"nervous traders" . . . "ashen and wide-eyed."

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2640.shtml


On Monday, Asian stock markets took another beating, on fears that the credit squeeze which began in the United States will continue to worsen in the months ahead. Every index from Tokyo to Sidney fell sharply continuing the "self-reinforcing" cycle of losses started last week on Wall Street. The Nikkei 225 average fell 3.3 percent, India's Sensex 2.9 percent, Taiwan's 3.5 percent, and Hong Kong's Hang Seng slumped 4.5 percent. The subprime tsunami is presently headed towards downtown Manhattan, where nervous traders are already hunkered-down in the trenches -- ashen and wide-eyed.

Amid the deluge of bad news over the last weekend, one story towers above all the others. The yen gained 1.5 percent against the dollar. (9 percent year-over-year) That means that Wall Street's biggest swindle, the carry trade, is finally unwinding. The over-levered hedge funds will now be forced to sell their positions quickly before the interest-rate window shuts and they're stuck with humongous bets they cannot cover. The faltering yen is the grease that lubricates the guillotine. $1 trillion in low interest loans -- which keeps the trading whirring along in US markets -- is about to get a haircut. Cheap Japanese credit is the hidden flywheel in Hedgistan's main cylinder. Once it is removed, the industry will seize up and clank to a halt. Fund managers can forget about the vacation rental in the Hamptons. It'll be sloppy Joes and Schlitz Malt Liquor on Coney Island from here on out.

-long snip-

As Noland concludes, "A devastating housing bust will bankrupt the mortgage insurers, while the solvency of their derivatives counterparties going forward will be in doubt in any number of scenarios. The GSEs are now integrally linked to what I expect to be Credit insurance's and 'structured finance's' astonishing downfall."

Amen.

The only thing looking up are oil futures. And they'll be denominated in euros soon enough.
---------------------------


crumble, crumble

america is almost the size of a bath tub, in which to be drowned.

Spinning wheel,

Gotta go round!!!

maybe the rosiness keeps you calm. leave them on.

They're here already. The Canadians are buying little cabins in Maine, so they can go hunting, fishing and skiing. When stuff is cheap, people buy.

Here's the great thing about property--ya can't take it with ya.


Remember when those "filthy A-rabs" in their dresses and sandals, with their ten wives behind them, bought up all of New York and London a few decades back? Everyone was still pissed off about the oil embargo that had finally ended, the fifty five cent a gallon gasoline, the fifty-five mile an hour speed limit, the odd-even gas rationing, the "turn the heat down to 68 and put on a damn sweater!" exhortations. OOOOOOOH, those "Mohamedans" will convert us to "their ways" and there will be a mosque in the center of Times Square and we'll all be forced to BOW DOWN! Oh, the HORROR!!! They can buy every building in Times Square, they can't pack it up and take it to Jeddah, though, can they?

Maybe you don't remember. I do, though.


Remember when the Japanese came and bought half of Hawaii and Pebble Beach golf course in the eighties, and were all over the place purchasing real estate at absurd prices, and people were CRYING that we'd lost WW2, only four decades later? They made the mistake, many of them, of "buying high." I remember that well.


Yeah, "The End Was Near" back then, too. We got over that. We'll get over this as well. I just can't get that excited, and it's not "rose colored glasses" you see, it's OLD AGE and EXPERIENCE talking.

I've seen this shit before. If you make lousy, stupid, speculative investments, you get back what you put in.

The sky isn't falling.

A bit o'history:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE5D8143BF933A25753C1A967958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print

"From the tone of the letters I received, I would have to say that there's an anti-Japanese feeling on this issue," said Sam Karas, chairman of the Board of Supervisors of Monterey County, who supports the membership plan.

The story is also an example of the problems Japanese companies are having in making a return on dozens of prized American golf courses, hotels and office buildings they purchased during a binge in the late 1980's, often at prices that seemed, to Americans, unbelievably high.

With the American real estate market depressed, those purchases now look less wise. And Japanese companies are also having problems at home because the real estate and stock markets there have declined.

Many real estate experts have said Mr. Isutani paid too much for the Pebble Beach Company. While Mr. Isutani is said by his representatives to have no interest in selling his new treasure, it is clear he will have a harder time realizing profits from it.

wheels..flying off!

- George W. Bush, as a recent fund-raiser, before heading to Texas to clear burning bushes.

don't believe it.

we can start making things to sell others again, and we need to start building rail infrastructure that the state owns for rapid transit.

We need to make the single occupant vehicle into a very expensive luxury, and make public transit universal. That alone would remake our economy and industrial base.

Green renewable energy, wind solar, geothermal, tides, we need the whole nine yards and we need it now. We need solar arrays on every unused surface in urbanities, and along highways.

We need another space race, only this time for sustainable energy, industry, housing, and agriculture.

Don't know how long my job will last-its tied to the building trade AND we use a lot of gas getting around--but we are getting our act together. Already we grow some of our own food, planning to do more. Going to get the solar panels installed and build the wind generator. Hubby got a bike to get back and forth, and, if need be, we go back to our land and hunker down, helping out our neighbors and keeping on going green with our habits.

I think that real estate is going to have to re think itself.

There is going to be a multi dwelling renaissance, and a new synergy between renewable energy, efficiency, and the local environment.
The new urbanism is almost upon us. And by that I don't just mean a return to the city, but a new city, with a new shape and
a far different (and less imposing) skyline than it has now.

We need to start making and selling STUFF again. Not gunning the engine with a bunch of Enron-style bullshitters in front of keyboards, wheeling and dealing and not doing any damned work.

The people who are taking a bath nowadays, many of them, are those folks. Unfortunately, there will be no small amount of collateral damage, from people who were suckered in with bullshit lines about insane, unrealistic profit. They saw prices on homes, for example, going up absurdly, and wanted to get in on a "good deal." Only it wasn't a good deal--it was like a friken Ponzi scheme.

Hopefully they'll learn the "Once burned, twice shy" lesson. If it sounds too good to be true, it generally is.

we need to make an actual 'single-passenger vehicle'- one that's enclosed, with 3-4 wheels not a cycle.

one that can be run electrically, and re-charged w/solar.

the u.s. needs to rebuild it's manufacturing infrastructure around renewable energy products/engines/etc...

some of the shittiest writing I've ever seen.

nt

nt

Nothing is built in NYC these days but LUXURY housing. If you can't afford that, you're out of luck. Move along.