Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2007/10/more-inflation.html

personally I'm applying for a civil servant position ASAP

Just FYI, during the 1930s depression, many civil servants were paid with vouchers rather than cash, because local governments were unable to collect property taxes and their receipts fell into the shitbin.

Economy's doing poorly enough as it stands, why do we deliberately want to roll it into the shitbin?

Because that way Hillary can rescue us all.

lol property taxes

shitbin's a great word, BTW.

you been loving my thread titles lately

i came to this country some time ago with little more than a crippling debt burden in GB Pounds and the shirt on my back. i used to have to send back $1,200 each month to pay off my UK debt, and now I'm sending back over $1,400 to cover the same amount of debt repayment. that's two and a half thousand dollars disappearing from my tiny disposable income every year, for no explicable reason. i *heart* the decline of the US economy.

anyway why start this thread now because the bit where ritholtz points out that domino's pizza can't print new menus fast enough to keep up with inflation was pretty fucking amazing

I wish rasheed wallace was still around to show us the latest and greatest exploding bubble blogs

wow Roberto that was some shitty timing, that sucks

This was in the paper today:

Mortgage defaults

Hit an annual rate of 1.5 million in September. That compares with 900,000 last year from fewer than 800,000 in 2005. At the current rate, more than one million Americans will lose their homes to foreclosure, making this the worst housing recession since the Second World War.

Housing starts

Sank to a 14-year low of 1.19 million in September. Starts are a vital economic engine, creating jobs and growth as people stuff their homes with sofas and TVs. Starts peaked at 2.3 million in early 2006, and the decline will be a drag on the rest of the economy until the slide stops.

Mortgages

A quarter of the roughly 50 million U.S. home mortgages are subprime. That's seven times the number of high-risk mortgages there were in 2001. That means that many more marginal homeowners have mortgages, making it far more likely they'll wind up in default.

House prices

Fell 3.2 per cent in the second quarter. Prices are falling faster and more broadly than they have in decades, according to the closely watched Case-Shiller index.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20071018.IBUSECONOMY18/TPStory/Business

where the hell is rasheed anyway?

economic blogs I read (they're all fairly liberal):

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/
http://angrybear.blogspot.com/
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/
http://www.janegalt.net/

In regard to inflation, in the USA during the past three years inflation has been soaring - but almost entirely in the housing sector. The fact that people are encouraged to see their houses as investments rather than as expenses doesn't mean that skyrocketing housing costs weren't inflationary. They were.

As the bubble market bursts, I predict a recession with an extra added bonus of inflation running close to 10% - before the end of 2008. As it has for the past 30 years, the official CPI will understate the real inflation rate. It was rigged under Reagan so that government entitlement programs indexed to the CPI would not increase at the true pace of inflation.

If Bush continues to shovel shit on the dollar right up to the end of his term in January 2009, the inflation rate could hit 15%-20% by 2010.

There are some good economics articles put up here as well:
http://www.VoxEU.org

Which shit on the dollar are you referring to?

As the bubble market bursts, I predict a recession with an extra added bonus of inflation running close to 10% - before the end of 2008.

lol

this is why i live in canada!

oh wait.

Guys, this is a good time stay in academia right?

It's a good time to learn a European language.

Prime shit examples:

When Bush was elected in 2000, the federal budget was in surplus and the national debt was being paid down. Had this state of affairs continued, as projected, it would have led both to lower interest rates and a strong dollar, together. Instead, Bush submitted a series of enormous tax cuts to the Republican-controlled Congress and lobbied them through. Immediately, the CBO's projected budget surpluses turned to projected deficits for the next decade.

Bush also initiated a war of choice, not necessity, in Iraq. This war has already cost well over $700 billion. Yet, Bush insisted on making his tax cuts permanent. Overall, the national debt has increased under Bush by about $2 trillion in seven years. This represents a difference of about $3 trillion of debt from what was projected at the start of his first term.

Because, due to Bush's tax cuts and other policies, the Federal government was in a far weaker position to stimulate the economy when the recession started after 9/11, almost the entire stimulus was delivered via lower interest rates. Because these rate cuts were artificial, and not based on a stronger dollar, this stimulus not only inflated the current housing bubble, but it also undercut the dollar even more than the ballooning national debt did.

Now the dollar is at an all-time low against the euro and the canadian dollar. However, the incomes of the top 10% of American households have increased at a good clip, while the lower 50% of households have seen a decrease in income after inflation. This is largely thanks to Bush's shitty policies. I expect more of the same mismanagement until he is gone.

I agree with everything you've just said. You're predictions still seem a tad extreme on the downside though, if I may so.

i wonder if income inequality will ever arrive as a political issue in this country. americans tend to not begrudge the rich - so it'll have to be more of a "for everyone's good" type of angle. no?

I remember the 1970s and early 80s quite well. Back then people couldn't belileve it, either. Bush has done a bangup job of recreating many of the same policy errors under Johnson and Nixon that led to raging stagflation back then, except the underlying economy is now weaker than it was in the 1970s and the oil shocks we are likely to get are not political, as when OPEC was formed, but structural.

Oil will exceed $100/barrel some time this winter. The ever-weakening dollar will lead to smaller profit margins and rising retail prices on all imported goods (which means almost everything we buy in the USA). Transport costs will rise with pil prices. Stock prices will erode along with profits. With so many savings tied up in stocks and home equity, consumer spending will be crunched, and personal debt and bancruptcies will rise like a tide. Businesses will retrench and unemployment will rise. No end in sight.

I hope I am wrong.

Anyone want to join my modern-day James Gang? We shall ride across the lower Midwest, robbing and pillaging.

sounds fun

Sorry, I don't want to relocate. But this scheme sounds ripe for franchising.

Oil will exceed $100/barrel some time this winter. The ever-weakening dollar will lead to smaller profit margins and rising retail prices on all imported goods (which means almost everything we buy in the USA). Transport costs will rise with pil prices. Stock prices will erode along with profits. With so many savings tied up in stocks and home equity, consumer spending will be crunched, and personal debt and bancruptcies will rise like a tide. Businesses will retrench and unemployment will rise. No end in sight.

I hope I am wrong.

-- Aimless, Saturday, 20 October 2007 19:07 (14 minutes ago) Link

The coming of $100/barrel oil is not Bush's fault. It's yours and mine and everyone else's for using too damned much energy. I agree Bush could and should have done a lot more with policy to encourage energy efficiency, but there's little he could have done to stop oil's eventual rise to that price level.

Part of the pricing of oil represents the weakness of the dollar. This hurts the USA more than it does other countries. US citizens are paid in dollars and the US government collects revenue in dollars, so they are stuck. EU countries can use euros to buy increasingly cheap dollars, so they don't see the same rise in prices as we do. The weakness of the dollar is mainly Bush's fault.

The US also uses way more oil than other countries.

he could have done to stop oil's eventual rise to that price level.
Not starting a war in Iraq would definitely have helped here.

http://bp3.blogger.com/_pMscxxELHEg/RxzD0s_7EYI/AAAAAAAABB4/ljDSXZhMG3o/s1600-h/IMFresets.jpg

arrgh, if that won't work then
http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2007/10/imf-mortgage-reset-chart.html

tombot u r freakin me out

i hope my small apartment + modest savings plan + job in "information services" is enough to weather the shitstorm, if it comes. i got myself out of credit card debt a few months ago, at least

well if you can hold down a job and don't have to worry about an ARM reset you should be okay, it's the homeowner with kids and a subprime loan and two cars who ought to be shitting themselves

apart from some student loans and binging on credit cards over a few years, i'm kind of debt phobic.

which has actually made me lose out over the past several years, i realize, since i pay for EVERYTHING with a debit/check card... i could have just paid that balance on a credit card with some rewards scheme and has some air miles or something

rolling gff personal finances into the shitbin thread, ha

This will give you a boner Tombot

http://nymag.com/guides/money/2007/39952/

the economy increased by 3.9% this quarter! bull market forever, baby. economy's better than ever. golden age.

yet me and so many people I know are getting laid off next month. granted we're all in the writing/design field, but urhhhhh. gggg.

http://nymag.com/guides/money/2007/catastrophist071105_560.jpg
http://nymag.com/guides/money/2007/catastrophist071105_2_560.jpg

^^^ lol

most of that guy's scenario is not really news to regular bigpicture/CR readers I don't think. But #5, the "we don't pay attention" thing, yeah, well, evidently the awareness campaign is underway, but hell if the big players are paying attention.

He also leaves out the approaching demographic catastrophe as millions of inexperienced thirtysomethings and even some late-twenties kids are forced to move into arguably tougher jobs that the boomers have been holding for two decades. Beyond the social security and healthcare costs associated with mass retirement, I don't really know if this generation has the work ethic and definitely not the rolodex to just start filling in and not fuck up royally. too busy updating their linkedin pages.

can someone explain what "being upside down on your mortgage" means, in plain English?

essentially, owing more than your home is worth.

also Tombot I'm not going to blame this generation as much as I blame their parents.

isn't that the way people buy homes? by paying for the privilege of a loan?

When you enter into a contract with a bank for a mortgage, both you and the bank assume that the property value will not plummet. The bank doesn't want you to default any more than you want to default. But if for whatever reason you need to sell your home, and you can't get what you owe on it, then you will owe the difference to the bank. And the bank knows that when that happens, you probably will not have enough assets to cover the difference.

Predatory-type loans (which seems like a nebulous description to me) typically compound the problem because they have higher transaction rates (points, etc.)

oh certainly! well played baby boom letting healthcare slide for the 20 years you've owned the electorate

yeah Tracer it's also called "negative equity"

absolutely unheard of for a person struggling with poverty to also have mental health and/or trauma issues on top of that. poor people aren't thinking of the future, they're thinking about how to survive right now, they've usually been in this mode for years, and they're so starved for pleasure that doesn't come with horrible consequences that a big credit card purchase is an attractive option. like, get those shoes you've always dreamed about owning or claw out an existence in self-imposed austerity for three years in the hopes that it will give you a little more padding in case of an emergency? and given the fact that you don't have stable mental health or relationships, how the fuck are you going to be strong enough to do the latter?

agreed. it’s also gross how people with money will latch on to the thing they perceive as an extravagance that someone scraping by owns, when that’s probably someone’s prized possession that they actually value and maintain because they understand that windfall may not come again

owning a house, owning real estate - that is a fucking extravagance.

An extravagance? It's out of reach for too many people, but it's hardly an extravagance. Owning a home should be within the reach of most of us. I realize that it isn't, but it should be.

milo's point is that constantly living hand to mouth with no visible path out of that situation creates a reality which cannot be improved by any financial advice that applies to people with even tiny amounts of discretionary income. anyone who's lived that kind of poverty very long understands this.

map: i agree with everything that you wrote in your posts. it’s true that i’ve never been poor—my income has been below official poverty lines for many years but it wasn’t acute or severe poverty, which i would never claim to have first-hand experience of—but my post wasn’t meant to be prescriptive; i’m bad at personal finances, have a lot of debt and no savings, live paycheck to paycheck. i haven’t been on vacation in years but if i did i would almost surely go deeper into debt in the process. credit provides real value (both psychologically and economically) but is also highly exploitative and regressive, and i do think some of that exploitativeness is derived from the financial illiteracy/irrational economic decisions of borrowers. as you said it’s more about psychology than economics. milo’s posts that i was replying to seemed to me to be saying “sure credit debt is bad how else could you ever afford a vacation” but imo that’s a purely illusory value of credit. the credit card company doesn’t pay for your vacation; *you* pay for it, and then on top of it you also pay them interest. they are profiting off of your impatience, lack of impulse control, poor financial planning skills. i don’t think that’s good. hopefully its possible to think that without denigrating a person who would make that decision. anyways sorry if my post read as victim-blamey or seemed condescending/aloof, that wasn’t my intention

imo there’s a difference between saying “you shouldn’t have spent money on this small pleasure” versus “you shouldn’t buy so much on credit.” my sister is far from poor but spends way too much on credit due to an addiction to online shopping and always has huge debt which she’s paying for out the wazoo in interest fees. she can *afford* everything she’s buying, it’s just the way she’s spaced out the payments/purchases in time that’s costing her more

otm. My parents had this problem, I am sure it contributed to the breakup of their marriage.

owning a house, owning real estate - that is a fucking extravagance.

― ꙮ (map), Saturday, 6 January 2024 12:47 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

An extravagance? It's out of reach for too many people, but it's hardly an extravagance. Owning a home should be within the reach of most of us. I realize that it isn't, but it should be.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Saturday, 6 January 2024 12:58 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

whether or not you think owning homes is an extravagance or not, housing markets with lower shares of owners (for example in many parts of europe where long term rentals are more common, or in singapore where every residence is technically public housing on a 99-year lease from the government) tend to function much better. when housing is primarily based on home ownership, increasing affordability means decreasing property values of home owners, which puts the two goals in opposition. only one generation can both buy cheap homes and have them be a source of wealth

I guess it depends on what you mean by "function." It's a truism that renters build up no equity.

that’s good though. making money off home equity means house prices are going up, which means housing is becoming less affordable. there are other sources of equity, but there’s only one housing market

If the assumption is that if the US had more renters, rental laws would be stronger, I think that's a pretty bad assumption to make.

They'd definitely be stronger, for landlords.

real chicken and egg situation and it assumes the organization of renters in absence of regulation can happen. you have to be a real piece of shit as a landlord, usually in areas other than that, to face repercussions

agreed. it’s also gross how people with money will latch on to the thing they perceive as an extravagance that someone scraping by owns, when that’s probably someone’s prized possession that they actually value and maintain because they understand that windfall may not come again

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Saturday, January 6, 2024 12:44 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Related pet peeve: people who apparently think that every mobile phone is a iPhone and every personal computer is a Mac. 1) These items are not always as big an extravagance as these critics assume, and 2) try functioning in the world as we know it without reliable online access (especially getting and keeping a job).

just batshit crazy. it’s nearly impossible to do anything without access to a computer of some sort and for the vast majority of the population, that’s a phone

one of the things support groups use to help the unhoused is to help them charge their phones. what are they going to do, sell their phone for exactly zero dollars and then be even worse off?

Evidence that people being down on the economy is not just the result of “vibes” or falling for Republican talking points:

https://wapo.st/3R0UpKl

Gift link ^^. Article is about increasing credit card defaults, especially among young people.

It’s still so wild to me that “most people struggling” is a fucking epistemological break that well-off liberals just don’t believe these days. We truly live in a sick age.

The article provides the reassurance we need in these unsettled times:

Wall Street has so far brushed off concerns about rising credit debt levels and payment struggles, forecasting earnings growth to accelerate from 5.6% in the first quarter to 17.1% by the fourth quarter.

But it also ends with a warning from an expert who understands how we should view these rising credit card delinquencies:

“If our forecast of a benign moderation in the labor market is correct, we think consumer spending will remain resilient,” wrote Michael Gapen, Bank of America Global Research analyst. “However, elevated credit card delinquencies among lower-income consumers could increase the sensitivity of these consumers to an adverse labor market shock.”

Truly spoken from the heart, Mr. Gapen.

The most minor of minor shitbinnery (relating to food prices, specifically) but I buy boxes of Clif Bars to have at work and noticed a couple weeks ago that they weren't being restocked and had a 'DISCONTINUED' label on the shelf underneath and I'm like, what's that about, and I found out what that was about when the shelves began to be restocked with the same size boxes for the same price except now there are five bars per package instead of six and each of the bars are noticeably smaller than before, and well

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fgns8tc2oof3d1.png

You love to see it (Mondelez says so).

Ugh.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fgns8tc2oof3d1.png

The FBI raided the offices of mega-landlord Cortland Management over algorithmic price-fixing that keeps apartments empty and raises rents across the country. I don't like Matt Stoller, but he's got a good write-up about it.

More grist for the mill:

Washington Post reports that “Average hourly wage growth accelerated sharply in May, to $34.91, up 4.1 percent from the previous year. Wages have consistently beaten inflation for nearly a year, boosting American workers’ standard of living after years of wages falling behind inflation.”

Gift link: https://wapo.st/3x6r36s

here we go?

rate cut when?

i think ppl/the markets are making way too big a deal out of this, similar to the yield curve inversion a couple years ago. the sahm rule (3 month moving average of unemployment increases by 0.5ppt from recent low over 12 months) is fine to look at, but imo it depends a lot on what the "recent low" is. and in this case it's 3.5%, which is insanely low, basically a historical aberration. the current unemployment rate of 4.3% is also very low; before 2017 the last time we had such low unemployment was in 2001.

nothing like a global pandemic to throw off expectations based on historically reliable indicators.

another thing is like, we've all kind of lost sight of this given that the last two recessions were so extreme, but historically and internationally many recessions have been mild and short. negative growth of like 0.2% for two or three quarters, unemployment goes up to 5-5.5%, inflation gets back under 2%, followed by a decent recovery--that sort of thing happens all the time. it's still bad, fed should cut at next meeting, etc. but it's a far cry from into the shitbin

Japan’s Nikkei down 12.5% in a single day today…

How ugly was that Japan close you ask?

TOPIX: -12% - worst day since 1987
TOPIX Banks: -17% - biggest one-day loss on record
Nikkei: -12% - worst session since 1987

Fun times.

— 𝐄𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭 𝐇𝐲𝐩𝐞 (@EffMktHype) August 5, 2024

So, uh….

AI bubble popping

i'm moving all my assets into artificial blood. i hear it could be BIG!

how can one bad u.s. jobs report send the world into a tailspin?

Well, also stuff like this:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/wall-streets-usd2-trillion-ai-reckoning.html

Which leads to stuff like this:

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/05/nvidia-super-micro-computer-lead-ai-trade-carnage-with-both-stocks-down-more-than-12percent.html

tech stocks are not the cause here, but they are vulnerable to a contagion.

The market sell-off, explained pic.twitter.com/wf4v9IuYH5

— Trung Phan (@TrungTPhan) August 5, 2024

times like these i invest heavily in popcorn

intel is not an AI stock but the CEO is tweeting scripture, which is not historically bullish.

you have to have a CPU in all those AI machines. it might not do all that much, but it's there!

Warren Buffett disclosing that Berkshire sold half of its Apple shares over the past quarter hasn't helped.

the government is a sucker! that's my conclusion after reading this story:

https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/medicare-extra-payments-home-visits-diagnosis-057dca8b?mod=hp_lead_pos7

Millions of times each year, insurers send nurses into the homes of Medicare recipients to look them over, run tests and ask dozens of questions.

The nurses aren’t there to treat anyone. They are gathering new diagnoses that entitle private Medicare Advantage insurers to collect extra money from the federal government.

A Wall Street Journal investigation of insurer home visits found the companies pushed nurses to run screening tests and add unusual diagnoses, turning the roughly hourlong stops in patients’ homes into an extra $1,818 per visit, on average, from 2019 to 2021. Those payments added up to about $15 billion during that period, according to a Journal analysis of Medicare data.

Nurse practitioner Shelley Manke, who used to work for the HouseCalls unit of UnitedHealth Group, was part of that small army making home visits. She made a half-dozen or so visits a day, she said in a recent interview.

Part of her routine, she said, was to warm up the big toes of her patients and use a portable testing device to measure how well blood was flowing to their extremities. The insurers were checking for cases of peripheral artery disease, a narrowing of blood vessels. Each new case entitled them to collect an extra $2,500 or so a year at that time.

But Manke didn’t trust the device. She had tried it on herself and had gotten an array of results. When she and other nurses raised concerns with managers, she said, they were told the company believed that data supported the tests and that they needed to keep using the device.

“It made me cringe,” said Manke, who stopped working for HouseCalls in 2022. “I didn’t think the diagnosis should come from us, period, because I didn’t feel we had an adequate test.”

Other nurses interviewed by the Journal said many of the diagnoses that home-visit companies encouraged them to make wouldn’t otherwise have occurred to them, and in many cases were unwarranted.

lol dmac

a lot of tech layoffs are sort of performative - for instance, 'laying off' positions that aren't even filled - but the Intel layoff looks genuine

it’s mostly just vibes. i don’t think this has much/anything to do with ai; hasn’t fallen much and it’s market cap is still up like a trillion dollars over the year. nikkei is crashing because boj is jacking rates to stop its currency from falling further. it’s most likely just panic over weakening us economy but every leading recession indicator except unemployment is pointing in the opposite direction

*nvidia hasn’t fallen much

I think it’s exciting for bears to finally have some fun after ages of watching the bulls walk around confidently while wearing no diapers whatsoever

Like caek alluded to I there’s some strong encouragement of “contagion” even if this really is just about the nikkei correcting - tech bears especially have every reason to laugh it up and hope for things to go all to shit

Nikkei is going to open up 10% going by futures.