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Once The Hype Was Exposed, The Selloff Was Unforgiving

A weekend topic starting with the Marina Times in California. “San Francisco’s real estate market may be cooling off a bit. ‘Some tech folks have lost up to a third of their stock portfolio’s value this year. Along with other buyers who have down payments invested in stocks, they are certainly more wary than they had been previously,’ according to Annie Williams with Sotheby’s International Realty.”

“It’s no wonder that people who are not uber wealthy are a bit more wary when buying a home. This can be devastating to sellers of course, who hear it’s a hot market — who expect multiple offers with over-asking bids in no time at all — and find they are unable to sell their homes. It happens, according to Janet Siroto in a realtor.com piece entitled ‘The Secret Shame of Owning a Home That Just Won’t Sell.’ ‘Denial, anger, embarrassment — all these emotions and more fill a home seller’s long days as they wait for their real estate agent to text or call with good news,’ Siroto writes.”

From Money Wise. “Rick Sharga, an executive with RealtyTrac, says Zillow’s business model was flawed, noting that house-flipping investors often pay too much and underestimate the time and cost to ready a home to sell. ‘Zillow Offers appears to have made both mistakes and done so at a large enough scale to result in hundreds of millions of dollars of losses,’ Sharga writes.”

The Real Deal. “Keller Williams, the Austin-based real estate franchise giant, has implemented yet another round of layoffs in its lending arm, Keller Mortgage. Keller Mortgage scaled up rapidly last year before laying off 150 recent recruits in October, according to Inman. Although the scale of these latest layoffs was still unclear at press time, more than a dozen Keller Mortgage employees posted notices on LinkedIn Tuesday that they’d been laid off, describing the job cuts as ‘big,’ ‘massive’ and ‘huge.'”

“Several other mortgage lenders — including Better, Pennymac, Guaranteed Rate, Mr. Cooper, and Wells Fargo — have downsized in recent months to adjust to lower refinancing volume, and the nation’s largest mortgage lender, Rocket, expects buyout offers it has made to 2,000 employees will save $180 million a year, according to Inman.”

From Tech Crunch. “Reluctantly, we’re writing a tech layoffs roundup for thrid week in a row, because once again, there have been reductions across stages and sectors. Over the past month, public and private tech companies have been announcing mass layoffs across sectors. Employees from Section4, Carvana, DataRobot, Mural, Robinhood, On Deck, Thrasio, MainStreet and Netflix have been impacted by the workforce reductions. Some bigger companies are instituting hiring freezes, such as Twitter and Meta, or announcing a shift in strategy, such as Uber.”

The New York Post. “The once-sizzling market for NFTs has become a spectacular bust, as high-profile auctions increasingly flop and investors who plunked down millions for bizarre digital artworks now struggle to unload them at a tiny fraction of what they paid. Last March, Bridge Oracle CEO Sina Estavi bought an NFT of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet for $2.9 million, calling it the ‘Mona Lisa of the digital world.’ Last month, he scrapped an auction to resell it after the highest bid came in below $14,000.”

“‘This has been fueled by ridiculously inflated cryptocurrency prices and hysterical bidding,’ Jeff Bell, CEO of LegalShield, a legal protection firm for consumers, told The Post. ‘This is no different than the Gold Rush or the dot-com bubble where people get ahead of themselves — everyone wants to get rich quick.'”

The Washington Post. “With the crypto market cratering by $500 billion in recent weeks, the hype over NFTs has cooled. And while Nate Hart, who is a cryptocurrency investor, is unlikely to sell, he knows that if he puts it on the market today, it would probably sell low. His cat picture isn’t from a sought-after collection, he said, like the colorful apes known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club or the pixelated people known as CryptoPunks.”

“‘It’s more wait-and-see,’ he said. ‘If it becomes a historical artifact, then it’s going to be extremely valuable. If that doesn’t happen, then maybe it just fades away into where nobody knows or ever cares about it.'”

From Bloomberg. “Snap Inc. plunged 43%, posting its biggest-ever one-day drop and dragging down social media peers, after the company cut its revenue and profit forecasts, blaming the weaker economic outlook for a sudden slowdown of its advertising business. The companies ‘are having to bring these unattainable, unrealistic investors’ expectations back down to Earth,’ said Dan Suzuki, deputy chief investment officer at Richard Bernstein Advisors.”

From FreightWaves. “Rob Slavin knows his tractor-trailers. He’s a senior pricing analyst at Ritchie Bros. Auctioneer, which sells hundreds of millions of dollars of used transportation equipment each year. And in the two decades he’s been selling or analyzing used truck prices, he’s never seen a market like the one of the past year and a half. Slavin saw big rigs double and sometimes triple in price. A used 2016 truck that would have cost around $32,000 at the end of 2020 would get auctioned off for $75,000, Slavin said. And, at a dealership, where trucks are reconditioned before getting sold, that truck would cost up to $90,000.”

“But he knows what goes up must go down. ‘I didn’t have any anticipation of it staying where it was,’ Slavin told FreightWaves. ‘I’m calling what we went through a once-in-a-lifetime experience.'”

From Globes. “Lavish parties were thrown, expensive offices leased and superfluous employees hired as US funds poured cheap money into startups, without due diligence. Now the party is over.Many in Israel’s tech sector believe that the shutting down of grocery delivery startup Avo’s Israel operations and the complete closure of AI solutions company BeyondMinds, with over 60 layoffs, is the start of a worrying trend. After years of success and prosperity, more and more companies are expected to fail in the coming months.”

“Over the past two years, unprecedented amounts of investment have flowed into Israeli startups and now the music seems to be stopping. ‘When we raised money last year, our entire due diligence process comprised just two meetings until we received a term sheet. Once such a due diligence process took 6-8 weeks and last year that shrank to five days,’ said the CEO of a startup that raised tens of millions of dollars. ‘Our investors looked at the presentation – which had data about revenue, growth and a list of customers – and everything was concluded with that. Nobody asked to see an excel sheet with other figures, nobody interviewed our management and nobody tried to talk with the customers.'”

“When Gil Dibner, the founder of the Israeli-European fund Angular Ventures attempts to define recent years in the startup investment market, he uses the term ‘collective delusion,’ used by the business guru Prof. Scott Galloway. ‘In recent years everybody has through big money at problems and opportunities, even when it was clear that throwing the money would not succeed in solving these problems,’ he says. ‘Now suddenly everybody is waking up to this collective delusion and understanding that beyond the opportunity, it is important that the company also has revenue, and unit economics (profitability for the sale of each product unit) and that it can justify the valuation that it was given.'”

From Daiji World in India. “The joke in the stock markets is tomatoes are more expensive than Zomato. Zomato trades at Rs 62.05 down from a peak of Rs 169.10. Share prices of tech startups such as Zomato, Nykaa and Paytm have caused huge wealth destruction for investors. Ravi Singh, Vice President and head of Research Share India said following the market slump due to the geopolitical crisis and interest rate hikes in developed economies, share prices of tech startups such as Zomato, Paytm and Nykaa have failed, erasing a large part of investors wealth.”

The Globe and Mail in Canada. “Trillions of dollars invested in stocks and cryptocurrencies have evaporated since the tech sector selloff began six months ago, and the last thing investors want to do is blame themselves. But if we’re being honest we must admit that we are all partly responsible, because once again our obsession with good stories is a leading culprit. Interest rates alone don’t explain the shift. What we’re seeing now follows a pattern that was also present in each of the ugliest market collapses of the past three decades, including Black Monday, the dot-com crash and the 2008-09 global financial crisis. In each and every one of those market routs, our psychological flaws played a prominent role.”

“And now it’s happening again. It’s painful to admit that we could be so silly, because we’ve been burned before – but believing anything else would be an absurd act of self-defence. When cannabis stocks took off five years ago, their investment thesis was eerily similar to the one for pandemic tech stocks. Investors thought they were getting in on the ground floor of the future. No matter how ridiculous the valuations were relative to hard numbers, such as the portion of the population that actually smokes weed or does edibles, investors were told – and happily believed – Canadian cannabis companies were set to take over the world.”

“It was the perfect test for behavioural economics. And we failed, spectacularly. Once the hype was exposed, the selloff was unforgiving, and it didn’t stop until there was hardly any value left. Keep that in mind the next time someone tries to argue a company that has never made money is worth tens of billions of dollars.”

From The Print. “With its real estate sector slowing down, China is cutting back on costs and issued directives to the administration of its local counties and cities to slash spending, in a bid to avoid an impending economic crisis. Real estate is a key revenue source for China’s local governments, which have grown reliant on sales of land-use rights for state-owned plots, which came to the equivalent of around 50 per cent of total tax revenue in 2021, according to Nikkei Asia.”

“With the top leadership doubling down on real estate financing in an attempt to deflate a housing bubble, revenue from such transactions fell drastically for the first four months of this year. Several provincial governments are now resorting to cutting back on expenses as much as possible, according to Nikkei Asia. While some government agencies have stopped all purchases of computers, desks and other supplies, others are no longer distributing notebooks and pencils to civil servants at government and Communist Party meetings.”

“Chinese Premier Li Keqiang had painted a grim picture of the job market in the world’s most populous nation due to widespread COVID-19 lockdowns. The No 2 in the hierarchy of China’s ruling Communist Party — called the employment situation ‘complex and grave.’ His remarks come at a time when the jobless rate in the country has climbed to the highest rate in almost two years, according to data from the government.”

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This Post Has 89 Comments

    2. In no time Bolt will be permanently Bolting their doors as will many of these no profit companies living off IPO/Startup funds.

  3. The Globes article is worth reading in full. Years ago I asked some K-frnan posters if the 1,000 unicorns joke was becuz they are so smart in silly valley, or if it was the result of the greatest money printing extravaganza in human history? And that was before the CCP virus fake money explosion!

    The answer is in. It’s gonna leave a mark.

  4. ‘While some government agencies have stopped all purchases of computers, desks and other supplies, others are no longer distributing notebooks and pencils to civil servants at government and Communist Party meetings’

    Hey Dan, care to share yer latest GDP forecast fer the commies? They can’t even buy big chief tablets.

    ‘A new wave of job cuts has hit China’s largest technology companies, as regulatory pressure and Covid lockdowns battered their business…Businesses with heavy losses, including cloud computing and video, were among the worst-affected at Tencent, having suffered at least two rounds of job cuts since April, another source said.’

    ‘Occasionally, entire teams of more than 20 employees were laid off, according to a third source. All sources declined to be named as they were not authorised to speak to the media. The deepening cuts come amid regulatory uncertainty in China’s tech sector and a slowing economy dragged down by strict Covid containment measures, which have hammered Big Tech earnings.’

    ‘In April, the unemployment rate of people between 16 and 24 years old in China was 18.2 per cent, compared with 13.9 per cent in Europe and 8.6 per cent in the US, according to Chinese media Caixin, citing Lu Feng, a professor at the National School of Development at Peking University in a seminar last week.’

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-big-tech-sees-wave-093000495.html

    This is why yer never getting our guns:

    ‘All sources declined to be named as they were not authorised to speak to the media’

    1. This is why yer never getting our guns

      People gunning up = a vote of No Confidence in the Brandon regime & where the country is headed. Meanwhile, as the globalists and their Democrat-Bolshevik Quislings redouble their efforts to disarm potential resisters, they would do well to remember that dozens of cops all kitted out in tacti-cool gear were too cowardly to take on a single gender-fluid punk in an elementary school – so who exactly do the comrades of the DNC plan on sending to disarm hardcore, well-armed American patriots?

      Gun stocks soar after Texas massacre

      https://www.news.com.au/finance/markets/world-markets/gun-stocks-soar-after-texas-massacre/news-story/1407aa5a6f0aee395ca69948e5f1ad47

      Shares in American guns and ammo manufacturers have skyrocketed in the wake of the Texas massacre for one reason.

      2. They won’t have to go door to door. First off the vast majority will comply. Middle class people won’t commit suicide for their guns. Second for those who don’t, they will just make your life miserable until you comply. You will not be able to open a bank account or renew your license or enroll your kids for school unless you show proof of a gun free home. The left has been gaming this for decades. They have the plans drawn up and ready for execution.

        1. You will not be able to open a bank account or renew your license or enroll your kids for school unless you show proof of a gun free home.

          And they’re expecting meek compliance? I don’t think so.

          1. . You will not be able to open a bank account or renew your license or enroll your kids for school unless you show proof of a gun free home.

            Will the SC agree to that?

        2. They have the plans

          Billions of $$ worth of arms for Nazzys in Ukraine because gun violence is heroic!

          They may have plans, but their plans do not work. None of them work.

    2. I’m reading “The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976.” It’s horrifying, but should be required reading for the dolts in our NEA indoctrination mills whose “educators” would like to take us down the same road.

    1. Replying to
      @ronmortgageguy

      ‘Of the 50% appraisal failure, what percentage of those secure the additional funds to proceed with the purchase? Anecdotally, what’s the moral of these buyers? Surprised, devastated?’

      Ron Butler
      @ronmortgageguy

      ‘Shocked. Total Disbelief. Mad at us for using the “wrong” appraisers. All of that. Big differences like $200K are hard to find additional down payment.’

      https://twitter.com/FrugalVG/status/1529886620811505678

      K-da REIC studiously avoiding the crater that is greater Toronto.

      1. ‘Shocked. Total Disbelief. Mad at us for using the “wrong” appraisers. All of that. Big differences like $200K are hard to find additional down payment.’

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

  7. “‘This has been fueled by ridiculously inflated cryptocurrency prices and hysterical bidding,’ Jeff Bell, CEO of LegalShield, a legal protection firm for consumers, told The Post.”

    And the reason for all of this “fueling” is …

    (ta da)

    … this:

    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

    1. If you zoom into the rightmost data point, you will make an interesting discovery: April 2022 is the first month in a very, very long time that M2 money shrank compared to the preceding month.

      It’s a good time to be out of debt and HODL a few $$$.

  8. Re-post from the last thread.

    Servant of the Corrupt (5/27/2022):

    “the portrait of the Ukraine President as a democratic paragon whitewashes the real Zelensky and conceals a vast web of corruption and international skullduggery of which Ukraine is situated in the centre. Understanding the real Zelensky, requires seeing him as a creation of Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. He is, in truth, a puppet of intrigue.

    It might be hard to believe now, but revelations from documents in the Pandora Papers — millions of files from offshore service providers leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with partners around the world — sent Zelensky reeling last year, threatening to end his political career. Though the actor-turned-politico campaigned as an anti-corruption reformer, the Pandora Papers showed him to be just as crooked as his predecessors.

    Of more than 300 politicians and public officials, including several current and former national leaders, in more than 91 countries and territories to whom the documents were linked, Ukraine was home to more secret offshore holdings than any other, including Russia. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which contributed to the investigation, found that just before Zelensky was elected president, “he gifted his stake in a key offshore company, the British Virgin Islands-registered Maltex Multicapital Corp., to his business partner — soon to be his top presidential aide. And in spite of giving up his shares, the documents show that an arrangement was soon made that would allow the offshore to keep paying dividends to a company that now belongs to his wife.”

    As it was with crackdowns on free speech and political opposition, Zelensky’s office attempted to justify the use of offshores by blaming the specter of Russian aggression. An adviser to Zelensky’s chief of staff said the offshores were necessary to “protect” the group’s incomes against the “aggressive actions” of the “corrupt” regime of former President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in a US-backed color revolution in 2014.”

    https://im1776.com/2022/05/27/servant-of-the-corrupt/

    1. More:

      “Shortly after taking the reins, Zelensky and his Servant of the People party began firing, supposedly for inefficiency, Ukrainian ministers with reputations as anti-corruption reformers. Daria Kaleniuk, head of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, told the Washington Post in March 2020 that the affair sent the message that Zelensky “can fire a person who takes a risk, for doing the right things, and blame this person for inefficiency.” Kiev-based reform reporter Oleg Sukhov echoed the sentiment last year, writing that “Zelensky has consistently protected corrupt officials from prosecution and killed anti-corruption reforms.” On the other hand, when faced with a petition calling for his dismissal, Zelensky refused to fire Oleh Tatarov, his deputy chief of staff, who had been charged with bribery …

      In 2019, just after Zelensky won his election, Kolomoisky signaled that he was prepared to pour oil over troubled waters and make peace with Russia. The civil war in eastern Ukraine has so far claimed more than 14,000 lives. The oligarch said it was enough: “They’re stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations,” he said about Russia and Ukraine according to the New York Times. But he also saw an obstacle: “People want peace, a good life, they don’t want to be at war. And you [Washington] are forcing us to be at war, and not even giving us the money for it …

      The war has completely reinvented Zelensky, thus saving his scandal-plagued presidency marked by broken promises. As a Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll showed, just 24 percent of voters supported him in late January. But now, thanks to the West’s embracement of the actor’s new persona which often places him beyond reproach, Zelensky has become the recipient of unqualified adoration and enormous amounts of international aid money. “Before the war the U.S. was sending $300 million per year to Ukraine,” said to NPR Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for International and Strategic Studies. “Now, we’re providing $100 million a day” to what was until recently considered “the most corrupt nation in Europe,” reports (of all newspapers) The Guardian.”

      Most corrupt nation in Europe?

      “They’re not sending their best”

    2. Looks like The Narrative just shifted…looks like we need to double down on our open-ended military and financial assistance. Thankfully, Ukraine’s rigid auditing controls and culture of moral rectitude will ensure none of this military aid or money ends up in the wrong hands.

      IS Ukraine LOSING the war in Donbas? Defenders fall back to avoid capture as Russians advance after blasting towns to wastelands while Boris Johnson offers fresh support to Ukrainian president Zelensky

      https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10863019/Ukraine-LOSING-Defenders-forced-fall-avoid-capture-Russians-advance-Donbas.html

    3. “Understanding the real Zelensky, requires seeing him as a creation of Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky.”

      Aren’t these guys from the same flock that meddle in U.S. elections, incite wars, push propaganda from media outlets, destroy the professional careers of critics, etc., and are universally loved by people the around the world?

  9. ” His cat picture isn’t from a sought-after collection, he said, like the colorful apes known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club or the pixelated people known as CryptoPunks.”
    “‘It’s more wait-and-see,’ he said. ‘If it becomes a historical artifact, “
    Has the Washington Post become a satire site? A cat Picture becoming a Historical artifact?

    1. Do not declaw your cats! It makes them less effective as weaponized felines when you hide in trees and drop them on unsuspecting realtors.

  10. And so it begins.

    https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Colorado-Springs_CO/dom-1
    – Days on realtor.com – “Today”
    – 124 Homes. In ONE day! I’m sure that’s normal. /s
    – Colorado Springs, CO – Price reduced = 16.2%
    – Nationally = 19.1%

    https://twitter.com/DiMartinoBooth/status/1530170347785445376?cxt=HHwWgICzmd_0oLwqAAAA
    Danielle DiMartino Booth
    @DiMartinoBooth
    “As sure as day follows night, prices will follow spiking supply as sellers panic-list their homes.”
    6:53 AM · May 27, 2022·Twitter for iPhone

    – Sure, we all know that Redfin is a shill, but the “price reduced” number bears mentioning.

    https://www.redfin.com/news/housing-market-update-price-drops-surge-to-19pct/
    Housing Market Update: Nearly 1 in 5 Sellers is Dropping Their Price, the Highest Rate Since October 2019
    May 26, 2022 by Tim Ellis

    “Nearly one in five (19.1%) home sellers dropped their price during the four week period ending May 22—the highest level since October 2019.”

    – And in related news on the inflation front… Let’s go Brandon!

    https://nypost.com/2022/05/26/team-biden-might-be-purposefully-crushing-the-middle-class/
    Opinion

    Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class
    By Glenn H. Reynolds
    May 26, 2022 4:50pm Updated

    “Vladimir Lenin supposedly once said, “The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.””

    “There’s some doubt as to whether this line is genuine; regardless, it seems like a pretty good description of what the Biden administration is doing to America’s middle class. “

    “Inflation is running rampant. The Producer Price Index, the most useful measure of general inflation, is up a whopping 16.3% from April 2021, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

    “That means that roughly $1 out of every $6 that people earn has been lost to inflation in a single year. Or to put it another way, 80 minutes’ earnings out of every eight-hour day have been eaten up.
    This is predictable, of course. Team Biden took an already-bloated federal budget and supersized it with spending last year, printing money hand-over-fist to fund a massive array of pork-filled programs, many if not most of which guided billions of dollars into the pockets of Democratic Party supporters.”

    “President Joe Biden dismissed inflation worries at the time, saying that Milton Friedman — the famed inflation-fighting economist — no longer runs the show. Well, the late economist certainly didn’t run Biden’s show, but his observation that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon was borne out in spades as prices took off.”

    “And it was a double whammy. Inflation comes when you have too much money chasing too few goods. The spending part provided the excess money, but the Biden team was right there helping to ensure fewer goods, too.”

    – The Fed’s “wealth effect” cuts both ways. Now add high inflation. See Ben’s M2 (M2SL) money supply chart for reference. The slow-motion train wreck of the bursting of “The Everything Bubble” continues apace.

  11. ‘Some tech folks have lost up to a third of their stock portfolio’s value this year. Along with other buyers who have down payments invested in stocks, they are certainly more wary than they had been previously,’

    Stupid is as stupid does.

    –Forrest Gump

  12. ‘This is no different than the Gold Rush or the dot-com bubble where people get ahead of themselves — everyone wants to get rich quick.’”

    No, there’s a big difference. With the gold rush there was at least the opportunity to actually find gold, something you feel and hold.

  15. Denver Colorado Real Estate Market Update – May 2022 With Denver Realtor Courtney Murphy

    May 22, 2022

    ‘Inventory saw another increase in April ending the month with 3,204 homes on the market. This was up 44.26% over March. Even though we are still well into seller’s market territory, buyers are feeling a bit of relief compared to the prior months. I fully expect to see inventory increase even more as we head into summer.’

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qsi_BVtjkg

    6:11.

  17. The difference between us and them, is we felt the pain as things went UP. I was pi$$ed and kept saying to my wife, “I can’t believe they’re doing it again”.

    These idiots are genuinely surprised.

  18. Breakfast this morning:

    Steak, egg and cheese on a Thomas’ Everything Bagel.

    New York strip steaks purchased yesterday at Publix, put in my truck and driven to my house courtesy of a 5.3 Liter naturally aspirated V8 internal combustion engine before being cooked to perfection on a charcoal Weber Grill, served with baked potato topped with gobs of butter and sour cream along with the obligatory vegetable, broccoli with cheese sauce.

    The steak was delicious last night and this morning.

    Fu#k AOC

    F#ck Joe Biden and his puppet masters

    … and God Bless the United States of America.

    1. God Bless the United States of America

      I took a break from beef last night and made a big plate of shrimp scampi.

    1. Keith Baldwin, a surgeon in Massachusetts, lost more than 90% of his savings in a few days when TerraUSD became unmoored from its peg to the U.S. dollar. Vanessa Leroy for The Wall Street Journal.

      Markets
      TerraUSD Crash Led to Vanished Savings, Shattered Dreams
      Investors swept up in the mania for the high-yielding stablecoin thought it would be safe
      By Alexander Osipovich and
      Caitlin Ostroff
      Updated May 27, 2022 4:04 pm ET

      TerraUSD was touted as a blue-chip cryptocurrency. Now its investors are reeling from painful losses and asking if it was all a get-rich-quick scheme.

      A surgeon in Massachusetts can’t stop thinking about how he lost his family’s nest egg. A young Ukrainian considered suicide after losing 90% of his savings. Other investors have given up dreams of starting new businesses or quitting their day jobs.

      All of them were swept up in the mania for TerraUSD, whose total value swelled to $18 billion before collapsing earlier this month. The coin’s sudden downfall is a reminder that crypto—which enjoyed a huge bull market last year—is often little more than a casino, with weak regulation and few means of recourse for the losers.

      The crash caught many investors off guard because TerraUSD was a stablecoin, designed to maintain its value of $1 per coin. Unlike bitcoin, which has crashed repeatedly in its short history, TerraUSD was pitched as a harbor from volatility. It slipped below $1 earlier this month and was trading around 3 cents on Friday.
      …
      https://www.wsj.com/articles/terrausd-crash-led-to-vanished-savings-shattered-dreams-11653649201

      2. Many of the believers thought it was the opportunity of a lifetime when the Luna coin linked to Terra went to $.01. When it went to half a cent it was a screaming buy! Today it is trading at $.000086 with 6.5 trillion units in circulation. Is the bottom in? How low can it go??

      3. designed to maintain its value of $1 per coin

        Yet appealing as an alternative to the $. No upside, all downside for the retail customer. Sorry guys, you’ve been had.

  21. Zillow Offers appears to have made both mistakes and done so at a large enough scale to result in hundreds of millions of dollars of losses,’ Sharga writes.”

    It was only Yellen Bux.

  22. Over the past month, public and private tech companies have been announcing mass layoffs across sectors.

    Oh dear. So we can’t tell axed Real Journalists from failing globalist propaganda mouthpieces to learn to code, since those jobs have all gone away? And strip joints are empty, so there goes that option for redundant hot realtor babes. Heckova job, Brandon.

  23. Federal Reserve cue card:

    Step 1: Create fake money stealing value from everyone

    Step 2: Loan the fake money to people with interest

    Step 3: Take people’s stuff when they can’t repay the debt

    Step 4: Get government to enforce our fraud

    Step 5: Plunder humanity

    1. There were multiple unheeded warnings. This whack job should never have been allowed to own a gun.

      1. His school records were sealed like Trayvons, so there was no reason on the computer not to stop him from buying the guns.

    2. ‘we don’t have the guts to hold parents responsible for the behavior of their kids’

      If you have any experience with family or even relationship law, you would know we can’t compel or control other people. Try it yerself: call police and tell them somebody is a meanie. They’ll tell you call us back when you’ve seen a crime. How can you be responsible if you can’t control or compel others to do what you want?

      In this case police were called and they stood there. Another good reason to never give up yer guns: the police are not going to save you. They probably won’t even get there for 20 minutes.

      1. Never, never, never give up the guns.

        Besides needing guns for defense, you might need guns to shoot game to survive.

        1. guns to shoot game to survive.

          Nothing says “Hey, I’m poaching over here!” like a .30 cal.

    3. Kids ought to be held legally responsible at 14 and their criminal records made public.

  25. Housing market isn’t going to crash, a plateau is more likely
    May 25, 2022 CNBC’s Diana Olick joins ‘The Exchange’ to report on the housing market slowdown.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaaMEEI3TxE

    3:11. Diane is the one pushing plateau – click! Comments:

    ‘We’re not going to crash like 2007-2008…..because this time is much worse with record government, consumer, and corporate debt levels. Olick continues to push the myth that the last real estate meltdown was caused by subprime loans. In reality, the vast majority of failed mortgages originated from prime borrowers belonging to the middle or upper middle class. Financial hardship and/or being underwater were powerful drivers for borrowers to give up. Even large financial institutions conducted strategic defaults. See Blackstone for a more recent reference.’

    ‘Unbridled arrogance. How in this day and age could you with a straight face use the word ‘never’ when it comes to housing collapse. Unreal.’

    ‘I have to give ya’ll credit for continuing to try to prop up the housing market but frankly, ‘BURN BABY! BURN!’

    ‘When homes go up by 30%-50% in a year you will most certainly get a huge pull back , you can bet on that. These cheerleaders know nothing. These are the same people that said the housing market wouldn’t crash in 08.’

    ‘Ah yes, the famous “permanently high plateau”.

    ‘I think plateau is a fantasy. Prices are already dropping 5-20 percent where I’m at.’

    ‘Can someone describe a scenario in past history where we’ve seen housing prices, “plateau,” like she mentions here? I am searching 100 years of data but can’t find anything even remotely similar lol’

    1. “We’re not going to crash like 2007-2008…..because this time is much worse with record government, consumer, and corporate debt levels”

      lol, the set up and then the gut punch.

    2. describe a scenario…“plateau”

      A debt pyramid is a grow or die thing. If imaginary profits do not exceed carry costs the only thing under real estate prices is a giant air pocket.

    3. ‘Ah yes, the famous “permanently high plateau”.

      “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. I do not feel there will be soon if ever a 50 or 60 point break from present levels, such as (bears) have predicted. I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher within a few months.” – Irving Fisher, Ph.D. in economics, Oct. 15, 1929

      – Thanks to the wonders of financialization via the FIRE sector, and Government and Federal Reserve System (aka the Fed) interventions and machinations, housing is now just another asset class, albeit illiquid, and with high carrying costs. Due to the spread of the Central Bank virus around the world, this is a global pandemic; virtually every OECD country has drunk the “RE is the path to riches” cool-aid and is now suffering their own individual housing bubbles, with all of them in various stages of collapse.

      – Housing (soon to be “hosing”) is just another speculative commodity/asset class. There. Said it, because no one else has, excluding a few brave souls and most excellent bloggers on the HBB!

      https://bankunderground.co.uk/2019/09/06/houses-are-assets-not-goods-taking-the-theory-to-the-uk-data/#more-5400

      Houses are assets not goods: taking the theory to the UK data
      BankUnderground Financial Markets, Macroeconomics
      06 September 2019 6 Minutes
      John Lewis and Fergus Cumming

      “We find that the rise in real house prices since 2000 can be explained almost entirely by lower interest rates. Increasing scarcity of housing, evidenced by real rental prices and their expected growth, has played a negligible role at the national level.”

      https://positivemoney.org/2019/09/bank-of-england-confirms-positive-money-analysis-of-house-prices/
      Bank of England finally admits high house prices are determined by finance, not supply and demand
      by Simon Youel
      09 2019

      “In a duo of fascinating blog posts this month, Bank of England researchers John Lewis and Fergus Cumming confirmed what we’ve been arguing for a long time: that houses are assets, the price of which is not determined so much by simple textbook supply and demand as with typical consumer goods, but by the role of finance.”

      “The mainstream narrative on Britain’s housing crisis is that housing is so expensive because there are simply not enough homes to go around. As I have argued elsewhere, not only is this narrative misleading, but it serves the pockets of property developers, and lets the real culprits – bankers and landlords – off the hook.”

      “Unfortunately, even the Bank of England has fallen into this habit at times, with governor Mark Carney repeating statements such as “The underlying dynamic reflects a chronic shortage of housing supply, which the Bank can’t tackle directly.””

      “But research from the Bank of England’s own staff suggests Carney should have known better – and perhaps that the Bank itself has been complicit in pushing house prices out of reach. In ‘Houses are assets not goods: taking the theory to the UK data’, Lewis and Cumming construct a twenty year model which shows that “relative scarcity of housing has played almost no role at the national level since 2000” in rocketing prices.””

      – Just remember when the feces meets the fan, exactly where the blame lies. Of course this is also due to speculators in no small part, but the Fed and Government set fiscal, housing, and monetary policies. They did this.

      Hosea 8:7
      NIV

      7
      “They sow the wind
      and reap the whirlwind.
      The stalk has no head;
      it will produce no flour.
      Were it to yield grain,
      foreigners would swallow it up.

    4. “‘We’re not going to crash like 2007-2008…..because this time is much worse with record government, consumer, and corporate debt levels.”

      What was it that Neil used to say? 🙂

  26. After wasting 20 minutes trying and failing to see the point of NFTs, I realized they were going to be the blow off top poster children for this bubble.

  27. “It’s painful to admit that we could be so silly, because we’ve been burned before”

    Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 17 times and I must be a dumb@$$.

    1. Bet it was a good show, hope you had a good time.

      PS

      “Hardly anyone in the audience without white hair (and skin).”

      Statistically that lowers the chance of a mass shooting to just about nil. 🙂

  29. Biden job disapproval among Hispanics hits 60%, just 26% approve: poll

    By Callie Patteson
    May 19, 2022

    Three-fifths of US Hispanics dislike the job President Biden is doing, according to a new survey out this week — yet another sign of widespread discontent as Americans grapple with the ongoing border crisis, baby formula shortage and skyrocketing inflation.

    https://nypost.com/2022/05/19/biden-job-disapproval-among-hisanics-hits-60p-percent-poll/

    The Names: 19 Children, 2 Teachers Killed in Uvalde School

    May 27, 2022 7:02 PM
    Associated Press

    https://www.voanews.com/a/the-names-19-children-2-teachers-killed-in-uvalde-school-/6592918.html

    1. Ghouls.

      Agreed. This was not an accident. It was planned. The depopulation plan has many prongs. The jab is but one of them.

  31. The wife’s best friend called today to say goodbye. She’s 67. Just got diagnosed with Leukemia 6 months ago. First in line to get vaxxed and boosted. Was living the life before. Perfectly healthy.

    Probably never know if it was the “vaccine” but now her family will wonder forever.

  32. I live in Coeur D’Alene, ID and the market has changed here. I would t say it’s in crash mode yet, but a noticeable difference from a few months ago. Used to be houses went pending in a day or two. Now it’s a week or two or three. Price reductions were unheard of now they aren’t common, but they are not an exception.

    Prices have doubled or more in the past 3 years so it’s inevitable that a correction is coming. Only question is how much.

    10 years ago $200k bought a decent house. Today that house is $600k. I don’t think it is ever going back to $200k. My guess is $500k. This area has been flooded with Californians buying homes sight unseen and paying cash. It’s not the Coeur D’Alene of yesteryear anymore, unfortunately.

    1. I don’t think it is ever going back to $200k. My guess is $500k.

      Some areas will crash harder than others. Places with no jobs will crash the hardest.

      Granted, last time the REIC and the Banking Clan conspired to keep foreclosures off the market, and the shadow inventory grew like a cancer. We all remember houses that were empty for years and never showed up on MLS or or anywhere else as “for sale”

    2. California is a cancer on the entire US, and the citizens are like an infestation that will not go away. I think this was planned to turn red states less red.

      1. Ironically enough the Californians moving here have turned this place even more red. The ones coming here are leaving Cali because they hate the politics. We had primaries a couple of weeks ago and it was a bloodbath for RINOs. County assessor, county commissioners, state reps, state senators, you name a race it was a clean sweep for conservatives in North Idaho. Lots of liberal tears flowing the day after.

  33. It’s going to be comedy gold when all the FBs who financially overstretched to buy insanely overpriced shacks realize more or less at the same time that the supply of Greater Fools just dried up, and now the “broken elevator” phase of the housing bubble awaits.

    Home listings suddenly jump as sellers worry they may miss out on the red-hot housing market

    https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/26/home-listings-suddenly-spike-as-sellers-worry-theyll-miss-out-on-red-hot-market.html

  34. Oh dear….

    Several Chinese local banks freeze deposits, triggering protests

    $1.5bn from 1m customers locked after lenders operated outside their region

    https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Finance/Several-Chinese-local-banks-freeze-deposits-triggering-protests

    SHANGHAI — Protests have broken out in China after several regional banks prevented customers from making withdrawals in late April, stoking fears of a greater credit crisis without an intervention from financial authorities.

    2. “When I called them on April 19 to ask about withdrawing my money, they said they had no deposits in my name,”

      That would be enough to elevate my blood pressure.

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