. To buy direct, last time I did it I went to Lugano Switzerland and opened an account at Credit Suisse, and bought them through the swiss acct.

My acountant tells me that if the acct is in europe, and the dollars are not repatriated, then the taxes are not owed until the money comes home. I have heard other opinions. But look at it this way, pay for a great week in Europe with a new euro bond as an investment in your swiss acct.

[bubba99]

California’s chattel mortgage law is such that at least on most purchase money first and seconds, there is no recourse. The lender does not need to go to court to foreclose, and cannot seize any property other than the real property secured by the trust deed. The exception is fraud.

If the borrower lied, deceived etc, the lender may come after personal assets. Plus many non-purchase money seconds, HELOC etc. do carry the risk of recourse beyond the underlying asset. Although these are secured by property, they also carry a personal liability on the part of the borrower. The loan was for a car or boat and for tax purposes was secured by real property and carries additional liability.

[bubba99]

PMI insures the primary loan. If that is a loan to value (ltv) of 80% the borrower does not need PMI on that loan. Secondary loans or seconds can be used to pay down the purchase to 80% ltv – so no PMI, but the borrower pays a higher rate for the second mortgage and everything is fine.

The borrower avoids PMI, the primary lender has their 80% ltv, the borrower only pays the higher rate on the second, not the entire loan so everyone is happy. At least until the default. In a default the first lender get their money first. If anything is left over the secondary lender can get paid. For the secondary lender to foreclose, they must pay off the first lender and work with what is left – hence the higher rate.

[bubba99]

Prop 87 has many really interesting arguments about what will happen after nominal taxes are added for an “oil extract fee”. Most have missed a fundamental issue with crude here in California vs Texas, or UAE. And that is the oil is here. It is cheaper, and it does not need to be transported 1000 or ten thousand miles to get here for refining. Diane Fienstein asked for a GAO investigation in 2005 as to why CA crude was so much less expensive than WestTexas benchmark. To date, no answer but the oil companies have lost a lot of litigation on the issue. (If the oil companies can keep the cost artifically low, they pay less under current royalty agreements. link http://www.mms.gov/ooc/PDFs/cahis.pdf

Our current cost of fuel is not based on price of manufacture, but nominal utility of the product – what the market will bear. Nominal taxes will not effect the marginal utility of gasoline or even close. Their only comments about the higher cost California mixture is that “it is more expensive to produce” even with lower cost California crude. The oil companies do not discuss production costs, only world prices of crude – not impacted by the lower cost California crude even at 106%% of its lower cost. They will not stop producing “California” crude, because it is too profitable.

[bubba99]

Californians have always paid more than that elsewhere in the country. We are used to paying 50% of our incomes to own our dream house. That is part of the reason California real estate is traditionally more expensive. But the bubble is not a California issue, but a national one. The Federal Reserve injected a lot of liquidity and credit into a system that had been stable for 30 years. The bubble has been since September 11, 2001 and is a Fed bubble that caused a real estate bubble on purpose.

The mean is not an issue of changing history, but explaining where we would be if the FED had not given away money to stop the effects of Sept 11 on the national economy. Prices doubled since 2001 because rates dropped in half. Rates are now returning to the “mean” and expect that prices will too. The same general area they were in 2001 before the shock to the system.

[bubba99]

The move out of the dollar has been stable and consistent. In 2002 it was 1.1 euro for one dollar. Today it is .78 euros for a dollar. Except for a brief rise at the end of 2005, it has been consistently down. It has been dollar denominated debt that has allowed the US to continue with deficit trade balances for years. In January a dollar bought about .86 Euros. Today that dollar buys about .78 Euros – a loss of 8 cents or almost 10% this year. So while the owner of the debt is being paid 5% by the U. S. Treasury, the currency exchange is costing him/her 10%. It is this negative interest that is funding the current US economy. We are buying foreign goods and services in dollars of debt and repaying them in devalued US dollars. Our trading partners are saying not any more. Even UAE is quitting us. Time to move out of the dollar.

My broker found me some Euro demonolater German and Netherlands government bonds paying about 2.5 to 3 percent. I’ll miss the current run up in the Dow, but the risk is a lot less. If the dollar vs. the euro continues its current trend – down – then the investment should yield 18% in dollars the middle of next year. The risk is that the Fed will stabilize the dollar by fixing the economy, or breaking it. That the trade deficit will go away as greater US exports pay for the imports is not likely. Other than food, I do not see much changing in the way of exports. For Americans to buy American, America would need to produce something here at home. Even an American car has 60% foreign parts. For Americans to stop buying everything foreign, they would need to be out of work. NO, these knuckleheads have really screwed up the economy to the point that it will take a recession/depression to begin to rebuild it. And with the world trade denominated in euros, there is not much chance that America will take leadership again. If and when OPEC denominates in euros our fate is sealed. I can only hope that we can still bring enough political pressure on OPEC to keep playing. Maybe that is what Iraq is about.

Man, I hope I am wrong! And I could be. If as the US economy turns down in a recession, so does the rest of the world. The US economy is the consumption engine that runs the worlds economy. China, Japan,Tai huan, Singapore, Germany and France all need the US to keep consuming to keep their domestic economies running. On top of that they need NATO or one of our other political organizations to keep safe. The US could stop the move out of dollars simply by threatening to bring the NATO or SEATO or . . . forces and “dollars” home. Another move could be tariffs on imported goods high enough to pay for the deficit. Forget the World Trade Organization (WTO) and start managing the US economy for the US. If others do not want to play, then they can go elsewhere to sell their goods and services. But unfortunately, I believe this will take a political will we do not have. Or the US could just stop creating dollars.

The M3 money supply (discontinued by the fed) will grow by a trillion dollars this year. Just say no. Stop increasing the supply of dollars, which has doubled since 1995, and stop the decline in the dollar. A dozen steps they could take to stabilize the dollar, but they will probably “stay the course”

[bubba99]

For families with “deep roots” in California, staying is an easier choice than for out of state transplants. The family has a number of overpriced housed in California, and has reaped some large profits from selling others. The existing properties, and profits provide a basis for our children to stay in the state.

When my daughter finishes her Phd at Berkeley, we will find the money for a down payment on property in California if that is what she wants – even if it is in the very overpriced city of Berkeley. I have tried living in other states and cannot imagine that prices would drive a Californian to the cold of Chicago, or the humidity of Texas, or the . . . of the south.

Just in San Diego we have UCSD, San Diego State, Scripts Institute and a hundred miles north, UCLA, USC, Cal Tech and many others. The level of education taken for granted in California dwarfs any other area I have been reluctantly transfered to over the years.

[bubba99]

I have found the if I use the login template on the left hand side of the page, I don’t have the “reply” type of issue where it looks like the user has not logged in

[bubba99]

It was easy money that created the bubble, and I can see the FED using the same tactic to forstall any housing bubble burst.

What if a new “special tax free” mortage backed security was created that paid 3% tax free and provided new 3.x % mortage money for 12 – 24 months to be used exclusively to re-finance action arms or other shakey mortgages.

With governmant guarantees the money would be available, the loans would limit the foreclosures on homes financed with “questionalble” mortgages, and prevent a spiral of downward pressure on housing.

I have no reason to believe that this will happen, but this or something like it could be in the FEDs bag of tricks.

[bubba99]

Blogs are like books. You can read or not read whatever part you prefer. If one poster is not to your liking, dont read his or her writings. There does not seem to be a limit to the number of active posts that the site can maintain.

[bubba99]

The use of Euros vs. dollars is easy to understand. A million dollars in $100 bills weighs 22 pounds. The same value in 500 Euro notes is roughly 3.5 pounds – a lot smaller volume. The US stopped making 500, 1000 and 10000 dollar denomonations just to make it harder on drug dealers. Plus the europeans are not trying to confiscate every “illegally” earned euro like the americans.

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