Housing bubble – The Burning Platform

FOURTH TURNING 2022 – BAD MOON RISING (PART 2)

In Part 1 of this article I laid out how the global elite have used this covid flu to manipulate the weak minded into a fear induced mass psychosis as a key element in their Great Reset plan to control the world and keep you technologically enslaved under lock and key. Now I will try to decipher how this mass hysteria might play out over the course of 2022 and beyond.

“Americans today fear that linearism (alias the American Dream) has run its course. Many would welcome some enlightenment about history’s patterns and rhythms, but today’s intellectual elites offer little that’s useful. Caught between the entropy of the chaoticists and the hubris of the linearists, the American people have lost their moorings.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” ― George Orwell

The American Dream, where all Americans, no matter the circumstances of their birth, had a legitimate opportunity to live a better life than their parents, based upon their own intelligence, work ethic, and good fortune, is an illusion in today’s world. The ruling elite have stolen the wealth of the nation and its citizens. This was not an accident, but a plan implemented over many decades, accelerating after Nixon closed the gold window and opened the door to unlimited amounts of debt being created out of thin air and backed by nothing.

Continue reading “FOURTH TURNING 2022 – BAD MOON RISING (PART 2)”

SIGNS, SIGNS, EVERYWHERE SIGNS

“Fools, as it has long been said, are indeed separated, soon or eventually, from their money. So, alas, are those who, responding to a general mood of optimism, are captured by a sense of their own financial acumen. Thus it has been for centuries; thus in the long future it will also be.” ― John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria

The signs of an epic bubble of historic proportions are everywhere. The stock market is a bubble, with valuations exceeding 2001. Margin debt is at all-time highs. The bond market is a bubble, with the Fed artificially suppressing rates and pumping trillions of QE into Wall Street. Housing is experiencing another bubble, with prices now far exceeding the 2005 peak. Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto-currencies are a bubble, being driven by the excess liquidity sloshing around the system. A joke crypto currency like Dogecoin soars into the stratosphere because money has no meaning anymore.

Continue reading “SIGNS, SIGNS, EVERYWHERE SIGNS”

TICK TOCK

“This country, and with it most of the Western world, is presently going through a period of inflation and credit expansion. As the quantity of money in circulation and deposits subject to check increases, there prevails a general tendency for the prices of commodities and services to rise. Business is booming. Yet such a boom, artificially engineered by monetary and credit expansion, cannot last forever. It must come to an end sooner or later. For paper money and bank deposits are not a proper substitute for non-existing capital goods. Economic theory has demonstrated in an irrefutable way that a prosperity created by an expansionist monetary and credit policy is illusory and must end in a slump, an economic crisis. It has happened again and again in the past, and it will happen in the future, too.” – Ludwig von Mises – 1952

Image result for recession

Continue reading “TICK TOCK”

A BIASED 2017 FORECAST (PART ONE)

“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.” – Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

A couple weeks ago I was lucky enough to see a live one hour interview with Michael Lewis at the Annenberg Center about his new book The Undoing Project. Everyone attending the lecture received a complimentary copy of the book. Being a huge fan of Lewis after reading Liar’s Poker, Boomerang, The Big Short, Flash Boys, and Moneyball, I was interested to hear about his new project. This was a completely new direction from his financial crisis books. I wasn’t sure whether it would keep my interest, but the story of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and their research into the psychology of judgement and decision making, creating a cognitive basis for common human errors that arise from heuristics and biases, was an eye opener.

In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules which people often use to form judgments and make decisions. They are mental shortcuts that usually involve focusing on one aspect of a complex problem and ignoring others. These rules work well under most circumstances, but they can lead to systematic deviations from logic, probability or rational choice theory. The resulting errors are called “cognitive biases” and many different types have been documented.

Continue reading “A BIASED 2017 FORECAST (PART ONE)”

RAMBLINGS FROM THE ROCKIES

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.” ― John Muir

We just got back from a family vacation in Colorado visiting my oldest son, who graduated college last year and immediately moved to Colorado to start his life. The trip was fun, enlightening, exhausting, and a lesson in how the easy money policies of the Fed result in mal-investment and the impoverishment of the middle class.

I don’t want to be a downer, as our week in Colorado was a fantastic journey where we witnessed some of the most stunning panoramas and beautiful awe inspiring vistas of our lives. My son is in the perfect place, as he loves mountain biking, hiking, snow boarding, camping, and hockey. After a week in Colorado, you realize why it is the least obese state in the union. It’s a perfect setting for those who enjoy the outdoors, as Colorado has 300 days of sunshine per year, along with the most snow per year.

I’ve only flown twice in the last eight years, so I wasn’t looking forward to getting molested by some obese low IQ TSA thug. Our flight was early on Wednesday morning and to my surprise the TSA line was non-existent. Getting a body scan still creeps me out. I hope my body scan grossed them out. This massive over-reaction to terrorism has stopped no attacks and cost citizens hundreds of billions and the loss of freedoms and liberties.

Continue reading “RAMBLINGS FROM THE ROCKIES”

MOTHER, SHOULD I TRUST THE GOVERNMENT? (Oldie but Goodie)

Originally Published in June 2013

Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?
Mother, do you think they’ll like this song?
Mother, do you think they’ll try to break my balls?
Ooh ah,
Mother, should I build the wall?

Mother, should I run for president?
Mother, should I trust the government?
Mother, will they put me in the firing line?
Ooh ah,
Is it just a waste of time?

Pink Floyd – Mother

The lyrics to Mother had both a literal and figurative meaning for Roger Waters. He was literally describing his overprotective single mother (his father was killed in World War II) building walls to protect him from the outside world. The figurative meaning is Big Mother sending its boys off to war and using fear to control and manipulate the masses. At the time he wrote this song in 1979, the Soviet Union was thought to be at its peak of power and the Berlin Wall represented a boundary between good and evil. Nuclear war was still a looming fear. Waters has always had a dim view of totalitarian states and institutions (English schools). Having seen his Wall Tour performance this past summer at Citizens Bank Park with a diverse crowd of 40,000, ranging in age from senior citizens to teenagers, it seems this song has gained new meaning. He sang a duet with himself from 1980 projected on the Wall and when he sang the lyric, “Mother, should I trust the government?” the entire stadium responded in unison – NO!!! This revealed a truth that is not permitted to be discussed by the corporate mainstream media acting as a mouthpiece for the ruling class. A growing legion of citizens in this country does not trust the government. This is very perceptive on their part.

In part one of this two part series – Hey You – I examined how an invisible government of wealthy, power hungry men have utilized the propaganda techniques of Edward Bernays and lured the American people into a narcissistic, techno-gadget, debt based servitude. Over the last one hundred years they have created a totalitarian state built upon egotism, material goods, and fulfilling our desires through Wall Street peddled debt and mass consumerism. It has been an incredibly effective form of control that has convinced the masses to love their servitude. The ruling oligarchs correctly chose the painless, amusement saturated, soft totalitarianism of Huxley’s Brave New World over the fearful, pain inflicting, surveillance state, house of horrors detailed in Orwell’s 1984.

Continue reading “MOTHER, SHOULD I TRUST THE GOVERNMENT? (Oldie but Goodie)”

Go See “The Big Short” Right Now — And Then Read This

Via The Intercept

THERE’S NO SUBJECT ON EARTH, with the possible exception of sex, that human beings find more inherently fascinating than money. Yet somehow most of the movies about the 2008 financial collapse have been as enticing and zesty as a raw potato.

That’s finally changed with The Big Short, based on the book by Michael Lewis about a small assortment of “outsiders and weirdos” who made hundreds of millions of dollars betting that the housing bubble of the 2000s would collapse. Near the end of the film one of them, played by Steve Carell, declares, “We live in an era of fraud” — not just fraud on Wall Street, he says, but sports fraud, corporate fraud, and government fraud.

What sets The Big Short apart and makes it truly great is that it portrays this worldwide, straight-faced fraud accurately; that is, as not just dangerous and enraging, but also extremely funny. It calls to mind Monty Python’s famous dead parrot sketch about a pet store salesman who defrauds his customer and then offers an endless stream of preposterous, contradictory obfuscations to conceal the obvious reality. The Big Short demonstrates that we’re now all living in that pet store.

Continue reading “Go See “The Big Short” Right Now — And Then Read This”

The remaking of an American housing bubble: Home prices are up 78 percent since 2000 and 30 percent since 2012

Guest Post by Dr. Housing Bubble

You have to realize what makes a bubble tick. People get caught up in a deep rooted herd mentality. The absolute blindness that occurred between 2005 and 2007 was incredible. Yet a decade later, people have forgotten many of the reasons why the bubble hit in the first place. Toxic loans were merely a symptom of the bigger issue – and that bigger issue was that stagnant incomes need riskier debt to keep prices moving higher. The system is built on everything moving higher and the Fed lives off of this.

Yet somehow, we had an enormous housing collapse. Today, prices are being driven higher by investors and foreign money. In a previous post we discussed how one housing development in Irvine had 80 percent of buyers from China paying all cash – all cash for a median price of $1.16 million. Even a couple of professionals can’t compete with all cash offers. The driver for pushing prices higher today is different but the result is the same – local families need to take on more precarious levels of debt to buy in today’s market. And the homeownership rate shows that many simply can’t compete.

The remaking of a housing bubble

There is now a growing voice of people echoing the views that a new bubble is emerging:

Continue reading “The remaking of an American housing bubble: Home prices are up 78 percent since 2000 and 30 percent since 2012”

HOUSING BUBBLE PART DEUX

The housing recovery without mortgage originations is coming to its inevitable conclusion. The Fed, Wall Street bankers and the US Treasury have been able to increase national home prices by 30%, with 50% to 100% in some bubble markets, using 0% interest rates, a massive buy and rent scheme, withholding foreclosures from the market, encouraging foreign cash buying, and allowing flippers back into the market. In a real free market would home prices go up by 30% while mortgage originations remained flat for the last four years?

Thirty year mortgage rates have been falling for the last 30 years. They bottomed at 3.35% in late 2012. Since then they rose as high as 4.4% in early 2014. They fell to 3.6% by early 2015 and are now hovering in the 3.8% range. Everyone who had a high interest mortgage loan, including those with underwater mortgages, have refinanced to a lower rate. The economic boost to the economy from the lower mortgage payments is over. The Obamacare costs have spent the mortgage payment savings. The combination of declining real household income, overpriced homes, millennials with massive levels of student loan debt, and now rising mortgage rates are putting a halt to this fake Fed recovery scheme.

Chart of the Day