ecosophia | An Utterly Serious Warning

It’s sad. My read is that many people think of real estate as the only substantive investment out there right now, and the thing most likely to hold its value, just because it seems less fake than the witches’ brew of dodgy financial instruments currently on offer—and they are about to get hosed. It hasn’t sunk in yet that there really isn’t anywhere very promising for an investor to park their money right now. Unfortunately that includes cash at the moment, which just pushes people into doomed speculative investments. Although you’d think 2008 might have debunked the idea of real estate as a risk-free money-maker; it really wasn’t that long ago!

Edited 2024-05-18 20:48 (UTC)

Thanks for this warning. We have a mortgage but otherwise no real estate investments. We'll sit tight and keep paying the mortgage and stocking up on savings.

https://youtu.be/Ta5hPRmxo8k?si=e-9_Z5gdYekyIB8f

That'll definitely do as an anthem for this post!

This one is for later:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJkNTfzghq0

Heh. Yeah, very likely.

I can go with that, but perhaps this one should be added to the playlist.

https://youtu.be/T5al0HmR4to?si=GkGp9yBOrJOy_bOg

I can only hope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDfAdHBtK_Q

Hmm, I saw this while at the Library and my eyes caught a book meant for checkout: "Investing for Dummies"

I have a feeling the Dems are trying to delay things so they can blame it on Trump.

A snowflake chance in hell.

I fail to remember or find that Bush quote about the sucker going down.

I see nothing better or safer than Treasury Direct. 5% is nothing to sneeze at.

The rest is tracking Joe Biden's medicine cabinet.

Ahem. Inflation is running in the double digits. The only debate is whether the first number is a 1 or a 2. So, just to stay even, you have to be making at least that much off your investment. Just to stay in place.

There's a reason they called bonds in the late 70s "Guaranteed certificates of confiscation".

If you round up the whole post-covid time period, that first digit is arguably 3.

He didn't say that it was enough to keep up with inflation. He just said "there's nothing better". Sometimes the only way to win is to lose more slowly than anyone else.

Lathechuck

6 month cds are paying ~5% these days. not keeping up with inflation, but way better than a savings account at <1%. if you're on the red queen's treadmill, best to be on the one that doesn't run so fast. whether you trust your bank or the fed is a whole 'nother argument...

I'm following real estate right now. We want to move out of the city and to a smaller commuter town. We've had an agent since Fall 2022 and have been waiting for the bubble to pop. In the last 3 weeks, inventory started piling up like it hasn't in the last 18 months and is building fast, especially single family homes. Condos still move, I guess boomers are downsizing?

I think I recall someone asking you previously when you'd know the bubble was deflated and IIRC, you said "When there is a For Sale sign on every street". So I've been watching the inventory count for our county.

Do you still think that's a marker of when the bubble is done? We don't want to do anything dumb but after 2020-2021, we don't want to be a part of our city anymore and are motivated to change our situation. I'm hoping the emotion won't lead us to a bad decision, trying to be rational and patient....

Patience is a very good idea at this point. Now that inventory is piling up, there's a very real chance prices will crash in the months ahead, and if you wait a year or so after the crash you'll have your pick of properties -- everyone will be trying to get rid of them and will accept a much lower bid than usual. Waiting is your friend!

What's another 18 months of looking in the big scheme of things? If it saves us hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's a good thing! The time waiting for the bubble to pop has really forced me to confront my magical thinking "If we just move out of the city everything will be ok!". Rationally, I know it's not true but it's an easy fantasy.

I read Charles Hugh Smith of the Of Two Minds blog and he had an interesting post a few months ago. He theorized that it only takes 4% of the houses listed in a market to take a fire sale price to force the market downwards. He also noted that ~10% of the market in many places is short term rentals. So if/when the post pandemic tourist rush dries up, the pro-AirBnB hosts who have multiple properties and are overleveraged by buying in the last few years will be forced to start selling their less profitable properties. In addition to inventory stats, I've been watching the 'Sold' stats in our county as they come out for signs of the first fire sale. Hasn't happened yet but sales are slowing and we're at the point where the majority of properties closing are coming in under asking price.

Another wildcard is the fee restructuring for agents that happens in July as a result of the national law suit about artificially high realtor fees. I thought the big rush to put houses on the market last month might be real estate agents pushing people to list now so they can close while commissions are still high. Would be ironic if they pushed the market into decline to save their own fees.

I think late summer as the tourists go home, people who have already moved on realize they don't want to pay for an empty house in winter, and realtors not knowing how to price themselves might turn into the Wild West in our market.

I have set searches on the major real estate listing sites too, and they email me little capsule updates every morning: listings sold, listings with price dropped, new listings in your parameters. I have noticed that just in the last few weeks, the number of listings in those updates has fallen off. One listing instead of five. So the thing is already in motion, I think-- the first little pebbles falling, before the rockslide. There's a lag for bankruptcies, but we're off the starting block already and there is no going back.

I recently inherited a (small, old, kind of crummy) property in a fishing town on the coast. We decided to let the realtor do as she liked, and she listed it for an eye-popping quarter million dollars (which people say is cheap for a house when I boggle about it to them!). It hasn’t sold so far (it’s been about a year), so I’ve been encouraging her to bring the price down. She says that prices are dropping back to what they were pre-COVID, but that places are sitting on the market for a lot longer because owners don’t want to accept reality, and most of them are investors or vacationers, not motivated owner-occupiers, so they can afford to hold out.

The problem with that kind of bust, is that the all-cash investor vultures will beat you out. I went through this in 2012 - with the market AND interest rates at near-bottom. The cash investors will beat you every time - no loan contingencies, no inspection contingencies. Additionally, a crash of this magnitude will freeze the credit markets, or at least make banks super picky, so getting a mortgage will be hard. We only got our house in 2012 because our realtor convinced a flipper mid-flip to stop renovations and sell out to us.

My late wife and I bought a very nice 3 bedroom craftsman bungalow in western Maryland in 2009 for $35,000, with decent mortgage terms. (I'd still be there except for her failing health, which made a move to a smaller place with better local resources necessary.) You have to know when to go back into the market; 2012 was to my mind rather too late in the last cycle.

I don't think it could possibly be any worse than it is now. We've been trying to buy a house for two years already, made four or five offers, and every time-- blasted out of the water by investors making cash offers above asking, no inspection. We could borrow more, and maybe outbid them. The bank would loan us the money. But it would not be financially responsible of us to take on that much debt. We'd lose the house the first time it needed a new roof.

So.

I've been keeping tabs on the reddit real estate investing subs lately trying to figure out how all that financing gimmickry works-- like, it drives me bonkers that people who want to buy a house and flip it or rent it out, have access to completely different types of financing than people who just want to buy a house to live in, and I *need* to understand how this works, or the walls close in and hope departs.

And this is not all being driven by the big firms. The pricing is driven by them, but the rush into REI is also a lot of just-some-dude types who've decided that being a landlord is the next Bitcoin. They're going into serious debt to do this, and counting on being able to collect enough rent to make a profit and service multiple high-interest loans, which is why rents are getting so ridiculous. That's not going to last in a declining economy, and as soon as we reach a critical mass of people not being able to afford the rent anymore, the whole thing tips over into the canyon. As Charles Hugh Smith points out, repeatedly, the working class is already up against the wall. We are paying as much as we can possibly pay for rent already. There's no squeezing out more, and groceries aren't getting any cheaper. So at some point very soon, a lot of us are going to lose the ability to keep paying, and either end up homeless or move into Uncle Bob's garage-- and then nobody will be paying rent on that dwelling. They're so heavily leveraged that lowering the rent isn't an option: they wouldn't be able to service the loan. The avalanche happens when these guys start defaulting. And they will: what they're doing is radically unsustainable. There'll likely be a little hang-time where everybody's hanging on for dear life, hoping things turn around. After that, only the big investors will still be in the market, the small fry cash investors will not be lining up to get burned again very soon. And they are the ones crowding us out of the market where we live. That might not be true of places where the big companies are heavily involved, like Atlanta and Charlotte, but it'll be enough in a lot of places, for regular people to finally afford a home. I think. I hope.

We've been out there looking since 2020. Made four offers on houses that were reasonable. Every offer fell through as we were outbid by investors who could overpay and offer cash without inspection. Most recent offer less than six months ago. At least in our area, this is definitely not over yet.

I think we may have peaked already, but there's a lag where people try to hang onto their "investments". The real excitement happens when the bankruptcies get going.

A stock market crash and economic collapse could be the real October surprise for this election year.
I must say though, I've been noticing intrusive thoughts about the need to invest money for the last year or so. I acknowledged these thoughts and did not heed them (since I knew a crash was coming). But, I guess, many people have had the same thoughts and couldn't resist them.

I should have known to come here for synchronicity. My wife and I saw some old friends last night, great people, but the real estate bug has caught them badly, and they consistently insist on buying bigger and better houses. In seeing them last night I detected something off, I think they knew they'd gone too far, but still not willing to back down and downsize, it's a sort of quiet terror, but an unwillingess to talk about anything other than endless growth. So yes, I think you may very well be right.

I on the other hand am no paragon of virtue, I am just no good at making money other than providing for my family, so I proved successful at collapsing ahead of time by default :)

Your last paragraph pretty well describes my relationship with money. Our investing apathy may well prove to be a blessing. - Croatoan

Greed is always how the con artists latch onto you. Being satisfied with what you have is like armor :)

+6 mithril armor, in my experience!

I entirely agree about the importance of being satisfied with what you happen to have. We use a local bank, and we park some of our money in certificates of deposits, which are FDIC insured. Whenever we go to roll over a CD, the bank agent often recommends that we see one of its investment counselors. When we tell her we live frugally and we're entirely content with the modest funds we already have, you can almost see her brain struggling to grasp what we're saying: for her, it really "does not compute"!

And yes, greed is one of the several "hooks" con artists use to play the marks. (My step-grandfather worked as a carnival sharper in his youth, back in the very early 1900s. He had left home in Copenhagen to go to sea when he was 13., and once he got to North America, he jumped ship and made his way on land. So I heard some things growing up.)

We're not into the "investing" level of anything, but even in the small things it's like... when we say things like "oh, we don't need a smartphone" or "but why would we want a car we'd have to take out a loan for?" or "no thanks, we make those ourselves" some people kind of light up, like we gave them permission to say stuff they wouldn't otherwise, share tips and stuff. But most people sort of glitch out. It's so weird.

OP here. I say to myself, if I want something new for instance, I'd love to build a small boat, I force myself to build it entirely myself, with as many recycled or free parts as possible, and if a want incurs a whole host of maintenance costs, it's not a viable project.

I also can't recommend enough the whole approach of looking poor, or just as poor as your neighbours. It's probably the practical side of the rules of the mage - staying silent, appearing ordinary, simple acts of charity, and I do find that practising a certain gruff and grumpy exterior helps to banish off people you just don't want around. It's no joke, because in tough times, people will lash out at those appearing to be better than others.

maybe it's my decade of unbankedness speaking, but:

“I make myself rich by making my wants few.”

This implies that the USD is going to remain useful as a store of value - for the real estate bubble to truly collapse, the price of a house in a metric other than dollars, for instance, cheeseburgers, has to decrease.

Where I live in Canada, I used to be able to get a double cheeseburger and a large coffee from McDonalds for $5. Small houses cost about $150,000 then. Now that same meal - which I rarely eat these days, because the quality has declined significantly and I don't want to patronize that establishment - costs $9, and would probably be $12 if the quality was kept up. Now the same houses cost $400,000. The house price has not changed much in cheeseburger terms - a house only costs about 11% more cheeseburgers and coffee than it used to, and that's using my imagined price where the cheeseburgers hadn't been debased along with the currency.

Justin

Not to derail, but I've noticed just about every burger joint has silently cut their portion sizes down. A burger today is quite smaller than the burger of yesterday. Even the better burger joints have downsized their burgers, rather than put up the price.

Back to real estate, most of it is driven by credit conditions and when those wobble, so does the price. A lot of that credit is state directed, not market directed and the state has had an interest in keeping house prices artificially high.

What we should be asking is has the state's interest in high prices changed and/or has their ability to rig markets degraded? And to answer those questions you need political connections. And if you have those kinds of connections, you're probably keeping your mouth shut.

One of the virtues of a market crash is that a lot of notional money vanishes very quickly. If you have, as we do, far more dollars than things to buy with them, that can balance out in one or, occasionally, both of two ways -- inflation of the currency or heavy losses in the markets. As it happens, I expect both, but then I grew up with stagflation in the 1970s.

I lived in south Florida close to 20 years ago. One day at a street festival, I'd say in 2006, there were several teams of attractive young women handing our brochures for zero-down mortgage loans.

I'd been made the offer to buy homes several times in the preceding year, despite having an unstable low-wage job at the time and no savings to speak of.

Even back then, when I didn't pay nearly as much attention to this stuff, I knew the market was not far from collapse. Sure enough...

I manage a team and know a women’s salary as she reports into me. A few weeks ago ago she told me she had bought a house in the greater toronto area. 1.3 million. It took all my composure to not say, but how??? She has a good salary, I assume her partner does too, but if they did what most people do here they are easily looking at $6000/month mortgage.

Eventually our converation swung to a point where she was discussing how long they had looked and she joked about needing bigger raises and said, well we are also viewing it as an investment. I know I feel it for a house a fraction of the cost and wonder if it was a mistake.

In my early 30s up in Canada and without doubt a large portion of millenial young “professionals” are in this already house poor boat.

My question for people here is what happens in the case of bubble popping?

Thanks for the great question and comment.

I marveled at the REQ (real estate question) in this country (Canada) for years. I said circa 2015 that "the bubble can't last much longer".

It used to be that I couldn't grasp how regular people were affording these prices. I am a physician and I wouldn't want to buy a 400k home, let alone... the obscenities they are paying in the major metros.

Eventually, it occurred to me that it comes down to this: people are justifying it to themselves by saying, pshaw, don't worry, yes the price is insane but "real estate always goes up so eventually it will turn out ok". It really is that simple, that is how people are thinking about it.

And the answer to the question: what happens, how does it end? Very, very badly, terribly and tragically for a lot of people, when the bubble finally bursts. Many, many folks will endure financial hardship for the rest of their lives, be underwater, have to declare bankruptcy, etc, etc., with ripple effects on the broader economy, banks, etc.

That really is what is going to happen, unfortunately.

No politician wants to touch the issue because there's no solution.

I am quite relieved my wife started residency in a Alberta several years ago. Without doubt we would have overextended ourselves to a large degree thinking it will all work out.

Now we are in a home that we thought was a great deal because it was so far below what we would pay in the Toronto area after saving for quite a few years. Turns out it is appropriate enough for what we make but still in hindsight we know we should have gone cheaper. Our hope at the time was that it would stay steady but who knows, just a few more years on her end which will be a huge relief.

Somebody downtown I know in Toronto died and was quite blue collar hence the 3 br house looked the same as decades earlier when they bought it i.e. no spiral staircases or open concept, etc... I was shocked however to see it going for under a million. Snapped up in under a week.

Canadian resident here. Been a homeowner since 2008, and only due to a generous gift of land from my parents and putting in sweat equity into my first home. I was certain the housing market was going to crash in 2012, as Canadian real estate never really went down even after 2008. Sold my house and moved into an apartment in 2012... real estate prices stayed afloat while our neighbours south of the border saw home prices drop out from underneath them. Never really understood how Canada dodged that bullet.

Fast forward to 2015. Prices slowly climbing. Bought another modest house in a small town, value stayed steady over the four years I owned it. Paid $209,000 for a four bedroom home on a one acre lot, carrying a $100,000 mortgage. Rates were really low then, maybe 2.5%? Sold it, then moved to BC.

Bought a home in 2019 just before the 'rona hit. Bought an acreage for $375,000 in another small town. We live with my father-in-law, so that helps spread the financial burden. Just after we bought it, prices went berserk. We're selling our home now for $575,000 as that's the going market value! Completely nuts, and not sure when prices will correct. I can't see Canada avoiding paying the piper again like in 2008, but I think one factor that's driving rural property prices up is the cities disgorging many people out to the country.

Another Canadian here. At my job I also know a few people getting on the property ladder. One colleague I know spends his free time renovating his current house in order to turn it into apartments, he is planning on getting a second mortgage for another house for his own family.

Maybe this is the received wisdom, but it does look like, from what I see around me in my area, that the Canadian real estate bubble is dependent on too much demand, from both residents and immigrants, chasing too few houses. The lack of supply comes partly from a lack of labour for housing construction and the use of housing for Airbnbs and the like, and the demand comes from residents trying to buy in order to rent out to either short-term and long-term tenants, and migrants moving here (I have nothing against immigrants, see my note below on this).

I'm not an expert in this, but I saw news recently about how Canada's GDP per person is shrinking in comparison to the other "developed" countries, which implies that overall the economy is getting worse. So my guess is that people here are trying to treat housing as a source of income, and setting rent accordingly (not to mention as a response to inflation), which in a way would seem to be part of a feedback loop with the GDP per capita metric, because overall people are worse off as housing costs increase. To beat inflation, some get into housing, and find they need (or simply get greedy and want) to set rents higher, which in turn fuels inflation. This also says something about the overall job market if this is the way many people are choosing to "make it". I'd be curious if someone with more knowledge on these things would confirm whether this is indeed the case.

So the bet many people look to be making involves the assumption that, even with a recession or worse, housing demand will be stable, because construction lacks enough labour to turn things around quickly, there will be enough tourism to fuel incomes and rents for those areas dependent on it, and that the population will continue to increase.

What would need to happen in order to shift this picture unfavorably for would-be landlords? One way of course is that an economic crisis in Canada and elsewhere could drop the demand for tourism, potentially expanding housing supply as people try to get out. Another would be a drop in the number of people trying to come into Canada. This brings me to my note about immigration. Like I said, I have nothing against immigrants; I was an immigrant elsewhere for many years and so I got a taste of what that means. I sympathize with the situation immigrants often find themselves in when they come to Canada. They are often sold a picture where there is demand for their skills; yet many professional bodies won't accept their credentials. So Canada says it desperately needs medical professionals, for example, but often immigrants are told they need to pay to go to university here (which is extremely expensive) to get those credentials in order to practice. This shows up in situations such as, for example, trained dentists having to work for close to minimum wage in Tim Hortons (a chain of coffee shops) because their credentials aren't recognized.

A few months ago, I saw articles talking about how potential immigrants were wising up to this. In India, for example, there were a few influencers making videos warning potential emigrants about what life in Canada was really like, from their perspective, along with stories of other recent migrants leaving Canada. If that trends catches, and I'm not certain if it will, then you could see a drop-off in demand for housing as a result.

If I knew more about the mechanics behind it, I would also comment on the effects on all this of the falling Canadian dollar, too. But my guess is that Canada's housing bubble will stay a bubble until these things change in a significant way, but for my part, due to the size of the bubble, I am staying well clear of it.

I work as a cook, and a few of the waitresses have decided to put money into NVIDIA, because of AI. I know enough about how the internet works to realize this is absurd, but it's another massive bubble, and if it pops too, this could become very messy for the tech world....

It has already become messy. Don't get me started with tech, but all those people they forced into taking those sketchy injectables? They're now drop kicking them right out the door and the way the tech industry works, they're going to find out that nobody wants them back in another tech job.

They do this every 20 years or so, hire a bunch of fresh faced naive college grads, flog them and punt them for a field goal after 20 years. Then they lie low and hire another batch of fresh faced college grads.

I don't know about the rest of tech (reliably news outlets overblows or puts out of perspective what they get from an insider) but I was never forced to be inoculated with the serum and my lead openly knows that, as he didn't take it either, though he did emphasize it is not something I should mention even on my most critical moods other than on a one on one basis and with good judgment. Though for about 6 months you had to voluntarily sign up if you wanted to go to the office but nobody checked. I went to take a look and it was emptier than a graveyard.

One of my colleagues is pissed to the core because his wife had to get her lower leg amputated because of a sudden turbo cancer and he blames it on the vaccine. The sentiment among engineers against the vaccine has increased, for sure, even if its not vocal.

The last part is 100% true, though it usually happens in the parts that build unnecessary things that make people in management look busy or are literally just a regular office with engineering in the title. For example, my engineering team absorbed some other teams so that they don't get axed and there is no way the team survives without the old guard, there are whole code repositories that take a decades perspective to make sense of. What I saw in the pandemic was brutal though, a couple of friends were laid off and shipped back home without even a notice or sorry warning. Some of the engineering teams, with compensation. There were things cut openly and others under the water. The rest? Laid off with the excuse of performance, sometimes in group calls. It was a nasty sight to behold. It made me feel grateful for my job, I'll probably hold my ground here for a bit longer, not a good time for movement for as much as recruiters are saying otherwise. I'll probably bite the next time they send and email and probe them and see what I can get out of them.

I think they will be needed when the cloud fails, but by then maybe will have been retired from the work field by health and poverty issues.

A perfect storm. There's also a mismatch between interns/juniors and seniors, juniors and interns learn now from LLMs, and the have a big part of the mental map in here be dragons mode.

People don't sit still - they move on and change into other things. You tell an engineer that he's done, he'll find something else to do. And he'll stop being an engineer.

Labor markets in general are broken, even when nobody is interfering. You get these shortages, management starts complaining but after a while they start raising rates. Those higher rates attract people but usually it takes time to train. And by the time all those people attracted to whatever finish training, the market crashes and all those jobs disappear. Only people who seem to win are those doing the training. And those few lucky enough to catch the bidding war at the right time.

I replace "LLM" with "Bullsh** Fountain". More like here be manure...

I replace "LLM" with "Bullsh** Fountain". More like here be manure...

Since the internet is a massive dump of shale. LLM is just a big powerful fan to spread it all around. That's why it consumes so much energy.

Of course shale consuming critters are enthusiastic since it lands in creative ways and they are tired of the same delivery.

I replace "LLM" with "Bullsh** Fountain". More like here be manure...

And when there is a gem in the AI manure pile it is probably just a ripoff of copyrighted material.

AI is just a way for these startups to sell copyrighted material without having to pay.

Here's something to give you a chuckle. It is recent that tech companies don't give computers to their engineers. Yes, that's correct. They give them a laptop that can connect to a more powerful "dev box", in some other cases they just have them connect through their own computers. Which is neat, I guess, but guess where that devbox is running? Correct, in the cloud. What happens if the cloud comes down? Yes, it would happen exactly what you are thinking would happen. A gigantic deadlock. It is not as widespread in the core engineering teams, but enough that concerns have been raised.

LLMs are useful to learn a programming language, search documentation and bounce ideas or get inspiration but it can't teach you how to program because that is a craft. It would be like saying that having a book on carpentry, or heck, having a robot tell you everything you want about carpentry makes you a carpenter. By itself it makes for messy and inconsistent code. To the point that LLM generated code is being banned from open-source code repositories and I certainly have banned them from my team, you can use them, but you have to write the code yourself. And I don't think that will ever change unless someone actually figures out how to make a machine think, reflect and self-correct, instead of knowing probabilistic relationships between words.

I think we will make better gardeners when the time comes, honestly: https://engineerdog.com/2023/05/29/why-do-so-many-programmers-want-to-be-farmers-how-to-build-a-corrugated-steel-garden-box/

Isn't this ironic that US had an edge on software on Russia and China and not only they cannot win their war on hardware but about to lose their software edge.

Russia and China, or India or other players, will probably take a few of the very good engineers!

At that point I will be far away from the software world. But yeah, actually, a lot of my Indian friends returned to India in the pandemic and are not coming back. That said however, the US is still top, though it's declining, whereas China is going upwards for example, especially in military tech.

I think the US is declining and at some point can fall over a cliff. This desperation of putin everything in the cloud and making everything in software as a service is detrimental.

Cloud is very centralized completely opposed to the decentralized nature of TCP/IP etc.

I think the on-premise servers and private small cloud will make their way back in the near future, and with it the need for a lot of expertise and technicians, and a lot of the older folks will come back to work.

https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/google-cloud-accidentally-deletes-125-billion-australian-pension-fund-124051800606_1.html

The biggest problem of the cloud is the grid, as to my knowledge no one tried to cold reboot a cloud, I think there were already cases of race conditions, I remember on from Azure due to a UPS firmware but I am not searching for it. An the grid is in the risk in the next years because as the fracking oil goes so the fracking gas eventually goes.

My nephew here in downstate Illinois graduated from college this past December, and now closed on a home three weeks ago listed for over $300K. He'd just found a job and made an offer about two months ago. He was married last summer, and apparently is anxious to get on with "the road of life", even willing to pay PMI since he didn't have 20% to put down on the new crib.

My brother thought his loan approval was somewhat desperate by the bank, at least compared to lending standards back when we were fresh out of college. IF my nephew stays gainfully employed (currently in IT) and IF the economy doesn't completely fall apart and IF he doesn't move for the next 7 to 10 years, he should come out okay.

That's three too many IFs for me. Yeah, it's a bubble.

If this happens the Seattle housing market is going to be a digested food show. Everyone, and I mean everyone, that came with me for work "owns" a "house" upwards of $750K (how someone thinks paying that amount of money for a cheaply made house is way out of my capacity for understanding) that expects of them to work for the rest of their productive lives at the same pace, in the same growth market they bought it at. Ouch. I did a tarot reading about a year ago when someone I know just bought his place. The card for the market? The Knight of Wands, and I think its likely the knight is about to fall off that horse.

"digested food show"! that's hella funny.
x

erika

Agreed. Took me a second to process it and then I realized “oh, lol” - Croatoan

I was laughing out loud when I wrote it. Read Ecosophia enough and euphemisms become a past time!

A friend of mine parlayed the Plandemic into relocating from his job in downtown Seattle into remotely working from a half million dollar home he purchased near the mouth of the Columbia River. He thought the prices were far more "reasonable" out of the city, but of course it's all relative - he's got some "ifs" in the calculation like my nephew.

I sold my house almost three years ago and have moved four times while renting. I thought there was a decent chance of a housing crash when I sold, but while history rhymes - this time may be a bit different. There's been lots of .gov support for the real estate and stock market bubbles, and I'm a bit cynical of Blackrock and other inside "investors" posting big losses if the market crashes. This economic downturn involves not just a deflationary credit collapse, but of course runs into resource scarcity while population numbers (even with Covid) have increased demand pressure.

A "reset" is coming - just not sure about the specifics.

So many ifs. People forget (or never notice) that taking a decision while in a good mood and feeling well doesn't mean at all you are going to feel the same while carrying out that decision (this is why sales people make you feel good and why manipulative advertising works). Sure, in the tech bonanza when recruiters pile up on your email inbox to get you in, in the richest country on the planet were even the thought process is comodified, things will look pretty sweet and easy going. Until they don't, your whole existence hurts and there is no end in sight... that's a really nasty way of understanding what privilege means and I think some people might experience it.

Nor would I say I'm 100% ready, just calm enough that I don't have that many hooks, all I worry about is my altar pieces and my books.

I wrote this yesterday in reply to the comment of the democrats holding it out until the next term and decided not to post it but here it is:

"Take this with a grain of salt, but I was feeling something moving here and there during the pandemic and then it felt as if, metaphorically speaking, we took an anesthetic, went on and it flared up as wars in Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza conflict without addressing the main issue, if we see the human world as an organism that is.

The way you put it though made me think if this impression I've got is the political sphere managing the damage and seeing who will take the blame once something bursts. When the soldier Aaron Bushnell protested by lighting himself on fire and more recently Maxwell Azzarello in NYC, one of the things I wondered in mild shock was: what is going on in the side of politics we don't see publicly lately for people to sacrifice their lives once they see how bad it is? And does it mean inflammation is getting close to showing as disease? If something happens in the economic or political spheres then at this point some people already know. What will they decide to blow up to cover their tracks? I don't know, but I sure hope they get caught"

Andrei Martyanov is one of the people I follow with my RSS reader and right after your warning I read this:
https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2024/05/kent-rollins-advice.html

Maybe he has the same massage therapist? ;)

bk.

I follow him, too. As a Russian ex-military man (now in the USA), he has helpful insights into Russian military (and geostrategic) thinking. And I was really struck by this new post of his, which is very much out of character for his blog.

FWIW, Kent Rollins' simple "cowboy cooking" advice is right on target. It's basically how I cook for us these days. (As far as fancier sorts of cookery go, my wife and I are both all "cooked out" now, after more than five decades of marriage. I do all the cooking these days.

I don't really like making predictions on markets, because of the massive amount of state interference I've seen over the past 20 years or so.

The real estate market is definitely a bubble. That shoeshine boy indicator is almost the definition of one. Usually paired with sketchy credit used to buy whatever. However, there are parts of the real estate market that are actively crashing, commercial real estate comes to mind. No tenants and interest rates that have gone higher than they planned for. I zoom out and I just see a picture of utter imbalance. Too much real estate where it's not needed and too little where it is. State interference. And you can bet (and this is about the only prediction I'll make) that the state will interfere when the bubble pops. They did last time.

The stock market? There's several scenarios I'd point out. One of them is Venezuela/Zimbabwe. Just take a look at a historical chart and sit and think about it. The other would be the Dow historical through the 70s. Up and down and up and down between 1000 and 500, going essentially nowhere (didn't the BeeGees sing about that?) as cars (and a bunch of other things) quadrupled in price. In any case, you don't trade constant dollar prices, you only trade what's on the ticker and nothing else.

I agree with your distaste about making "predictions". I gave up on them years ago. Now I just kinda try and compute the odds. And even then I hedge as much as possible.

Right now, I would guess that we have around a 30% chance of a "bad moon a-risin'". This particular SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess) value has been rising of late, but now I am trying to analyze whether this is a valid analysis or I am letting the silliness of the political world get to me.

Who knows for sure. I think that the best you can do is better calibrate your expectations to the reality unfolding.

Just leave yourself an out in case you misjudge.

Might I suggest another place to pay attention to instead of Venezuela/Zimbabwe. While hyper-inflation may occur eventually, the first thing that will happen is hyper-deflation. How does that make sense, you might ask? Look at Crete and it's collapse 10 or so year ago.

The economy imploded, and the first thing that happened was the banks closed over a holiday. And then the holiday got extended. And then extended indefinitely. Of course the really connected were able to move their money out of the country right before, but the rest of the people got stuck with having all electronic forms of money frozen, and the only way they could get money was it being rationed to them via ATMs. Suddenly, it didn't matter how much money you had in your bank account, cause the banks wouldn't let you access it but $50 a week.

The bank fraudsters are going to do everything they can to keep things together, and this will be one of the first things that happens if it looks like total collapse. Just stop the plebes from accessing their money. It is for this reason, that a financial guru I pay attention to suggests keeping a hidden shoebox of cash, because if the banks close, it doesn't matter if you were a millionaire or not, if you don't have any money on hand for your daily needs.

There's something like a 100:1 ratio of total money to available physical paper cash, last time I checked. Been that way for a while. Like with everything else financial, doesn't matter, as long as everyone isn't trying to find the exits at the same time.

I've been wondering when the real estate market is going to crash. Nice to see more people reading the signs.

I have a fair amount of money in a standard savings account right now. It feels silly because my savings are eroding as the value of the US dollar diminishes. Can any of you recommend something better to do with my savings? Even a high yield savings account seems like it might not be the best course.

- B

This next little bit isn't advice; this is me thinking out loud to myself.

My situation isn't too different from yours - house paid for, a decent amount in savings - but I've given up on the whole notion that my money is supposed to make me more money, or even supposed to be a stable source of security - there is something cockeyed about that notion that is part of how we got ourselves into this mess. The old writings which warned against usury were really onto something - it is a great way to erode and evaporate the value of what passes for money.

All I can really do usefully is to be careful and to be very grateful for what I have.

There really is only one safe place to lay up treasure - where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

"my money is supposed to make me more money, or even supposed to be a stable source of security"

More generally I see the extreme sentiment of people wanting to get rich easy and then just kick back for the rest of it. That's one of the ways to say "I hate my life so much I want out of it as fast as I can and when I do I won't think about it and just play."

Somehow there is this notion that if you just do the right things, you are guaranteed, no questions, full-refund, to a life of grace, good fortune and riches so everyone should have a chance of multiplying their money for free. That's nuts on jar, being shaken, vigorously. And it's the same reason most latin-americans hate the tourists that "have made it". What do you mean I am not entitled to all this? I am "retired" now, of course I do.

>> Somehow there is this notion that if you just do the right things, you are guaranteed, no questions, full-refund, to a life of grace, good fortune and riches so everyone should have a chance of multiplying their money for free.

Do the right things, but especially think the Right Thoughts.

In other words, Think and Grow Rich, or maybe, the Power of Positive Thinking... seems like I've heard of that somewheres...

You just described in a nutshell the New Thought church I was raised in.

The featured Book of the Week over on Magic Monday is very appropriate as a corrective balance to that.

Take away the sensation of pain and people will swing their intestines around their necks as a fashion statement... We have taken a lot of the sensations of pain here.

Determine what your objective is. Really think about it. Then look around for a suitable market niche, something that provides for a need. Then hedge wisely.

We have had a masonry heater built into our house. We are fortunate to have an Austrian trained master-builder living in our valley. This is a centuries old technology for super efficient wood heat from northern Europe. It creates very little air pollution and doesn't require tending a fire: all the wood is put in and burnt in one go once (mostly) or twice (if it's really cold) a day. The estimate is about 1/3 of the wood resources that would be required to heat the house with a modern "efficient" wood stove.

We see investing in this heater is a way of preserving some of our good fortune (We are Boomers; lucky enough to have lived most of our working lives before peak oil) for the benefit of future generations. There are functional masonry heaters in northern Europe that are 400 years old and museum models that could still be functional that are even older.
If you own you home and are happy where you are, it would be well worth considering.

I do not yet own a house, but that's definitely something I'll look into!

I wonder if their design is related to rocket mass heaters?

Rocket Mass Heaters were developed relatively recently in N. America. They are awesome; I was able to help build one in 2011. I believe the designs are becoming more similar to the masonry heaters. The principles are the same.
We looked at RMHs first but installing a RMH is a DIY project and I don't think the insurance companies will approve them(if that matters to you). Having an accredited masonry heater master-builder in the valley, it was pretty easy to decide to support him.

We have one; it was installed by the previous owner, over 30 years ago.

I'm a big fan. There is nothing like wood heat in the winter.

The main downside is that it's rather like a giant pet that must be fed and lightly tended for four hours every single day. Our stove is "woken up" in November with a series of gradually larger fires over a few days, and once it's up to full temp, we must build a fire once a day till we shut it down in the spring. This is no big deal if you're a homebody, but complicates spontaneous trips and such.

Hmm, where are you? Colder than here I suspect.
Ours doesn't need that kind of attention. But then winters are relatively mild here in the PNW and ours has a by-pass damper that makes getting that first fire going pretty easy. We can sit and watch the fire if we want but all we have to do is remember close off the air flow damper at the end.
That's the other difference between masonry heaters and RMH. With a masonry heater all the wood is put into a sealed firebox and the fire is lit. With a RMH fuel is fed into the hopper constantly while the fire is burning.

We're in New England, usually fairly cold winters (0 degrees F. is a typical low, but we've had minus twenty a time or two as well.

We're following directions from the previous owner. Part of the issue is having two dampers to open and close when starting or shutting down a fire. If we forget at bedtime, much of the heat just goes up the chimney and cools down the thermal mass. I think as well, it is better for the thermal mass not to be subject to large swings of temperature-- cracks are more likely to develop. So we have to start the fire 4 hours before desired bedtime to make sure we can close up the dampers.

Milkyway, we load our stove with over two large armfuls of hardwood at each burn. It burns very hot, but still takes 4 hours before no coals are glowing.

Ok, so your winters are colder than ours. :-)

I can‘t help you with the dampers (although if you could link to a photo or two in the upcoming open post, maybe somebody there can help you with them?).

We only let our fire burn down until there are no open flames anymore - the coals are still glowing nicely at this point, and then we close the door. That‘s how we were told to do it by our builder (an experienced old guy who also told us to clean the window/door with ashes instead of the standard „oven cleaning“ stuff his son recommended, but I admit we‘ve yet to try… ;-) ).

I.e. it takes way less time, and you lose a lot less heat.

Also, we usually fire it up well before bedtime. If we do it too late, the main peak of heat goes into the house while we‘re all asleep, which is a bit pointless - but of course this depends on your personal schedule, and also on the weather and the conditions in your house.

With your winter temperatures, you‘ll probably need to heat it up twice, don‘t you?

Either way, you could play around with when you heat it up, and especially with closing all the doors and dampers earlier - maybe that helps to make things more manageable!

Milkyway

The main damper is a thick steel sheet with a handle attached to one end. It slides in and out of the exhaust flue, opening or closing it off. Carbon monoxide would leak back into the house if we closed it with any coals still glowing. (And we've set off the CO alarm a few times when we tried to cheat.)

Yes, two burns a day is much more enjoyable, but it doesn't usually work well with our schedules to burn in the morning.

So, evenings, we enjoy the heat with a book in front of the fire, and dress warmly pretty much all winter.

Even with these small tradeoffs, it still seems like a fine way to collapse early and avoid the rush. We only use our oil furnace when desperate, and we can even cut a substantial amount of our own wood from downed trees.

Usually a by pass damper in the exhaust flue is only opened to ease a cold start then closed to drive the hot gases through the channels in the thermal mass, then rejoin the flue beyond the bypass. If yours must be opened to burn at all there might be something restricting the channels. Even a properly managed masonry heater will accumulate dust in those channels and must be vacuumed out every few years or so.

In the fire box too much ash can restrict the draught, (air intake) our door (with integrated draught) has a warning in German not to allow too much ash to accumulate. Some systems have an ash drawer that must be emptied to keep the air flowing.

I re-split our wood quite small with a kinetic electric splitter. It’s so fast and fun it’s hard not to turn everything to kindling:-) I pile 25 to 35 pounds of <20% moisture wood in a ‘crib’ (ie. piled criss cross), with about an inch between sticks and with the largest pieces at the bottom. Some kindling and a fire starter on top and Claire and I sit back and enjoy.

You might find a stove mason in your area to consult with at https://masoncontractors.org/author/masonry-heater-association-of-north-america/

Cheers, Rob Rhodes

Yes, that's the way ours works too. It burns for around an hour or so and we turn the draft way down once the flames are gone. Then we go back and shut it down completely about an hour or 2 later.

I can confirm that damp newsprint and ashes is the best way to clean glass. I learned that from my mother decades ago and was very pleased to find it worked just as well as I remembered and better than I hoped when I tried it with our stove.

Edited 2024-05-21 04:42 (UTC)

Hi there,

I‘m not sure why yours needs four hours (unless you light it several times a day?). Ours takes an hour to burn down, maybe. And once it burns, it burns - we simply have to adjust the door setting once when it got going (although we could probably do without this step), and then close the door completely when it‘s burned down. Maybe yours is slightly different in build?

For getting it going on cold days if it hasn‘t been „on“ before, have you tried a „teaser fire“? If you have access to your chimney somewhere (e.g. through a cleaning opening in the basement), you can light a bundle of old newspaper or similar stuff straight in the chimney to heat up the air there. If the chimney is really cold, you might have to do that several times to get it up to a sufficient temperature. Then light the main fire right away, and the chimney will pull a lot better.

If you don‘t have cleaning access to the chimney, try the teaser fire in the main fire-room and see if that helps.

We usually do this in autumn before the first fire, and also if there hasn’t been a fire for a few days in winter. Not sure if this will be sufficient in very cold areas, but it certainly works for us.

Milkyway

We have one of these, too - and it was one of the best investments or our life! It‘s not just that it works, and works well. The heat is also mostly distributed through radiation, i.e. not hot air being blown around the room, but the feeling is also _very_ different from „floor heating“. It just feels… dunno how to put it. Natural, maybe, like basking in sunwarmth?

The heated bench is one of the most contested places in the house on cold winter days… ;-)

Milkyway

I am in a similar situation with a good amount of money in savings and I know it's value is degrading. Not sure how to alleviate that except to decrease my expenses by learning self-sufficiency and hope that helps. I am already living a pretty simple life.

Some people push gold, but I think the government can devalue that as well. When I heard Costco was selling gold in some locations I also thought of the Joe Kennedy story.

Plus, if you get to a point where you are in truly bad straits and you need to convert your gold to, say, groceries... as soon as you bust out a krugerrand you're advertising to all and sundry that if they come to your house and tie up your family, you'll probably cough up more. That's not a theoretical, it's a common story from the economic collapse in Argentina.

I do think it's good to have a little bit of precious metals set aside for a small emergency fund, but it's also maybe important to think through what that's gonna look like on the other end if you have to cash it in for necessities, because as soon as it looks like you're the sort of person who has a stash of bullion under your floorboards, you've painted a target on yourself and your family. Like, personally, I think it's better to invest in skills that make you useful to others, which can't be stolen. And for emergencies, it's way better if you look like you're parting with grandma's wedding ring, cashing in a broken necklace or a bent bangle bracelet, or selling that weird sterling spoon somebody traded you for some plumbing work, than digging out a stash of collector coins.

You might want to consider TIPs:

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/marketable-securities/tips/

Most people I know who've squirreled away quite a bit of cash have these, though I believe there may be pretty low limits on how much is "protected" by the highest interest rates.

They won't protect your principal entirely from inflation, but they're better than a savings account. And in the deflationary credit collapse part of the coming "reset", the goal is to lose less than the other guy. We're all likely to lose wealth to some degree, no matter how we're positioned.

Before anyone goes out and buys TIPS bonds, please make sure you understand how they are taxed. Otherwise, you might be in for a nasty surprise down the road.

Interest earned on Treasury Direct bonds are taxed at the federal level just as any other income. However, this income is not taxable at the state level.
https://www.treasurydirect.gov/savings-bonds/tax-information-ee-i-bonds/

All right, perhaps I need to do more than just leave a cryptic warning.

The issue with TIPS isn't who taxes them, it's when. You pay tax on the inflation adjustments up front even though you don't get that cash until later (except indirectly via the higher coupon payments). In other words, in a given year it is possible you'd owe more in taxes than you received in cash. Someone who buys them is presumably worried about high inflation, and that's exactly what can trigger this problem.

Also, to be clear to readers, I bonds are not the same as TIPS. I bonds work more how one might "expect" but there are limits on how much you can buy each year.

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/research-center/history-of-savings-bond/comparing-tips-to-i/

I'm in the same boat. I took an early retirement and went lump sum on a modest pension. Nearly half the funding was from debt instruments, and remembering 2008, I wouldn't expect it to remain solvent.

Though the taxes are going to be steep, I am wagering it will be a smaller loss than the next market correction. That, and why feed the beast that wants to put me on the menu.

I did park the cash in a savings account with a credit union. They are more regulated and SHOULD be less risky than a bank. When the bubble bursts, expect a lot more bank failures.

Reality is, I will need to find a new income down the road. The best that can be done is use some of the money for projects that would reduce future living expenses. I do plan to keep some of it as a nest egg. We'll see how inflation plays out in that.

Ultimately, there is no completely safe option. That's life. I did put a portion of it into precious metals. The idea of trading gold or silver for groceries invites a messy end, but enough to cash in for a few years of property taxes in case of steep inflation might make the difference.

Please take this with a generous grain of salt. Even if this works for me, there is no one size fits all. Planning for a comfortable poverty instead of investing for unearned wealth is also quite heretical. I have learned to keep a bit quiet about it.

Edited (typos) 2024-05-20 17:39 (UTC)

Denninger over at market ticker agrees with you on the timing, and Charles Hugh Smith on the overall shape of things.

It's been a total drag not being able to get my family out of rentals and into a house where we're allowed to install window screens and dig up the yard and plant food. But every day it looks more and more like it would be an even bigger drag if we had succeeded.

When we found out how much the bank was willing to lend us, it kind of took our breath away. Really? On our income? We could barely make the mortgage payments on that (and we'd be over seventy before paying it off!), and we'd be in the soup the first time the roof needed replacing. It has been sobering to realize that the reason we can't buy a house right now, is because everybody else has been in an absolute frenzy of... doing exactly that. Mortgaged to the eyeballs, and borrowing more for routine maintenance. How much of the country right now is riding the knife edge of no savings, overwhelming debt, and one or two missed payments away from insolvency and homelessness, because a realtor and a banker told them "Oh yeah! You can totally afford a house! You've got this!"? You know, plus all the investor vulture types.

The town we live in right now... as much as we love the job and the church community, in a sharp economic decline it's probably for the best that we haven't been able to put down roots. We're already overrun with meth zombies thanks to an ACLU lawsuit a few years back that forced the city to stop enforcing panhandling laws (how the eff does the ACLU, who don't live here, get to overrule our elected government?). Throw in a sharp decline in employment and a sharp increase in foreclosures and evictions, and it's gonna look like a postapocalyptic wasteland... and we'll be throwing the kids in the truck and heading back to the family compound. And the fact that I think about this a lot says we're better off not buying here so it's just as well we can't afford to.

What remains the same is, whether we want it or not, God looks after us and puts us where we *need* to be. His mercy is not always comfortable, but it's always good. Thanks be to God.

"What remains the same is, whether we want it or not, God looks after us and puts us where we *need* to be. His mercy is not always comfortable, but it's always good. Thanks be to God."

Dearest Methylethyl, that's exactly where I'm at right now.

X

Erika

--sending my love, Erika!

thanks / for some reason that made me break into tears.
(smile)
x

<3 to you both.
Thanks to you Methylethyl for the wisdom and Charlie Obert for the quote.

- Cicada Grove

Also, I keep reminding myself of the parable of the sparrows and the lilies (they don't worry about tomorrow, yet God takes care of them, how much more so it will be for you).

I am working on myself to relax and be as at peace with the future as a sparrow is. Here's a song I like that speaks to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRJZQFRyZ6s

- Cicada Grove

Well, in that case you are getting a double dose :-)

I will never understand those lame rules about not enforcing panhandling laws and making the space people live on livable. It's a real shame those people are in that state but why should the whole ship go down with them? If they care that much they should adopt them or something. Part of my ancestry used to sacrifice people to the gods if you were drunk inside the city, and I kinda get it in my sour moods you know.

One of my friends was chased down the street with a knife by a drugged homeless person. What did the bystanders yell at the police officer chasing the homeless down? "Leave him alone!! Abusive bla bla"

I'm reading a book called *the Least of Us* by Sam Quinones that documents the changes in the US illegal drug market over the last three decades or so-- the switch from pot,coca,and opium based (plant derived) substances, with their attendant agricultural limitations on supply, to synthetics like fentanyl and meth: cheap, made in a lab, virtually no limit on availability. It explains so much of what we are seeing now, wrt the homeless zombie invasion. If his intel is accurate, it's very much to do with the shift from ephedrine-based meth to dirt-cheap Mexican P2P meth that happened between 2009 and about 2016 (when exactly depends on what part of the country you're in-- So.Cal got hit first). Apparently ephedrine-based is bad for you in roughly the same ways that pretty much every drug of abuse is bad for you... but P2P is not just super cheap by comparison, but also full of chemical contaminants that cause brain damage. So all the twitching and tooth rot and schizo symptoms... that's the P2P, and it happened after Mexico banned imports of ephedrine from China. If you had access to the psych-callout/intake numbers for your county, you could probably look at them and pinpoint the month when P2P reached your area. Family we are acquainted with, pretty much all meth users at some time or other (but used to be the functional sort you could count on for odd jobs when they were sober)... over the last four years or so about half of them have died. It's that bad.

The author is remarkably optimistic about recovery programs... but looking at the details he gives about it, I don't share his hopes. It's very very resource intensive to salvage these people, to whatever degree salvage is even possible. Worth the effort since jail doesn't do any good at all, and I think there's a big role that churches and charitable organizations could step into there, but part of me sees a future where if we can't cut off the supply, and we're looking at overall economic decline and shrinking of resources... these people are going to end up being euthanized like rabid dogs because there simply aren't any available resources to deal with them. It's just one more aspect of the border crisis that needs to be dealt with urgently, but since it affects only the lower 60% or so of the income curve, legislators feel OK ignoring it. Sowing the wind.

So.. panhandling laws and the ACLU are just a little piece of it (albeit a piece that makes a big difference to local quality of life for everyone). China, Mexico and the open border are bigger pieces. And weirdly, it's sort of a nasty tail-barb on the real estate monster, because both the drugs, and the inability to enforce the law, are creating large real-estate no-go zones. There *are* some affordable houses for sale in our area. But not in any area where I'd ever let my kids out of the house without an armed guard and a large dog. Even in our marginal neighborhood, we've had two bikes and a tricycle stolen from the yard, and a set of tools from our vehicle. I do wonder what would happen with the "affordable housing shortage" if law enforcement were allowed to provide basic physical security in these places. Right now, in my town, you can't live adjacent to wooded areas (you can see the camps on google satellite), near the railroad tracks or powerline cut-throughs (which the hobos use as footpaths), anywhere within about eight blocks of a homeless shelter or church/charitable organization that offers free food or social services (and I *like* those organizations!), and all of the public amenities anywhere near those zones, such as parks and libraries, are... I can't take the kids there. It's a huge problem.

Interesting, I hadn't thought about the shift from plant based to synthetic drugs, but it makes sense also with prosecution, it's much easier to hide a lab than a field. Mexico has a gigantic infrastructure for producing generic pharmaceuticals, and Pharmacist is one of the most popular careers, so I am not surprised at all we are producing all the synthetic drugs too. And now that you mention it, there was a meth lab that got busted last year or a couple back in the same street my house is in, so there is definitely an increase.

The timing of the ban of ephedrine from China makes sense!

I agree with you in the role spirituality can take, unfortunately I don't see supply going down any time soon. Entire towns and chunks of states in Mexico thrive due to the drug market, to the point we call the government a narco-state. It is an incredibly serious problem that capitalizes on the rot we have taken our societies to; a functional society doesn't have a problem with drug addiction nor, mmm, identity problems. I remember an experiment with rats about this, were they would be happy and allowed time outside or something like that, they wouldn't touch the drug but when they took that away they died of overdose.

The border crisis is a very complicated matter, the people crossing are my people, but every time I see something like that I go in conflict. One for the desperation that makes people leave everything like that and another just because I don't approve of it and I personally more solid measures should be used while we pave some way for people to work here legally without immigrating. I remember my debate club in high school was against illegal emigration to the U.S but rather focusing on well-being programs here. I am glad Obrador's government spun a whole battery of well-being programs from hospitals to banks and pharmacies and I think Claudia will continue that work; it was so needed that even the opposition used as a slogan "If we win, the well-being programs will stay" (yeah right).

One thing that desperately needs to be addressed here is the quality of life, because that is causing many of these things, but... that would take a whole social, economic and political overhaul in the same way Mexico would need a similar process to get our resources serve us instead of foreign investors and get rid of extreme poverty, social injustice and violence. Mexico is not a safe country either, obviously --there is no way any bike, or anything inside a car stays put at night even in the nicest borough in the country-- but the crime is different, it's a business, a necessity, and narcos even protect some towns and punish petty crimes mercilessly (they are not good people because of this, they want approval and do atrocities to get it too). Here I am afraid to get randomly shot (I've heard gun shots on the street the other day) or stabbed by some crazy dude or I don't know what in a corner of a park at night knowing the police will come but won't do anything. It's impressive to watch how we have stifled our ability to get anything done and at the same time spend preposterous amounts of money in it. And more so, having a very vocal group that apparently thinks this is alright? Sheez, we are living in the upside-down.

It's not an easier situation in Mexico, even if differently. Crazy hobo crime might not be a thing but it's brutal. People shouldn't starve, lack basic education, medical care and utilities in such a rich country while we have tourists complaining about our regional music being "too loud for them" on their resorts while seeping margaritas or thinking it's okay to just come here and "retire" in spite of the locals; nor should children find organized crime something to be proud of or worse, stolen by organized groups to be "trained" to be criminals... nor should women be afraid for their lives, mexico being the number one in feminicides; Nor should my best friend had to be shot repeatedly and left to rot on a ditch. It's a year today. But it's all the same, this gigantic monster we set loose that filled us with the whole battery of deadly sins.

It's true. This is systemic, much larger and the hydra has many heads as you say. I take refuge in the Trinity and the Virgin and on the many gods and goddesses that so patiently are still there despite my many mistakes, because really, when the world outside feels like is aflame, I can find no way I could see any of these without having at least some sort of inner peace.

Yes, this is all over. My youngest is looking, probably just looking, at houses in her area, not a large town at all, and since living there 9 months can now say that areas that once looked good on paper, she wouldnt buy in, too close to services, too many screaming people on the streets or thefts, and all bike paths and parks by the rivers are no go's too -- sounds as bad as out by me. So the houses in those areas just get more rundown

Exactly.

I've seen the stats on number of houses vis a vis population. The US does not have a housing shortage. There are plenty of houses, and the ratio of houses to people is as high as it's ever been. What we have is a vacancy crisis: On the higher end, it's residential properties being scarfed up by investors and either left empty as an auxiliary savings account, or turned into short-term vacation rentals... and on the low end, houses that've been trashed by squatters while they were tied up in legal squabbles, and entire neighborhoods that've been abandoned by law enforcement, so that they are basically unlivable.

A realtor recently shouted at a friend of mine for daring to point out the market is not looking good... I think the smart ones know the winds are changing and are getting nervous.

Are there any traditional signs of economic collapse in mundane astrology?

When we could have bought a house (downtown very big city) for next to nothing (in our 20s!) I balked and had no vision for planning ahead. I 'did my art.' When the ex wife said, 'This is our last chance. We can get a house on _________ Street for 90,000. It's going out of control from here on.' I balked and had no vision for planning ahead. I 'did my art.' Years later she bought one way way way higher.. Prices were still rising.

Long story short. Sold her house and bought in a small town. i'm old and 'do my art.'

Real Estate, huh ? *SIGH*

Somebody ought to look at what Rhonda's up to these days. Maybe she perpetrated (sic) another book : 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘞𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴 : 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘦𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘵 (a.k.a. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘵 2)

I've been buying market garden equipment but our absentee landlords changed their mind and won't let us use it here. Instead of selling the walking tractor and screen house parts I decided to push the limits and grow what we need for subsistence using caterpillar tunnels. Now the neighbors have started moving in and planting in the back of the lot that I had cleared out for the larger structure, basically trespassing. It's a tricky situation because if we rat out the neighbors they will return the favor since this is all zoned residential. So far I've decided to make our presence known by planting a few things and cutting sight lines through the brush. Honestly though we're waiting for an opportunity to move farther away from the city since the gangs in the dueling low income housing projects down the street are killing each other about once a week now. Unfortunately the market is still brutal at the moment and our current deal is amazing compared to what's out there.

So far it's been all about muddling through. No easy answers, just try and work with the shifting conditions and prepare to jump on the right opportunity. I'm grateful every time I go to my cushy day job, but it would feel a whole lot better if I was making money on my side gig without getting hassled by the frothy by-products of the real estate frenzy.

KVD

Similar here.

Giant side-yard on our rental. But reduced to gardening on the sly because landlords are not a fan of urban agriculture. And desperate to move somewhere I could have, say, goats or rabbits without having them stolen. Or where I could enjoy agricultural luxuries like an outdoor spigot (which, mysteriously, our rental house lacks-- can't even wash the car in the driveway!).

But land prices... Jiminy Cricket! Only the gods could afford a whole acre around here. And it's not like it's a nice town.

Thanks for this heads up. I saw this yesterday but didn't take the time to comment, but you posted this right about the same time and day my family was having our annual picnic and my millenial nephew brought up the topic of real estate, talking about all that was wrong with the situation now. He also works in the solar industry FWIW and I think some of this came from working with home "owners," also his age group... Anyway, even as he talked about all the bad practices going on, someone else said, "oh, you should get into real estate." (I don't think that was his idea or point from what I gathered of the conversation.) Anyway, interesting synchronicity, if a grim one. (It was a real nice gathering though...)

It's good to be on the fringe, when that means you don't buy a bunch of adult toys and rack up the debt. If having nothing to "show" for your work means you aren't afraid of "having" things leveraged by loans.

Bracing...

JPM

re: solar and real estate: One underappreciated aspect of the mania for solar, is that there's a lot of weird financing going on with it. We don't even *look* at houses with solar panels on them, no matter how cheap, because it's nearly impossible to tell up front who owns the panels, and whether or not you'll be stuck with the bill for them. At least with a mobile home there's an established process for checking the separate titles on the land and the trailer. Solar panels... that stuff's very obscure and hard to find out, AFAICT.

Hmmm. That's interesting. I haven't looked into getting them, except maybe as a small portable system to power my ham equipment... but it does make sense that this would be the case. -JPM

Navigating a divorce, my wife and I close on the sale of our former house tomorrow. We are receiving a premium price for it which covers all the investments we've made in the fairly short time we owned it. I am not too upset to be able to sell into the craziness while the music is still going, but I'm quite satisfied with my very modest apartment. My share of the proceeds will put my emergency living expense fund in good order.

For those of you who were paying attention last time. What happens to local government when real estate prices and the property taxes that support them crash?

I have argued so many times with them because my property taxes keep going up because someone else paid too much for a house. Its not like I improved the property! I showed them all the deferred maintenance and they did at least bring it back from the 30% increase this year. No one in their right mind would pay that for my house and even if they would it isn't like they will loan the money for taxes while I live in it. (Sorry rant over there, at least California got that partly right with all kinds of other consequences)

Anyway the original question is back to lenocrats because it isn't like they would accept less than what they have been getting just cause the money isn't real.

In my area, the property taxes didnt fall that much for alot of houses as CA limits how much property taxes are allowed to rise each year, so in their minds, our taxes were undervalued already for houses that have been owned for a number of years. They did a small adjustment, as that made people feel better, and then cut libraries open hours, smaller branches not open at all or once a week, cut class offerings at high schools to only "core" classes needed to meet graduation requirements, this included band and some sports in places, cut some bus routes, like mine. Close all government offices on fridays and give a 20% pay decrease ( which was soon back to what it was (pay) after some years but still with the 4 day work week to this day for some departments) and stopped fixing the roads and other infrastructure, the state version of medicaid, medi-cal, stopped funding dentists and vision -- that is what I can remember for the moment

Atmospheric River

An Utterly Serious Warning

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Thanks.

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How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?

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We won't get fooled again!

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Treasury debt

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synchronicity..

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Predictions are dicey things

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Savings

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