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Paying The Price For That Long-Term Period Of Accommodative Lending

A weekend topic starting with Bankrate. “‘Effectively, increased mortgage rates reduce conventional buyers’ buying power by 9% to 10% to 11%, pending their debt-to-income ratio,’ said Baron Christopher Hanson of Echo Fine Properties. ‘Pre-approved buyers for $500,000 to $1 million in mortgage funding can see their purchasing power reduced by $45,000 to $110,000 based on a rise in mortgage rates. This cooling of traditionally financed buying power across the board ultimately puts pressure on sellers hoping to earn top dollar on their homes.'”

“‘Current mortgage rates are making it less affordable to buy a home,’ said Adrian Brikho, senior mortgage advisor at Brik Home Loans. ‘Buyers who were on the edge of qualifying are going to get priced out of the market. We’re going to see a slowdown in demand in the coming months, which will affect the price a seller can get for their home.'”

“‘It’s important to remember that there is a consistent correlation between interest rates and home prices,” said Ward Morrison, CEO of Motto Franchising LLC. ‘When interest rates increase, affordability of homebuying decreases, causing an inverse reaction to home valuation. To offset this issue, the market stabilizes and home prices go down.'”

From Yahoo Finance. “Higher interest rates may actually be a good thing for home prices and the housing market in general. ‘Low rates make housing less affordable in the long run and rates have been on a long downward trend,’ wrote Jonathan Miller, CEO of Miller Samuel Inc., a real estate appraisal and consulting firm.”

From Business Insider. “‘Buyer demand is moderating in the face of high costs, and we’re beginning to see more homeowners take price cuts on their listings and overall inventory declines lessen in response,’ Danielle Hale, Realtor.com chief economist, told Insider. Though the average listing price was $405,000, 6% of homes actually sold at a lower price than they were listed.”

From Market Watch. “While an inversion of the yield curve may not have a direct impact on mortgage rates, it can prompt lenders to be stingier. In the past, yield-curve inversions have been associated with a tightening of credit. ‘If it costs more to borrow short term than what you’re going to earn by lending long term, you’re going to do less lending,’ said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate.com.”

From My San Antonio. “More than 90 employees have been laid off in USAA Federal Savings Bank’s mortgage department as the need for its services have dwindled. The employee positions were eliminated as the bank projects a 34% drop to 25,000 real estate loans despite having staff in place to facilitate an anticipated 38,000 loans, the Express-News reported. Emails to staff obtained by the Express-News say the challenging home buying market and rising interest led to the terminations.”

From Housing Wire. “Nonbanks and mortgage subsidiaries of chartered banks reported grim profitability figures in the fourth quarter of 2021, when costs reached a new high and margins fell to the lowest level since early 2019. And most industry observers think it will only get worse in the next few quarters. Net gains in Q4 declined to $1,099 on each loan originated, compared to $2,594 in the previous quarter, according to a report published by the Mortgage Bankers Association.”

From Better Dwelling. “Canadian mortgages are getting a lot more expensive as bond yields surge higher. The benchmark Government of Canada (GoC) bonds are climbing, influencing fixed-term mortgage costs. Canada hasn’t seen this kind of pressure on bond yields since the 90s, at the peak of the last tightening cycle. This cycle, however, is just getting started. Expect mortgage rates to climb like they haven’t in a whole generation.”

“‘That is the steepest one-year move in this key bond since the late 1990s and was last seriously topped in the great tightening cycle of 1994/95 (when yields popped by more than 400 bps in a year),’ says BMO Chief Economist Douglas Porter. ‘That’s the largest five-year rise in five-year rates in 40 years of records.'”

From News.com.au in Australia. “The RBA could deliver an interest rate hike in June, and then at least six more by the end of the year, according to market expectations. As the red line in this next graph shows, the future of interest rates is up, up, up. The average new home loan for an owner-occupier these days is a bit over $600,000. Repayments on that loan are around $2350 a month at the average mortgage rate (2.48 per cent). If interest rates go up seven times by December, repayments would be $2,950 a month. That’s an extra $600. Can you find that much extra in just nine months?”

“Have no doubt the banks would pass on interest rate rises in full. In fact, they’ve been lifting some mortgage interest rates before that even happens. Take a look at fixed interest rates. Recently they were below variable interest rates, as the next graph shows. Banks thought they would benefit from locking your rate in. Now, fixed rates have shot up as banks realise locking people into a low rate was good for the customer, not for them. Rising fixed rates are a sign banks don’t want to lock people into a low rate; a sign banks think official interest rates will be rising soon, and variable rates will pop up too.”

The Delaware News Journal. “As of March 31, the national average for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is 4.67%, according to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, known as Freddie Mac. That’s up from about 3.05% in March 2021, said John Chartrand, Del-One Federal Credit Union chief lending officer.The jump in rates happened quickly. When the U.S. weekly average for a 30-year, fixed rate mortgage climbed to 4.16% March 17, that was the first time the rate exceeded 4% since May 2019, according to Freddie Mac. Then the rate climbed to 4.42% March 24 and rose again to 4.67% March 31.”

“‘We have enjoyed an incredible run of very low interest rates,’ said Jeff Ruben, president of WSFS Mortgage. ‘I think we were poised for rate increases just before pandemic happened but then there was real initiative to spur lower interest rates to help the economy during the pandemic. We’re now paying the price for that long-term period of accommodative lending.'”

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This Post Has 84 Comments

  1. Russia Today — Ukraine explains why it stopped recruiting foreigners (4/1/2022):

    “Ukraine’s ‘International Legion’ no longer wants foreign recruits to fight Russia, a spokesman told Canada’s National Post on Friday. Despite Kiev once welcoming Westerners with open arms, it has now been revealed that supplies are low, and inexperienced volunteers aren’t ready for combat.

    The ‘International Legion’s website is still soliciting recruits, explaining the step-by-step process for anyone interested. On Reddit’s ‘VolunteersForUkraine’ forum, potential recruits and those already in Ukraine swap advice, encouragement, and sometimes horror stories.

    One poster who allegedly survived a Russian missile strike on a training center for foreign recruits last month described how his commanding officers were “sending untrained guys to the front with little ammo and s**t AKs and they’re getting killed.” The Reddit user said that he fled to Poland after the attack with a number of foreign veterans, as “the legion is totally outgunned as has a few crazy Ukrainian leaders. After the attack one officer wanted to march everyone to Kiev and fight. Absolute insanity. Stay home.”

    https://www.rt.com/russia/553137-ukraines-international-legion-explains-why/

    Reddit’s VolunteersForUkraine?

    “They’re not sending their best”

    1. How many would-be terrorists are going to be flocking to Ukraine to get tactical training & combat experience? Not to mention all those anti-armor & shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles that are flooding into the country – a black hole for corruption – which means Ukraine is going to be a black market arms bazaar for years to come.

      1. The expensive high tech weapons have short lived activation codes that an armorer officer has to re-enter on a desired schedule. This prevents their use if stolen.

    2. “…inexperienced volunteers aren’t ready for combat.”

      This is a fake news story, IMHO. It is very easy for a veteran soldier to spot a fake, or suss-out another soldier’s prior service experience.

  2. ‘Banks thought they would benefit from locking your rate in. Now, fixed rates have shot up as banks realise locking people into a low rate was good for the customer, not for them’

    That’s quite a pickle.

    2. “That’s quite a pickle.”

      Ah, but the collected hefty fees were soooo profitable.

  3. ‘When interest rates increase, affordability of homebuying decreases, causing an inverse reaction to home valuation. To offset this issue, the market stabilizes and home prices go down’

    Golly Ward, what a tangled web of crater yer in. Probably would have been better to let the market set loan rates based on credit, incomes, risk etc.

    1. ‘To offset this issue, the market stabilizes and home prices go down’

      And lower home prices make them more affordable.

      So this is a good thing, in line with a longstanding US political objective of providing affordable housing.

      1. And yet more affordable will not make for more desirable once fear becomes firmly entrenched. Ah the dynamics of a bursting bubble.

        1. Nobody wants to catch themselves a falling knife. But once the price adjustment process finishes playing out, I expect the onset of a golden era of affordable housing, with residential prices realigning with local incomes and employment prospects.

      2. “More affordable” translates to “Less equity wealth for the neighbors”. Not a good thing in our stupid consumer-based economy.

        Tighten your seatbelts.

        1. A chart …

          https://images.app.goo.gl/JafiqHojFQDnBHfp6

          Note: Price equals Value. The price paid for one house establishes the equity values for all of the neighboring comparables. If the price paid is jumped up by, say, fifty thousands then the equity wealth for ALL the neighboring comparables also jumps up by fifty thousand dollars. If there are a hundred neighboring comparables then the fifty thousand dollar price jump for that one house will magically create five million dollars of equity value for the neighbors.

          Unfortunately (for some) the reverse is true: If the last house sold had a fifty thousand dollar price decrease then the collective equity wealth losses to the hundred comparables is five million dollars.

          All of this wierd behavior markets and people are in the firm control of wonderful people such as myself because I get to decide what is “affordable” and what is not.

          Life is good if you are a banker, not so good if you are not.

          😁

    1. The Financial Times
      Capital markets
      Global fundraising in capital markets shrinks by $900bn in first quarter
      Flow of deals evaporates as investors take fright at volatility and US interest rate path
      Bankers and investors say the drop-off in activity stems from dramatic swings in global stock markets and the start of interest-rate rises from the Federal Reserve
      © FT montage/Bloomberg
      Joe Rennison, Nicholas Megaw and Eric Platt in New York yesterday

      Global fundraising in capital markets shrivelled by more than $900bn in the first quarter from the same period in 2021 as surging inflation, war in Ukraine and volatile asset prices delayed stock listings and hampered bond deals.

      Businesses raised $2.3tn in the first three months of the year through equity sales and new borrowings in bond and loan markets, the smallest sum in six years and down from more than $3.2tn from a year ago, according to data provider Refinitiv.

      Bankers and investors say the drop-off in activity stems from dramatic swings in global stock markets and the start of interest-rate rises from the Federal Reserve, which has prompted money managers to shy away from riskier investments and high-flying stocks.
      …

      2. When interest rates were falling to basically 0, they claimed to be geniuses and deserved the million dollar bonuses. Now that the free money is going back to just (by historic standards) low levels, they need to start the blame game.


        A majority of Wall Street investors believe the biggest threat facing the markets right now is a policy error by the Federal Reserve as the central bank wrestles with taming decades-high inflation, according to the new CNBC Delivering Alpha investor survey.

        We polled about 400 chief investment officers, equity strategists, portfolio managers and CNBC contributors who manage money about where they stood on the markets for the rest of 2022. The survey was conducted this week.

        Forty-six percent of the survey respondents said a Fed misstep could have the potential to derail the bull market, while 33% said surging U.S. inflation poses a major threat. Eleven percent listed further aggression from Russia after its invasion of Ukraine as the biggest threat to the markets.

    1. some interesting details in the article

      The hospitality industry has had the highest wage increase in the past financial year owing to a staff shortage crisis, with a 3.5 per cent rise in take home pay, according to Mr Lambert.

      “So in less than a 12-month time period to February 2022, the industry has already had three mandated increases and a market increase due to the severe workforce shortage,” Mr Lambert said.

      He added that staff shortages have “actually gotten worse” despite international borders opening, meaning there are nearly 100,000 open positions in accommodation and food services, with some barista and kitchenhand roles commanding close to six-figure wages.

    1. It rains and the water runs to the ocean and by Summer its all gone. Snow does help store it because the Governor hasn’t figured out how it melt it all at once and send it to the ocean unlike opening damns and draining lakes.

      “$33 million for fisheries and wildlife support to protect and conserve California’s diverse ecosystems. This means empty more water from reservoirs to protect fish, without any accountability, as has been the failing status quo for 30 years.May 21, 2021

  9. costs reached a new high and margins fell to the lowest level since early 2019. And most industry observers think it will only get worse in the next few quarters. Net gains in Q4 declined to $1,099 on each loan originated, compared to $2,594 in the previous quarter,
    In previous downturns I remember seeing a loss on the average loan.
    Yeah, it’s gonna get ugly, real Ugly if rates go up a lot more (Maybe even a little more) Depending on your credit score and Down payment current rates can be over 5.00% for lower Down payment & Fico (700-720 ) FreddieMac Data assumes down payment of 20%.

    Good thing everyone is putting down 20% so they get the best rates.

      1. net gains down so much per mortgage?
        Lower margins for one thing, as competition increases you have to lower your margins to win business and 2) Volume. there are economies of scale in the mortgage business, mostly on the back end. Loan officers payout usually increase in BPS as their volumes exceed certain targets. (Example: at production volume Over $2.00 million bps payout goes up 10 bps)

      1. That sounds like an intentional, planned genocide.

        Yuval Harari has an address, somewhere. He’s not important enough to have a round the clock security detail.

        Sure would be a shame if something rather unfortunate happened to Yuval Harari, wouldn’t it now?

        Ben, get the ropes ready…

      2. Yuval Harari “what do we need so many useless humans for?”

        This guy is tiny! I would almost feel bad for throat punching that little rat. *Almost.*

    2. Steve Kirsch Newletter — $1M reward for a CDC or FDA whistleblower (4/1/2022):

      “I am willing to pay up to $1M for information that I can give to the DOJ and state attorney generals to bring criminal charges against these people.

      You don’t have to reveal your identity. All you need to do is supply information that we can authenticate that shows the corruption for how all the safety signals were ignored. You can keep your job at the CDC or FDA. Nobody has to know.

      You can contact me at stevekirsch-request@protonmail.com and put WHISTLEBLOWER in caps in the subject line of your message and put in the body what evidence you have, why the evidence is credible, and we can go from there.”

      https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/up-to-1m-for-a-cdc-or-fda-whistleblower?s=r

      The Day Of The Rope is coming…

      1. You can keep your job at the CDC or FDA. Nobody has to know.

        Like they’re not going to look for the mole if that happens?! $1M isn’t enough to ruin your career and make yourself a target.

        1. At least in “normal” times, whistleblowers are completely protected. That one million would turn into $20 million if one were fired for simply telling the truth.

          1. Steve Kirsch tosses around $1M+ offers but can’t recognize that his offers are woefully insufficient for his ask.

        2. It’s a shame that we need to even try to bribe people into acting morally.

          A person with an understanding of natural law would do it for free, and without regard for limb and life.

          Hey, even if you took the money: if you can survive until the dust settles you could parlay that million into much, much more with a good book deal! And if you can’t survive you’ve died with honor.

    3. This is a Mass Formation Psychosis.

      New York Times — Teenagers Report Growing Anxiety. Maybe That’s Rational (4/2/2022):

      “This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published results from a survey of American teenagers that was conducted between January and June of 2021, and the findings aren’t great. According to the CDC:

      More than one in three high school students (37.1 percent) experienced poor mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition, 44.2 percent of students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, almost 20 percent seriously considered suicide, and 9.0 percent attempted suicide during the 12 months before the survey.”

      https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/02/opinion/cdc-teenagers.html

      Maybe that’s rational? A rational response to being subjected to Mass Formation Psychosis (note that after Dr. Robert Malone appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast, Google immediately manipulated their search results for Mass Formation Psychosis).

      Instead of killing themselves, or shooting up their school, maybe some of these kids will channel that energy into locating, hunting down, and executing the people responsible for the Mass Formation Psychosis.

      Happy *TWENTY FIVE MONTH* anniversary of “two weeks to flatten the curve”

      1. The Grand Jury Peoples Court presented A compelling case that proved the Pandemic of Covid was contrived with the basis of the scam being the false testing.

        Professor Harari is a disgusting intellectual, no different than any murderous tyrant wanting to rationalize killing people or hacking people. .

        He’s going to Judge the worth of humans and what their fate should be , even right to live or not be raped by technology. .

        He envisions perfect controlled slaves, with no free will that are programmed to do the bidding of a elite group of peopLe who are a bunch of psychopaths. A God complex is what they have, and a arrogance that dangerous to this earth.
        And, they are all masters of trickery and fraud , so as to assault humans , but make it look like they are saving lives by their medical fraud.
        And the ironic thing about this small group of hijackers of humans, they would be nothing without what humans created for thousands of years. They are parasites and thieves in their ivory towers that want a world of depopulation for their self serving bizarre utopia.
        Forced deprivation of populations by control of all resources with a Great Reset , One World order dictorship , taking away all options for people, no freedoms, no pursuit of happiness for humans, you will have nothing and eat bugs and fake food, while injections will be forced.
        Lovely world they want for people, that just sounds like prison, or slavery, deprivation and force.
        So, they have been mouthing the phrase ” One World Order “, to much lately , so no hiding this power grab anymore.

      2. Happy *TWENTY FIVE MONTH* anniversary of “two weeks to flatten the curve”

        The latest fear propaganda coming out of the UK is that “reinfections are soaring” and the only way to protect yourself is, of course, to get yet another booster.

        1. Here’s more:

          LONDON (AP) — The prevalence of COVID-19 in the U.K. has reached record levels, with about 1 in 13 people estimated to be infected with the virus in the past week, according to the latest figures from Britain’s official statistics agency.

          Some 4.9 million people were estimated to have the coronavirus in the week ending March 26, up from 4.3 million recorded in the previous week, the Office for National Statistics said Friday. The latest surge is driven by the more transmissible omicron variant BA.2, which is the dominant variant across the U.K.

          So, how many weeks until they peddle this BS in the US?

  11. Substack long read for the weekend:

    “The short version of my detransition story for those who want the bare details is that when I was fifteen, I was introduced to gender ideology on Tumblr and began to call myself nonbinary. Over the next few years, I would continue to go deeper and deeper down the trans identity rabbit hole, and by the time I was eighteen, I saw myself as a “trans man”, otherwise known as “FtM”. Shortly after my eighteenth birthday, I made an appointment at a Planned Parenthood to begin a testosterone regimen. At my first appointment, I was prescribed testosterone, and I would remain on this regimen for a year and a half. It had an extremely negative effect on my mental health, and I finally admitted what a disaster it had been when I was 19, sometime around February or March 2018. When the disillusionment fully set in, I stopped the testosterone treatment and began the process of getting my life back on track. It has not been easy, and the whole experience seriously derailed my life in ways I could never have foreseen when I was that fifteen-year-old kid playing with pronouns on Tumblr.”

    https://lacroicsz.substack.com/p/by-any-other-name?s=r

    The only website possibly worse than Reddit is Tumblr.

    BTW, if you spend money on any products, services, amusement parks from the Disney corporation, you are financially contributing to this.

    Globalists rape kids. They rape, and mutilate, and destroy children. This is who the globalists are, and this is what they do.

    1. Once China’s Plunge Protection Team can’t pump life back into the bubble, it’s beyond resuscitation, by definition.

  14. ‘Buyers who were on the edge of qualifying are going to get priced out of the market. We’re going to see a slowdown in demand in the coming months, which will affect the price a seller can get for their home.’

    If you took freshman economics, you may recall the figure with a big X in it. The vertical (“Y”) axis is price and the horizontal (“X”) axis is quantity sold. The segment of the X that slopes down to the right is demand and the segment that slopes up to the right is supply.

    That pricing out of buyers due to higher interest rates translates into a shift to the left in demand. Freshman economics predicts that the equilibrium price of homes will fall, as will the number of homes selling. Sellers who can’t wait until the Fed pumps prices back up a few years from now will have to sell at a lower price than expected, and used home sellers may suddenly face a big drop off in sales from recent levels, requiring them to relocate or find another occupation.

  15. Well worth watching the 12 minute video.

    Tucker Carlson: Democrats are the ones benefitting from Biden’s energy crisis

    Democrats want to completely change the way you power your home, and it will make them money

    By Tucker Carlson | Fox News
    Published April 1, 2022 11:00pm EDT

    Biden keeps telling us these energy sanctions are going to crush Putin, but they haven’t. That’s clearly not true. Putin’s fine. The ruble has almost completely recovered since the day Russia invaded. So much for destroying the Russian economy and getting the Russian military to withdraw from Ukraine and yet we in the U.S. are paying higher and higher gas prices thanks to these sanctions.

    So, Biden is not hurting Vladimir Putin. Biden is hurting American citizens. Why? What exactly is this about? Well, the first thing you should know and never forget is that nothing changes a society faster than a war, even a war in another country. If you want to reorder a society, you’re going to need a major crisis in order to do it. The democratic process is not going to work for you. The democratic process will never get you to total transformation because voters almost never want systemic change. They prefer incremental improvement and that’s why they tend to elect the very same people to office year after year.

    They do that because radicalism—big change—scares them. They are not looking —and they are never looking —for massive, abrupt changes to the way they live. So again, if you want a revolution, you’re going to need some kind of emergency to justify it.

    Let’s say, for example, that you wanted to change a country’s 250-year-old system of voting in order to make that system much more vulnerable to mass election fraud, which you would commit. How would you go about doing something like that? You couldn’t do it by referendum. No. You might need to declare a public health emergency and then institute vote-by-mail in the name of fighting a pandemic. You should try that because that might work.

    Or, for another example, how would you go about taking full control over an economy built on fossil fuels? Well, you’d first have to break the existing economy because if you gave people a choice over how to power their vehicles, homes and businesses, not many of them would choose windmills. No, they’d go with what they have, which is oil and gas. So, you’d have to take that choice away from them. You couldn’t let them choose and you couldn’t do this by democratic means because no legislature would ever vote for a change like that because they know voters don’t want it.

    So instead, you might use a war underway across the world to declare an energy shortage in your country and then make fossil fuels unaffordable for the average person and that way, people would have no choice but to switch over to the new system, which, not incidentally, you and your friends and your donors would control.

    So that’d be one way, maybe the only way to get a Green New Deal, without having to get it through Congress because it never would go through Congress. Hmm. Do you think that’s what’s happening here? You’d hate to think so. You wouldn’t want to think that your government would intentionally exacerbate the suffering of millions of Ukrainian civilians in order to take over America’s energy grid, but that seems to be exactly what is happening right now and we know this because the administration has essentially told us up.

    Energy inflation is a direct and intended result of White House policies. The whole point of these policies is to make it impossible for you to use fossil fuels because you can’t afford it and then substitute those fossil fuels, which you could afford with new green energy that you have no choice but to use. They’re saying that essentially out loud. Here’s the Speaker of the House, third in line to the presidency, Nancy Pelosi. She explained that even though we probably could fix this problem by producing more of our own energy in the United States, which we own, which is the root of our prosperity, we’re not going to do that because cheap oil would devalue her family’s investments in renewable. Sorry, we didn’t mean to say that. We mean cheap oil would destroy the planet.

    NANCY PELOSI: “We cannot allow the fossil fuel industry to use this as an excuse to reverse everything we’re doing to save the planet.”

    “We can’t stop what we’re doing.” She’s just saying it, right up there in English, “We’re doing this,” which they are. So, this is a lady with huge estates all over the country who brags that she has a $30,000 freezer telling you, you’re just have to suck it up and be poor for the planet she doesn’t care about at all.

    So, who’s benefiting from this? China’s benefiting from it. We already told you that. That’s obvious, but the Biden administration’s donors are benefiting from it, too, and one of them is now the Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm. Thanks to reporting from the Washington Free Beacon, which we are grateful for, we know that Jennifer Granholm held millions of dollars in stock in so-called green energy companies while she was serving as the secretary of energy.

    Oh, because it’s an investment scam and they’re all in on it. Check investments right now in renewable energies since the manmade energy crisis that Joe Biden and his sanctions set off and you’ll see it’s quite a robust market right now. Who’s benefiting from that? Right, people like Jennifer Granholm. She wants to force you to subsidize her investments. That’s the medium to long-term strategy and no crisis in the last decade has given them better cover than the invasion of the client state of Ukraine that Jennifer Granholm can’t even find on a map. There’s a reason they’re focused on Ukraine and it’s to give you the Green New Deal, whether you want it or not.

    https://www.foxnews.com/category/shows/tucker-carlson-tonight

    1. The City / County of Denver has banned the installation of natural gas for cooking / heating in all new residential construction. I was on a project for a few months last year with a plumber who called that ban “stealing food from his family” because no gas means less work for plumbers.

      As a sparky, it’s fun to pretend, it’s fun to play along. I will install your electric vehicle charger, you can charge your electric vehicle with electricity created by burning coal, you get to have your virtue signal, and I get paid.

      “They’re not sending their best”

    2. we in the U.S. are paying higher and higher gas prices thanks to these sanctions

      I appreciate that sanctions will hurt us, and not the Russians, but prices were headed up since the beginning of the year. There must be another possible explanation as cause precedes effect usually.

      3. “There must be another possible explanation as cause precedes effect usually.”

        He goes on to say…

        “Energy inflation is a direct and intended result of White House policies. The whole point of these policies is to make it impossible for you to use fossil fuels because you can’t afford it and then substitute those fossil fuels, which you could afford with new green energy that you have no choice but to use.”

        1. Which could be extended to meat, to make it unaffordable so you have to eat bug paste.

          2. rice is $8/half kilo in Shanghai

            Interesting. I just checked King Soopers online. A 2 lb bag (almost a kilo) is $1.69.

            Maybe there is a real food shortage in China, and people were about to find out anyway, so they are resorting to lock downs to mask the problem?

            They won’t be getting any rice from Vlad, but maybe they can make a deal for some wheat.

          3. Maybe there is a real food shortage in China

            I should have pointed out that Shanghai is in a lockdown.

          4. I should have pointed out that Shanghai is in a lockdown.

            Were there shortages during the Wuhan lock downs? I seem to recall videos of well stocked supermarkets.

  16. Will China’s current COVID-19 quake trigger a globally destructive pandemic tsunami wave elsewhere?

    Time will tell.

  17. Russian Ruble Has Recovered ALL Post-Sanctions Losses And Is Now Trading HIGHER Than Before War

    Chris Menahan
    InformationLiberation
    Apr. 01, 2022

    Less than one week after Joe Biden claimed his “unprecedented sanctions” had reduced the ruble “to rubble,” Russia’s currency has recovered all its losses and is now trading higher than before the war began.

    https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=62994

    President Biden
    @POTUS

    United States government official
    As a result of our unprecedented sanctions, the ruble was almost immediately reduced to rubble.

    The Russian economy is on track to be cut in half.

    It was ranked the 11th biggest economy in the world before this invasion — and soon, it will not even rank among the top 20.
    6:10 PM · Mar 26, 2022

    https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1507842574865866763?s=20&t=NmxXm20NzqxNbgbIgeDMhg

    1. Russia is fighting for a 1,000+ year old civilization.

      The West is fighting for drag queen story hour.

      “They’re not sending their best”

  18. Pfizer’s Adverse Events Disclosures: Public or Confidential?

    “Attached is a document that [Stevan Looney, Esq.] put together, which consists of portions of several official Pfizer documents, comparing Pfizer’s public disclosures of adverse events to its confidential disclosures to the FDA of adverse events.”

    “The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate in one place some of Pfizer’s and the FDA’s fraud, both by commission (what Pfizer said publicly) and also, and equally significantly, by omission (what Pfizer did not say publicly that it had a duty to say).”

    1. Edward Dowd (former BlackRock portfolio manager) on Gettr:

      “Insurance company actuaries are not dumb folks…the internal troop movements are knee jerk reactions to a “once in a 200 year flood.” Once they realize they are victims of Fraud they will react & the media blackout will be over. I believe the flood gates will open soon.”

      “To all the Wall Street Sell Side Insurance & Pharmaceutical analysts:
      You best get on board…the train is about to leave the station & make you guys look like morons. $PFE $MRNA #Fraud”

  19. Incorrect statement, just heard in MSM headline news: “At today’s interest rates, a home would cost 40% more than a year ago.”

    Nothing a little math can’t fix, though:

    1 -1/1.4 = 28.6%.

    Slightly more correct version:

    “At today’s interest rates, a home priced to actually sell, rather than sit on the market forever, would cost 28.6% less than it would have cost a year ago.”

  21. Clown World: Transgender Undersecretary of Health Declared a Role Model for ‘Trans Kids’

    Infowars.com
    April 2nd 2022, 5:34 pm

    MSNBC fawns over Rachel Levine being a role model for “trans kids” despite herding COVID-positive patients into nursing homes as Pennsylvania’s health secretary.

    Transgender Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine declared himself a role model in the wake of his confirmation as a four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.

    When asked by MSNBC anchor Hallie Jackson on Thursday if he sees himself as a “role model” for “trans kids”, Levine answered in the affirmative, saying he just wants to “give back” as a top Health and Human Services official.

    Alex Stein #99
    @alexstein99
    She is a hero…thank you for your Service Rachel

    https://twitter.com/alexstein99/status/1510090099320573957?s=20&t=jQR9UQ9IOoMMjHywuqFU_Q

    “So I am truly privileged and I am honored to serve as a role model for transgender individuals. But what I want to do is give back.”

    “And the two ways I can give back is one, to be very vocal and advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community – specifically transgender individuals – and to work on specific policies at HHS and throughout the administration that support diversity equity and inclusion,” Levine added.

    And what exactly did Levine do to earn his place as a four-star admiral and a “role model”?

    By toeing the Democrat line as Pennsylvania’s Health Secretary, where he moved his 95-year-old mother out of a nursing home just as he ordered COVID-positive patients into nursing homes across the state.

    Approximately 70% of the total COVID deaths in Pennsylvania came from nursing home patients.

    Truly the stuff of a real role model.

    This is just another day in Joe Biden’s clown world.

  23. Is this a good time to stand back and stand by on moving new monies into stock or bond investments?

    1. The Financial Times
      US economy
      Fed’s Daly says case for half-point rate rise in May has grown
      Signs the US central bank is preparing aggressive moves to bring persistent inflation under control
      Mary Daly says data show the labour market is ‘tight to an unsustainable level’
      © Mark Green/FT
      Colby Smith in Washington an hour ago

      The case for a half-point interest rate increase at the Federal Reserve’s next policy meeting in May has grown, according to Mary Daly, president of the US central bank’s San Francisco branch, in the latest sign that it is readying aggressive moves to root out high inflation.

      Daly joins an expanding group of Fed officials who have jettisoned a gradual approach to scaling back support for the economy in the aftermath of the pandemic-induced recession. They have embraced a more rapid withdrawal as the labour market has bounded back and price pressures have become far-reaching.

      Support has coalesced in recent weeks for interest rates to rise to a “neutral” level that neither aids nor constrains growth, and to get there more quickly than initially expected by moving in larger increments than the quarter-point rate increase delivered in March. That entails resurrecting a tool last used more than two decades ago and raising rates by half a percentage point at one or more meetings this year.

      “The case for 50, barring any negative surprise between now and the next meeting, has grown,” said Daly in an interview with the Financial Times on Friday. “I’m more confident that taking these early adjustments would be appropriate.”

      Estimating the neutral policy rate to be between 2.3 per cent and 2.5 per cent, and advocating for getting to that level “efficiently” this year, Daly acknowledged that that translates to “multiple” half-point adjustments given the target range of between 0.25 per cent and 0.50 per cent.
      …

      1. the labour market is ‘tight to an unsustainable level’

        Why are so many millions of Americans not returning to the “labor force”?

        1. I recall reading a piece from a labor economist who mentioned workers losing their “motivation” once they’ve been out of the workforce longer than six months.

          1. out of the workforce longer than six months.

            I took a two week vacation fishing in Northern Ontario in my thirties. First two week vacation of my life. I was tempted to not return.

        2. Why are so many millions of Americans not returning to the “labor force”?

          Is the “free cheese” good enough, perhaps? Sure, not as much as a paycheck, but you get to be a lay about.

      1. Maybe turning to AOC and her economic advisors for Modern Monetary Policy direction wasn’t a good call?

        1. If workers started on a serious debt reduction plan once re-employed that extra money would not appear as demand that forces prices higher.

        2. “Fed officials were entirely caught off guard.”

          That’s because they are managers, not leaders.

  24. From the bankrate.com article:
    …
    “We really have learned that the economy can sustain much lower unemployment than we originally thought without troubling levels of inflation,” Powell said in response to a question from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York.
    …
    Bottom line

    Economists for the past several years have been questioning the accuracy of the Phillips curve and whether it actually oversimplifies the U.S. economy.

    The model has become “weaker and weaker and weaker to the point where it’s a faint heartbeat that you can hear now,” Powell said in his July 2019 congressional testimony.

    Today’s soaring inflation comes at a complicated time for Fed officials. In 2020, they unveiled a new policy that essentially abandoned the Phillips-curve minded way of thinking, no longer deciding to preemptively hike rates to ward off inflation as joblessness declined.

    Yet, that era might now be in the rearview mirror, as officials prepare to lift off rates at least three times in 2022.

    “It is possible that, when and if we get past this experience, the traditional thinking about the relationship between unemployment and inflation will re-assert itself,” Hamrick says. “No doubt it will be closely monitored by central banks, economists and ultimately of interest to consumers, workers and employers.”
    …

    1. as joblessness declined

      As millions not returning to the labor force do not experience “joblessness”. Jay is quite the comedian.

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