southsider2k5

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 01:18 PM) You are still not addressing the financial lag that I was referring to (and I think Balta was as well). It isn't about taxes. The lag is in the fact that if people took out cash or lowered their payments, then the positive net cash going into the economy from those people is spread out over a few years. As the money fades and cannot be replaced like salaries can, then the economy begins to fizzle. Further added to that is the 2 to 5 year window for people falling out of ARM mortgages and selling their homes on the quick, as mentioned before. Those lag factors are just now starting to become relevant, and will increase in their effect in the coming 5 to 10 years. By the way, this timing will be coincidental with the baby boomers selling their family homes at a higher rate, as they enter retirement. Not a great combination for the housing market. It is about taxes, to a large extent, and in a few different ways. Americans have a negative savings rate, which means every dime they take in, goes out the door and then some. This money comes back to the government time and time again in the form of taxes on all sorts of stuff. Whether it is income taxes through jobs created (or lack of revenue because of jobs lost), or sales taxes, income taxes as people make money on home speculation, inheritance taxes as people die rich because of the spiked value of their home, or anything else... the affect on taxes is there. If people are proping up the American economy through home spending to that extent, the economists would not be adding to revenue expectations right now, because even with the slowdown already underway, there would be an effect (ie loss of revenues, not gains) felt now, and even if you want to assume a lag effect, they would reducing revenue expectation, and not expanding them.

QUOTE(Chisoxfn @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 01:01 PM) Its been discussed a few times as of late by MLB and the Players Union. I think we'll start to see more talks of an international draft, but logistically it could be a very difficult thing to agree to and do. The NHL and NBA seem to do just fine at it... Its only difficult because the players union doesn't want to see it happen.

QUOTE(AbeFroman @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 12:31 PM) #1) I would hardly call the federal reserve a government program. Institutionally, it has practically nothing to do with the government at all. Its decisions cannot controled by Congress or by the President. #2) You conclusion is eroneous. Government deficits are not a good measuring stick of economic performance. If the government spends less, then the budget will shrink even if tax revenues are the same. In 2005, spending by the Federal government did not grow as much as incoming revenue.... So the deficit shrank. Furthermore (and maybe more imporantly) remember that there is a lag in tax revenue. How the Housing market was in Jan 2005 is not indicative of how it is in December... and certainly not indiciative of how it is now. GDP is a much better indication of an economy's performance. And by all accounts GDP is going to be affected by the housing slump. Don't believe me, then just check this out: Bernanke says that we will see a 1% decline in GDP... which sounds minor, but isit has a massive effect on the US (and world) economcy. http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/04/news/econo...on=money_latest #2 wasn't claiming to be an indication of economic conditions. Supposedly all of the record revenues coming in are because of the housing boom, which isn't happening anymore, yet revenues are still even exceeding these record expectations. Also I realize that taxes are a lag of up to a fiscal year... if this is the case, why are they still raising expectations for tax revenues in the future, if the still pending impact of the housing market is totally yet to be felt. If we were looking at this impact on the deficit (which is what we were talking about in the first place) we would need to look at total deficit and tax revenues, which is exactly what I did. QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 12:34 PM) You know as well as I do that the housing market is a totally different beast from the normal economy, in that the economy in many parts can react vastly more rapidly than the housing market. First, the new housing construction market is always going to be a lagging indicator of the state of the housing market, because housing units do not just pop up overnight. It takes months or years for houses that begin to be constructed to hit the market, and it's not exactly a logical move to begin construction on a house and then stop halfway just because there's a downturn in the market, so the jobs in the construction of housing created during the boom won't just all vanish this month because prices started to go down. Secondly, the housing market can take years to adapt to a downturn in housing prices, because not everyone is interested in selling their house simultaneously. Because of the fact that downturns in the housing market only effect a limited number of people at any given time, the duration of the downturn is going to play a very large role in how big of an impact is has on the economy as a whole. A short correction or a soft-landing will have a much more reduced impact than a long period of stagnation in the housing market, because it would only effect the people who were selling at that specific time. Third, at least thus far, the real estate and housing companies have been taking extraordinary steps to try to make sure they are able to sell the houses they currently have, steps which do not show up in housing prices and which have in fact served to provide some measure of economic stimulus on their own. Things like giving away timeshares and new cars to go along with the purchase of a house at a particular price. In other words, its entirely possible that the economy will weather a temporary downturn in housing prices. But the longer and more extreme it is, the more effect it will have on the economy as a whole. #1. Housing starts are down. There is less construction going on right now. We don't even have to look at a lag, because the numbers tell us it is happening right now. #2. Exsisting home sales are down. Prices are flat at best in most areas, and falling in areas which experienced the biggest booms for the most part. Houses are also taking longer to sell. There is no longer a lag here either. Homes that don't sell, don't realize revenues, which don't generate new sales, which don't generate home improvements etc... It is happening right now... or I guess not happening as the case may be. #3. The situation you are speaking of here is for just new home sales, and only those within preestablished subdivisions. This is a niche market, as the vast majority of home sales are exsisting homes, not brand new construction. Something like this isn't going to serve to artificially hold up home prices to much of an extent. QUOTE(Chisoxfn @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 12:56 PM) I could really go on and on cause I'm in the vast minority that feels these programs are amazing. If you want to know why real estate has appreciated so much it is in large part due to the fact that loans are much easier to get now than they were 25 years ago. And currently we can say that now far more than ever. Invest in tulip bulbs lately?

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 12:03 PM) Now that is a good point, which we have discussed before. Much of the quick recovery from the 2001-2002 recession was NOT from any government program, contrary to what some want to believe. It was people taking advantage of really low interest rates to take out equity or re-fi their mortgages or get into bigger, more expensive homes. That particular ingredient will not be such a dominant force in the coming decade. Two things. #1, interest rates were low because a government program, the federal reserve bank, lowered them. #2 If housing is such a huge key to the economy, how can we have a quickly falling budget deficit which has been factored downwards at least twice now in the last year? Also if this is such a huge force, how are tax receipts growing so quickly, while the housing markets is seeing declines like it hasn't seen in a long time?

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/commentary/0,...76_3_0_,00.html Here are some theories and ideas from the 1st episode of season 3

Interesting polls from the Foley fallout... http://www.courant.com/news/politics/hc-fo...dlines-politics

Boy, I'll bet he is kicking himself for not listening to everyone who told him to LEAVE THAT CRAZY b****, when he had the chance...

QUOTE(Texsox @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:24 AM) I remember when I was buying my first house. I received some good intended advice to stretch a little a buy a little more house than was comfortable to pay for today, because each year my income would be growing. Because it was the owner of the company I was working for telling me this, I followed the advice. But there was a difference of a 30 year fixed and an ARM. I knew what my payments would be, I also had a good guess about the tax situation and figured on a couple increases over the next couple years. Bottom line, I was glad I did that. The extra room was great once we started having kids. Without stretching I would have been moving again in a couple years. I was also careful in staying within reason. I knew too many people that were house rich and cash poor. So I understand how some people fall into the siren song of a nicer house than they can afford today. I also understand how the seemingly logical statement of your income will be increasing every year works. It doesn't even have to be high pressure. Just have the person stand in the four bedroom house with the big deck, three car garage, and huge master suite then in the three bedroom, two bath, with the 2 1/2 car garage, and no deck and ask them which place they want to live in today for the same money? We got approved for double what the wife and I figured we could afford. Our realtor kept telling us to try a little higher price to find what we wanted. The appraiser valued our house at a number higher than what we paid for the place, so the banker tried to talk us into taking the extra money out for extra stuff... In other words, the forces trying to get you to over extend are pretty much everyone but yourself. QUOTE(mreye @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:27 AM) Don't lie. You built your first house with logs. Logs? They didn't have axes back then... His first house was a cave. QUOTE(Athomeboy_2000 @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:32 AM) wait, so to get a foreclosed home, I have to have a check ready to pay? I cant take out my own loan? It doesn't matter how you get your money, you have to have it that day at the auction.

QUOTE(Steff @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:25 AM) My jag uncle is running my grama's house into the ground and doesn't have the money for the taxes - which went unpaid last month - so I am on the hunt to obtain that property. It's commercial and I can turn a quick big buck on it. It does take a while for residential property to end up on the market, I want to say something like a year, at least in IN... I don't know if it is different in IL or in commercial property. I would call the courthouse of whatever county the property is in, because odds are the auction will happen there.

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:18 AM) I would have to go see if its still true, but, at one time, you could trade futures and options on bankruptcy and foreclosure rates at the CME. SS2K5, are those contracts still out there? Any open interest? Bankruptcy's were delisted in 03. On the housing end they look like they only have contracts on housing and commerical real estate futures, but not foreclosures.

QUOTE(Steff @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:16 AM) Any idea on houses that the taxes aren't paid on...? That would be the ones (I assume you are talking about property taxes) What happens is in order for the city/county to foreclose they have to make an annoucement of their intentions, which gives the property owner their last legal notification. The notices are usually printed in a legal notices area of the classifieds of a local newspaper. Within that it will give the property location and the intended time of sale. Now the owners have up until that sale starts to pay their back taxes, so not all sales end up at the auction... I have no idea how the bank foreclosure stuff works.

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:12 AM) Except they don't. And actually, I don't agree anyway. I learned that stuff from my parents because I needed to know. Great - I was fortunate. But secondary education is supposed to prepare kids for adult life. To me, finance is just as important as math or English or history. It should be included. I am NOT saying we need to teach home maintenance or meal plans. They have no clue. Why do you think the credit card companies are on college campuses nailing kids as freshmen away from home for the first time, during their first days on campus?

QUOTE(Athomeboy_2000 @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:12 AM) ANyone know of any good places to look for forclosures? Your local newspaper will list all auctions, and they usually occur at the county courthouse. Do your research ahead of time, because they are sold for cash, and they are all as-is.

QUOTE(Soxy @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:09 AM) So, it's okay for him to sleep with a 17 year old female page? I don't see that situation any different from Studds'. Not at all. In fact the whole differences of the way society views that its cool for an old guy to hit on a young girl is pretty discusting if you ask me.

QUOTE(beautox @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 10:51 PM) i thought the 40 man roster didn't have to be set till right before the winter meetings, i could be wrong though. It doesn't have to be... but that doesn't mean the planning and manuvering won't happen before then...

QUOTE(Steff @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 06:04 PM) Happy Birthday to all you guys.. And I'm gonna sneak in an almost HB.. My step-daughter and her hubby are about to be new parents with the birth mother of the baby they are adopting in labor right now! Hopefully all goes well. That has got to be an extremely stressful and exciting thing all at the sametime.

QUOTE(Queen Prawn @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 09:18 PM) Much better...the auctions were removed and the fees were credited. Passwords were changed all-over (in areas where money changes hands). Now if I can figure out who is behind (630) 260-7222 (I swear this isn't an old number I had - the only two I had were 630-985 and the other was work and I can't remember what it was but I would never have used it for ebay). First of all, if you have a phone number, call the police. This is an act of fraud, even though it happened in cyberspace. Second, hopefully you got something out of the live chat. When I had the samekind of problem, that was the most effective tool at actually getting ahold of someone.

QUOTE(kapkomet @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 09:17 PM) The caution is, you have to know your market - REALLY understand it. Most people don't. That's my point. They focus on the payment, and they aren't thinking about the other side. Listen to the ads for ARMs. Not now, but two years ago. (stupid announcer guy voice) Now YOUUUUUUUUUU can have a $500,000 mortgage for just $499 a month. Call me NOW to find out HOWWWW... (/end) That baits people. And it's a quick sell for realtors. Again, I'm not saying that it's NOT for everyone, but you have to be careful, and most people don't understand that. You do, Steff does, "finance types" do, but I think I said the same thing when this came up before, most people don't. And there you go. By and large the general public has no idea about financial tools. When they have their banker tell them that this is a good idea, and that the person can afford it, and you mix in a dose of appraiser who would say my ass is really a $500,000 condo, and you have a recipe for disaster.

QUOTE(Rex Kicka** @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 06:33 PM) If I recall correctly, the only thing the Democrats could do, they did. They can't kick him out of the body because he didn't commit a crime. They DID censure him. They DID even go so far as hire an independent prosecutor to investigate the charges against him and found nothing. The Democrats made serious changes to the page program to protect the pages and give them more serious supervision. How many independent prosecutors have the GOP led Congress put forth to see what's going on? And furthermore, exactly who in the Democratic leadership of 2006 was protecting the jackass in the scandal back in 1983? That's like me using Nixon's dirty tricks in 1972 and 1973 to justify alleged wrong doing for the Clinton administration. Pointless, inane and misleading. It's just a tactic of people who want to deflect criticism from the Republicans because they can't stomach the fact that everything this leadership says they believe in, they don't actually give a s*** about. The only thing that they could do? Did they pull their support for him as a canditate? Did they allow him to caucus with them? Did they publicly call him to the matt and say he doesn't represent the democratic part and we don't want him running as one? Heck he got appointed to leadership positions, which means the dems had to support him. Heck he got reelected that 5 times and that doesn't happen without the support of your party, which I guess means the democratic leadership gives it tacit approval for having sex with 17 year old kids according to what I am reading here in another post. It also means they don't really seem to give a s*** about reelecting and empowering admited child predators/molestors, who just happened to be lucky they were in Washington DC and not another state, or they would have been imprisioned. I know Foley is a scumbag, who deserves his turn in prision. Heck I will lock his ass in there, along with anyone who protected him. But my point that we aren't seeing practiced, what is being preached, as usual. The way that this is being portrayed is that the entire republician party had real time access to all of this information, and decided to not only do nothing, they decided to conduct one of the worst coverups since I don't know when. Even if you believe all of the names bantered about in the media we are still talking about literally a handful of actual elected officials knew something, and we still don't know exactly what they knew. Even if we assume they knew the worst of it, somehow I doubt they ran back to all of the rest of their peers and said "hey guess what I heard about Foley!", which blows the whole systematic thing out of the water. Its kinda hard to give approval to something you don't know about. Its different. It's always different.

John Lennon would have been 66 today.... Imagine.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/09/real_estat...06100911cnn=yes

It will be interesting to see what his posting fee is...

Another random thought here.... if it isn't OK to group the radical Islamists as represently all Islam, why is it OK to paint all repubs are being a part of this scandal? Guys like Hastert I understand, but unless Dems are calling the entire party coverup artists and child molesters, this should be affecting anyone except the few people who have been named, right?

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 02:24 PM) I wasn't talking about Social Security. Compared to Medicare, Social Security is perfectly fine. We only have a Social Security problem in the sense that we have a general fund problem - because we're running a deficit right now, we're not saving up money like we are supposed to in order to deal with that program. Medicare on the other hand is an absolute disaster and shows no signs of getting better without serious and massive health care reform. Medicare is the perfect example of why the government shouldn't get into business where the private sector is much more effecient. There are a few ideas I have to help the system outside of medicare... First of all there is an employee shortage in most of the medical sectors. Lots of it is self-imposed because of things like litigant happy lawyers suing the system dry, a big part of it is the huge expense of becoming anything in the healthcare industry, such as the price of medical school. Another thing that would cut medical errors and fraud by a HUGE percentage is to get the entire health and pharma industries onto an electronic system for all drugs and prescriptions. A couple things would be at work there... #1-stupid things like handwriting errors would be elimated, as everything would be electronically entered by the doctor. It would be emailed to the pharmacy of the patients choice, where it theoretically could be waiting for them by the time they get there. #2-Doctor hopping would be eliminated because the persons file would have information on all of their perscriptions #3-Drug interactions would be instantly flagged, instead of depending on incomplete information from a doctor or a pharamcy who might not know everything the patient is on. #4-no call approval needed for narcotics, because by sending the script the doc is giving it his OK. There are some other things I have thought about in the past, but can't remember right now... I am sure I'll have more later.

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 02:14 PM) Ok, I see your point on the things that would help better and agree with you (although, would this president actually use a line-item veto?) that those would work better. I am still going to argue though that the deficit right now is a major concern, not as much because of the size of it now, but because of the size of it in the future. In my view, we're sitting there staring at a bill which is guaranteed to come up in a few years to pay for the baby-boom retirement. There's simply no way around it...we aren't going to be able to suddenly deny them health care after taxing them for Medicare for all those years. That bill is going to come whether we like it or not. So here's the metaphor...you've just bought something, say a car, that you don't have to pay for until the start of 2008. Do you a.) save up money in 2007 to make those payments easier, or b.) pretend you don't have that bill coming up, and keep spending and spending and spending in 2007? No one has the guts to actually fix social security. People who think they are going to be able to retire on full benefits without getting their taxes raise are just naive. Everytime it gets talked about the AARP and special interest groups like that fly into action, and rally the troops... In reality there are only two ways or a combination of two things that will fix the system 1- Raise taxes on FICA 2- Reduce benefits on FICA Anything that doesn't include those at least one of those two things in some way shape or form is a complete waste of time. The sooner we do it the better, but neither party wants to alienate the voting seniors to get something right done. I harbor no delusions about getting government aid when I retire. I don't expect a dime to be around by then.