[spdrun]

Nothing wrong with stated income/no income as long as LTV is kept to a sane quantity. No more than 50-60% of value with assets to cover a year or two of payments in the bank.

It actually has a place with people whose incomes vary greatly from year to year, but the way it was done before 2007 was asinine.

Interestingly, the Texan law that you mention dated from the 1800s, pre-S&L crisis.

[spdrun]

Hopefully you had a badass honeymoon!

[spdrun]

But why FORCE people to maximize their purchasing power? There should be more of a place for people who want to take it slow, and say work two 30-35 hour a day jobs between a married couple (thus having approx the same # of working hours per week as a couple did in the 70s). No stigma should be attached to that.

And things like health insurance and retirement benefits should be 100% divorced from employment in order to minimize fixed costs of hiring. And thus the cost difference between three people working 35 hours a week and two working 52.5 each. If that’s socialism, then I’m proudly a socialist in this respect.

[spdrun]

We shouldn’t maximize growth for the sake of growth — we should maximize human happiness.

The fusion reactor would be awesome if it works, but I’ll believe it when I see a working prototype that exceeds breakeven by a sizable margin. We’ve been five years away for the past twenty-five years.

However, we were given a free fusion reactor up in the sky whose fuel will last a few billion years more. We should be doing more to harness its power. With a worldwide superconducting power grid to smooth out variations in sunlight, we could do pretty darn well with existing technology.

We should also be working on portable fusion reactors, but I see them as being more useful for things like long-term space travel. (There’s also the question of output – will they produce undesired radioisotopes?)

[spdrun]

UC Gal – congrats! (Both on your wedding and not buying into the planner hype.)

[spdrun]

Yeah, I was speaking to economic diversity here, less so to racial/ethnic diversity.

[spdrun]

If you’re comparing center cities, I’d say that SF might trump Manhattan right now. For sure SF would “win” over the five boroughs of NYC.

I’d also say that my gut says that SF + burbs is more expensive than NYC + burbs. There are a lot more poor/cheap areas within 20 miles of NYC than near SF.

Keep in mind also that this survey totals average costs. It doesn’t compare apples to apples. If the norm is a 4 bedroom house in city #1, and people spend slightly more on housing than in city #2, where the norm is a 2 bedroom apartment, city #1 will be seen as more expensive. Even though you actually get more “bang for the buck” in city #1 and could live more cheaply (take roommates, buy a duplex, whatever).

[spdrun]

Have to admit I did buy a couple shares of NFLX AH. It doesn’t seem to be dropping further from the price at which I bought, and I’m counting on lemmings seeing a “bargain” and bidding it up. KNOCK ON WOOD!

Shoveler – the good thing (as a prospective buyer of RE) that even if rates drop below 3.5%, the average Joe’s confidence will be eroded. Making them less likely to want to buy property (especially if their investments are looking poor) and making them more likely to want to sell. Short if necessary.

I’m not betting on prices dropping to 2011 levels, but something in between then and now would be nice.

[spdrun]

FlyerInHI, IMHO, NY being a “financial capital” is actually a negative because it’s made NY’s economy less diverse than it was historically. It’s still pretty resilient due to foreign investment, people playing both sides of the markets, and controls on apartment purchase down payments (by condo/co-op boards), but it’s less diverse than it was 40-50 years ago. This makes it less resilient and I daresay less interesting.

[spdrun]

Can’t you buy a few shares A.H.? It did beat earnings, and the HBO direct-streaming deal isn’t huge yet due to customer inertia and other Netflix offerings.

-25% is an overreaction, and it might revert to something like -10% tomorrow.

[spdrun]

Here’s hoping for the markets to stabilize before the last Fed meeting, so the Fed board won’t get any uppity ideas about extending QE3. Then after QE3 is put out of its misery … let us live in INTERESTING TIMES!

[spdrun]

Well, here’s to a leg down, then! And an arm too! We need a good correction to keep things from getting insane a year or two from now.

[spdrun]

Buying any RJET (parent company of Frontier, who transported the Ebola patient)? Maybe they should rename to Vector Air…

[spdrun]

401(k) was codified in the late 70s and became popular in the mid-80s. Roth IRA came into being in late 90s. (Personally, I think laws should discourage risky investments as tax-free retirement vehicles, and either guarantee a decent gov’t pension to everyone, or mandate investment in very safe areas. Retirement shouldn’t be a casino.)

I can’t speak to the 70s, but frankly, I liked many aspects of NYC in the 1980s and early 90s. Cheap, more economically diverse, and less rule-abiding.

I remember someone complaining about paying $500/mo for a big 2 bedroom place on the Lower East Side in the early 90s.

Personally, I hope that a slowdown in the financial industry would force a diversification of the city into things like tech firms and R&D. A lot of creative effort put towards the finance industry (shifting Monopoly money around) is actually wasted effort — imagine if more of our best and brightest went into engineering and hard science vs finance. We have the world-class universities and a lot of damn smart people.

Keep in mind that Bell Labs was founded in NYC, so this would not be unprecedented.

[spdrun]

Nope. No stock market bubbles to dwarf previous bubbles since 1995. Nothing here to see. 1987 was considered a bad crash, and it was mild compared to early 2000s and 2008.

If we’d followed the trendline from the 80s through mid 90s, we’d be at about S&P 1000 now without two major recessionary shocks.

As far as real-estate “recovering” from a defence bubble in the early 80s, “recovery” implies that it was fairly priced in the early 80s. And that the re-pricing after the defence bubble burst was a disease, not strong medicine.

[Author]

Posts