Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Sept. 30 that the U.S. economy will probably slow next year as the surge in stocks comes to an end. …“The odds are we flatten out,” he said of stocks in a Bloomberg Television interview. “That flattening out will put some sort of dull face on 2010.” – Bloomberg1 Wasn’t it some guy name of Fred Nietzsche talked about hysteria repeating itself? The stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression cost Fisher much of his personal wealth and academic reputation. He famously predicted, a few days [October 17, 1929] before…
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  To paraphrase an old Pete Seeger song, "Where have all the owner-occupiers gone- long time passing?" Wherever they’ve gone, in Phoenix they’re not out there selling houses.  That market remains dominated by the banks: Two-thirds of the Phoenix-area homes that changed owners last month were either new foreclosures or resales of properties that had recently been foreclosures. The latest Realty Studies report from the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University explains a recovery can’t really be established until foreclosure-related activity is not the dominant force in the Valley housing market. "Although the level of activity…
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  David Lereah, former chief economist of the National Association of Realtors and perma-bull has moved off of the radar in the news media, but apparently his spirit is being channeled by Dave Carpenter of A.P.  This article is a real blast from the past.  I had to double-check the date to be sure this wasn’t from 2005 or something.  When’s the last time you read a report that had the nerve to say this? [Hat tip M.R.] For all the doom and gloom about the housing market, it still generally pays to own a home.   That might be…
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It’s been a rough year for the travel industry.  California has seen a tripling of hotel foreclosures in the first nine months of the year.  Arizona’s hotels are also struggling, and last month the city of Phoenix asked residents to help: A new study released by the Greater Phoenix Convention and Visitors Bureau cites tens of thousands of jobs and $166 million in sales and property taxes from Phoenix hotels as evidence of the need to support the industry’s recovery efforts. The city is trying to enlist residents as volunteer sales representatives, asking them to help woo the conventions of…
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  There are a few quotes out there that we love to hate- Greenspan’s "a little froth" comment back in 2005 or Bernanke’s "green shoots" comment last April.  Here’s another one we can snicker at six months from now: "The great recession is over," said NABE [National Association of Business Economists] President-Elect Lynn Reaser. "The vast majority of business economists believe that the recession has ended, but that the economic recovery is likely to be more moderate than those typically experienced following steep declines." Here’s another good one from the same survey:

  It was tough enough to sell condos in Phoenix in this market.  Now it just got darn near impossible:  [Thanks L!] New federal loan-guarantee rules imposed to fend off future government losses from plummeting condominium prices have rendered condos utterly worthless, Valley real-estate experts said. The Federal Housing Administration rules, which took effect Oct. 1, prohibit any new FHA-backed loans on condo units in projects that include more than 25 percent commercial space. In addition, no single investor – including the developer – may own more than 10 percent of the units in a particular project. That particular restriction…
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As Doomers can imagine, I’ve got extremely serious reservations about this story,1 but for the purposes of the present project those are going to be laid aside. Google Street View has just come online in Halifax, and I’m very pleased with having just discovered an improved walking route between our digs and the campus of St Mary’s.  As it happens, the Armoury Square condo project featured in the article lies just about halfway along the route, and can serve as one of the focal points as I build a picture of my world over the next several weeks.  When we…
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  It’s Friday, and I have Manhattan real estate on my mind.  It’s hard not to, since I’ve spent the past few days here.  Vacancies are at 20 year highs and prices are down, but that doesn’t stop hope from springing eternal: [Embedding is disabled, but check out this Bloomberg video here.] It was perversely funny that Bloomberg was speculating that the bonuses were going to "heat up"  the housing market.  Sure, they said that a third of people on Wall Street said they were expecting bigger bonuses, but there are a lot fewer people on Wall Street than there…
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An investor class that includes foreign central banks bought 34.5 percent of the notes, compared with 46.5 percent at the last auction and an average of 45.36 percent at the past five auctions. Bloomberg1 Could have fooled me. Last week’s change in foreign central banks’ holdings of US Treasury and Agency Debt was from a liveliness class that includes "dead." The Fed’s own MBS holdings were also essentially unchanged, falling just $0.074 billion. This week’s Reuters report2 yielded numbers so small that the up/down story was largely irrelevant. The report was, as usual, based on the weekly update from the…
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I sincerely hope that Larry Mizel’s project stays up on YouTube for a good long time.  If nothing else the opening frames provide a valuable tutorial for inflating what looks like pretty thin and local [ LATER: oops1 2 ] official encouragement into something that to the casual viewer might link the message to the policy level of a government agency like the FBI or FEMA. . . .

I went to a landscape seminar years ago where the speaker offered a sage bit of advice.  He said that when landscaping a property, it was important to consider the fact that trees and shrubs grow and get larger over time.  That should seem obvious, but too many people landscape a property only considering how the property looks today, without considering how it will look in the future.  He said that envisioning how the landscape will look 20 years from now will prevent mistakes like trees too near walks or foundations where they can cause damage, or large thorny hedges…
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If you have $735,000 to invest and are looking for a rental property with a tenant already in place, you might want to consider purchasing the Arizona State Capitol building.  Jon Stewart’s Daily Show does a video tour of the property: [Hat tip Freedom’s Phoenix The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c Arizona State Capitol Building for Sale www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview  

Many times when people walk away from their foreclosed home they leave a lot of stuff behind.  Sadly, one of the things being left behind is their pets.  Shelters are now bursting at the seams: [Thanks L!] The Valley-based (Phoenix area) Lost Our Home Pet Foundation, a no-kill pet rescue group that serves real estate professionals who discover pets abandoned in backyards without food or water, saw calls double from 15 to 30 a day during the summer, according to Jodi Polanski of Mesa, president of the group. From 2007 to 2008, the Arizona Humane Society experienced a 100 percent…
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I had to post this quote from Paul Tucker, Bank of England Deputy Governor.  This is one of the more sensible things I’ve read this week: We cannot continue with a regime where, crudely, the downside is picked up by the taxpayers and the upside is picked up by the shareholders and the bank’s managers.

… But finally, Mr. Wu said, you get so far from the core of the business that you’re simply "off the target" altogether, with "products that do not build the value or equity of the brand." So destructive of the brand were these products that they would only be explored if the revenues from them were "necessary for the survival of the company." What product did he point to as the canary in the coffee mine? Instant coffee. Mr. Wu called it "a product of last resort." – WSJ1 Yes I know discrimination is frowned on in American, but this2…
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