E
Eeyore
- Jan 1, 1970
- 0
John said:Bubbles always do, and the people who wait til the peak to jump in are
the ones that get hosed. I bought my house at "the worst possible
time" so it's worth maybe 4x what I paid for it.
What's anti-American in pointing out that stock markets around the
world have all gone done in the past week in reaction to to reports
that several of the U.S. "sub-prime" mortgage sellers are in financial
problems because their clients are having to default on their mortages
in large enough numbers to depress the housing market?
What would be a "pro-American" stance? That of an ostrich with its
head buried in the sand?
I was a home owner in England in 1990 when that housing price bubble
burst
What? With Islamic servants?
...Jim Thompson
Buy low, wait, sell high. It's not all that complex.
John
The Channel may save you yet again.
John
Mine's getting on for being worth 10x what I paid (admittedly 24 yrs ago).
Graham
Jim said:Not likely, the Brits are already overrun.
Not likely, the Brits are already overrun. They've even had some
bombings.
...Jim Thompson
Your perennial hope that terrible things will happen to the US.
They
likely won't in your lifetime, you know. You take hope in the
occasional negative glitch, but the longterm trends are good. Sorry.
You could try shutting up. This ostrich thing implies that you are
anticipating disaster. I'm not.
My only problem is how really hard it
is to find employees these days.
Bubbles always do, and the people who wait til the peak to jump in are
the ones that get hosed.
I bought my house at "the worst possible
time" so it's worth maybe 4x what I paid for it. In California,
property tax is pinned to the purchase price, even better.
Continental Europe has a bigger problem: unless people start making
babies fast, it's facing a population demographic on the scale of the
Black Death. What will that do for the housing market? For industry?
For defense? Whatever, it won't be a glitch. Hey, maybe I can buy a
villa or two in Tuscany.
Any excuse to live off your wife, eh?
And why not? If I'd insisted on maximising my income at the expense of
hers, we'd we a lot worse off than we are now.
John said:Your perennial hope that terrible things will happen to the US.
Continental Europe has a bigger problem: unless people start making
babies fast, it's facing a population demographic on the scale of the
Black Death.
It's interesting that the US has about 6 million Muslims, and nearly
zero resulting problems. Arab Muslims, in particular, are well
represented in engineering and have higher than average household
incomes. Black Muslims do much worse, partly because many Black
Muslims converted while in prison.
John said:It's interesting that the US has about 6 million Muslims
, and nearly
zero resulting problems. Arab Muslims, in particular, are well
represented in engineering and have higher than average household
incomes. Black Muslims do much worse, partly because many Black
Muslims converted while in prison.
Arab Muslims do better than Black Muslims because most of the Arab
Muslims were rich enough to get educated elsewhere in the world and
rich enough to be able immigrate to the U.S. Black Muslims are drawn
from your home-bred poor, with all the disadvantages that entails.
Have a look at "Inequality by Design, Cracking the Bell Curve Myth"
by the Sociology Department at Berkley - ISBN-10: 0691028982 ISBN-13:
978-0691028989 - which is still available from Amazon, new and used,
for $29.95 or less.
I'd much prefer that they didn't - when the U.S. sneezes, Europe and
Australia catch cold. The fact that the U.S. has been running a huge
balance of payments deficit for the past twenty years is rather
worrying from this point of view, and I'd greatly prefer the sort of
soft landing that a responsible administration might be able to
engineer, if you ever manage to elect one with some kind of contact
with reality.
I do hope you are right.
That is the ostrich thing. New Orleans didn't anticipate Katrina, and
it cost them dearly.
disaster - involves making sure that if something does go wrong, the
equivalents of the dykes, or oil reserves or whatever are available to
minimise the consequences.
The current crisis in the "sub-prime" mortgage market has a lot in
common with the savings and loan disaster of the 1980's. Those who
don't know history are condemned to repeat it.
You probably need to spread your net a little wider.
So how do you know when a market has peaked?
And where do you live
while you are waiting to find out?
Sociology is the least rational of all the soft sciences, and UCB
collects the goofiest of sociologists. The only academic field that's
arguably worse is Labor Relations.
The foreign trade defecit will be a problem only if someone does try
to "engineer" it. If the dollar drops a bit more, Boeing will be happy
and Airbus may go under.
I grew up in New Orleans, and was up all night when the eye of Betsy
passed over the city, leaving devastation. The Lakefront flooded then,
too. Everybody knew the "ideal" hurricane (and Katrina wasn't even
that) would eventually cover the city, and the pumping stations, with
12 feet of water. But the Big Easy, The City that Care Forgot, Laissez
Les Bon Temps Roulle (really, that's the way they say it), forgot to
care. Hell, it took them 20 years to install guard rails on some
terrible roadway curves, and then they installed them backwards, sharp
edge out.
Anticipating disaster - as opposed to expecting
My last hire was from Houston. I met him here.
When it is accepted wisdom that real estate is a good investment, and
everybody is doing it.
Wherever you already are?