Recent Tweets that caught my eye: Surging housing supply in select cities, China’s massive shipbuilding, mainstream media deathbed, strangely rising mortgage refis, and how to rescue a hedgehog.
Weapons to Ukraine
Is Blinkin itching for WWIII?
Mainstream Media Deathbed
Fast Food Prices
Give Credit to Biden
How to Rescue a Hedgehog
For those who say I only post negative news, here’s a great story. If you like this, I will post more in my Weekend Tweet articles.
Not Just Bankruptcies, Liquidations Are Rising
Massive Homebuilder Supply in Some Cities
Rising Inventory
Child Trafficking
Shipbuilding
The Wall Street Journal is constantly in support of more military spending everywhere. Not once do any of these writers ever say how they propose to pay for anything.
Worse Off Than a Year Ago?
Adam’s chart was from WSJ. My charts were from a Fed survey.
Expect More Inflation
Mortgage Refis Rising
Refis Rising From Low Levels
“That it’s heading up again now with the highest rates in 20 years shouldn’t just be dismissed.”
I agree with the above comment. In absolute terms, refis are at a very low level. But why are they rising at all? People are taking a 3 percent mortgage and refinancing for a 7 percent mortgage.
Q: Why?
A: Consumer stress to pay bills is high and rising.
New Home Sales Sink 4.7 Percent on Top of Huge Negative Revisions
New Home Sales plunged. And the Census Department completely revised away last month’s fictional 8.8 percent rise.
For discussion, please see New Home Sales Sink 4.7 Percent on Top of Huge Negative Revisions
Expect Big Negative Revisions to BLS Monthly Jobs in 2023
On April 24, the BLS released a little-read jobs report that shows reported jobs in 2023 may be wildly overstated. In turn, that means GDP is likely overstated as well.
For discussion, please see Expect Big Negative Revisions to BLS Monthly Jobs in 2023, GDP Too
Consistently large negative revisions are the hallmark of recessions.
Homebuilders Have the Most Inventory Since May 2008
Speculative building, measured by started but unsold housing inventory, is at the highest level since May of 2008. To unload these units, builders will have to offer steep discounts.
For discussion, please see Homebuilders Have the Most Inventory Since May 2008, Big Discounts Coming
On the brighter side, we know how to rescue a hedgehog.
“The Biden Admin’s desperate plot to remove the Guatemalan Attorney General just got more insane. Remember, she’s investigating child trafficking at the US border and how the Biden Admin may be involved.”
Reminds me of the Biden meddling that got Shokin fired in Ukraine.
What I find amazing, having seen the movie about child trafficking which is one of the favored tactics of how Intel Services get control of politicians and others, is that it is perhaps true that the widely mocked Q-Anon was right all along.
Though I would guess it is not a wholly left wing thing. The Pedo Project may be mostly left wing but not entirely
Refinances could also be strategic.
If you think the market is set to crash, getting your cash out makes sense.
Selling is hard. Grabbing your cash and planning to let the bank have the house is easy. It’ll trash your credit score, but you will have a big pile of cash, so who cares?
Most people wouldn’t have enough cash to last them a LIFETIME. After you trash your credit good luck getting an affordable auto loan, credit card or a decent landlord to rent to you. Most people don’t think about the consequences of ruining your credit. They find out 1st hand after they ruined their credit.
Laura – young people DONT CARE about this. They are pissed at what has been done to them by boomers and the system. Assuming they care is a mistake
One of the interesting things I seen this weekend was a supposed video of a guy shooting Ukraine military officers who were trying to drag someone off to the war. From what I could see it appeared to be an older guy. Being one myself I have to wonder if I wouldn’t do the same thing.
Ukraine is finished. They’d be wise to take Russia’s most recent offer but seems we have a bunch of morons here in the US that insist on getting their teeth kicked in first and we’re all going to pay the price over a bunch of idiots egos.
We ditched paid TV 10 years ago. I hooked up an antenna waiting for cable at the new home. Ending up catching over 100 free channels.
Cancelled the cable TV order. Add to it free Samsung channels and Pluto, it’s easily several hundred channels but even with all those channels we rarely watch TV and absolutely not news on it.
Streaming was fun for a while but that got old quick. Almost no new content or content we wanted to watch so we cancelled that as well.
For news I go to podcasts that talk about global politics which the US legacy media doesn’t touch because it exposes the US uniparty of gaslighting sycophants.
wWe live rural and recently got unlimited satellite internet for $65 month. It’s fast, can watch movies etc. It doesn’t go out anymore than our satellite tv did. We had it years ago but it was over $100 a month for a half ass data plan and you couldn’t watch much and we’ve been without for awhile. So this new service is really cool as we don’t have any hard lines here. The satellite tv providers kept going up in price so the wife was always switching around and one portion of the house ended up looking like a used satellite dish parking lot I chewed her ass out I just had a new roof not too long ago and seems she’s always having a different service screw crap to the top of the house I told her this was the last time. I spent yesterday afternoon pulling all this junk off.
This is all you need to know about the “unexplained” surge in sudden deaths:
“If the sudden deaths we’re seeing were occurring in the unvaccinated, this would be on every news channel 24/7. But it’s not.”
Here’s what’s truly alarming:
“The employed [people] of our country are dropping dead and getting disabled at a rate that is beyond the general population. I blame the vaccines. If it’s not that, then what is it? And why are we talking about it?”
link to t.me
It’s obvious what the reason is, which is why they won’t talk about it. The official narrative was “safe and effective.”
Again … this is having an enormous impact on the job market:
link to t.me
AWAKE GP SHARES WHAT SHE IS SEEING NZ…
Last night I had a speaking event in a small South Island NZ town.
The hall was full, with an engaged, enthusiastic and intelligent audience.
After we finished, one of the people who came forward to speak with me, introduced herself as a GP.
She is a working GP.
She shared that their medical practice is absolutely swamped with patients….
She told me that the nature of the consultations has changed.
Now there are many more serious, complex and multi system conditions….that are rarely if ever seen in a GP practice.
Her observation was fully in line with the quote from a recent Herald article about the crumbling of Emergency Department care in hospitals….because of sheer numbers AND the increasingly complex and serious nature of presenting conditions.
Yes – the GP believes she knows why she is seeing this.
She is awake. Overworked, concerned, but awake
People Refinancing now are:
Absolutely taking paper money “equity” gains out for 1 of 2 reasons
1) they have a crazy need to continue the illusion of success and keeping up with the neighbors is hard when brutal 100% compounded inflation over the last 4 years has cut your discretionary to ZERO or negative. Same shit was happening in the 2002-2006 time frame before OOPS
2) they are thinking they are amazing investors and either want to quit their job and “trade” full time with this needed bank roll or they just want to YOLO in to bitfraud and NVDA and all kinds of 1999 Cisco and Pets.com type dogshit that they have been conditioned to believe only goes up. This too will be a March 2000+ OOPS
The mechanics and tactics may be different but the human behaviors and greed never change.
So.e because they need to pay off high interest c/c debt
I’m in my 70s. I haven’t watched an MSM news program since the build up (the MSM lies) of the Iraq war. The lies were an insult to anyone with a double digit IQ. I haven’t watch a non-news ‘show’ on mainstream TV for about 30 years. I seriously don’t see what people enjoy when watching the garbage on the TV and as for paying some stupid company like COMCAST to broadcast that $hite to your home, well I have no idea what value for money you think you are getting…..you must have a single digit IQ.
Perhaps Biden’s higher rates are forcing the hedge funds and private equity to finally sell these “freebee” properties as they cant make their profits unless they can borrow money at the special zero percent they did for 14 years. A big cheer if that is finally happening.
Yes, China is becoming dominant in many areas, such as ship building.
And Mish has commented many times on how China has become dominant in solar panels, windmills, nuclear power, EVs, high speed electric rail, rare earth metal refining, etc.
China, is leading by example. In 2022 they added 87GW of solar. In 2023 they added 217 GW of solar. In comparison the US has installed a “total” of 175 GW of solar since we started in 1973. China added more solar energy in 2023 than we added in 50 years.
Wind numbers are the similar. China added 77 GW of wind in 2023 to reach a total wind capacity of 440 GW. In the US our total wind capacity is 141 GW.
Yes, China still uses a lot of coal and is currently the biggest emitter of CO2 in the world. But with their rapid acceleration of wind and solar, 2024 will be the turning point for them. Expect 2024 to be the peak of China’s coal consumption. By the end of 2024 or early 2025, China’s coal consumption will begin decline. Simply because they continue to add so much wind and solar.
And this will continue. Because more renewables will make China less dependent on coal imports, and will lead to them becoming the lowest cost energy country in the world. Which will give them another economic advantage in their desire to out compete the US and everyone else.
great investment ideas……….thank you
But do wind and solar work? Can it be counted on?
Are there locations where it does work?
A recent CSIS think tank study admits that China’s shipbuilding capacity is 230x greater than the United States.
Regime media deserves its extinction. What they’ve done is pure, unfiltered treason and is the exact opposite of informing the citizenry. No forgiveness. Ever.
They have the capacity. Doesn’t mean they are using 100% of it.
If you go here
link to statista.com
You can see Korea + Japan = China. Even Europe is much greater than America.
But so what. Does the US have to dominate ever last industry in the whole world?
According to Peter Zaihan their Navy is vastly inferior to the USA. This is mic fear mongering.
Hasn’t the media/evening news always appealed to the Social Security set? I remember watching Walter Cronkite in the 1970s and his sponsors were products like Polygrip (hold your dentures to your gums) and Metamucil (if you suffered from constipation).
True, but the advertisers hate that, and not just for the news.
link to en.wikipedia.org
Yes. Mostly because the elderly are a captive audience.
Younger people with energy are moving around doing things. The elderly mostly just sit around because that’s all they can do.
Israeli special forces soldiers who support Bibi revolted against Gallant, Israel’s defense minister and Halevi, Israel’s chief of staff. Gallant and Gantz support Biden’s suicide pill : three whore states for a peace deal with MBS. The fascists, waving flags along with the hostages families, want to oust Bibi, to save Israel’s democracy before it’s too late.
Refi rates: That PPG graph looks to be the only one showing useful information. The other two weirdly clipped versions of what looks like the same ConorSen graph are clearly misleading.
PPG shows no real change for the last couple years.
When you refinance a mortgage it goes from a non-recourse loan to a full-recourse loan.
The bank can now come after your personal assets.
A point that is never mentioned and the typical borrower doesn’t realise.
Yes. In addition, if one buys a house for cash, then later gets a mortgage, that is considered a refinance, even with no prior mortgage.
This aint good if you are refinancing into a rising interest rate environment.
Like a huge student loan in “gender studies”, you may have sealed your financial fate.
Only 12 states are Non-Recourse.
The rest already can come after you regardless of whether it’s your first loan or not. Guessing you live in one of those 12.
Facing Possible Cash Crunch, Giant Real Estate Fund Limits Withdrawals
Starwood Real Estate Income Trust is restricting what investors can redeem rather than sell its properties to raise cash.
By Maureen Farrell
May 23, 2024
A giant real estate fund managed by the company of the billionaire investor Barry Sternlicht is limiting the amount of money that investors can redeem, in an attempt to fend off a potential cash crunch as high interest rates pummel the market for commercial properties like office buildings.
Starwood Real Estate Income Trust, which manages about $10 billion and is one of the largest real estate investment trusts around, said on Thursday that it would buy back only 1 percent of the value of the fund’s assets every quarter, down from 5 percent earlier.
Starwood said that it had chosen to tighten the limit because it was facing more withdrawals than it could meet with its cash on hand, and that it was a better option than raising money by selling properties at discounted prices. The value of commercial properties has fallen — hit both by lower occupancy since the coronavirus pandemic and by high interest rates that make real estate less affordable.
…
link to nytimes.com
“The median age of an MSNBC viewer is 70 years old.Fox News is 69, and even MTV is 51 years old.”
How can I profit from it?
Short MSM.
I would prefer to milk the boomers with the following:
1. They love ICE trucks & cars and their homes, especially fancy ones and RVs. My choice of profiting off boomers here is insurance companies.
2. They need pharmaceuticals to extend their last days. My choice here is big pharma stocks.
3. They love to travel (in those cars above) and on airplanes so I have oil stocks.
4. They love to eat and eat and eat so have food stocks.
5. They love to collect social security so I invest in T-bills, TLT and other bonds.
Shorting the MSM would be a fool’s errand, the boomer group has the most wealth and they are glued to MSN and FoxNews so buying these companies now would be a prudent move since they are in deep value territory if you are inclined to invest in media companies. Personally, I like internet advertises over old media so I picked up a few stocks in this group as well but that’s for the long term.
Buy QCOM AI computers that can kill the media hosts, launch a cyber attack against Iran and improve mgt. Wait for the price to come down, to BU 2021 high,
The Mogambo Guru was on this thing called ‘the internet’ 25 years ago.
Wait for the IPO on Batesville.
MSNBC 70? I am surprised at that
Nice overview of the world in 3 minutes … the Utne reader for twitter!
Positive news: Elon’s 4th Starship launch upcoming. Will change economics of space (commercial and military …maybe drop Gaza aid from Space someday)
Indeed it will change everything in just about every sector.
Urgent deliveries (FedEx/UPS/DHL) get a new meaning using Starship although I wonder what is so valuable to launch across the planet that couldn’t be built/inventoried close-by.
Downside is Kessler Syndrome eventually.
Well if you need a hundred tons of something in an hour on the other side of the planet, SpaceX can do it.
Only if you want it in Orbit.
SpaceX doesn’t land it again.
It is built to land stuff too.
NONE of the MSM is reliable including Fox. Each Shows host slants “the news” to their politics/ideology. We just dropped ALL of our TV Stations/Cable yesterday. We’re only watching what’s available on Roku. We get better information from Shows/podcasts, etc. from Rumble. I like hosts that back up what they say with facts (i.e. Mish Posts). I also have several websites I check for news/info. Mishtalk is my favorite website. I appreciate the charts and back up info in addition to his opinions – which he explains why.
I mostly watch CNBC, Schwab Network, or Bloomberg TV+ because that’s where the people who love money hang out.
Rev. Ike loves money –
link to m.youtube.com
I suspect people refi-ing now are a small group on variable rate loans and can’t bear the pain/fear that rates might edge higher again and want to end that potential fear at all cost. Again all driven by Biden deficit-caused inflation.
After the fiasco in Ukraine, its shameless that Biden is trying to get an attorney general of yet another country fired to cover up his family’s misdeeds…. and what kind of sicko is trafficking in children?
What kind of sicko is trafficking in children? I would suspect most of our political leaders as well as a sizable portion of the elites in most fields. Narcissistic people that see themselves as “Gods”. See Andrenochrome.
How would a refi from a 3% into a 7% work? That makes no sense?
Even assuming the borrower has a fair amount of equity to take out, the monthly payment would more than double – and if cash / income is a problem there is a high probability the bank will reject the new loan.
If the borrower is actually refinancing credit card debt into a home equity loan (aka 2nd mortgage) at 7%, that would make some sense (assuming again the borrower has equity in the house). 7% is much better than the interest rate on a credit card
But the borrower would be crazy to refi 3% into 7%, and the lender too (much higher credit risk, much higher capital charge)
You lose your job and have to move to another city to take another job. Unless you want to rent, you have to take the hit and rebuild your finances.
That would be a move, not a refi
True.
Your scenario is a new loan, not a refi. Mortgages are not transferable.
Willie’s question remains open.
Yeah I don’t understand it either. Especially when you’d be far better off with a HELOC where only the fresh borrowed amount is at 7% and the original mortgage remains at 3%.
If you NEED the money you probably wouldn’t get approved for a HELOC. Requirements for these types of mortgages are stricter. Also some people want a lower payment. If you take out a 30 yr mortgage and refi after 10 years your new mortgage will be 30 years again.
Definitely not correct.
Go to this site
link to mortgagecalculator.org
Put in 400K home, 300K down and 100K loan at 30 years and 3%. Monthly payment is 421 dollars. Then it shows after year 10 you still own 76K.
Then go back and put in 400K home, 324K down and 76K loan at 30 years and 7 percent. Monthly payment is now 505.
You went backwards.
cheaper than c/c.
I wrote “If the borrower is actually refinancing credit card debt into a home equity loan…”
The borrower gets a second mortgage in order to purchase something expensive like a new Lexus, etc.. Generally, the property owner wants money and isn’t going anywhere.
Please no happy hedgehog stories. There is an oversupply elsewhere. Black swan stories, please.
Fox beats CNN and MSNBC ratings. I watch none of the above list. Retired boomers groupthinks are watching Fox and CNN bc they agree with them. Bring more baby animal stories to beat Tucker, Stephen, Col Micky and Scott Ritter. After their RE collapse China stimulated ship buildings and EV. The Hooties are hurting China. S.Africa might join the “club” hunting Zionist ships near Cape of Good Hope.
It will be a different world when Hooters goes to China.
“America must rebuild its maritime sector,…”
Yeah! Some Fed enriched retard should “Inveeest” in it! That’ll do it!. Never mind America not having had anyone capable of building a fishboat for 30 years by now.
Of course: “We”, that’d be taxpayers, must make it worth vile for the great “inveeeestors”; by guaranteeing the a return!
That way, our “data driven” reports can show that Biden has a “marine sector.” And that “we’re the Greatest.” Never mind we not being capable of building anything larger than Phelps which even floats.
America can build yachts for oligarchs. Then there is Huntington Ingalls building military ships in Newport News, i.e on artificial support. And then, nothing…
Once you let the shipbuilding industry wither, it will never come back.
The US Navy has large carriers and mini carriers – like LHA 7 and 8 with F-35B and Osprey. The navy can launch drones like the ones that attack the Russian fleet in the black sea to protect Taiwan.
Are anyone still building big yachts in the US anymore? AFAIK Palmer Johnson had no choice but to save money by building in that famous cheap labor and “low-environmental standards” (indoctrineese for Twump’s too incompetent to compete) country, The Netherlands, by now. They did build some very nice boats in the US, back when The US was still a first-world, industrialized country.
I have a family of hedgehogs in my yard and occasionally I ask them for financial and relational advice but they keep their opinions to themselves.
Doug, where do you live?
I live in France in the Paris region. I have a place where the city becomes rural so we are surrounded by fields of grain and horses yet I am 35 minutes from the center of Paris by car. I am American but my wife is French so I have a foot in both worlds. Since the area has been pesticide-free for something like twenty years, we have an incredible amount of wildlife.
You are a very lucky man. And I’m sure that more than just luck was involved.
It was luck that I met a French girl in Africa 1978.
LOL. God Bless. I have a hometown friend moved to France 30 plus years ago, around that area, married French women, 3 kids.
Technie but one hell of a bass player.
I had a pet albino african pygmy hedgehog when I was in college (20 years ago). Very interesting pet. Had him for 7 years.
The inflationary depression is barreling along just fine!
Look for the coming deflationary depression, which is what wide deployment of AI/Automation/Robots will bring on.
link to m.youtube.com
Death by ToothFairy…
The scourge of economies everywhere….
There is no record for Democrats to run on, (just a legacy of battlefield defeats, runaway inflation, frightening genital mutilation atrocities, martial law, forced mRNA injections, the obliteration of small businesses, lawfare, and the contamination of culture with divisive and destructive marxism). So they gotta smear Trump and anyone opposed to the Imperial City’s plundering, blundering, and war profiteering).
If the Dems win, it will be because of one issue — old men telling young women they will be forced to raise their rapist’s baby or they will be jailed (that is exactly what the state laws say) isnt playing well with the younger women. Thats if the Dems win ….