March 3, 2008
Perspective on Real Estate
We have decent people running against each other and that’s good news. Now if we can populate Congress with decent, good people, we will have won the battle to save this Union—a battle that has been losing both decency and efficiency!
Cover Story: Business Week (March 10) "Multinationals: Are They Good for America." Well, good or bad, they are reality without the blemishes of political nonsense and no-sense! Globalization is here to stay. Perhaps someday it may include interplanetary, but I shall be long gone when that possibility arrives.
Cover Story: The Economist: "The Trouble with Russia’s Economy." The trouble is that Communism is far from dead and too much oil that allows serious mistakes to go unpunished, plus too many nuclear bombs which allow risk-taking that could destroy this world!!
N Y Times (March 2): "Is a Lean Economy Turning Mean—Now It’s Even Harder to Find a Job." The job picture is a disaster. We are cursed with and by an administration that is Herbert Hoover—without his decency or intelligence, and you may remember what happened? No actions, as he didn’t believe in federal action (just like now). The Republicans mostly believe that the federal government must take action instead of political crapola. They have no comprehension that the federal government must know when to take action, which action to take and do it quickly. This President is as bad in economics as he is in leading our armies!!
The loss of jobs is worse than slow growth, for new jobs are the muscle, without which our economy is a parade of volatile numbers that are behind the times and only spew out meaningless stock market fiction, which is beginning to be recognized.
The population, long ago, has split into the haves and have nots. The typical consumer is battered with inexcusable gasoline pricing that makes the oil czars richer, more powerful and more (never less) greedy.
(The sagacious Warren Buffett complains that many companies have overstated earnings as he expressed puzzlement that their auditors let them get away with it!! This is what has ruined trust in most institutions on whom we must trust in order to gain fiscal reliability! The Republicans consider him a left-wing nutcase because he is so right almost all the time and so successful at his intuitive judgments!)
I believe that it will create the recession—or worse—about which we’ve been hearing—waiting for two consecutive negative Quarters (what a foolish manner of official estimates, when reality officially has arrived. Plus, what is reality when there is so much discrepancy about what numbers to believe about new jobs. A great number of jobs were lost rather than gained, the stuff that will stick to the ribs of our near future.
That means we are already in a true recession, and consequently jobs lost, none gained; much less money being invested in new plant and equipment; the consumer headed for even more massive credit card debt; and the pitiful actions of the government will help nothing except that the administration will tell us “everything is all right and the critics are Democrats who hate their country while historians will tell the future that all was better than good.” The government doesn’t lie, it just tells bigger lies, for the “big lie” is a technique that should be punished by law, not by election crap!
The housing situation is a disaster that keeps people from buying (foreclosures top sales—153,745 foreclosure notices sent out in January, compared with 43,000 total sales of new homes), builders from constructing, and the lenders from lending. Greed still leads the way as analysts still try to figure out how to end this disaster, still pocking the ruins for evidence of what really caused this crash. In the meantime, the president (the man who trusts Putin but not any one who disagrees with him).
srg
