Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktVital Statistics:
| Last | Change | Percent | |
| S&P Futures | 1413.8 | -1.3 | -0.09% |
| Eurostoxx Index | 2543.8 | 3.9 | 0.15% |
| Oil (WTI) | 107.1 | 0.1 | 0.07% |
| LIBOR | 0.4707 | -0.002 | -0.42% |
| US Dollar Index (DXY) | 79.023 | 0.041 | 0.05% |
| 10 Year Govt Bond Yield | 2.23% | -0.02% | |
| RPX Composite | 169.62 | -0.2 |
Markets are largely maintaining their gains after yesterday’s huge rally. Bonds and MBS are up slightly.
The S&P / Case-Schiller index showed a 3.8% decline year over year. Only Miami, Phoenix, and Washington DC reported increases. Atlanta was the outlier on the downside, with a nearly 15% decline YOY. Note that these are January numbers – Case-Schiller has a couple month lag.
Bloomberg has a story about bidding wars for homes in some parts of the US. While I had heard about bidding wars in the usual places – NYC and DC, this is the first I have heard about bidding wars in places like Seattle. The big question will be whether this is a permanent or temporary phenomenon. Supposedly the settlement with the State AGs ended foreclosure moratoriums, which means more supply is going to be dumped on the market. That said, I am hearing anecdotes of bidding wars in hard hit areas like Phoenix, at least in the $80k – $120k range.
On the other side of the coin, the Campbell / Inside Mortgage Finance survey notes that investors purchases are becoming a larger proportion of home sales, particularly short sales. This is being driven by the long financing timeline. Their Distressed Property Index shows that nearly half of home sales are distressed.
Chart: S&P / Case-Schiller Composite Index
Filed under: Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
Those Atlanta numbers make sense to me. My brother lives right outside Atlanta and just bought a 2400 sq ft house for under $100,000. I wanted to throw something at the wall of my smaller and much more expensive house just outside of stupid Detroit. Then I realized that my walls are worth a lot of money so I’d better not damage them.
I need to start looking at law firms in the Atlanta area.
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Detroit was up 1.7% YOY, but prices really got hammered there.
Chicago was down 6.6% YOY. Gotta be better than Hotlanta.
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Detroit was up 1.7% YOY, but prices really got hammered there
Yeah, my property taxes actually went up. It’s amazing how quickly they reasses house prices for property tax purposes when the values are going up. I was renting when the housing market collapsed, but my understanding is that it was pulling teeth in my city to get them to reasses.
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Brent, NYT DealBook suggests GC and CFO of MF Global will testify they knew nothing… .
Ashot, no city hurries to reassess in a downturn. Why, the entire stability of a municipal budget depends on the stable valuation of property. Municipalities that have ordered annual or bi-annual appraisals have quickly added an adjunct ordinance that lets them raise the tax rate to cover the loss of valuation.
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Much of the Chicago area housing mkt. is still in a coma. Another year, at least, before the area bottoms out.
My view, backed by little solid evidence mind you, is that Chicago has become quaintly archaic. On the surface, it’s wonderful and delightful to visit (hint hint). But too many years of petty fiefdoms give it a slow and plodgy feel underneath.
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The Art Institute has two of my favorite paintings in one room: American Gothic and Nighthawks.
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On the surface, it’s wonderful and delightful to visit (hint hint).
I love visiting Chicago and will be doing so at the end of June for a conference.
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@Mark, I can’t wait to read the finding of fact with MF when all is said and done.
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As we have discussed before housing is an essentially local story, and in many markets the prices are simply still too high, in spite of our efforts to reflate them.
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While we’re waiting for more hyperbole on health care a note about a subject that has come up several times in the last few days.
Contrary to the public perception your chance of being murdered with a firewarm is slightly less in any givern year than your chance of being killed by a drunk driver.
In 2009 murders by firearms 9146
http://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/2010/09/14/2009-f…
in 2009 drunk driving fatalities 10,839
http://www.alcoholalert.com/drunk-driving-statisti…
BUT if you really want to live dangerously visit a hospital:
In 2002 for instance according to the NEJM hospital acquired infections are estimated to have cause 99,000 deaths.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMra0904124
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banned:
BUT if you really want to live dangerously visit a hospital:
Perhaps instead of forcing us all to buy insurance, Obama should force us all to buy guns.
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brent :
I posted a second comment about gun murders here, but I can’t see it. Can anybody else?
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Where? I don’t see it.
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It got put in spam. I un-spammed it. Should be viewable now.
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It would be interesting to see where the murders occur vs. where the drunk driving fatalities occur. For instance, I hear about a murder pretty much every day on the Detroit news. So there are plenty of places where you are probably far, far more likely to be killed by a drunk driver. Whereas some places, DC comes to mind, public transportation probably decreases the amount of drunk driving so being murdered is more likely. So I guess I’m saying, like housing, murder and drunk driving is a local story.
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ash — maybe this is helpful re: gun homicides. you can change the inputs with a drop menu at the top of the map
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/sep/27/gun-crime-map-statistics
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nova:
Did you ever wonder why The Guardian, a UK paper, thinks gun crimes in the US is an issue relevant to its readership?
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Did you ever wonder why The Guardian, a UK paper, thinks gun crimes in the US is an issue relevant to its readership?
I know this was addressed to nova, but my first thought on opening the link was why did The Guardian go to all the trouble? My second thought was that I was surprised California was the worst, but then I realized they have a larger population than Michigan.
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ashot:
I know this was addressed to nova, but my first thought on opening the link was why did The Guardian go to all the trouble?
As you may have guessed, I have a theory.
I think that The Guardian’s core readership in the UK is comprised mainly of well-educated, anti-American lefties. The Guardian caters to their smug sense of cultural/intellectual superiority with articles about those crazy, gun-toting, bible-thumping Americans. This was particularly true back when Bush was president (coincidentally spanning my 7.5 years spent in the UK), but I’m guessing it remains true even today.
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I think that The Guardian’s core readership in the UK is comprised mainly of well-educated, anti-American lefties.The Guardian caters to their smug sense of cultural/intellectual superiority with articles about those crazy, gun-toting, bible-thumping Americans.
I don’t know if I agree with the anti-American lefties part, but I figured it had something to do with enjoying making America look bad and feeding into stereotypes of America. I have always understood readership of the various newspapers in the UK is divided by a variety of factors such as politics and socio-economic status to a larger extent than here in the US. Is that true?
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ashot:
I don’t know if I agree with the anti-American lefties part…
I don’t think there is much arguing that The Guardian is a paper of and for the moderate left. (Even it’s one-time online editor, Emily Bell, proclaimed that its journalism comes from a “slightly more liberal perspective”.) Whether or not it qualifies as anti-American is obviously in the eye of the beholder, but the seemingly obsessive stream of ill-/misinformed criticism of the US that was produced by it while I was paying attention certainly convinced me of the fact.
Is that true?
My sense from my time there is that there is some truth there, although with the advent of satellite/cable TV and the internet, probably not quite as much so now as in the past. My understanding is that in days past, people were very much identified by the broadsheet/tabloid that they read. That’s not quite so obvious today, I don’t think.
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Mark:
The Art Institute has two of my favorite paintings in one room: American Gothic and Nighthawks.
Well, not right now — I think Nighthawks is out on exhibition. Last time I was at the Art Institute, they had moved Nighthawks and I had to wade through the Pollocks and Conrad’s boxes to find it again.
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When I hear Nighthawks, I automatically think of this. Troubling.
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ash
If you don’t live in these ten cities:
New Orleans, St Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, Newark, Mobile, Oakland Washington DC, Kansas City or Buffalo,
you have zero chance of being murdered by a firearm, absent a one off event like Colombine or VTech.
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Scott:
Yikes. Maybe if you look at this link enough, you can get that other thing out of your mind.
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scott:
for the same reason that they think so here.
The things that we fear the most, gun murders, child kidnapping, nuclear war are completely irrational, statitistically speaking as opposed to sudden death from vehicle accidents, or from an infection
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I suppose it depends on your perspective. you can look at that map and see so few murders by firearm per 100,000 that it’s a non issue. or you can say America is the wild west.
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I suppose I don’t see what about that map makes America look bad.
In a country of 300 million+ people from all over the world and awash in firearms, about 10,000* were murdered by guns in 2010. Banned is right.
As an aside, some friends and I had a groupon for a shooting lesson/rental this weekend. the class was packed with undergrad women. they started them out with .22, but by the end of the day, more than a handful were hitting their targets with .38 revolvers.
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Nighthawks the movie has great sentimental value to me as it was the second movie I ever took my wife to (Breaking Away was the first.). I love the painting ‘Nighthawks’ (and most everything Hopper) but I can take or leave ‘American Gothic’. Here are my photos of things in the Art Institute including both AG and Nighthawks.
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nova:
Absent a sexual charge from a larger weapon, lol, the best handgun is the one you’re most accurate with.
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Having a discussion over at Ezra on two of my worst subjects, health care and taxes (not related to investing).
He maintains that there is no difference between the fine in the Obama plan and the credit in the Ryan. However, the credit is fixed and the fine scaled to income. Doesn’t that means they are not equivalent/
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I think that The Guardian’s core readership in the UK is comprised mainly of well-educated, anti-American lefties. The Guardian caters to their smug sense of cultural/intellectual superiority with articles about those crazy, gun-toting, bible-thumping Americans. This was particularly true back when Bush was president (coincidentally spanning my 7.5 years spent in the UK), but I’m guessing it remains true even today.
My experience as well. I lived in London from 2001-2004. The Guardian and the BBC were definitely left wing, even in a European context.
Did you work in the City or the Docklands?
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Brent:
Did you work in the City or the Docklands?
I was in The City, just down the road from Bank station. Lived out in a town called Claygate, right near Esher and Cobham (big American community in Cobham). I was there from 1999 to 2006.
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1 – agree on the handgun selection criteria.
2 – That’s a recycled talking point from last spring. If I get the tax credit, that’s money in my pocket. If I pay the fine, that goes to the IRS to be used (well, i’m not really sure)
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I was in the Docklands. Lived just north of Hyde Park (Lancaster Gate tube stop)
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