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Turn Out The Lights, The Party’s Over, But What About The Hangover?

A report from WFTV in Florida. “It sounds simple and safe. Homeowners who lost jobs can skip mortgage payments now, then repay at the end of the loan. But some federal lawmakers, who helped pass the CARES Act that allows forbearance, say it can be a costly trap. Some lenders could demand full repayment within months. ‘Right now, people are set to fail when they have these balloon payments. Who loses their job and can’t afford six months of payments, suddenly has enough to pay it all back?’ said Central Florida Rep. Darren Soto.”

“Ken Gibbs qualified and skipped mortgage payments because of hurricane forbearance. But after three missed payments the lender demanded full repayment on month four. That was money Gibbs didn’t have. ‘Stop sending harassing letters that they’re going to foreclose on my house,’ Gibbs said.”

From WTSP in Florida. “Hotels are open, but private vacation rentals are closed – and that’s not fair. That’s the argument a group of Floridians is making in a lawsuit they filed Thursday in federal court against Gov. Ron DeSantis. Galen Alsop is a retired fighter pilot, and his wife Wendy left her teaching job to manage the rental home in Destin they purchased with their life savings. Mike McGrath lives in Clearwater and owns two short term rental properties there. Paul Gasner calls Dunedin home. He owns vacation properties in Clearwater Beach and Pasco County.”

“Mark Peery lives in Panama City Beach, and according to the lawsuit, renting his 21 properties and 150 weeks of time-share rights accounts for his whole livelihood. Florida Beach Rentals said it has already lost more than $1.5 million, according to the lawsuit. Gasner said he’s losing about $10,000 a month because of his inability to rent his properties. Peery said he will lose $78,500 by the end of May.”

The Herald Tribune in Florida. “New home construction remained solid in Southwest Florida in early 2020, but the housing outlook has changed dramatically in the last several weeks. ‘It appears that the first quarter of 2020 will be the high water mark for economic growth and housing activity in the U.S., including the Sarasota market,’ said David Cobb, regional director with Metrostudy. ‘The economy falls fast, as it has, but the recovery will be gradual, and not a quick bounce back. It could be very similar to what we saw in the housing market between the years 2009 and 2019 — a big crash with a slow, steady recovery.'”

“Home builders could be challenged by growing levels of vacant developed lots — ready for homes to be built — during the economic recovery. In Manatee County, for example, if starts drop 50% from current levels, and the supply of vacant developed lots remains where it is today, that would raise the months supply of those lots from 21 months to about 43 months, well above equilibrium and the highest in eight years.”

The Star Tribune in Minnesota. “During the Great Recession, Todd Simning wagered much of what he had earned over the previous 18 years that the downturn would be short-lived and that he would get back to business quickly. It wasn’t and he lost a boatload of money.”

“In this economic downturn, the Twin Cities developer said he is not going to let history repeat itself. ‘I was way too optimistic and I waited, thinking that things would turn around fast,’ he said of his experience during the recession. ‘I’m not going to make the same mistake again — ever.'”

“After more than a year of planning, Simning recently pulled the plug on TMBR, a 10-story condo building in the North Loop neighborhood in Minneapolis, and is instead moving forward with plans for a shorter building with 100 rental apartments. Simning said that after nearly a year of marketing the units, which ranged from about $500,000 to more than $2 million, he had commitments in place for nearly a third of the 59 units. Those reservations had recently started converting to purchase agreements, but they will now be canceled and deposits/earnest money will be refunded.”

“Simning said he still needed at least 30 presales before he could secure financing and break ground on the project. Given the uncertainties about how long the pandemic would last and the lingering pain of the decisions he made during the 2008 recession, he decided it wasn’t prudent to move forward. His decision was solidified after talking with his banker, who made it clear that credit markets were already tightening.”

“On the Sunday after Gov. Walz announced the stay-at-home order in March, Simning said two of his clients called within an hour of one another and put their projects on hold. ‘Their permits were ready to go,’ he said. ‘But they said ‘don’t dig.’ The next day, another client called and put their project on hold. ‘They said ‘we just need to see how this plays out.’ This caught everyone flat-footed.'”

The Post-Dispatch in Missouri. “The market this year, before the coronavirus hit, was ‘very robust,’ said National Association of Realtors Chief Economist Lawrence Yun. Fewer houses were up for sale. Competition among buyers was often fierce. ‘And suddenly the lights are out,’ he said.”

“Some worry about long-term consequences. The Hersches, from Overland, are still looking for the right new house, and the right time to put theirs on the market. But Tana Hersch fears the pandemic will hurt their chances. ‘I’m afraid we invested all this money and we are fixing this house up through the years and we are not getting any of that back, and having to settle for way less than what we would want,’ she said.”

The Santa Fe New Mexican. “For Brandon Delgado, it all started when the National Basketball Association suspended its season in early March. For Christine Robertson and Mary Ann Kaye, it hit just days later, as Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham began placing restrictions on business operations around New Mexico. And for Todd Davis, it took hold as President Donald Trump initiated a travel ban. But perhaps the beginnings weren’t as important as the net effect: By late March, these owners or managers of vacation and short-term rental properties were essentially out of business.”

“‘It was pretty devastating,’ said Kaye, who manages Casas de Guadalupe, a 12-unit, short-term rental facility in business for over a decade. ‘We lost most of March and April and then into the first two weeks of May people are pretty much canceling.’ June, she said, ‘looks dismal.'”

“Similar words were used by other Santa Fe-based operators to describe how phones started ringing off the hook with news of cancellations as national and state leaders reacted to the spreading respiratory virus by imposing travel, lodging and business restrictions. Short-term rental owners and managers interviewed for this story said they are considering the possibility of offering long-term rentals. Some said they would consider rental price reductions as well.”

The Idaho Statesman. “In late March, Casey Lynch got off a reassuring call with his lender: Yes, the bank would still finance a downtown Boise project that his firm Roundhouse was in the early stages of planning. Two weeks later, the bank called him back. It wouldn’t be making loans after all. Lynch, who builds and operates apartments, isn’t the only developer in the Boise area to see a project delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. Uncertainty in the industry has led some developers to pull back on their applications.”

“Homebuilders like Neider and Corey Barton say they’re still moving forward, business as usual. But for apartment and townhouse builders who rely on lenders to finance their projects, the coronavirus could stall development. ‘Short-term, you will see almost no new construction in the Valley, including on multifamily,’ Lynch said. ‘You couldn’t finance almost any speculative project right now.'”

“For Scott Weyrauch, this is the second time in his life that a recession has interrupted a move. Based in Las Vegas, the 49-year-old works as a self-employed project manager for trade shows and events around the country. He planned to put his Las Vegas house on the market on March 18 and relocate to Boise this summer. But then the coronavirus hit. Every major trade show was canceled until October. ‘I need to see my industry come back before I put my house on the market,’ Weyrauch said. Until he can sell his house in Las Vegas, he can’t move.”

“Lynch expects that Weyrauch isn’t the only one in that situation. ‘The 20,000 people a year moving to the Treasure Valley could be cut in half,’ he said. ‘If you’re moving from California and your personal balance sheet has been decimated by this, the last thing you’re going to do is pack up and move to a place where you don’t have a job.'”

The Bay Area Newsgroup in California. “Thirty Bay Area cities — from Concord to San Leandro to Los Altos — all shrank just a little bit last year, which delivered the region’s slowest population growth since 2006. California’s population grew just 0.2 percent in 2019, continuing a trend of slowing growth that started after the Great Recession, according to estimates released by the state’s Department of Finance this month.”

“Within the state, growth has been slowest in expensive coastal areas and fastest in the Central Valley and other more affordable inland parts of the state, said Doug Kuczynski, a demographer at the Department of Finance. ‘It’s mostly due to migration,’ Kuczynski said. ‘People are moving out of state and not as many people are moving to California into those high-cost areas.'”

“Residents say they’re fed up with the region’s high cost of living, gridlocked traffic and growing homelessness crisis — nearly three in four residents say the quality of life in the region has worsened in the past five years, according to the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. The exodus hit San Mateo County particularly hard, making it one of 26 California counties that shrunk slightly last year. Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and Marin counties also lost residents last year. For the third year in a row, California and the Bay Area added more housing than people, in part thanks to an increase in the number of accessory dwelling units, Kuczynski said.”

The Nashville Scene in Tennessee. “In mid-March, Nashville’s boom years — a decade or so of extraordinary growth and prosperity — blinked out like a dying neon sign. The tourists who would typically be crowding the city’s bars and restaurants were suddenly absent. For the week of March 22-28, the city’s hotel occupancy rate was 9.3 percent, compared to 92.6 percent during the same week in 2019. All of this was done for good reason, in the interest of public health. Arguably, it should have been done even sooner. But the effect was the same: Turn out the lights, the party’s over. But what about the hangover?”

“In Nashville, the crisis has revealed weaknesses in a city that had every reason to be at its strongest. What did we get for our time in the sun, our decade of growth and cultural cachet as the burgeoning ‘It City’? And when the rain came, did it have to be this bad? Did we blow the boom years?”

“The current crisis will hit Metro departments hard. Metro Nashville Public Schools had already been asked to cut $100 million out of its budget for the current fiscal year, and the district is up against a $25 million shortfall for the upcoming year. The direct cause of today’s pain is the pandemic, but it was arguably inevitable after a decade of good times that was not matched by the political action needed to make it sustainable or equitable.”

“Councilmember Tanaka Vercher — who served as Budget and Finance Committee chair and supported a property tax increase last year — points to other core government responsibilities that she says have been neglected, like infrastructure. ‘We, meaning all of us — government, citizens, ‘we’ because we’re all in this collectively — we lost focus,’ she says. “We were romanced by being coined the ‘It City.’”

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This Post Has 89 Comments

  1. ‘For the third year in a row, California and the Bay Area added more housing than people’

    Third year? Wa happened to my shortage bay aryans?

  2. ‘The Hersches, from Overland, are still looking for the right new house, and the right time to put theirs on the market. But Tana Hersch fears the pandemic will hurt their chances. ‘I’m afraid we invested all this money and we are fixing this house up through the years and we are not getting any of that back, and having to settle for way less than what we would want’

    via GIPHY

    1. ‘I’m afraid we invested all this money and we are fixing this house up through the years and we are not getting any of that back, and having to settle for way less than what we would want’

      You mean all that millennial grey and white oak flooring might have been for nothing? You don’t say!

    2. and having to settle for way less than what we would want

      But doesn’t that also mean that the replacement house will also be cheaper and that the price gap between the two will actually shrink?

      Or was she planning on becoming an equity locust?

  3. It’s different now in the COVID-19 era, as stock market valuations are fully decoupled from corporate earnings.

    1. The stock market keeps rising while earnings keep falling — what if stocks are right?
      Published: May 9, 2020 at 11:55 a.m. ET
      By Tomi Kilgore
      S&P 500 valuations rise to 18-year highs as earnings fall at fastest pace since the 2008 financial crisis

      There’s a debate on Wall Street over whether stock market investors know something that the rest of America doesn’t when it comes to what a post-COVID-19 pandemic future looks like.

      The death toll from COVID-19 is still rising, albeit at a slower rate.

      More than 20 million people have lost their jobs since the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in March, with unemployment spiking to a post-World War II high.

      Meanwhile, earnings of the S&P 500 companies are falling as if the 2008 financial crisis is repeating itself, and it’s likely to get a lot worse;

      Nevermind the facts, because the S&P 500 index surged 1.7% Friday, and has now rocketed more than 30% in about six weeks. See Market Snapshot.

      “[W]e think that markets might be getting a little ahead of fundamentals/economic reality and are pretty close to fairly valued,” said Sameer Samana, senior global market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute. “That leaves them vulnerable to disappointment on a number of fronts.”
      …

      1. The stock market keeps rising while earnings keep falling — what if stocks are right?

        What does that mean for firms whose earnings hold steady? To the moon, Alice? Or will they, as expected in clown world, have their stock prices fall?

    2. This episode in financial history is playing out like one of those sci-fi movies where everyone realizes that an asteroid is going to collide with the earth, and it’s only a matter of time until the planet is destroyed. Will the Fed be able to save all of humanity from imminent destruction?

      1. There are no activist central bankers in most gloomster paradigms.

        The Tell
        A ‘much more severe’ selloff looms in the stock market, strategist warns
        Published: May 10, 2020 at 12:27 p.m. ET
        By Shawn Langlois
        Leuthold Group warns of a deeper selloff ahead. iStockphoto

        The coronavirus death toll continues to rise across the U.S., as do the number of job losses, with an increasing number of companies reporting on the deep damage the pandemic has already inflicted. Yet the stock market, despite its volatile stretches, continues to hold up relatively well.

        This viral tweet captured the disconnect last month:

        Doug Ramsey, the chief investment officer of The Leuthold Group, warned clients that the day is coming when the dire state of the economy catches up with equity investors. “The stock market punishment doesn’t fit the economic crime,” he said. “We expect it eventually will.”
        …

      2. Given the backdrop of Unlimited Quarantinive Easing to support risk assets, would it work better for savers to park ca$h in banks paying out 1% interest, or to HODL stocks, junk bonds, real estate, and cryptocurrencies?

        1. Savings
          The Trader
          The Coronavirus Crisis Is a Reason to Save. Here’s Where Investors Can Put Their Cash.
          By Carleton English
          Updated May 8, 2020 8:27 pm ET / Original May 8, 2020 9:01 am ET
          Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty Images
          Read More Trader
          – Stock Valuations Are Near Dot-Com-Era Levels. Don’t Expect a Bust This Time.

          Cash may be king, but it isn’t earning much—unless you know where to look.

          Over the past two months, households have understandably wanted to boost their cash holdings to wait out the unprecedented volatility of the first quarter and the fear of lost wages, as the unemployment rate rapidly soared to 14.7% in April.

          But while holding cash can be reassuring for households needing to meet short-term obligations, it can be detrimental to investment portfolios when it isn’t earning anything. And with interest rates now near zero, savers are again being penalized.

          With interest rates on certificates of deposit hovering just above 0%, savers are finding there really isn’t a place to get yield, Brant Cavagnaro, financial advisor at Wealthstream, tells Barron’s.

          “We typically do not recommend CDs if you can get the same rate with 100% liquidity by not being locked up for a specific amount of time,” Cavagnaro said.

          One place households can park their cash is in online banks, which have less overhead than their bricks-and-mortar peers. Many familiar names—such as Marcus by Goldman Sachs and Ally Financial—offer interest rates of at least 1% without the withdrawal penalties levied by most CDs.

          With online banks generally clamoring for the same set of customers, savers are likely to find similar rates across institutions. As always, households will want to park their money at institutions that are insured either by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. or the National Credit Union Administration. Households with cash savings in excess of $250,000 will need to be mindful about how much they keep in each account in each family member’s name, or perhaps split their savings across insured institutions.
          …

          1. The only thing I can think is that the big stock market Companies think the small business sector is going to go by the wayside. Than big business will pick up their market share and they will be even bigger monopolies.

        2. At least 1% allocated to Cryptocurrencies (bare minimum). Don’t listen to the old timers in here…if it dips hard soon, that’s the time to buy.

          1. Cryptocurrencies (bare minimum)

            They should change the name to Techcurrencies. It would sell better to the young crowd.

          2. Don’t listen to the old timers in here…

            What do you know that they don’t know?

    3. It’s strange how stock market analysts keep talking about earnings as though they somehow matter to valuations. Did they somehow miss the memo that we have entered a New Era now, where earnings are irrelevant?

      Earnings Watch
      Time to take a breath as earnings slow, but you may want to avoid the numbers to stay calm
      Published: May 10, 2020 at 9:00 a.m. ET
      By Emily Bary
      – Earnings Watch: After a hectic two-week stretch, S&P500 earnings are expected to decline 13.6% from last year, and worst may be yet to come
      – At least this week will be slower … MarketWatch photo illustration/Getty Images, iStockphoto

      While the tone of first-quarter earnings isn’t particularly encouraging, the pace of reports will finally relax in the week ahead, which is reason enough to breathe a sigh of relief.

      More than 85% of S&P 500 index US:SPX companies have reported earnings this quarter — most of them in the past two weeks — and just 18 components are set to report in the week ahead, along with only one Dow Jones Industrial Average company: Cisco Systems Inc.

      It hasn’t been a pretty stretch thus far as companies detailed the early impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on their financial performance. Aggregate earnings for the first quarter are expected to be down about 13.6% from a year ago, the worst performance since the third quarter of 2009, according to FactSet Senior Earnings Analyst John Butters. That is way down from expectations for 4.5% growth at the start of the first quarter.
      …

    4. Market Snapshot
      Why the Dow can jump 400 points even as the economy destroys over 20 million jobs
      Published: May 9, 2020 at 3:19 p.m. ET
      By William Watts
      Investors are confident the consumer will be back after deep freeze, but it could be touch-and-go
      AFP/Getty Images

      Main Street thinks Wall Street is crazy. Wall Street thinks Main Street is going to be relatively OK.

      That’s the apparent message after the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA, +1.90%) jumped more than 400 points Friday and stocks continued a torrid rebound despite data that showed the U.S. economy shed more than 20 million jobs in April. Lockdowns aimed at containing the deadly COVID-19 pandemic pushed the unemployment rate up to 14.7% — a postwar high that economists said likely understates the devastation.

      Advisors and analysts say they have been inundated with calls from clients asking why stocks keep soaring as the economic data grows uglier by the day.

      They have a well-worn list of reasons: the market is forward looking and has already anticipated a sharp but short recession; there are tentative signs the outbreak has peaked; progress toward treatments and even, potentially, a vaccine; the Federal Reserve’s unleashing of unprecedented monetary stimulus and lending backstops, with the promise to do more; and a raft of federal spending aimed at shoring up workers and companies, albeit while drawing mixed reviews.

      But the test will be whether the consumer — long the main engine of the U.S. economy — springs back to life after being virtually, or even literally, shut in during the pandemic.

      “It’s all going to come down to consumer spending. If we’re all sitting inside and not out spending money in September-October, the market’s not going to like that — the market will go down,” said Scott Wren, senior global market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute, in a phone interview.

      Whether consumers are out spending or shut inside come fall will, of course, depend in large part on how the pandemic plays out. While infections and the death rate in New York, the center of the outbreak in the U.S., and other urban hot spots have turned lower, outbreaks have worsened in other parts of the country. Meanwhile, several states have begun loosening restrictions or making plans to do so.
      …

      1. The Financial Times
        Coronavirus business update 30 days complimentary
        Coronavirus
        New virus outbreaks hamper efforts to reopen global economy
        Europe’s cautious steps tempered by fresh infections in South Korea, Germany and China
        A testing station at the Westfleisch meat processing company in Hamm, Germany, where many workers have tested positive for coronavirus
        © Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty
        FT reporters
        5 hours ago

        New Covid-19 outbreaks in South Korea, Germany and China have highlighted the challenge faced by governments seeking to loosen social restrictions, as millions of Europeans prepare for the tentative reopening of their economies today.

        France, Spain, Denmark, Norway and the UK will all lift some measures brought in to contain the spread of the deadly virus, as leaders across the region seek to limit the worsening economic damage.

        In Spain, just over half the population will enter “phase 1” of the country’s exit from lockdown, allowing bars and restaurants to serve customers outside and people to congregate in groups up to 10. However, restrictions will remain in the worst hit parts of the country, including Madrid and Barcelona.

        Spain’s daily death toll from the virus — at 143 — fell to its lowest in two months on Sunday.

        Secondary school children will return to classrooms across Norway, while Denmark will permit shops to reopen their doors.

        France also begins its “deconfinement” process on Monday, with some of the harshest social restrictions — such as needing a permission slip to leave the house — being lifted. Officially, most businesses will be permitted to reopen provided they can maintain social distancing rules for both staff and customers.

        The UK, the worst-hit country in the world after the US in terms of deaths, will also take the first cautious steps towards easing its lockdown measures this week, with citizens being allowed to take unlimited outdoor exercise.

        Giuseppe Conte, Italy’s prime minister, said on Sunday that the country’s lockdown could end earlier than planned as Rome attempts to mitigate a brutal recession caused by nearly two months of freezing the economy.

        But as parts of Europe take their first steps out of lockdown, fresh outbreaks have already forced governments elsewhere to tighten restrictions again.

        The Seoul city authorities were forced to shut down bars and clubs in the South Korean capital after a cluster of new infections was linked to the city’s party district.

        The country reported 34 new cases on Sunday, most of which were locally transmitted, marking a sharp increase from the past week when the country had several days of no local infections.

        The outbreak is a blow to the government in South Korea, which has won international praise for mass testing, high-tech contact tracing and social distancing to combat what was, for a time, the worst outbreak outside of China.
        Recommended
        Eurozone economy
        Parisian bookseller on edge as reopening looms

        Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s president, on Sunday cautioned that while the country’s virus handling was a source of national “pride”, a “prolonged war” lay ahead.

        “The [latest] infection cluster . . . has raised awareness that, even during the stabilisation phase, similar situations can arise again anytime, anywhere, in an enclosed, crowded space. It’s not over until it’s over,” he said.

        Chinese authorities also reimposed restrictions in a city near the border with North Korea on Sunday after recording a handful of new cases.

        Meanwhile, Germany has experienced a rise in the reproduction rate — the average number of people that each confirmed coronavirus patient infects — to above 1, just days after Angela Merkel’s government moved to relax the shutdown on public life in Europe’s biggest economy.

        According to the Robert Koch Institute, the R number was 1.1 as of Saturday evening. Three districts exceeded the government’s self-imposed limit of more than 50 new infections per 10,000 people during the past seven days and will now have to postpone their exit from lockdown.
        …

  4. ‘In mid-March, Nashville’s boom years — a decade or so of extraordinary growth and prosperity — blinked out like a dying neon sign. The tourists who would typically be crowding the city’s bars and restaurants were suddenly absent. For the week of March 22-28, the city’s hotel occupancy rate was 9.3 percent, compared to 92.6 percent during the same week in 2019’

    You had your boom, enjoy the bust.

    1. A twenty-something daughter of a family in our circle set out for Nashville last year to try her luck as a singer-songwriter. Now she’s back home a few miles away, separated by time and distance from her nascent livelihood. It’s a very tough period for young people in the entertainment industry.

      1. The odds of success are probably comparable to making it as an actor or a professional athlete.

        There are tons of people who graduated from Julliard that you’ve never heard of. Some get lucky, like Kevin Conroy, a Julliard grad whose career was going nowhere, until he was cast as the voice of Batman and Bruce Wayne in Batman the Animated Series, which at the time he only did so he could pay the rent. He made a very lucrative career out of voicing Batman in cartoons and video games, with Mark Hamill opposite him voicing The Joker.

        1. I’ve been on the fringes of the music industry for long enough to know this first hand. I can count the number of truly successful musicians I have personally known over the decades on the fingers of one, or at most two hands. And I have a number of tales of personal ruin to offset the success stories. For most highly talented musicians, life is an ongoing struggle in obscurity to make ends meet.

          1. Yup. I also have to wonder how many teen athletes who seem utterly amazing never make it to the pros.

            And then there are the actors. There are so many we only know of because they had a role in a show. Garrett Wang of Star Trek comes to mind. I have never seen him in anything besides Voyager. These days he seems to be a permanent fixture at fan conventions, where he sells autographs and photos. And he was a lucky one.

          2. The children of those in entertainment have several shots at getting it right, while its the casting couch for the pleb hopefuls.

  5. ‘“The market this year, before the coronavirus hit, was ‘very robust,’ said National Association of Realtors Chief Economist Lawrence Yun. Fewer houses were up for sale. Competition among buyers was often fierce. ‘And suddenly the lights are out’

    Hey Larry, say cheese, Click!

        1. The Bitcoin fanboys used to show up on the gold boards to mock the “old bugs.” They suddenly went missing some time ago – probably hanging out behind the dumpster with their dreams of untold speculative riches from a scam currency.

      2. So many leveraged gamblers have succumbed to the siren song of the central banking establishments’ rock bottom rates!

        ‘The price of bitcoin has fallen by around 70 per cent since topping $US20,000 late last year to around $US6000 at the time of writing.

        In the same period, the total market capitalisation of more than 1800 cryptocurrencies tracked by Coinmarketcap has fallen from $US800 billion to under $US200 billion.

        The Reddit user said he was “now mostly into” Neo, Ontology, Elastos, Stellar and HPB. The user explained that it was a “simple loan” banks give “almost instantly in UAE”. “You can get $100,000 within few days on your account without much verification,” he said.

        “I’m 32 and it was my first speculative investment. I think it’s an age where we’re still unconscious and take lot of risk if we don’t have big responsibilities like a kid or bills to pay.”

        Just in case, he added that “if there is any ridiculously rich Emirati who doesn’t know what to do with his money, feel free to contact me”.

        “Miracles happen sometimes!”

        Reddit users were part amused and part sympathetic. “I don’t think there’s anything we can say that you don’t go to sleep thinking about already,” one wrote.

        Another said, “So this is why we hit $US20,000.”’

        1. In the same period, the total market capitalisation of more than 1800 cryptocurrencies tracked by Coinmarketcap has fallen from $US800 billion to under $US200 billion.

          Still overvalued … by $200B.

    2. As long as the Fed keeps pumping in trillions of Unlimited Quarantinive Easing per month, cryptocurrencies should do just fine.

    3. In the long run, yer crypto is dead.

      Apr 29, 2020,06:50pm EDT
      Bitcoin At ‘Critical Point’ As Price Suddenly Roars Toward $10,000
      Billy BambroughContributor
      Crypto & Blockchain
      I write about how bitcoin, crypto and blockchain can change the world.
      More From Forbes

      Bitcoin has suddenly soared, surging toward $10,000 and returning the bitcoin market to its pre-coronavirus pandemic bull run.

      The bitcoin price, up over 30% since the end of March, has almost erased its coronavirus crash losses—and is outperforming the U.S. S&P 500 index as well as most other major markets.
      …

    4. Is the “Bitcoin halving” already underway?

      Bitcoin stabilizes after yesterday’s flash crash—but for how long?
      Bitcoin’s price stabilized on Sunday after a chaotic 15% dip just 12 hours earlier.
      By Mathew Di Salvo
      2 min read
      May 10, 2020
      Last night, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap crashed in value by 15% but the price stabilized on Sunday afternoon. Image: Shutterstock
      In brief
      – After a good week, Bitcoin crashed on Saturday night.
      – Prices have since stabilized.
      – Ahead of Tuesday’s halving, it’s not clear which way the coin will go.

      Many hope that Tuesday’s Bitcoin halving will bump up the price of Bitcoin, but last night, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap crashed in value by 15%. As of Sunday afternoon, the price has stabilized…for now.

      On Saturday night, the price of Bitcoin fell from around $9,800 to lows of $8,518, according to data from metrics site CoinMarketCap. And one of the most popular crypto exchanges, Coinbase, went offline as whales unloaded their Bitcoin onto the market.
      …

    5. So much banking crater, I’m having trouble keeping up with Ben’s posts here.

      Bitcoin is a real crapshoot. There is just no discernable pattern. The moves in precious metals can be explained. But BtC? At best it might be good for day-trading, or hour trading. Not for the faint of heart.

      Heh, Real Vision Finance did a little series of videos on crypto entrepreneurs. They were convinced it was the wave of the future, and were high-talking about offering crypto to the masses of the “unbanked” in third world countries. Uh-huh. Enjoy your scrambled electrons, bois. Because that’s all you got.

  8. ‘Right now, people are set to fail when they have these balloon payments. Who loses their job and can’t afford six months of payments, suddenly has enough to pay it all back?’ said Central Florida Rep. Darren Soto.”

    Who indeed, Rep. Soto. You & your fellow clowns just deferred the inevitable.

  9. CCP virus test tracking by a site called covidtracking.

    The media keeps telling us that the “case count” remains high and is essentially flat since early April which give one the impression that the epidemic in the US hasn’t peaked in the least. We also hear that more testing keeps getting done.

    If those two bits of information are put together it emerges that the positive tests peaked April 1 at 22% of tests performed and have dropped steadily to now 12% nation wide. I haven’t seen anywhere the Experts comment on how many weeks an infected person will test positive.

  10. ‘Stop sending harassing letters that they’re going to foreclose on my house,’ Gibbs said.”

    It’s not your house, Gibbs. Once you’re and your fellow FBs are in breach of contract, the bank has every right to reclaim what’s theirs.

    1. Just remember that when central bankers flood the markets with fresh cash and devalue your savings, they are just reclaiming what is theirs.

      1. Nobody on high seems willing to acknowledge how flooding the financial markets with a tsunami tide of liquidity has the effect of washing the value of conservative savers’ wealth out to sea.

        “I drink your milkshake.“

  11. Florida Beach Rentals said it has already lost more than $1.5 million, according to the lawsuit. Gasner said he’s losing about $10,000 a month because of his inability to rent his properties. Peery said he will lose $78,500 by the end of May.”

    When housing losses we must eat
    Let us stamp our little feet!

  12. It could be very similar to what we saw in the housing market between the years 2009 and 2019 — a big crash with a slow, steady recovery.’”

    Or it could be similar to what we saw from 1929 on, when markets crashed hard followed by a slow grind lower until WWII shifted us to a wartime economy.

    1. Even then the stock market eventually went up…following 25 straight years that it took to reclaim its 1929 level…if you are willing to ignore 25 years of inflation between 1929 and 1954.

  13. In Manatee County, for example, if starts drop 50% from current levels, and the supply of vacant developed lots remains where it is today, that would raise the months supply of those lots from 21 months to about 43 months, well above equilibrium and the highest in eight years.”

    Oh, the huge manatee!

    https://imgur.com/r/funny/Ss2qt

  14. “After more than a year of planning, Simning recently pulled the plug on TMBR, a 10-story condo building in the North Loop neighborhood in Minneapolis, and is instead moving forward with plans for a shorter building with 100 rental apartments.

    TMBR…why not just change the name to Timber? As Caitlyn said, sometimes ya gotta just roll with it….

  15. ‘I’m afraid we invested all this money and we are fixing this house up through the years and we are not getting any of that back, and having to settle for way less than what we would want,’ she said.”

    Mr. Market doesn’t give a rat’s ass about greedhead wish prices, Tana. Or your galactic sense of entitlement.

  16. By late March, these owners or managers of vacation and short-term rental properties were essentially out of business.”

    Die, speculator scum.

  17. “‘It was pretty devastating,’ said Kaye, who manages Casas de Guadalupe, a 12-unit, short-term rental facility in business for over a decade.

    So for a decade you deprived people of affordable housing, Kaye. But once Casas de Schlonged emerges from bankruptcy proceedings, maybe the new owner will have a more viable long-term business model: use those 12 units to provide affordable shelter at a fair price for stable long-term tenants.

  18. ‘You couldn’t finance almost any speculative project right now.’”

    Good. Housing is meant to be shelter, not a speculative investment.

  19. “Residents say they’re fed up with the region’s high cost of living, gridlocked traffic and growing homelessness crisis — nearly three in four residents say the quality of life in the region has worsened in the past five years, according to the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.

    And yet these ‘tards continue to pull the D lever every election. The stupid, it burns.

    1. And yet these ‘tards continue to pull the D lever every election

      In which case, I prefer that they stay in California and gloat about how amazing the weather is, to which I will always reply “Yeah, the weather is awful where I live, you wouldn’t believe how cold it gets here. You’d hate it. Don’t even think of moving here.”

      1. I’d prefer that we tree them with bloodhounds as soon as they ooze into the red states, then boxcar them back to California with a warning they’ll be tarred and feathered if they try coming back.

      2. Its not just the weather…As far as moving to Colorado…No thanks…To far away from places like San Luis Obispo, Yosemite & Tahoe…

        1. And after the Boogaloo, all the water of the Colorado River stays here. No water for Clownifornia 🙁

        2. “…places like San Luis Obispo, Yosemite & Tahoe…”

          All three of these places are heavily dependent on summer tourism, e.g., hotel and restaurant taxes. Must be nice right now with little to no traffic.

        3. Lol, Cali has all these great places that the clown residents point to but dont get to enjoy much – and they’re super crowded and way overpriced. But the fools have to keep convincing themselves that those far away places are the reason they put up with the taxes, crime, gridlock, insane politicians, homeless, etc. Its hilarious – from a mental health perspective its the very definition of insanity, like a stockholm syndrome type affliction.

          1. Cali has all these great places that the clown residents point to but dont get to enjoy much – and they’re super crowded and way overpriced.

            That’s the thing – they used to be enjoyable when I was a kid. Now the crowds and the prices make them a nightmare.

  20. ‘We, meaning all of us — government, citizens, ‘we’ because we’re all in this collectively — we lost focus,’ she says.

    No, Tanaka, you corrupt Democrat apparatchik, we’re NOT all in this collectively – you and your fellow collectivist scum created this mess with your tax and spend profligacy, and by diverting tax revenues into Democrat patronage and graft rackets. So don’t even try pulling the “We are all responsible, so no one is accountable” card.

  21. Of all of our captured regulators, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is hands-down the most corrupt and singularly worthless. These asshats have for the past decade, at least, turned a blind eye to trading desks at the Fed’s primary-dealer bankers blatantly manipulating the price of gold and silver with such illegal stratagems as naked shorting and orchestrating mass dumps of paper (non-existent) gold. Not surprisingly, these see-no-evil CFTC scumbags have also allowed dangerous systemic flaws in how commodities are traded that have put the entire financial system, not to mention the net worth of unsuspecting retail investors, at serious risk. I give you Exhibit A:

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-08/oil-crash-busted-a-broker-s-computers-and-inflicted-huge-losses?sref=5CqwjcI3

    Syed Shah usually buys and sells stocks and currencies through his Interactive Brokers account, but he couldn’t resist trying his hand at some oil trading on April 20, the day prices plunged below zero for the first time ever. The day trader, working from his house in a Toronto suburb, figured he couldn’t lose as he spent $2,400 snapping up crude at $3.30 a barrel, and then 50 cents. Then came what looked like the deal of a lifetime: buying 212 futures contracts on West Texas Intermediate for an astonishing penny each.

    What he didn’t know was oil’s first trip into negative pricing had broken Interactive Brokers Group Inc. Its software couldn’t cope with that pesky minus sign, even though it was always technically possible — though this was an outlandish idea before the pandemic — for the crude market to go upside down. Crude was actually around negative $3.70 a barrel when Shah’s screen had it at 1 cent. Interactive Brokers never displayed a subzero price to him as oil kept diving to end the day at minus $37.63 a barrel.

    At midnight, Shah got the devastating news: he owed Interactive Brokers $9 million. He’d started the day with $77,000 in his account.

  22. So this is why Sacramento inventory is at all time low, why homes go pending and sell at higher prices in spite of COVID19 and mass layoffs! Greedy home owners can skip a year of mortgage payments and live free for a year!

    1. why homes go pending and sell at higher prices ??

      My nephew just refinanced 30 year fixed @ 2.4%…Do the math on a $500,000. purchase…Thats what’s driving it right now…

    1. I was there a year ago, I wanted to see it for myself rather than read about what real journalists write about it. Walking west from my hotel near the Powell Street BART station, the scent of urine was intermittent but frequent. There was poop on the sidewalk, not big piles of it, more like smears like someone stepped in it and tracked it along the sidewalk for a few steps.

      This was different from visiting NYC in the 1990’s, not a summer acrid smell of stale p*ss. More like a maritime poop/pee climate.

      Vote Democrat Party if you want more of this. Visiting downtown Denver today is proof of that.

      #Forward

      1. Wait, why?

        “I’m with you. I don’t want to be legally and financially responsible for something so large and expensive. sometimes I get the feeling I should be paying for my own equity instead of a landlords but then I think about having to do a $5k – $20k roof or septic system repair, having to buy a new refrigerator, a new stove, a new washing machine, a new HVAC unit. not being able to sell if I want or have to move. losing my income and not being able to make the mortgage and having my home taken from me after tens of thousands of dollars sunk into the mortgage. being stuck with a massive and worthless asset if the “market” crashes again. just so many things that make renting seem like living on easy mode”

        Anonymous — 2020

        2. These are just some of the things that a married guy raising a family has to deal with during the kid’s journey from kindergarten through k12 and beyond. If you’re a good planner and control your spending you’ll survive, a struggle that only 35% achieve.

  28. DebtDonkey was rolling stone….
    rented a house from the bank with a loan…
    and when she died all that was left was the loan.

    Tukwila, WA Housing Prices Crater 18% YOY As One Seattle Broker Admits “I’ll Go Back To Selling Drugs If This Market Doesn’t Turn Around Soon”

    https://www.movoto.com/tukwila-wa/market-trends/

  29. What is it with people that think take out a mortgage, they have a God given right to that house?? No savings in case of a rainy day. Just a huge sense of entitlement.

    The forbearance with the balloon payment is essentially giving them time to sell it and recoup their equity while moving to more affordable – i.e .an apt!!! – housing. It is not meant as a reward for never saving.

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