After the Bust

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!I know that a book could be writting on this subject, and it is not my intent to write one.  There are a number of thing that most people can do to increase their energy savings through lowered consumption.  Some of them are just common sense, and sure you will say “everyone knows that,” while there are a few other suggestions that you may not have thought of.  Here’s a quick list: 1.  Take time to plan your trips, make sure that your routes are the ones that are the shortest and most efficeint. ...

Ok, now I understand why this healh care plan is going to be so expensive.  12 million foriegn aliens are going to get free coverage, yes, that makes sense.  If we buy some additional printing presses the U.S. Mint can run the ones that we already have and the new ones faster, and we can print enough money to cover everyone with health insurance in both North and South America.  Why not?  It’s a great idea.  Talk about good international relations! I guess not guarding the borders well will now be a whole lot more expensive than it used to be.  For every undocumented alien who gets...

If you are trying to follow where we are in the real estate cycle you may want to check out “The Big Picture” at www.ritholtz.com and specifically read the recent post on the blog at http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/07/why-housing-isnt-yet-bottoming/ it has some great arguments about why we are still headed down.  Sadly, I agree with his assessment.  He published the following chart on his site which dramatically displays just how bad things are historically: As discussed on this site within other posts, there are some who believe that we will not turn around this mess without...

The unemployment rate in Nevada hit 12.3% the other day and I have read that it is at or near 15% in Michigan.  Nationally we have hit a 50 year unemployment high that is climbing, and there are nearly a million and a half people not counted as unemployed because they haven’t searched recently for work. When you consider the fact that the unemployed are staying that way for a longer and longer period, you can begin to understand why polls are saying that there is an “erosion of confidence” in our economic system.  The problem is that there are no real signs that things are...

Have you ever started to wonder what is going to happen to our health care system if one of these proposed plans ever reaches the light of day?  Pundits say it is “impossible” for the proposed plans to cause the termination of Medicare because it is “so popular.”  There is, however, no way to float a national health care system without destroying anything that is good about the one we have.  It will be some trick if a  government sponsored national health care plan manages to survive without creating massive supply and demand distortions.  I’m still trying to...

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article today authored by Stan Leibowitz entitled  New Evidence on the Foreclosure Crisis it’s an eye opener because the article identifies negative equity as the main cause for mortgage foreclosure, not mortgage rate changes or unemployment, which many thought were the reasons.  It is important to understand that foreclosure are happening because people are finding themselves in debt holes that are so deep that it would take them decades to get out of them, and rather than spend every dollar that they earn trying to make it right (pay it...

I still do some business, but I’m not as active as I once was before the “bust.”  What I have seen in my limited sampling of the business world is a dramatic increase in slow pay no pay situations.  It seems like the guys who used to pay in 10 days are now paying their bills out at 45 days and the guys who did net 30 payments are paying in 90 days.  That affects me a bit, but I don’t have a huge number of invoices outstanding at any given time.  The slow pay trend must be having a nasty impact on larger businesses with many outstanding  invoices.  If many companies...

The lines are being drawn for the Senate battle on Mr. Obama’s health plan.  I know that the government systems that I have seen overseas provided inferior quality, inferior to what most of us have come to expect from our system.  On the other hand, I have seen my health insurance increase to the point where it makes my mortgage payment look reasonable. So part of the question is, do you want to continue down the path that you are on, with private health insurance companies taking huge profits and increasing premiums to the point of absurdity, or should things change? The war...

Three dollar a gallon gas is not a welcome sight at the pump, not when unemployment is nearly 12% and home prices are falling at 2% per month.  On top of everything else, we here in Las Vegas just got hit with a fat 7% electricty rate increase.  When you live in the desert and the temperature at times hits 115 degrees you don’t have a lot of choices about paying for power, you either pay or suffer the physical pain.  Looking to the short term future I would say that things are going to get worse before they get better, and I consider myself to be a relatively optimistic person. ...

I read an article by Martin D. Weiss, PhD entitled “California Collapsing” on the Internet, it is located at http://www.moneyandmarkets.com/california-collapsing-34271 and it is an eye opening report.  I knew there were some serious problems going on in the state but an 11.5% unemployment rate and a $ 24.3 billion dollar budget deficit were surprising numbers to discover. With a mind numbing budget crisis, crushing debt, high unemployment, commercial real estate defaults increasing and a new wave of mortgage resets with 50% to 80% defaults likely in the home mortgage market,...