Lets get out of the current one first...
Posted on 06/25/2011 10:30:58 AM PDT by Brilliant
...Housing remains critical, so I looked up one of the few people who saw the housing bust and financial crisis coming years before they happened: Gary Shilling, economist and author of “The Age of Deleveraging...”
“I’m predicting another recession next year,” he told me.
Not a double dip, he emphasized, because we’re already two years from the end of the last recession... So, he’s looking for a brand new cyclical recession beginning in 2012...
This time, however, the recovery has been “distinctly subpar,” in his words. “As of the first quarter, ..real GDP is barely above its peak in the fourth quarter of 2007, whereas earlier recoveries were well above their previous tops 13 quarters later,” he wrote in a recent edition of his newsletter, Insight...
He’s actually looking for another 20% drop in housing prices before we hit bottom in 2013...
Since housing prices nationally already have fallen by a third from their peak, that means that, if he’s right, they’ll end up a stomach-churning 45% off their early 2006 highs...
Lenders have foreclosed on 3.5 million American homes since 2007; Shilling expects millions of more foreclosures in the years ahead.
If this happens, “you know what that will do to consumer spending,” said Shilling. “That’s a recession — an easy forecast.”
And once housing markets hit bottom, it can take a decade for them to recover, as in Texas after the oil bust or Southern California after the end of the Cold War. That could mean subpar growth — average annual GDP gains of 2% — for years to come, he predicted...
The Obama administration’s own attempt to “fix” the housing market — the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) — was, in Shilling’s words, “a miserable failure...”
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
Most homes over $300k are already 45% off their peak.
The old recession has never ended, and most of us would call it a depression. It will get worse this year, and next year, for however long the bunch of losers at the White House and the Fed are trying to fix it.
Lets get out of the current one first...
Its only a depression or recession to the ones who lost their jobs. All the others pay no attention.
Hunh. I must have missed the memo.
People who still have their jobs are watching their buying power shrink as well; the “non-existent” inflation gets them, too. They’re also often having some of the workloads of their laid-off co-workers dumped on them as well; articles have been written about the effects of surviving layoffs in this economy.
Few people can ignore this, even if they wanted to.
14 million people out of work for record-setting durations; another 11 million well-educated people flipping burgers or greeting shoppers for a living. Yeah, we’ve been out of recession for two years now. Right.
And we’re headed for an even deeper hole with the communist policies of the ruling class who are, of course, completely insulated from the dreadful results of their actions.
We are so thoroughly hosed.
It is creepy how this nonsense is just thrown out there; it is like everybody (actually just Obama’s media) is pretending the emperor’s new clothes are quite fashionable...
German soldiers described this sh!t in the last year of WWII; as they were being pushed back to Berlin itself, they were fed a diet of nonsense about victories elsewhere that weren’t real (but couldn’t be verified at the time), and had to listen to their “Obama” babble about superweapons that would turn the tide. By the end of the war he was giving orders to armies that didn’t even exist anymore; the army was smart enough to know that he was an incompetent nut, and they tried to stop him with the bomb plot.
I hope it works out for your son. I’m sure you know that Bay Area housing prices are distorted by several things that are not driven by free markets. First, so much of our land is off-limits to construction by government fiat and there is simply no more land for building in Silicon Valley. Scarce land means high land prices — unless you are willing to commute 90 minutes to your job from Hollister or maybe 45 minutes from Morgan Hill. House prices are roughly inversely related to commute time to the jobs in the valley. If you value time with your family, you have to pay these prices.
Second, California and federal environmental policies have made the cost of building materials soar. Concrete, copper, lumber - you name it and it is scarce and very costly here, much more so than in other parts of the country.
I bought my first house in 1978 in Palo Alto for $100k and my Dad said I was absolutely nuts, too. Dad had the perspective of living in Missouri and Pennsylvania where land was plentiful and you could simply move further out from the center city to get a cheap house in a new subdivision. You can’t do that here. I was scared to death making that first purchase, but I had arrived in 1973 and the same house was going for about $50k at that time. I missed the huge run-up in prices in the early 70s, so I jumped in and (luckily) things worked out for me. Of course, I had demographics and the (somewhat) early blossoming of Silicon Valley working in my favor.
Today, even though California has the worst business environment in the country, we do have a few notable exceptions such as Facebook, LinkedIn, the new Apple campus, Google, etc. all within spitting distance of Cupertino. There are still fortunes to be made here in tech. Best of luck to your son.
“another 11 million well-educated people flipping burgers or greeting shoppers for a living”
If they’re lucky; I was in a McDonalds recently where every visible employee was Hispanic. They had a sign that they participate in E-Verify; I guess that makes it acceptable to not hire Americans. In NE New Jersey, many jobs are closed to people who can’t speak Spanish or Portuguese.
Yea okay whatever. We're still in it.
I remember the Oil Bust in Houston late 80’s. It was really difficult for the unemployed. The employed never missed a beat, they went to work and never looked up. Still today many have no thoughts on state of the economy. As long as the checks arrived it was business as usual. I am reminded of the expression....Its only a depression when you lose your job.
How ‘bout that “Hope ‘n’ Change”?
I bought my first house in Campbell in 1972. Although I left the valley in 1973, I kept the house and rented it out. I eventually sold it a few years later and made out like a bandit.
I’d imagine that things hadn’t changed much for the people still working in Houston at the time, so they could carry on as though it was business as usual. This situation we’re in now is different in the sense that the inflation makes it impossible for even those holding onto their jobs to ignore the rising prices of groceries, and especially gasoline. The last people who remained untouched by this depression (civil servants) are now feeling the bite as well; when cities like Camden, NJ lay off 1/3 of their police officers (CAMDEN!), nobody can ignore this. Here in northern NJ the NY Giants went through a 30 year waiting list for season tickets for their new stadium in SIX MONTHS, and still haven’t sold out as they had in their old stadium. Our public school teachers were the last to feel the bite, but they are now; even the Dems they had in their pockets “sold them out” (in their eyes).
If people can still carry on as though nothing is wrong, they are delusional or extremely self-centered.
The basic numbers I use is that salaries haven’t gone up much since 1994, but housing prices are still hovering around year 2000 prices. Either salaries must go up or housing prices must come down.
Well, you do know what real estate agents say: Location, location, location!
I assume that the house's location were felt to more than compensate for the house's age and generally run-down condition.
But one question, if you will allow: How did he finance it? How much down? How much per month? At what interest rate? Did he have a 15-year mortgage, or a 30-year-mortgage? Are both he and his wife high salary-earners?
sorry if that seems overly inquisitive - I just have difficulty wrapping my brain around that price-tag!
egards,
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