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What's the worst that could happen from here? Okay, sure. The growth rate is currently negative and has been falling for 18 months. That's just this winter's East Coast's polar vortex temporarily rippling back through space and time though. Any rational optimist can see that.
Further, we already knew that the East Coast's weather would carry over to existing home sales in the West. To think otherwise is just crazy talk!
In all seriousness, the housing optimists better hope we not only stay in the channel but move back above 0% soon, or speculators may someday wish that they had embraced their fistfuls of dollars instead.
Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart
7 comments:
Housing is my favorite, uh, rant, of course.
The same goddamn house my parents rented for $400/mo in the late 70s now rents for $2000, a rise over twice the official rate of inflation, and, what's more galling, there's damn little actual capital depreciation going on to 'justify' that add'l cost -- ('good') renters don't 'consume' housing so much as just occupy it.
Georgists have a saying -- "All Taxes Come Out of Rents" -- and, a corollary, all tax cuts feed into rising rents (not dollar for dollar, but rents are set at what households can afford).
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CUUR0000SEHA
is why we're broke -- the ever-rising rent tap on working America The only drop in that curve was when 50% of the workaday economy was basically taken out.
What happens now is the curious thing. Clearly we can't raise taxes on the masses, since that would be back-breaking.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=sm8
annualized per-capita federal deficit.
As long as we keep printing, we can keep borrowing, since TMK one new Fed dollar can create a lot of monetary expansion as it pings through our financialized economy.
But we ~could~ get another 2006-2007 consumer pullback, why the hell not. We haven't really fixed what's wrong with the economy, more like just added fuel to the fires consuming it.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/NETEXP
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TCU
the 'recovery' is looking pretty long in the tooth, but we're not even back to the 1990 low.
The 2014 election will have consequences, as the parties begin to set the table for 2016.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=smb
housing (blue), health care (red), % total wages
Raise taxes and pain's gonna fall.
Cut gov't spending, same thing.
Luckily, there's a third option still available.
Troy,
But we ~could~ get another 2006-2007 consumer pullback, why the hell not. We haven't really fixed what's wrong with the economy, more like just added fuel to the fires consuming it.
I've been assured that the Fed has permanently put a stop to recessions with their "savers earn no interest" approach to rescuing the economy, so hey, we've got that going for us.
And as an added bonus, an inverted yield curve often signals problems with the economy so by preventing the yield curve from inverting it's just like taking that indicator back behind the woodshed.
What happens behind the woodshed, stays behind the woodshed, lol. Sigh.
It's a bit like breaking one's thermometer because one doesn't like the reading though. Doesn't exactly cure the flu.
Tank slapper... Something something...
Heterodyne feedback... Something something...
Ends well... Something something...
Rob Dawg,
Rogue Trader... Something something...
"Outstanding student debt again topped $1 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2013, making it the second-largest pool of debt in the nation behind mortgages. This has tripled in just a decade, as higher-education prices increased faster than medical costs, up 500 percent since 1985. "
Really amazing how poorly we're running this railroad. It doesn't have to be this bad, but we've got some powerful mofos paying a lot of money to BS enough people to keep their game going.
Couple of years back I was on a focus group the Howard Jarvis people were paying for to run some of their 2012-cycle anti-union ads by for feedback.
This is not to say the pro-union side is that much better, I almost fear their pension time bomb more than the landlords' increasing take, because the latter is at least easily avoidable.
Troy,
Really amazing how poorly we're running this railroad. It doesn't have to be this bad, but we've got some powerful mofos paying a lot of money to BS enough people to keep their game going.
Emphasis added.
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