hanson001

21 Comments

    • Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [view article]
      For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?

      I Corinthians 1:19-20

      Yes sir, over and over again.       Oct 08 12:58 PM
    • Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [view article]
      "Way to go, Georgie !!"

      What! The Congress get no credit?       Sep 29 03:56 PM
    • Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [view article]
      axelrod6008: If I could have my way, the people that helped create this problem would have zero assets. That would mean that a great deal of the world's population would have no roof over their head. The plan that's in front of Congress is the government attempting to preserve what is left.

      The government will not allow a run on the banks? Yeah, like the Great Depression, when we had bank holidays, after the damage was done. And the French government couldn't stop the bastille coming down, eventhough they said don't do that. One could argue the run has already begun with Bearns Stearns and Lehman. The government always acts after the infection has taken hold.       Sep 25 12:09 PM
    • Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [view article]
      axelrod608: "In the P&B (Paulson and Bernake) plan I have yet to hear where the proceeds would go. Wouldn't paying the creditors be a good thing, especially since P&B have repeatedly made the case that their plan is to fix the credit problem ? "

      The tax payers, like always, are the creditors. The proceeds, depending on how the reverse auction turns out, could be a good investment. Don't get me wrong. I am for the free-hand no matter what. My belief is that great stress is the only way to change behavior.

      axelrod608: "It would be a piece of cake to add a dozen or more judges to the bankruptcy system to handle the additional demand. The cost would be recaptured in the asset auctions. More responsible companies with stronger balance sheets and more conservative executives would buy up the assets of the insolvent companies and put them back to work. And they wouldn't play Lotto with their shareholders' funds."

      This problem is global and I believe we are close to a run on the banks. The behavior in the money market accounts and the t-bill yields should give you a clue. People, smartly, have no confidence in the system. Too many lies, too much greed, too many people with great dept levels crying about the government having the same problem. Wow! We have a very sick culture.

      Our sin nature makes me collect ammo.       Sep 25 09:48 AM
    • Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [view article]
      notosmart: Why the pride man? The world will follow us down the rat hole. Look at the sovereign wealth funds; they haven't made good on their investments here. Look at all the foreign banks that hold our government paper. This is global, and while our ship is sinking, they are taking on water also. Sep 11 11:15 AM
    • Can the US Government Afford Future Bailouts? [view article]
      LOL. monday1929: "How about shipping each American a small printing press to save postage on stimulus checks." Killer!

      Well, I think the consumer's printing press came in the form of home equity loans. Wonder how many of these are upside down?       Sep 10 04:14 PM
    • The Complete Failure of Owners' Equivalent Rent [view article]
      "If home prices are going up, but rates are going down (like happened a few years ago), then the monthly payment for new buyers might actually be lower year over year! "

      This has proven not to be true. If it were true, I wouldn't be feeding homeless people in the soup kitchen today. The home price increase wiped out any savings from lower interest rates on average.

      It would be better if the CPI measured rents and home prices.
      Aug 15 05:01 PM
    • The Complete Failure of Owners' Equivalent Rent [view article]
      Disstresse: The CPI measures a basket of good and services. Over 80,000 items are measured each month. I bet you didn't purchased a few of the 80,000 items that are in the Index. So which items should they drop?

      The CPI was never meant to be a personal inflation Index. The items make their way into the Index from Census Bureau surveys. These items are then placed in categories and weighted based on proportion of income spent on each category.

      So, I think the author and everyone else knows that the CPI is not our personal inflation indicator. I read this author a great deal and he on the government numbers like a blue tick hound. He is only showing how the published numbers are not reflecting the general inflation level that we experience. He does a wonderful, comprehensive job if you ask me.



      Aug 15 01:36 PM
    • While Natural Gas Production Increases, Company Stock Prices May Not [view article]
      Jack: I think we lack storage, facilities to liquify, and ships to carry. This would have to be built out and I don't know what price justifies its build. I am thinking along your same lines however. Aug 12 10:32 AM
    • Why the 2008 Housing Relief Bill is No Relief [view article]
      No worries, Obama is going to fix everything. In fact, Oprah Winfrey guarantees it. All those souls clapping at his gathering and her show can not be wrong. The crowd is always right; right? Jul 29 01:14 PM
    • Americans Changing The Way They Live [Housing Tracker] [view article]
      Love your format Judy.

      I worked in Atlanta, GA from 2002 - 2007. This was the housing bubble years. I noticed many people I worked with, in order to pay the mortgage, take in boarders. Bubbles always gives one clues before they bust.       Jul 23 10:36 AM
    • Is Natural Gas Down for the Count? [view article]
      I wonder how much gas the Haynesville Shale will bring to the market. What will this 4th largest gas field in the world do to the price of NG? I am located in the Haynesville Shale in NW Louisiana. Being here, I am starting to hear production numbers.

      Petrohawk has a horizontal well producing 16.8 million cubic feet per day. From Chesapeake's recent conference call on July 2nd, their 8 horizontal wells in the Haynesville are producing 5 - 15 mmcfe per day. Louisiana pipeline infrastructure is better than the other shale plays and our NG gets to market fast. It will be interesting to see what production in the Haynesville does to inventory levels.       Jul 21 01:12 PM
    • Homebuilders Woo Back First-Time Homebuyers [Housing Tracker] [view article]
      Dont guess we will ever get it.

      "In 2006, KB’s basic model in Victorville, Cal. [was] 3,800-sf and sold for $328,000. Today, its stripped down offering goes for $220,000, at less than half the size."

      The size of the home is less than half the 2006 model but the price didn't come down by half. The price came down about 33%.

      Guess the housing market will keep going down until value shows up. I mean the person buying the home mentioned above is not getting a good deal. They are paying too much. And isn't this what got us into the housing market slump. The home cost too much so we come up with creative ways to finance something that cost too much.

      We will keep repeating the same mistakes until we learn the lesson.
      Jul 17 10:20 AM
    • Housing: Barron's Calls a Bottom [view article]
      Home prices. No telling how far they might fall or move sideways. If one looks at the purchaser of homes, I have never seen the consumer so tapped out. And during the escalation of the price, the consumer's wages could not keep up with the price changes. This brought about creative financing along with people cashing out equity in an ever increasing asset class.

      Happy birthday! Add to this inflation (headline inflation doesn't begin to caputure it), sinking dollar, and interest rates that have no where to go but up, and the only remedy I see to the problem is decreasing the price, greatly reducing inventory, or building much smaller homes that people can afford.

      I read some time ago (maybe two years) that people were buying homes two times the size they grew up in. I thought this strange, but knowing human behavior, "look at me I am successful", knew we would dig our own grave. I mean are we not producing less children now? Why such a big house. Back in the day, one could not purchase a home if the payments were more than 30% of his/her income. Looks like we are going back to the day.

      Dang! We didn't raise our kids to watch what they spend.

      Jul 14 11:52 AM
    • Government's Inflation Statistics Not Fooling Everyone [view article]
      Keep the BLS numbers in your mind but never trade on them.

      I had the pleasure of working at the BLS for five years. I worked on the CPI for those years but had friends that worked on the ECI and Employment numbers.

      First let me say I always wanted to get in there and see how the data was collected. I loved the idea of the CPI and had always played close attention to the monthly numbers.

      Many changes have been made to the CPI over the last couple of decades. So much so, that like a lot of you, I do not trust the numbers. Seasonal changes, quality changes, and substitution effect changes have made the index non-comprehensive in my opinion. It makes my head swim studying the changes and how they effect the headline numbers.

      I do know the numbers no longer reflect what's actually happening in the real world. Housing inflation in the CPI is a total waste. We measured rents and not actual home prices. One can figure how bad inflation was understated during the low interest rate period when everyone was buying an escalating asset class (homes), and the downward pressure this put on rents. For home price information I use S&P/Case-Shiller Index. Not perfect but at least it measures actual sales.

      I would like to say something about the health care part of the index. Hospitals do not like to realease information about their transactions. We all dreaded working on any health care items of the CPI. We use actual bills and to get these updated every other month takes an act of God. I could right an essay on trying to collect this information. I think most data collectors, regrettably, probably give up trying to compare apples to apples. Plus it takes a great deal of time to get this right and one has production to make.

      I never have seen government workers work as hard as I witnessed in the CPI. The changing collection technology, and the constant changes in collection methods make turnover very great. It takes a great deal of money and one year of training to put someone in the field. They are asked to do the almost impossible. The good ones move on, leaving the person that needs the pay check "yes men" behind to help put together an index that doesn't reflect reality.

      Anyone that puts reality over a pay check gets the hell out.       Jul 08 01:02 PM
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