Home Prices Moving Up

Just out is the press release on housing…

New York, February 23, 2016 – S&P Dow Jones Indices today released the latest results for the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices. Data released today for December 2015 show that home prices continued their rise across the country over the last 12 months. More than 27 years of history for these data series is available, and can be accessed in full by going to www.homeprice.spdji.com. Additional content on the housing market can also be found on S&P Dow Jones Indices’ housing blog: www.housingviews.com.  

Year-over-Year  The S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index, covering all nine U.S. census divisions, recorded a slightly higher year-over-year gain with a 5.4% annual increase in December 2015 versus a 5.2% increase in November 2015. The 10-City Composite increased 5.1% in the year to December compared to 5.2% previously. The 20-City Composite’s year-over-year gain was 5.7%, the same as November.  

Portland, San Francisco and Denver continue to report the highest year over year gains among the 20 cities with another month of double digit annual price increases. Portland led the way with an 11.4% year-over-year price increase, followed by San Francisco with 10.3% and Denver with a 10.2% increase. Thirteen cities reported greater price increases in the year ending December 2015 versus the year ending November 2015. Phoenix had the longest streak of year-over-year increases, reporting a gain of 6.3% in December 2015, and the twelfth consecutive increase in annual price gains. Detroit posted a 7.1% year-over-year price, up from 6.3%, the largest annual increase this month. 

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We do note on this last chart that housing prices are back to where they were in 2005…And that’s the price only.  Doesn’t count commissions or the effects of inflation so draw your own conclusions.

Mine is it is still far better to be your own landlord than make someone else rich while you miss the benefits of home ownership…

If – as we have been hypothecating for a while – we see a major fifth wave up in the market, then we may see an astronomical housing recovery and zoom onto new highs if a fifth macro Elliott wave shows us.

We have experienced a lot of “price compression” in the market place, yet when I go out and buy building materials, the prices have not come down and if this is the case going forward, then the fifth wave in stocks could bring housing up to new all time levels as well.

Talk to your builders…they might see this too.  When house prices where whacked in many places by 50 percent in the 2008-2009 period, the materials prices can down a much more restrained 10-20 percent.

Where are all the doom prophets today?  LOL…(I crack myself up sometimes…)

Market Breather?

We are still expecting this to be a generally sideways kind of week in the market…. because now with Housing data in, the next psychological hurdle is the G20.

Overnight, Asia was down about half a percent and ditto things in Europe.

Futures in the US were up about 30 on the Dow after the Housing report.

Got a pet theory here:  There is nothing good about peace, at least insofar at the global economy is concerned, because it’s all turning into a massive mish-mash of too big to fails.  It used to be that it was banks.  But now, with yields very low for a long period of time, where will insurance companies come up with the gains they have wrongly anticipated in order to make good on annuities and such?

At what point would the insurance business have to start unloading prodigious amounts of real estate (mostly commercial) in order to help fund their annuity obligations?  And when it happens, will that turn into a huge drag on the economy?

Worse: Would the insurance clans begin to position themselves as too big to fail?  Could they make a case that “If you don’t bail us out, we will start dumping our stock and bond portfolios right and left and you – governments of the world – can’t handle that….

After that – once the insurance folks figure out that they could follow in the “Too Big” footsteps crafted by the banksters and was A.I.G. a test run?  Could the defense industry then follow as well?  “Give us a moderate sized war because we will lay off umpteen zillion people if we can sell planes, missiles, tanks, and militaria…”

On to the high points of strong-armed complexity.  Groups spanning from the local Black Lives Matter to the Banksters at the top, the macro-trend is for every-increasing strong-arming of the public’s mindset and purse….

Speaking of BLM and Racism…

The headline this morning is a fine example of what I’m talking about – this notion that hypercomplexity eventually bubbles into uselessness:  “Black Lives Matter slams public library’s ban on blacks-only meetings as racist…”

Of course, I’m sure if the Klan was to pull off the same thing – wanting to use a public meeting place but then applying race as an entrance criteria, BLM (and Ure’s truly) would have a problem with that.  But with the shoe on the other foot, BLM is asking for special rules for them.

No…equality is the point:  Everyone wants equality and this how that stuff works.  Race is not a criteria in any direction.  Otherwise, it’s just a matter of “who owns the best racism plan this week.”

Hypercomplexity – and how we deal with it – is the most important issue out there.  Sadly, it is being widely trivialized.  I got a product announcement overnight about two new decks of playing cards that are in the works.  One features financial collapse while the other one is themed nuclear war.

Ha, ha….very funny until you’re dead.

The Daily Obama Bash

We don’t generally get into the herd/pile-on relative to the chief executive, but failure to actually secure the border or, to name another promise, shut down Gitmo, does tempt us from time to time.

Especially when we read headlines like “White House expected to meet Guantanamo plan deadline, but it won’t change much in Congress.”  If you have trouble with the math doesn’t this pencil out to 7-years of doing nothing and then producing only a plan

OK, too harsh?  Not as harsh as one of the presidential candidates puts it “Ben Carson: Obama was ‘raised white.’

Ben Carson’s books are still worth reading regardless of which political party you’ve been suckered into, since both are owned by corporations and DC law firms from a real policy standpoint.

The U.S.Department of Self-Congratulations

Seems to have been founded by John Kerry as Kerry “Hails Deal With Russia for Syria Ceasefire.”

Write down where you read it first:  This will blow up and end badly.  There are just too many defense contractors and war-making is just too big a business for peace to be really affordable.

Europe Rediscovered “Borders”

And with Greece holding the bag as the main thoroughfare into the former European Union, quickly becoming EUrabia, the headline that Greece Blasts Austria as More Migrants Stranded is not surprise whatsoever.

Europe is waking up to the idea that there are too many people for massive free lunch programs. 

If you’re waiting for numbskulls in Washington to figure this out, too, don’t hold your breath.  They are playing for personal profit and re-election and if they actually solved anything they would have to move on to other problems.

And change, my friend, is never welcome anywhere.

Global Subsidence?

Got another interesting story going bout how sea level is rising faster than anyone expected.

It isn’t just the article over at the AAAS site (Sea levels are rising at their fastest rate in 2000 years) that have our attention.  It’s also that the story (Seas are now rising faster than they have in 2,800 years, scientists say) is getting traction in the Washington Post.

A couple of “reality checks” here:

First, I have yet to see the meaningful study of global thermodynamics.  Let me explain:  We have a couple of huge areas called polar caps.  But think of them as ice cubes.  Since the last Ice age, they have been cool.  But now a lot of the ice is coming up on the cross-over temp where the state-change to water takes place.

Since output from the sun drives a lot of things, seems pretty logical that any time you’re not descending into an Ice Age you can call the period you’re in “global warming” and do so with a lawyer-like straight face.

But the other missing piece of the puzzle is how much of the sea level rise is caused by land mass erosion?

Again, simple math problem – but we know, just to use an example (from Wikipedia) “The prehistoric and historic delta lobes of the Mississippi River Delta have influenced the formation of the Louisiana coastline and led to the creation of over 4 million acres of coastal wetlands”

I may not be the brightest bulb in the ham sandwich (or whatever the old saying is) but seems to me that if one river system alone creates 4-million acres of new land, then perhaps the remaining water out at sea will be displace and rise.

This is not to mention the thermal expansion of water problem

Good news?  All of this is nothing that a quick nuclear war won’t fix.  Of course, salinity levels would go up and 6-billion plus would die..but hey!  Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few, now, can we?

20 thoughts on “Home Prices Moving Up”

  1. Looks like the jerks who kept Gitmo open have gotten their wish. They get you to blame Obama for failing, not them for making it so. That makes you one of the useful idiots, doesn’t it?

      • I wonder if Congress forgot to vote that minor law in that would give him authorization to do an executive order on that issue.

        “” Executive Orders are generally used to direct federal agencies and officials in their execution of congressionally established laws or policies””..

        I wonder if congress had forgotten to leave the pre authorization on this issue..

        • Please send us a cite on the “Catch and Release” law or the “Open Border” law to make your case more than political pandering. EO’s are seldom codified – take Wm Jeffr. BJ’s Southwest Border Task Force EO, for example, please. Yet it has gotten legs and acts like a law…like I said, sleazy lawyers will do anything they want regardless of the law…
          This is how Wm Jef BJ put it in EO 13,122:

          By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to provide a more rapid and integrated Federal response to the economic development challenges of the Southwest Border region, it is hereby ordered as follows: (blah, blah, blah…kiss of 150 miles inside the US border from 1999. Event he ACLU calls it the Constitution Free Zone)

          Not a law that commanded him to do it…he just made it up and points to the Constitution and the laws existant. From there he winged it.

      • A partisan Congress you seem to support passed a law saying he could use no money to relocate the detainees into the US. They attached it to a must-pass military funding bill. But keep blaming the only guy trying to fix the problem, rather than those who cause it, and keep it festering.

  2. border problems … they are just another one of the big problems that were inherited by the present administration. if my memory serves me right I was still in the learning to shave ages when I first heard about the huge problem that no one could get a hold of.. I think obama was more worried about learning to ride that very first tricycle about that time.the same thing with bank bailouts etc.. in my opinion we have been sold down the river to big interest groups by our very own congress for decades. they don’t even take time to read the very same bills they hand to us instead they go outside for recess or some other great holiday.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKaifXTOpoI. As long as we all insist on voting those very same people back election after election then we deserve everything they dish out to us and should smile and say.. sir may I have another.
    http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/memory-of-immigration-reform-under-ronald-reagan-haunts-current-debate/1273597

    • Key pont everyone is missing: Will the Obama admin be tried in a decade for genocide because they were allowing unchecked immigration from Zika virus areas? And where is the clean bill of health on the imported 10,000 from the M.E.?

      • probably.. who else can you blame.. if congress doesn’t want to do the job.. why not let the president issue executive orders then blame him for the problems later on..He’s the only one that is taking an active interest in our country and the people..

      • No need to worry about Zika . Doctors in Brazil have come forward to say that (coincidentally) a new larvacide was being sprayed on that area and this is thought to be the reason-and not a virus known for 40+ years which to now had never caused disease. So it may not have been the new,recently mandated TDAP. Of course, it does bother me that Zika was trademarked in about 1947 by the Rockefeller Foundation folks.

    • The border problem has been around for quite awhile…

      Immigration Act of 1917 (Wilson admin)
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1917

      Under Ike:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation

      Under Hoover and FDR:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback

      While Fact Check says it’s not true, the numbers wrt Ike, Truman and Hoover’s ‘repatriations’ prove that it did, indeed, occur. The numbers just aren’t as high as the urban legend claims.
      http://www.factcheck.org/2010/07/hoover-truman-ike-mass-dep

      …and that material is from a quick search. ;)

  3. Yup. what ten days of work for that hard working congress till after the election.. phew.. tough days ahead.. Now what needed to be addressed about our economy again.. who will be left to deal with it if congress doesn’t even have an interest in dropping by the office..
    IN MY WAY OF THINKING WE THE PEOPLE ARE ROYALLY SCREWED..

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DES-FOA_xXA

    • Please, don’t bring up Rachel Maddow from LAST YEAR. Let’s agree that we can only change the future, not the pasture…
      And if you must, learn to count. From story day 7/28 to election there were 13 sessions…not 10 and August is the vacation break…vacation…not lay down do nothing (that’s the rest of the year). And part of Sept is for Labor Day and oh, why do I try explaining?

      • Picky, picky, picky, George. Facts and Truth? What a novel idea. Our education system should try it sometime hey? Oh wait I think they used to do that way back when…

  4. My wish is that Congress stays in permanent recess – they do much less harm when not in session. Much safer to just pay them to stay home, as well as Federal Judges, SCOTUS and most gubbermint aplhabet agencies.

    • I’m with ya! Retire ’em permanently. Seems like all the necessary, non-housekeeping laws have already been written. No need to keep re-inventing the wheel just to keep a few hundred assholes in paychecks and luxurious accommodations. Let the lawyers sort out the details. Its what they rape us for anyway.

  5. OK…
    We had a sizable portion of the population get “caught” in the 2008 housing crisis and take a big hit on their net worth etc.

    If UG [ Ure the Great ] is correct along with other writers and I believe he/they are…

    Then…housing will go up faster than it can be paid for. Only way to “participate” in this newest bubble is by increasing debt significantly yet again! I guess if one has the hard cash. Really doesn’t matter does it? Herd mentality. Then…those buyers will get caught out in the storm worse than those back in 2008.
    Plus general inflation will be nasty.
    If my intro to econ from college is recalled correctly?

    TPB will thus be able to perform not a “hair cut” but a buzz cut flat top on yet another sizable segment of the Sheeple.

  6. Oh, republicans and their incessant political whining. The folks whining that Obama hasn’t closed Gitmo are the same folks who want Gitmo to not only remain open, but to accept more prisoners.

    If Obama could have his way I think he would close Gitmo in a second. So what’s preventing it, the same disingenuous folks who are whining that he still hasn’t shut it down.

  7. It is imperative that we blame man for the global warming. Then we can say that if man caused it man has to stop it, no matter what the cost. It is a huge leap to go from global warming, a natural phase, to man made global warming. The connection just does not exist. Every “proof” has been debunked as pseudo science.

  8. Just something to laugh about…. we out in the west tend to think of BLM as being the federal gestapo, not a black activist group. :). Hence your use always makes me do a double take.

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