Like Fool’s Gold, Today They Are A Nearly Worthless Investment
A weekend topic starting with the Real Deal. “When long-standing rules for negotiating broker commissions were thrown up in the air, buyers were left hanging with questions on how mortgages will factor into the revamped process. Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are among those clarifying policies regarding how commissions could impact loans, Inman reported. While the seller side of a transaction is coming into focus, however, the new norms awaiting the buyer side remain elusive. Fannie and Freddie told lenders that sellers may continue to pay buyer agent commissions, as is standard, and that those payments won’t count against limits for ‘interested party contributions.’ Fannie and Freddie restrict IPCs, or concessions that may benefit interested parties if homes sell for especially high prices, to between 2 and 9 percent of the property’s value. That protects lenders vulnerable to buyers paying more than a home’s actual worth, as buyers with home equity are less likely to be foreclosed upon.”
“The Department of Housing and Urban Development appears to be in lockstep with Fannie and Freddie regarding FHA loans. HUD said sellers can pay buyer’s agent fees without that counting as a seller concession. One proposal on the table would see Fannie, Freddie and the FHA gain the power to guarantee loans slightly exceeding the appraised value of a home, so long as excess funds are used to pay non-recurring closing costs such as commissions.”
CBS Bay Area in California. “Sonoma County supervisors on Tuesday took the unusual step of voting to reduce taxes on cannabis production, recognizing that the industry has hit hard times. While the tax cut will help, legal weed growers argue if county legislators really wants pot cultivation businesses to survive, they shouldn’t be taxed at all. Erich Pearson ducks into his Glen Ellen cannabis nursery to examine the rows of potted plants used as growing stock for next season’s crop. When Erich Pearson’s company SPARC began operating, he figured officials were overestimating what the value of cannabis would be to Sonoma County. ‘The industry is not the pot of gold that they thought it was in 2016 when they began to contemplate these taxes,’ said Pearson.”
“‘I mean, originally, this was going to be a cash cow. And it’s not,’ said board chair David Rabbitt. ‘And that’s true for everyone. But be careful what you wish for, I guess.'”
The Los Angeles Times. “Times are getting increasingly tough for many of California’s wine grape growers. More recently, a tectonic shift in generational drinking habits has led to a global glut of wine. Here in the heart of San Joaquin County’s prized wine country, thousands of tons of unpicked grapes cling to abandoned vines, and piles of gnarled wood and wire mark vast, uprooted vineyards. Wine, once the height of boomer culture and conspicuous consumption, has lost its cool among young, more frugal and health-conscious potential customers, many of whom prefer cannabis over Cabernet, experts say. In France, the government is spending more than $200 million to destroy excess wine amid plummeting demand. In Australia, vineyards have been forced to stockpile two years’ worth of production due to lack of buyers.”
“Emergency requests for vineyard removals have exceeded the capacity of heavy equipment operators to complete them. ‘I have so many incoming work orders I’ll never get them done,’ said Donald Wortley, 80, a general contractor who has removed vines for growers in Lodi for 50 years. ‘The situation in Lodi wine country is tragic — almost every grape grower in the region is in trouble. Every vineyard you see that was not harvested means that the owner worked that year for nothing. I fear we will soon start seeing bankruptcies.'”
“Lodi Winegrape Commissioner Stuart Spencer claimed that every retailer and grocery he visited in the past few months had their shelves stocked with foreign-sourced bulk imports. ‘And all the while many retailers proudly proclaim their support for our local farms,’ Spencer said. ‘In no world does it make sense to ship bulk wine from across the globe to sit on a shelf in Lodi while thousands of tons of California wine grapes go unharvested and local growers remove family vineyards and take out loans to pay their farming bills.'”
“Greg Lauchland, 30, whose family has been growing wine grapes in the Lodi region for 104 years, described the situation as ‘a slap in the face.’ ‘It was a tough decision to make for longtime wine grape growers like us, but we planted 130 acres with almonds in October,’ he said. In March, Sacramento-based Blue Diamond Growers, a cooperative of almond growers, eliminated 38 corporate jobs as part of an effort to remain cost efficient amid challenges including an oversupply of almonds and shifts in consumer shopping patterns.”
Market Place. “Something has happened to the film and television industry over the last two years: Many of the jobs it creates have moved from its traditional centers in Los Angeles and New York City to the rest of the country. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data crunched by our partners at APM Research Lab, employment in ‘motion picture and sound recording’ has grown nationwide, but the share of workers in LA or New York went from just under half at the beginning of 2023 to just one-third earlier this year. Hollywood was in something of a production bubble. Chasing the success of Netflix, tons of companies set up streaming services in recent years, banking on demand from subscribers. To entice them, they filled their platforms with new shows and movies. All this activity peaked in 2022, when 600 original scripted shows were in production, according to the network FX. That gave lots of opportunities to everyone who makes a film shoot possible.”
“But it didn’t last. ‘When the beginning of 2023 happened, it seemed like there was this chill on production and making things and buying things,’ said Janie Haddad Tompkins, who describes herself as a ‘journeyman actor.’ Investors started feeling the effects of rising interest rates. ‘Wall Street just got significantly less patient with the spending by the studios on streaming platforms as soon as money started to be more expensive,’ explained Patrick Adler, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong and head of the consulting firm Westwood Economics.”
The Desert Sun. “The future of a long-delayed luxury resort in La Quinta called Talus is in doubt once again, as a major lender threatened this week to foreclose on parts of the property. And on Wednesday, following the lender’s sale notice, the city took steps to protect its interests and issued a notice of default against the developer, although city officials say the project could still get back on track. The city announced the default notice against the SilverRock Development Company, as well as project leader Robert Green, just a day after the council received an update on the project from City Manager Jon McMillen that largely focused on the company’s efforts to finalize the financing for the $600 million project by late May.”
“The default notice — which marks the third issued by the city against the development company — was issued the same day that Cypress Point Holdings, a corporate investment firm for Talus, recorded a notice of trustee’s sale against Green and his company and scheduled a foreclosure sale. While some of the standalone Montage-branded homes have been built at the site, construction has slowed significantly until the additional funding is finalized, with work on most of the buildings paused since late 2022. The project has also drawn criticism from neighboring residents, with more than 300 people recently signing an online petition that raises concerns about blowing dust coming from the project. Only one resident, Ron Holmes, spoke during the council’s discussion Tuesday, saying it ‘sounds like a leap of faith that a lender is going to come in and bail them out.'”
The San Francisco Standard. “With a $54 million loan from Bank of America coming due for its downtown San Francisco building at 115 Sansome St., the Vanbarton Group held a private auction last December to help the bank recoup whatever money it could get back. More than 20 bids came in for the restored 14-story beaux-arts building. But lo and behold, the winner of that auction ended up being none other than Vanbarton itself. The final price came in at around $35 million—nearly 40% off the original loan amount and 60% less than the New York investor’s original 2016 purchase price of $83 million.”
“Gary Kaplan, a partner at Farella Braun + Martel LLP who specializes in restructuring and bankruptcy issues, explained that in most cases, lenders are loath to take back and operate commercial buildings themselves. ‘They just want to get paid,’ Kaplan said of lenders, and because commercial deals are mostly transacted through limited liability companies, recouping value on the property is their only recourse. ‘The figures that borrowers and owners got [before the pandemic] are not as relevant anymore as the facts on the ground,’ Kaplan said. ‘Forget about the original money, it’s gone.'”
The San Francisco Chronicle. “A building in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood once known as a hotbed for tech startups just sold for around a fourth of its 2019 price. Once described as hosting a ‘start-up village,’ the four-story building at 410 Townsend St. near a Caltrain stop just sold for $22 million, according to real estate firm CBRE, which facilitated the sale. At that price, New York Life Real Estate Investors and investment firm Bridgeton purchased the building at nearly a fourth of the $86 million it fetched in 2019.”
ABC 7 San Francisco. “The taxi industry in San Francisco continues to experience hardship even after the pandemic. The closures of downtown businesses and fewer conventions have aggravated the situation even further. Taxi medallions look like a mini license plate. Once worth tens of thousands of dollars like fool’s gold, today they are a nearly worthless investment after ride sharing companies came online. ‘They took all of our business and our business is dead completely 100%. We don’t have any business and most of the drivers leave the taxi business because they don’t make money,’ expressed Wahab Al hindawi, a medallion holder.”
“Taxi drivers who paid for their medallions had taken out loans. But with business down and a worthless medallion, many stopped paying, damaging their credit. ‘It’s safe to estimate that about 300 of those medallions sold through the program have been foreclosed on,’ revealed Marcelo Fonseca, who also owns a medallion. Ibrar Ahmed is one of those medallion owners who dished out $250,000. Today, he is still trying to pay off his loan while struggling to meet ends meet. ‘They don’t think we are human beings. If they spend $1 billion on the homeless, they should give us a break on the medallion price,’ added Ahmed.”
The Union Tribune. “March was the 24th consecutive month the number of homeless residents connected to housing was eclipsed by the number of people who lost a place to stay for the first time, according to a new report from the Regional Task Force on Homelessness. There were 1,226 people housed, while 1,337 became newly homeless. ‘There’s just not enough housing at a price point that people can afford,’ said Jennifer Nations, managing director of the Homelessness Hub research lab at UC San Diego. ‘This is especially evident in the numbers of first-time homeless,’ she added, many of whom are older adults.”
“A growing body of research has found that areas with high costs of living tend to have more people on the street, and the city of San Diego recently logged some of the highest rents and the biggest jump in home prices nationwide. Combine that with addiction and mental health struggles — a survey last year found around a fifth of those without shelter had a substance use disorder and more than a quarter reported serious mental health diagnoses — and the ripple effects are profound.”
“‘It’s horrible,’ Moe Girton, owner of the Hillcrest restaurants Gossip Grill and Barrel & Board, said about nearby encampments. Sidewalks were stained with feces. Needles could be found by asphalt. A man had recently tried to burn down one of her buildings, she added. Stefan Chicote, general manager of the nearby restaurant Baja Betty’s, said confrontations with unstable passersby had led him to hand out pepper spray to staff. ‘It feels like nobody’s on our side.'”
“Perhaps no recent case better embodies the ways living outside can intersect with crime than the death of a 41-year-old earlier this month in El Cajon. Police said both the victim, a man found with ‘blunt force trauma,’ and the alleged killer, a 37-year-old arrested last week, were homeless. People are dying from fentanyl and hypothermia and heart disease. A decade ago, around 150 homeless individuals died annually, according to the county medical examiner. Last year, the toll was 624, an average of one person every 14 hours.”
The Mercury News. “On the heels of a new state audit that found California has failed to consistently track and assess the effectiveness of its billions of dollars in homelessness spending, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday announced a plan to ensure cities and counties are doing their part to solve the crisis. The announcement is the latest example of Newsom’s calling for more accountability from local governments as California’s unhoused population has ballooned to an estimated 181,000 people despite more than $24 billion in state funds spent over the past five years to combat homelessness. ‘I’m not interested in funding failure any longer,’ Newsom said during a virtual news conference on Thursday.”
The New York Post. “Swimsuit model Kristen Louelle Gaffney is fed up with California — and she’s leaving. Gaffney, 34, blasted California’s homeless and drug crises as a reason she and her 2-time Super Bowl champion husband, Tyler Gaffney, took their three kids and fled to Nashville, Tennessee. Gaffney, a San Diego native, told Fox News she was fed up with policies created by President Biden, Gov. Gavin Newsom and city governments that have fueled the problems. ‘The more we claim, and I use the word claim very strongly, that we’re helping these people, it seems like the situation is getting worse,’ Gaffney said.”
“Gaffney said she was ‘constantly giving money’ but wasn’t seeing the results of the donations especially when it came from homeless families cared by single mothers, veterans and the elderly, who should be the first recipients of free housing. ‘Drug addicts should be last on the list,’ she said. ‘We should be focusing on the people that need help.'”
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‘Fannie and Freddie told lenders that sellers may continue to pay buyer agent commissions, as is standard, and that those payments won’t count against limits for ‘interested party contributions.’ Fannie and Freddie restrict IPCs, or concessions that may benefit interested parties if homes sell for especially high prices, to between 2 and 9 percent of the property’s value. That protects lenders vulnerable to buyers paying more than a home’s actual worth, as buyers with home equity are less likely to be foreclosed upon’
‘The Department of Housing and Urban Development appears to be in lockstep with Fannie and Freddie regarding FHA loans. HUD said sellers can pay buyer’s agent fees without that counting as a seller concession. One proposal on the table would see Fannie, Freddie and the FHA gain the power to guarantee loans slightly exceeding the appraised value of a home’
I wanted to include this with the K-fna crater as I found it yesterday morning and it’s too important to wait. So this is how these criminal enterprises are planning to handle the UHS lawsuit disaster about making over 100% loans. They just change the internal rules!
More foreclosures fer everyone! Have you heard of any hearings on this? And of course FHA is in ‘lockstep’, all these goons have to most to lose if the gravy train is disrupted.
‘Drug addicts should be last on the list,’ she said. ‘We should be focusing on the people that need help’
I’d add drug addicts shouldn’t be on the list at all.
‘We should be focusing on the people that need help’
We should be focusing on the people that help will help.
‘Once worth tens of thousands of dollars like fool’s gold, today they are a nearly worthless investment after ride sharing companies came online’
‘Wall Street just got significantly less patient with the spending by the studios on streaming platforms as soon as money started to be more expensive’
There is a downside to free money.
The Regime That Doesn’t Care
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/regime-doesnt-care
[This is long so all you are gonna get are snips.]
We’ve all come across warnings against doom scrolling.
This is the practice of waking up in the morning, scouring headlines, seizing on the bad news, and dwelling on the darkness. You do this during downtimes in the day and in the evening. Your mood worsens, permanently.
It cannot be good for the human spirit.
The term implies that we are somehow looking for doom because it gives us a dopamine rush or something. Testing this idea, I’ve variously tried to avoid doing that. But there is a problem. It is impossible to avoid simply because the bad news is so ubiquitous. In fact, I’ve come to distrust any venues that are not reporting it!
Many people have concluded that if we are looking for something other than doom, we should leave what we called “the news” entirely and focus on culture, religion, philosophy, history, art, poetry, or find something practical and productive to do.
[snip]
As my friend Aaron Kheriaty often observes, they believe we are stupid. They actually think we cannot make connections, have no memory, no knowledge of anything serious, and will just eat up their porridge of baloney daily while exercising no critical intelligence over any of it.
This rubs me wrong particularly on the subject of the mRNA shots designed to address the virus. We know for certain that they were oversold and failed in all the ways they were supposed to succeed. We are further flooded with evidence of their harms both from personal experience and the scientific literature.
But do we read or hear about this in the legacy media? Absolutely not. Even when it is overwhelmingly clear that the shot should be considered a possible cause in the sudden rise of heart attacks, sudden death, turbo cancers, and maladies of all sorts, this whole subject is somehow unsayable in the corporate media.
The silence on this topic is so conspicuous and apparent that it discredits everything else. And what is the reason for it? Well, pharma advertising provides a stunning 75 percent of revenue for mainline television. That’s an astounding number. The networks are simply not going to bite the hand that feeds them.
That’s true for TV and probably something similar applies to everything else too.
What does this mean for the rest of us? It means that every time we turn on the TV, we are risking getting propagandized by companies that are seriously in league with the government to generate the highest possible revenue stream for themselves regardless of the consequences.
And why zero focus on vaccine injury? Incredibly, the companies themselves are indemnified against liability for any harms they cause. Just think about the implications of this. Even if you know for sure that you have been harmed by a product you were forced or otherwise manipulated to take, there is almost nothing you can do about it.
That’s an incredible fact, and goes a very long way toward explaining the silent treatment.
The discrediting of major media in this context reveals a deeper and more terrifying truth. Much of the elite class of economic and social managers do not have our best interests in mind. Once you realize this, the color of the world changes for you. Once you gain that insight, there is pretty much no going back from it.
Millions have come to this realization over the last four years. It has changed us as people. We desperately want to live normal happy lives but we are overwhelmed by what we’ve learned. It’s like the curtain was pulled back and we have seen what is really going on. The whole of official culture is screaming at us to ignore that man behind the curtain.
I’ve recently taken my own advice and thrown myself into reading history as a refuge. My choice was probably not the best if my goal was to brighten my spirits. I have been reading “The Vampire Economy” by German economist and financier Gunter Reimann, published in 1939 (and which I scanned and uploaded with the author’s permission).
The book was written as the Nazi Party had gained full control of government (and everything else) and the full war in Europe was about to commence with the German invasion of Poland.
Reimann brilliantly dissects the reality of a regime that cared nothing for the spreading suffering of the people.
“Nazi leaders in Germany do not fear possible national economic ruin in wartime,” he writes.
“They feel that, whatever happens, they will remain on top, that the worse matters become, the more dependent on them will be the propertied classes. And if the worst comes to the worst, they are prepared to sacrifice all other interests to maintain their hold on the State. If they themselves must go, they are ready to pull the temple down with them.”
That’s a bracing analysis and it could apply to many regimes in history, not just the Nazis. Indeed, good government in history has rarely been the norm. Power often benefits from suffering. As Americans we are not used to thinking this way about our elites. But it is probably time to realize that this trajectory is very much in play.
This might be the most striking change among millions of Americans over the last five or so years. We’ve come to realize that our leaders in so many sectors of American life (or global life, for that matter) do not favor our best interests. This is a troubling realization but it explains so much. It’s why the elites did not care about the harms of lockdowns or untested shots and are unconcerned about inflation, mass immigration, the rise of crime, squatting and the insecurity of property, exploding government debt, growing population surveillance, or anything like the normal rules of civilized life.
The regime, in the broadest possible way we can conceive of that term, simply doesn’t care. Even worse, it grows and benefits at our expense. They know it. We know it. They like it this way.
“5% of people think, 10% THINK they think, the other 85% would rather die than think. ” attributed to Edison.
Gallup — American Public Opinion and Vaccination Requirements (9/3/2021):
“Americans’ political identity is strongly related to their opinions about vaccine requirements, echoing similar partisan differences on such issues as vaccination hesitancy, mask requirements and the importance of COVID-19 as the nation’s top problem. Very large majorities of Democrats are in favor of each of the five vaccination requirements tested …
The variation across these party/vaccination status groups is extreme. For example, 96% of vaccinated Democrats favor the requirement for proof of vaccination before flying on an airplane, compared with 12% of unvaccinated Republicans. Ninety-four percent of vaccinated Democrats favor the requirement for attendance at events, compared with 9% of unvaccinated Republicans.”
https://news.gallup.com/poll/354506/update-american-public-opinion-vaccination-requirements.aspx
Democrat Party voters elected the politicians who enacted a mandate to have you FIRED FROM YOUR JOB for not getting injected with experimental deadly mRNA poison.
In Australia they built concentration camps for CCP Flu, and Democrat Party wants that here in USA.
Democrat Party is the party of medical genocide.
[This is rich …]
Wash Post admits reality: ‘Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power’ – U.S. ‘power grid’ being pushed ‘to the brink. Utilities can’t keep up’ – ‘It is staggering’ – But WaPo frets energy shortage ‘threatens to stifle the transition to cleaner energy’
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/04/19/wash-post-admits-reality-amid-explosive-demand-america-is-running-out-of-power-u-s-power-grid-being-pushed-to-the-brink-utilities-can/
[Some snips …]
WaPo: Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.
In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades.
Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma.
The soaring demand is touching off a scramble to try to squeeze more juice out of an aging power grid while pushing commercial customers to go to extraordinary lengths to lock down energy sources, such as building their own power plants.
“When you look at the numbers, it is staggering,” said Jason Shaw, chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, which regulates electricity. “It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How were the projections that far off? This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.”
[“It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation.” Lol.]
Re-post from another thread this week.
City Journal — When Politics and Physics Collide (4/17/2024):
“The belief that mandates and massive subsidies can summon a world without fossil fuels is magical thinking.”
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-magical-thinking-behind-the-energy-transition
Commies gonna commie. Stalin and Mao murdered millions of their own citizens attempting to enact doomed to fail economic policies. Globalist scum in alleged western liberal democracy governments want more of this. They want you dead, because YOU are the carbon they want to reduce.
‘It is staggering’ – But WaPo frets energy shortage ‘threatens to stifle the transition to cleaner energy’
\\
– ‘It’ has nothing to do with ‘cleaner’ energy. The globalists want all of the world’s resources, including energy, for themselves. Everyone else can freeze in Winter and sweat in Summer. Germany 🇩🇪 is a good example of this ‘policy.’
– We are to own nothing and eat insects. 🐜 They want fewer of us also. Just die already. ☠️
– WaPo is the propaganda arm of the D party, which is now full on globalist and communist, but I repeat myself.
– Renewables aren’t reliable. Large hail can and does destroy solar panels. Wind turbines regularly break down. Nuclear power is safe and reliable, Also, no CO2.
– The only science here is political science.
– China is the largest coal burner and CO2 emitter on the planet, with India a distant second. Everyone else is a fart in a wind storm, but CCP China gets a pass, because commie.
– “Socialism is Western civilization in retrograde.” – I said that.
“Who is John Galt?”
Moment Rep. Mike Waltz holds up a $90,000 bag of insulator joints as stumped USAF Secretary admits he has NO IDEA such basic parts cost that much for taxpayers
By WILL POTTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 18:51 EDT, 18 April 2024
Waltz began his grilling of the Air Force secretary by holding up the small bag of bushings, which only contained a handful of bolts.
‘This, Mr. Secretary, is a bag of bushings,’ he began. ‘This bag of bushings, stamped out by machines, don’t need a high school diploma, nothing high tech about this, all of this bag is compliant with the FAA specifications.
‘How much do you think the Air Force pays for this bag of bushings?’
Kendall responded that he ‘didn’t know’, leading Waltz to quickly clarify: ‘$90,000.’
Waving the small bag in the air, the exacerbated representative continued: ‘This is a $90,000 bag of bushings, that you need for any jet turbine engine.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13325745/Mike-Waltz-bushings-air-force-military-overspending.html
Meanwhile, the Iranians are able to crank out crude missile drones for about $10K. Sure, our fancy schmancy missiles can shoot them down, but what happens when we run out of those expensive missiles, whose replacements can take years to make? I recall reading that our and our allies’ Navies have to retreat when they run out of rockets.
I saw an interesting auto show video recently from China. It was a large trade show dedicated to what they call illegal cars. The gist was that the companies represented there were unlicensed to make cars yet the place was packed with cars and they were all EVs. You could get a functional road vehicle for 800 US dollars. One of the interesting aspects they showed was that while obviously there are some quality issues they were still using modern manufacturing techniques and the build quality for the price was pretty amazing. Cant even get a used golf cart for that here. The math winds up being that you can get a whole car there for the price of one car payment in the US. This is what credit bubbles do.
I used to buy brand new motorcycles in China for extremely cheap. Not the best things on the road, and definitely would not stand up to a decade of use, but it got the job done for little money.
Washington Post — Reduce your carbon footprint with these 5 climate-friendly recipes (4/20/2024):
“Earth Day may be around the corner, but it’s important to make climate-friendly food decisions year-round. Agriculture contributes about 25 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, so the choices we make about the food on our plates — and the food that winds up in the trash — matter. There’s plenty of advice swirling around about how to make those choices better, but sometimes it can feel overwhelming. We’re here to help you turn this information into action — at least in the kitchen.
We’ve picked out recipes that feature eco-friendly, low-impact ingredients to show you that reducing your carbon footprint can both feel and taste good.”
https://archive.ph/DOPbL
It starts with recipes to cook with vegetables, and it will end with rationing, famine, and you being loaded into the boxcars taken to the climate re-education camps.
UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is the action plan implemented worldwide to inventory and control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all energy, all education, all information, and all human beings in the world. INVENTORY AND CONTROL.—-Rosa Koire
Luxury watches have long been sought after as a valuable asset. That’s why Rolex, Patek Philippe and Cartier watch prices so closely followed, as they ebb and flow with people’s appetite for high-end spending.
But that’s not how Rolex’s CEO Jean-Frédéric Dufour wants things to be. If anything, he thinks it’s risky to think of watches as investments that frequently change in value.
“I don’t like it when people compare watches with stocks. This sends the wrong message and is dangerous,” Rolex’s Dufour said in an interview with Swiss outlet NZZ earlier this month. Instead, Rolex’s watches are more akin to “products” than investments, he added.
Watches are often viewed as investments because their value can rise with time, and timepieces have followed the boom and bust seen in the broader financial markets in the past, according to Boston Consulting Group. During the COVID-19 pandemic, watch prices were surging, somewhat in tandem with the stock market highs.
Dufour’s comments come just when the world of watches has gone through a prolonged period of tumult as high interest rates and economic pressures add to shoppers’ woes. The fall in prices of luxury watches by Rolex, Patek, Audemars Piguet and others has felt especially spectacular as it followed the highs of the COVID-19 pandemic when people splurged on watch purchases.
The price tag on secondhand watches has plunged nearly 40% in the last two years, according to London-based Subdial.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/secondhand-watch-prices-tanked-luxury-111723332.html
Anyone who ventures out with a high-end watch in cities like SF, NYC, LA, etc. is asking to be an involuntary reparations donor.
I once toyed with getting a low end mechanical Swiss watch (Tissot); but I quickly talked myself out of it.
“The price tag on secondhand watches has plunged nearly 40% in the last two years, according to London-based Subdial.”
The fed.gov needs to build a floor under watch prices.
Talk about an inconvenient truth. After months of trying to explain away the gathering clouds over the electric-vehicle sector as the usual growing pains of an emerging market, the EV faithful swallowed a bitter pill this week when Tesla finally blinked.
The market and spiritual leader of EVs said it will lay off more than 10 per cent of its work force, more than 14,000 people, because of slowing global demand. The company’s deliveries have dropped for the first time in four years, and unsold inventory has swelled to almost 50,000 vehicles.
Tesla’s stock tumbled on the news, and rumours circulated that the summer launch of its highly anticipated US$25,000 car, meant to compete with low-priced Chinese EVs, would be delayed – rumours Tesla CEO Elon Musk denied.
The glimpse into Tesla’s mortality was a blow to even the most devout EVangelists, many of whom have dismissed anyone who has dared to tell the truth about the ominous signs of trouble on the road to EV nirvana as Luddites with a Chicken Little complex.
For those who have been paying attention, the cooling reflected in the Tesla layoffs should come as no surprise. Cracks appeared last summer when U.S. car dealers reported that almost 100,000 unsold EVs had piled up on their lots, more than twice the industry average for inventory.
This year started with a thud. Fisker, the pure-play EV maker lurching toward bankruptcy, was delisted by the New York Stock Exchange and is now a penny stock on the over-the-counter market. Rivian, whose quality issues earned it a place on Consumer Reports’ list of worst car brands of 2024, just told investors it won’t increase shipments this year. Lucid beat delivery expectations for the quarter, but only after deep price cuts that investors fear will hurt margins. And we’re talking small numbers – fewer than 2,000 cars were shipped.
The Big Three North American automakers, meanwhile, have braked hard on their EV plans. Earlier this month Ford delayed EV production at its Oakville, Ont., plant for two years, putting 2,700 jobs and billions of dollars in investment into doubt. This follows the shutdown of production of its F-150 Lightning EV pickup trucks in Michigan, which brought hundreds of layoffs and a redeployment of resources.
The reasons are well-documented. EV prices have tended to be significantly higher than those of gas-powered or hybrid models. Range anxiety has been exacerbated by the slow build-out of charging infrastructure. In the United States, a multibillion-dollar federal program launched three years ago to develop a national network of charging stations had built just one as of the end of last year.
And as rental-car giant Hertz discovered recently, the costs of maintaining, repairing and insuring EVs are significantly higher.
After investing heavily in EVs, the company put 20,000 almost-new EVs up for sale because of soft customer demand and pulled back on plans to convert part of its fleet to electric by mid-decade. Its CEO subsequently resigned.
And then came the Tesla bombshell. When the deep-pocketed beacon for the industry’s future puts it in reverse, even the thirstiest EV Kool-Aid drinker is bound to do a spit take.
To be sure, every emerging sector, especially one that requires massive changes in infrastructure and consumer behaviour, sees players come and go. And like any market that has experienced red-hot growth, the EV market needs a breather and a recalibration.
As for those pesky reliability issues plaguing many brands, well, they’re just growing pains. Every early adopter expects a few bugs.
The bugs, however, have become bigger than breadbaskets – big enough to bite Tesla. Even Mr. Musk’s glass-half-full suggestion that the layoffs would position the company for its next phase of growth runs counter to global consumer trends.
Somewhere, Mr. Toyoda must be feeling some vindication for his prescience. After all, he lost his job at one point because activist progressive investors objected to his refusal to bet the farm on EVs.
Instead, he pursued a multiplatform strategy that included hybrids, alternative fuels, gas and electric vehicles.
That strategy was based not on political virtue signalling but on the fact there are huge chunks of the world’s population who don’t have – and never will have – access to reliable electricity, so the EV market at its peak will account for just 30 per cent of the global auto market.
Now, 30 per cent of a market expected to reach US$4-trillion by 2030 isn’t chicken feed. It’s certainly enough incentive to push the EV industry to continue to innovate.
But with evidence mounting that Mr. Toyoda’s perspective has validity, it’s about time to temper the cheerleading and start telling the truth about EVs, as inconvenient as it may be.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-tesla-layoffs-bring-the-entire-electric-vehicle-industry-into-question/
and unsold inventory has swelled to almost 50,000 vehicles
I remember when you had to order a Tesla and wait weeks for delivery.
There is a Tesla repair depot in my little burg, housed in the the old Chevy dealership site. At first it was just a repair shop, but now has a showroom with a lot full of new cars.
“Tesla’s stock tumbled on the news…”
I thought Wall street rallied when workers were laid-off?
One day after a Montreal police officer fired gunshots at a suspect in a stolen vehicle(opens in a new tab), senior officers were telling parliamentarians that organized crime groups are recruiting people as young as 15 in the city to steal cars so that they can be shipped overseas.
In some cases, the youth are tortured if things go wrong, according to Yannick Desmarais, a commander with the Montreal Police Service (SPVM).
“For us, we see these young people of 15 to 25 years of age, and we’ve seen young people from Montreal [go] to Toronto to steal cars, and they get even tortured in Toronto if they aren’t successful. So we feel it’s very important to work as a team,” Desmarais told the House Committee on Public Safety and National Security on Thursday.
https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/young-people-tortured-if-stolen-vehicle-operations-fail-montreal-police-tell-mps-1.6854110
It’s obvious that the stolen cars are being loaded into cargo ships and are shipped to places like Africa. How hard can it be to intercept them at the docks? I strongly suspect that brown envelopes are at play.
“I strongly suspect that brown envelopes are at play.”
I’m shocked that Canada’s finest are suspected of corruption.
The FBI was tipped off in April 2020 to gain-of-function virus research in China, funded by the agency formerly headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, that “would leave no signature of purposeful human manipulation,” emails from agents at the bureau show.
At least one FBI agent at the bureau’s Newark Field Office referred to the revelation as “alarming.” Another agent called the tip “interesting,” and vowed to follow-up with others at the FBI.
The five-pages of emails were obtained by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch via a Freedom of Information Act request and released Friday.
“These smoking gun documents showed the FBI quickly understood that Fauci’s agency funded the gain-of-function research that could disguise the resulting coronavirus as ‘natural,’” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.
“These new documents further demonstrate the need for a comprehensive criminal investigation into Fauci’s gain-of-function scandal,” he added.
In an email exchange from April 23, 2020, with the subject line “Follow up call,” a person whose name is redacted passes along details and analysis to several FBI Newark Field Office officials related to the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases $661,000 grant to EcoHealth Alliance for bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“The reason I am writing is that the experimental strategy proposed in Aim 3 (‘infectious clone technology’), if performed using commercial or in-house gene synthesis to prepare the infectious clones, *** would leave no signatures of purposeful human manipulation***,” the unnamed individual informed the FBI.
The individual sending the email – who appears to have been previously interviewed by agents at the Newark Field Office – scrutinized the project details related to EcoHealth Alliance’s grant from NIAD (details which are publicly available), and translated the jargon into “lay language” for the FBI agents to better understand, it appears.
“Hey are you going to be in office tomorrow?” an agent wrote as they forwarded the missive to another person at the bureau. “We just interviewed our person from [redacted] and he provided us with some alarming new info. Give me call if you can.”
“This interesting, I’m following up with the squad tomorrow morning,” an unnamed assistant special agent in charge of national security then writes to Newark Field Office Special Agent in Charge Gregory Ehrie. Ehrie replies: “[Redacted] Details when you can.”
Emails previously obtained by Judicial Watch indicate that the FBI opened an “inquiry” into the National Institutes of Health’s bat coronavirus grant tied to the Wuhan Institute of Virology around May of 2020.
The FBI determined last year that an accidental lab leak was the most likely explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in March 2023.
https://nypost.com/2024/04/19/us-news/fbi-got-tip-that-fauci-funded-virus-research-at-wuhan-lab-would-leave-no-trace-of-human-manipulation/
The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan
“incident”? I think it was 100% deliberate. The only thing that went wrong was that the virus, as well as the ready for market mRNA jabs, were not as deadly as planned. Which if true likely means they will try again. Remember, the “ideal global population” is 500B. As far as the Davos crowd is concerned there are far, far too many mouths to feed.
500B.
Million?
Correct. I probably crossed my wires when thinking of spending.
Are you worried Mr Market is setting up for a repeat of its 2022 swoon?
Market report
Tech losses hammer S&P 500, Nasdaq to end week
Today at 1:51 a.m.
by STAN CHOE THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
…
https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2024/apr/20/tech-losses-hammer-sp-500-nasdaq-to-end-week/
Markets
Bank of America’s top global strategist warns of growing bubble risk in the stock market as the economy heads for a no-landing scenario — and shares 3 charts showing the market could be headed for trouble
William Edwards
Apr 20, 2024, 1:30 AM PDT
paris stock exchange trader
REUTERS
Michael Hartnett, Bank of America’s top global strategist, thinks a no-landing scenario is the most-likely outcome for the US economy in the months ahead. That means the labor market would remain strong, but inflation would also stay above the Federal Reserve’s long-term goal of 2%.
While that’s fine for now, Hartnett warns it’s a path that eventually leads to trouble for the economy and stocks. The longer inflation stays elevated, the longer the Fed has to keep policy restrictive or even tighten further, putting the economy at risk of a recession as businesses and consumers slow borrowing and spending.
…
https://www.businessinsider.com/stock-market-crash-bubble-charts-trouble-ahead-bank-of-america-2024-4
A much anticipated tiny cabin village for homeless people is finally open in San Francisco’s Mission District after years of planning, delays and intense controversy over the project’s steep price tag.
As of Tuesday, 10 unhoused people had moved into the village, located near the BART 16th Street Station, with plans to welcome an additional five people each day until all 60 cabins are occupied, according to Emily Cohen, spokesperson for the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.
The village at 1979 Mission St., which is San Francisco’s second tiny home site, is only expected to last about two years, before developers break ground on an affordable housing project at the site. That’s despite an eye-popping price tag of about $113,000 for each cabin, when taking into account the cost of a community room and management offices.
Cities such as Oakland and San Jose have built tiny cabin villages for a fraction of that cost in recent years, prompting critics to question why public projects — from tiny homes to trash cans to toilets — seem to cost so much in San Francisco. The city will spend an additional $2.9 million a year to provide services at the site.
The high costs of the project concerned city officials and residents from the start. It also recently led leaders of a nonprofit that oversaw the much cheaper building of the city’s first tiny home village at 33 Gough St. to question whether the city should take on projects like these.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/sf-s-tiny-cabins-for-the-homeless-with-insane-price-tag-finally-open-in-mission-district/ar-BB1lO11M
prompting critics to question why public projects — from tiny homes to trash cans to toilets — seem to cost so much in San Francisco
Why? Because the right people are making a fortune. The looting will continue until the city resembles Detroit and there is nothing left to grift.
and management offices
How is voting for open borders working out for ya, New Yorkers?
https://nypost.com/2024/04/20/us-news/nyc-high-school-soccer-game-canceled-after-group-of-about-30-migrants-refuse-to-leave-the-field-even-after-cops-showed-up/
The latest trend in NYC is for illegal invaders to display a store’s stolen merchandise at significant discounts right outside the store on the sidewalk. When the police do a raid they go right back to it as soon as the police leave. There are no real consequences and since it is all stolen, they don’t suffer any actual losses. Winning!
In other news, at Chicago area Home Depot locations they now have segregated parking lots with warring illegal day labor depending on their country of origin. Park in section one for mexican, section two for venez, section 3 for other. I’m sure it will be fine.
ANDY NGO REPORTS: Antifa trial of the decade exposes a violent conspiracy in San Diego riot (4/18/2024):
“As the criminal trial of two So Cal Antifa members goes into its third week, the public is learning about how one of the notorious Antifa groups organizes and carries out violence against targets.
Jeremy Jonathan White, 41, and Brian Cortez Lightfoot Jr., 27, both of Los Angeles, are accused of carrying out violent attacks on supporters of former President Donald Trump in a felony conspiracy—the first time Antifa suspects have been charged with such a serious felony accusation anywhere in the US. Nine of their co-defendant comrades have already been convicted in plea deals, including Luis Francisco Mora, 32, who took a last-minute plea deal at the start of the trial.
On Jan. 9, 2021, roving mobs of black-clad So Cal Antifa members attacked supporters of Donald Trump and people walking on the boardwalk at Pacific Beach in San Diego County. A dog and his walker were among those maced. Eleven people, about half from Los Angeles County, were indicted in 2022 by a secret grand jury on a total of 29 felonies, including conspiracy to riot, assault and other violent crimes. Prosecutors alleged the defendants engaged in a coordinated conspiracy to riot.
White is accused of two felonies: felony conspiracy to riot, plus felony assault of a man on a bicycle who was documenting the Antifa rioters with his cell phone. Lightfoot is accused of sixteen felonies as the alleged “ringleader” of the attack: conspiracy to riot, plus nine unlawful uses of tear gas charges and six felony assaults on six different victims.
Most of the nine co-defendants who already took plea deals still await sentencing, in which they expect to be sentenced to prison. Two were already sentenced to five years in prison each; their sentences were enhanced by prior outstanding felony charges in unrelated crimes.
The weeks of testimony in the trial so far featured experts on Antifa, detectives, and the victims of the violence that day. Testimony is supported by video evidence captured during the riot and messages sent between the co-conspirators. Just before jury selection, co-defendant Luis Francisco Mora took a last-minute plea deal and admitted to the charge of conspiracy to riot, plus assault by means likely to produce great bodily injury.”
https://thepostmillennial.com/andy-ngo-reports-antifa-trial-of-the-decade-exposes-a-violent-conspiracy-in-san-diego-riot
“They’re not sending their best”
That’s funny, I haven’t heard a word of this on the CBS Evening News or any other MSM outlet.
But here are sone…
U.S. and World News Headlines : NPR
Women of color still lag behind in STEM jobs, despite efforts to change
Biden administration restricts oil and gas leasing in Alaska’s petroleum reserve
Ukraine’s prime minister says, if passed, $60B U.S. aid package will be critical
What to know about week 1 of Trump’s criminal trial, with jury selection complete
Senate passes reauthorization of key surveillance program despite privacy concerns
Biden administration adds Title IX protections for LGBTQ students, assault victims
https://www.npr.org/sections/news/
“That’s funny, I haven’t heard a word of this on the CBS Evening News or any other MSM outlet.”
Me neither. Bias or collusion?
Song for the old Dawgs like me who listened to it on their transistor radios when they were ten years old back in 1970. But it comes with a video for the young Dawgs who grew up with cell phones, computers and High Def flat screen TVs and not rotary dial phones on the kitchen wall and black and white TVs.
https://youtu.be/sL7qxlEtrCc?si=fyzp3GnOc36wGTqy
White Western Electric 554 Wall Telephone
https://www.ebay.com/itm/275226974131?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=ta1vwzNuSvy&sssrc=2047675&ssuid=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY
Another transistor radio song from 1970.
Sorry, no accompanying video for the young Dawgs.
https://youtu.be/7-VXC0h1Y6M?si=8NqnoBJzI09mRCk0
I thought the whole point of legalizing weed was to tax it.
Nah, they’re just broke. So that $15-20 bottle of wine is left on the shelf.
This isn’t news. A lot of filming, especially for TV shows, moved to Canada a long time ago. Now it’s also moving to flyover, where the labor is non union and the pay is much lower. Expect virtual reality sets like Disney’s “The Volume” to start popping up in cheaper locales.
Hillcrest, huh? If memory serves me right, Hillcrest was the first rainbow neighborhood in San Diego, where all the cool people hung out. Now, surprise, surprise, it’s a cesspool.
I hope she remembers that she’s a refugee and not a missionary.
“I hope she remembers that she’s a refugee and not a missionary.”
\\
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFnOfpIJL0M
21,749,899 views Oct 5, 2009 #TomPettyAndTheHeartbreakers #TomPetty #Remastered
REMASTERED IN HD!
Official Music Video for Refugee performed by Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers
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Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers Lyrics
We got somethin’, we both know it, we don’t talk too much about it
Ain’t no real big secret, all the same, somehow we get around it
Listen, it don’t really matter to me baby
You believe what you want to believe, you see
You don’t have to live like a refugee
(Don’t have to live like a refugee)
Somewhere, somehow, somebody must have kicked you around some
Tell me why you want to lay there, revel in your abandon
Honey, it don’t make no difference to me, baby
Everybody’s had to fight to be free, you see
You don’t have to live like a refugee
(Don’t have to live like a refugee)
No baby you don’t have to live like a refugee
(Don’t have to live like a refugee)
Baby we ain’t the first
I’m sure a lot of other lovers been burned
Right now this seems real to you, but it’s
One of those things you gotta feel to be true
Somewhere, somehow, somebody must have kicked you around some
Who knows maybe you were kidnapped, tied up
Taken away and held for ransom
Honey, it don’t really matter to me, baby
Everybody’s had to fight to be free, you see
Don’t have to live like a refugee
(Don’t have to live like a refugee)
No you don’t have to live like a refugee
(Don’t have to live like a refugee)
You don’t have to live like a refugee
(Don’t have to live like a refugee)
– You will own bugs and live in filth, but not houses…
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng
Monty Python – Constitutional Peasants Scene (HD)
5,444,968 views Dec 6, 2013
The king receives a lesson in government from Dennis…
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https://creditnews.com/markets/housing-affordability-has-fallen-off-a-cliff-for-the-middle-class-study-finds/
Middle class can’t afford home in nearly half of top 100 U.S. metros, study finds
Homeownership is no longer a staple of the middle-class American Dream
By Sam Bourgi | 19 April 2024
Housing is becoming an exclusively upper-class privilege in a growing number of cities.
According to a new study by Creditnews Research, in 2024, middle-class households could afford to buy an average home in just 52 of the country’s 100 largest metros.
Just five years earlier, they could afford a home in 91 of the top 100 metros.
The situation is far worse for lower middle-class households, as they can only afford a home in seven of the largest 100 metros.
In total, 41 out of the 100 metros require a gross annual income of $100,000 or more to qualify for an average home. In 13 metros, an average income of more than $155,000 is needed.
A home is considered affordable if monthly housing and mortgage costs don’t exceed 28% of a household’s gross income.
Affording a home is no longer a guarantee for the middle class
Being considered “middle class” doesn’t carry the same significance as it did just a few years ago.
“In the past, if you were middle class, it was almost assumed you would become a homeowner,” said Ali Wolf, chief economist of Zonda, a housing market research firm.
“Today, the aspiration is still there, but it is a lot more difficult. You have to be wealthy or lucky.”
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“In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” – Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx
“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.” – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
“The establishment of a central bank is 90% of communizing a nation.” – Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin
A home is considered affordable if monthly housing and mortgage costs don’t exceed 28% of a household’s gross income.
It was always 25% of Net Income. Ignoring taxes is foolish.
Are you expecting to see lower interest rates any day now?
Finance
People are forking out record $2,800 a month on average just to cover their mortgage payments
Theron Mohamed
Apr 19, 2024, 7:58 AM ET
US dollars
Kham/Reuters
– Mortgage holders are shelling out a record $2,800 on average to cover their monthly payments.
– Mortgage costs have soared due to rising house prices and soaring interest rates.
– Mortgage rates are at a five-month high after stubborn inflation dashed hopes for rate cuts soon.
…
https://www.businessinsider.com/mortgage-payments-housing-market-interest-rates-house-prices-sales-2024-4?amp
Did you ever notice how no matter what changes in the housing market, the predicted result according to MSM-quoted real estate experts is that housing prices will increase?
I wonder if anything could conceivably happen that would make housing prices decrease. Perhaps a sharp increase in inventory coupled with higher-for-longer interest rates?
New Mortgage Rate Spike Threatens California Housing Market
Published Apr 18, 2024 at 5:40 PM EDT
Updated Apr 18, 2024 at 5:56 PM EDT
By Omar Mohammed
Reporter, Economy & Finance
The continued rise in mortgage rates is likely to make homeownership unaffordable for large swathes of households in California and stifle the supply of homes for sale, housing economists say—a development that could make prices shoot up as competition for homes escalates.
On Thursday, Freddie Mac revealed that borrowing costs for home loans soared above 7 percent for the first time this year. As of April 18, the 30-year fixed rate mortgage averaged 7.1 percent compared to 6.88 percent the previous week.
“As rates trend higher, potential homebuyers are deciding whether to buy before rates rise even more or hold off in hopes of decreases later in the year,” Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist, said in a statement.
In California, one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, elevated mortgage rates are going to make it even harder for prospective homebuyers to afford a home, economists say.
“Interest rates rising will continue to create housing affordability challenges and tighten up supply for the housing market in California,” said Oscar Wei, deputy chief economist at the California Association of Realtors.
The median price of a home in the Golden State hit its highest level in seven months in March, going up by close to 8 percent to $855,000 from a year ago. High prices have helped stifle supply as sellers sitting on low mortgages are reluctant to sell and enter a market that will ask for 7-plus mortgage rates.
High prices have made affording a home beyond the grasp of a huge chunk of Californian households. About 85 percent of residents in the state will struggle to be able to pay for a median-priced home.
…
https://www.newsweek.com/new-mortgage-rate-spike-threatens-california-housing-market-1891955
Inventory has risen in my neighborhood: 5 out of about 400 houses. We’ll see how high it gets this summer.
Unless you are a trust fund baby or corporate officer or independently wealthy by other means, I wouldn’t even think about buying until inventory reverts to its pre-pandemic levels of around 1.2 million. Right now they are less than 2/3 of that, and buying is a competition among the wealthy.
It’s better to rent for half the monthly cost and keep your powder dry for the fire sale when the bubble bursts.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ACTLISCOUUS
5 major cities where pros predict home prices are likely to drop next
Updated: March 2, 2024 at 9:00 a.m. ET
By Alisa Wolfson
Home prices are still rising, except in these spots.
As many as 14% of the housing markets in a recent National Association of Realtors (NAR) survey reported home price declines in the fourth quarter of 2023. Getty Images
On a broad scale, home prices have gone up, up and then up some more: More than 85% of metro areas registered home price increases in the fourth quarter of 2023, according to a new report from the National Association of Realtors (NAR).
For aspiring homebuyers, that is no doubt met with a big “ugh.” But there may be good news on the housing front: Not only do pros predict that mortgage rates will drop in 2024 (you can see some of the best rates you may qualify for now here), there are, in fact, housing markets where home prices have been declining. Indeed, 14% (32 out of 221 markets measured) of the housing markets in NAR’s survey saw home price declines in the fourth quarter.
“We tend to talk about the housing market at a national level and from that bird’s eye view, average home prices have increased,” says Kate Wood, home expert at NerdWallet. “But the on-the-ground reality that home buyers and sellers face will vary by location. It’s difficult to generalize even at the state level. Listing prices may be going up on average, but if they’re declining in your area, you may be able to make a strong offer at or possibly even below the asking price. It is truly, location, location, location.”
So where are these elusive home price declines — and where might we see them in the future? Here’s what we uncovered.
According to NAR, these 10 housing markets saw the biggest price declines from the fourth quarter of 2022 through the fourth quarter of 2024:
Metro area Percent home price decline (Q4 2022-Q4 2023)
Jackson, Miss. -14.1%
Cleveland-Elyria, Ohio -8.9%
Naples-Immokalee-Marco Island, Fla. -5.9%
Akron, Ohio -5.6%
Punta Gorda, Fla. -5.5%
Provo-Orem, Utah -4.8%
New Orleans-Metairie, La. -4.6%
San Antonio-New Braunfels, Texas -4.3%
Elmira, N.Y. -4.2%
North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton, Fla. -3.9%
“After seeing relentless demand and skyrocketing prices, areas in the Sunbelt are finally seeing inventory recover and prices adjust,” explains Hannah Jones, economic research analyst at Realtor.com, about some of the markets where home prices declined. “The Florida metros of Naples-Immokalee-Marco Island, Punta Gorda and North Port Sarasota-Bradenton saw inventory levels climb more than 50% year-over-year and even as much as 125% in Punta Gorda, in the fourth quarter of 2023. As inventory built up in many of these areas, buyers bought more affordable homes and sellers likely softened prices in order to attract buyer demand.”
It’s also likely that the cities with declines in home prices saw these trends due to factors such as limited inventory and high housing costs compared to previous years, says WalletHub analyst Cassandra Happe. “These areas might have faced challenges in housing affordability despite marginal improvements in the overall housing market, leading to decreased demand and subsequent price declines,” Happe says. “Additionally, economic factors unique to each region, such as job markets and local industries, could have influenced the housing market dynamics.”
Where might prices drop next? Information services company Corelogic’s latest CoreLogic Market Risk Indicator (MRI), published last month, predicts a “very high” risk of home prices dropping in these five markets over the next 12 months. The forecast analyzes 392 major metros using variables like price, time between sales, property type, loan type and distressed sales.
Top 5 Markets at Risk of Home Price Decline
Spokane-Spokane Valley, Wash.
West Palm Beach- Boca Raton-Delray Beach, Fla.
Tampa- St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Fla.
Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, Ga.
Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach, Fla.
So what does this all mean for homebuyers? One big thing is that you need to remember that “real estate is very local,” says Jacob Channel, senior economist at LendingTree.
That means you need to do your homework about your specific area, says Jeff Taylor, managing director at Digital Risk, a loan quality due diligence company that outsources underwriting for mortgage institutions. “Each local market requires street to street pricing analysis, and local realtors have all the data you need to make smart home buying and selling decisions,” Taylor says.”
…
https://www.marketwatch.com/picks/5-major-cities-where-pros-predict-home-prices-are-likely-to-drop-next-1c820ca9
https://www.amazon.com/All-Real-Estate-Local-Sellers/dp/0385519222
Once America’s Hottest Housing Market, Austin Is Running in Reverse
Home prices have fallen more than anywhere in the U.S.
Well-paid tech workers relocating to Austin, Texas, helped drive the city’s housing boom.
By Will Parker
| Photographs by Tyler Dane Hansen for The Wall Street Journal
March 18, 2024 5:30 am ET
1100
The Sunbelt city that came to symbolize the pandemic housing boom is now leading a national property cool-down.
Home prices and apartment rents in Austin, Texas, have fallen more than anywhere else in the country, after a period of overbuilding and a slowdown in job and population growth.
That marks a sharp reversal from previous years when Austin’s real-estate market was sizzling. The city attracted waves of remote workers on six-figure tech salaries. Others arrived after companies such as Tesla and Oracle moved offices there, taking advantage of lower taxes and less business regulation. Austin’s economy grew at nearly double the national rate, and it became the country’s 10th-largest city.
…
https://www.wsj.com/economy/housing/once-americas-hottest-housing-market-austin-is-running-in-reverse-94226027
Austin House Prices Are Falling But Experts Say They’re Just ‘Going Back To Normal’: These Are The City’s More Affordable Neighborhoods
By Clare Trapasso
Apr 1, 2024
The Austin, TX, housing market boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving residents scrambling to get on the property ladder as an influx of workers flooded the town.
Now, with construction slowing and fewer new workers moving in, housing prices are falling and the market is “going back to normal,” according to local real estate agents.
In 2022, Ben Brajtbord, 38, and his girlfriend, Emily Sawyer, 34, started house hunting in Austin when the local market was still on fire. The first-time homebuyers figured it wouldn’t get any easier to buy a home.
But the couple, who both work in financial services, lost about 10 bidding wars to buyers who offered six figures over the asking price. They finally had an offer accepted in August 2022. It was for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, ranch-style house with a two-car garage in South Austin.
At the time, mortgage rates had risen, thinning out the buyer pool. The couple sensed a shift in the market and were able to get the home, originally listed for $590,000, for $565,000.
“It went from the craziest of the crazy to ‘Oh, maybe we have a shot,’” says Sawyer.
After a steep run-up in home prices in the Austin metropolitan area during the pandemic, prices have since started to fall. This is due to a confluence of higher mortgage rates, fewer new residents moving in from pricier parts of the country, investor purchases slowing down, and a boom in new construction.
The median list price in the metro fell 6.1% over the past two years, to a median of $542,000 in February, according to the most recent Realtor.com® data. (This was from the highest price in the second quarter of 2022.) Monthly rents, a median of $1,530 in February, were down 4.4% year over year.
…
https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/these-5-austin-texas-neighborhoods-had-the-largest-price-drops/
House Prices Are Plummeting in San Francisco
Published Jan 31, 2024 at 9:35 AM EST
Updated Feb 02, 2024 at 3:43 AM EST
By Giulia Carbonaro
US News Reporter
The city of San Francisco continues to report some of the biggest price drops in the entire country, with condos downtown being sold for thousands of dollars less than they were purchased years ago, according to Zillow adverts.
The average San Francisco home value was $1,216,087 as of December 31, down 5.6 percent from a year before, according to data from Zillow. Redfin writes that the median sale price of a home in the city dropped even lower, down 7.6 percent from a year before. The median sale price per square foot in San Francisco is $874, down 3.8 percent compared to a year before, according to the company.
Home prices in the city have been plummeting since reaching a peak of $1,449,470 in May 2022, with the exception of September 2023, when they saw a modest month-on-month increase from $1,226,112 to $1,228,976, according to Zillow. Since then, they have continued falling consistently until the end of December, the latest data available.
While home prices dipped only modestly between late summer 2022 and spring 2023 during what experts called a “correction” of the housing market, San Francisco experienced some of the most dramatic price drops in the country.
San Francisco experienced a 1.3 percent drop in prices between October and November 2023—the largest monthly decline in the country, according to the latest S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller national home price index released on Tuesday.
That’s because, after being one of the most overvalued markets and most expensive urban areas in the country for decades, the city was hit harder by the affordability crisis caused by high mortgage rates, low supply, high demand and skyrocketing prices. The pandemic—with the rise of remote work—also profoundly impacted the city, with many tech and start-up workers leaving San Francisco for cheaper cities nearby.
“San Francisco’s housing market is suffering from high mortgage rates like every other market, but it is especially vulnerable because prices were already really high there and it is the center of the tech world,” Redfin’s Head of Economic Research, Chen Zhao, told Newsweek.
“With layoffs and the effects of remote work especially acute in tech, San Francisco saw one of the largest corrections in house prices once the Fed started hiking interest rates,” she said.
“Things are stabilized and recovered somewhat but not completely. With mortgage rates expected to decline slightly, but remain high, prices are unlikely to recover much more unless remote work patterns really change or San Francisco’s reputation in the press changes dramatically.”
Vacation rental investor Rohin Dhar has been keeping track of what he described as “aggressive price cuts” in San Francisco, sharing the advert pages of homes for sales on Zillow on X, formerly known as Twitter. In one such advert, a 2,012 sq ft home with four bedrooms and three bathrooms is now being sold for $1,095,000 after a price cut of $704,000 from when it was listed for sale on January 19.
The last time the house was sold, according to Zillow, in late March 2004, it was priced at $600,000.
…
https://www.newsweek.com/house-prices-are-plummeting-san-francisco-1865601
California experiences increasing trend of people leaving state
(Kaylen Ho/Daily Bruin)
By Eugenie Chang
Jan. 29, 2024 6:39 p.m.
This post was updated Jan. 30 at 10:04 p.m.
The 2023 U-Haul Growth Index indicated that California is facing the greatest out-migration of any state for the fourth consecutive year.
The U-Haul Growth Index measures changes in state populations by correlating population decline to an increase in U-Haul’s transactions of moving equipment in one direction. Although this index alone cannot capture the full extent of population changes, it reflects the fact that California has faced negative domestic migration for nearly 20 years.
According to the Public Policy Institute of California, the state experienced a decline in overall population for the first time in 2021. The institute also reported that California is increasingly losing residents to nearby states, such as Arizona, Nevada and Texas.
Affordability challenges are one of the main factors contributing to California’s net migration loss, said Maximilian Buchholz, an assistant professor in the Department of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley and a former UCLA postdoctoral fellow. He added that a combination of increasing housing costs and decreasing wages is responsible for the trends of out-migration.
“Wages for people who don’t have college degrees have essentially not grown at all in the last 40 years,” Buchholz said. “In fact, in LA, … real wages have actually declined a little bit for people who don’t have college degrees.”
In addition to rising living costs, increased workplace flexibility and the introduction of remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic are incentives for moving to different states, said Michael Stoll, a professor of public policy and urban planning at UCLA.
“That became more likely and probable, especially when combined with some of the relaxations of employers’ need for certain occupations,” Stoll said. “COVID really did allow people to choose other locations that are lower cost and housing, meaning outside of California.”
While economic factors remain the dominant explanation for migration trends, political orientation could also play a small role in the recent trend of population loss, said Jamie Goodwin-White, an associate professor of geography at UCLA.
Goodwin-White said individuals’ ideologies cannot be discounted as a motivation for moving out of the state, although there is little more than anecdotal evidence to suggest this is true. She added that a lot of emphasis is placed on whether conservatives want to leave for political reasons, but other factors take precedence for their moves.
“I’m not denying that there may be an element of that that’s true, but that also intersects with things like economic status or susceptibility to high levels of taxes, for example, amongst high earners,” Goodwin-White said.
Buchholz, Stoll and Goodwin-White all said the overall quantity of people leaving California is minimal, given that those leaving the state only make up around 1% of California’s total population. In particular, Stoll said he thinks media depictions of the “California exodus” are overblown.
“It’s not a large exodus,” Stoll said. “It’s been three years of net migration loss from California, but the numbers are not terrifically large. … In the overall migration of Americans, it’s a disproportionate number, but relative to the size of California, it is very small.”
…
https://dailybruin.com/2024/01/29/california-experiences-increasing-trend-of-people-leaving-state
“Buchholz, Stoll and Goodwin-White all said the overall quantity of people leaving California is minimal, given that those leaving the state only make up around 1% of California’s total population.”
Whatever happened to your trees-to-the-sky population growth driving California housing demand and prices higher for longer?
KTLA
How much does the ‘American dream’ cost in California?
Addy Bink
9 hours ago
For years, the American dream seemed attainable. A home with a yard surrounded by a picket fence; a dog named Fido or Spot running around with your two kids as you come home from a nice job where you get paid enough to afford the aforementioned space.
But, following multiple years of stubborn inflation, coupled with a housing market that refuses to cool and a trend of mounting debt, achieving the American dream has become, to some, just a dream. Even more recently, an analysis found that most American households would need to spend $10,000 or more just to afford the same goods and quality of life they had in 2021.
A new report, released earlier this month, found that in every state, you need to earn at least six figures to achieve the American dream.
Personal finance site GoBankingRates considered the costs of multiple metrics that could be used to define the “American dream:” being a married couple with two children living in a home for four with a car and a pet; plus annual groceries, pet care, a mortgage, healthcare, utilities, education, and child care. That total was then considered 50% of the household’s income, following the oft-used 50/30/20 budgeting technique (50% for needs, 30% for wants, and 20% for saving or paying down debt).
Following recent trends (more on that in a moment), the analysis found that in states along the coasts, the costs required for the “American dream” were much higher than in the South, Midwest, and Plains.
Nowhere is the American dream more expensive than Hawaii, according to the GoBankingRates report; fueled in part by high housing and grocery costs, residents in Hawaii would need almost $260,800 to afford the idyllic life.
That’s roughly $15,000 more than California, which only outranked Hawaii in two categories: annual car costs, and annual child care costs.
In four other states, residents need to earn more than $200,000 to get a house with a picket fence: Massachusetts, Washington, New Jersey, and New Hampshire.
USC cancels all commencement speakers amid valedictorian speech controversy
The cheapest state was Mississippi, where GoBankingRates found you would need less than $110,000. Compared to Hawaii (and most other states on the list), Mississippi had the most affordable housing costs, which largely contributed to top ranking. In six other states, the American dream costs less than $125,000: Arkansas, Kentucky, Alabama, West Virginia, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.
…
https://ktla.com/news/california/how-much-does-the-american-dream-cost-in-california/amp/
Home for Sale
California News
California home prices climb higher, but sales stall
A sign is posted in front of a home for sale on February 05, 2024 in San Anselmo, California.(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
by: Marc Sternfield
Posted: Apr 19, 2024 / 11:16 AM PDT
Updated: Apr 19, 2024 / 11:16 AM PDT
Sales of existing single-family homes in California dipped in March as mortgage rates once again edged higher, according to new data from the California Association of Realtors.
After two consecutive months of double-digit increases, statewide home sales fell by 7.8% month over month and were down 4.4% percent from March 2023 on a seasonally adjusted annualized rate.
Home prices, however, continued to climb.
The median price of a single-family home in California was $854,490 last month, up nearly $50,000 over February and more than $60,000 higher than March 2023.
The San Francisco Bay Area continues to be the Golden State’s priciest region, with a median home price of $1.38 million, followed by the Central Coast ($950,000) and then Southern California ($850,000), the data shows. The median price in metro Los Angeles was $801,000.
…
https://ktla.com/news/california/california-home-prices-climb-higher-but-sales-stall/
Image files for Jeff — Tax Free Edition:
https://ibb.co/6HhbVBD
https://ibb.co/6NF4LjQ
Monday this week I made the single largest payment I’ve ever made to the IRS, so they can send it all to Ukraine and Israel.
My labor on this project will not generate a penny to our unelected, illegitimate, occupation government. And yes, that is new snow outside.
“Monday this week I made the single largest payment I’ve ever made to the IRS, so they can send it all to Ukraine and Israel.”
IRS Announces Tax Refund Increase as It Rakes in Near-Record $4.7 Trillion From Taxpayers
By Tom Ozimek
4/19/2024
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has disclosed that it raked in nearly $5 trillion in taxes from Americans in the last fiscal year, while boosting the amount it paid out in refunds by nearly 3 percent and boasting that it kept its pledge not to increase audit rates for those earning less than $400,000 per year.
After a record $4.9 trillion haul in the 2022 fiscal year, the IRS collected a slightly lower but still substantial $4.7 trillion last year, according to the IRS’s annual Data Book for fiscal year 2023.
The eye-catching tax-intake amount was made possible in part due to a significant funding boost of $78 billion that the IRS used in part to hire more enforcers and deploy advanced technologies like artificial intelligence to squeeze more dollars from non-compliant taxpayers.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/
Project looks good. Electrical work looks tight , you must know a good electrician.
‘Lodi Winegrape Commissioner Stuart Spencer claimed that every retailer and grocery he visited in the past few months had their shelves stocked with foreign-sourced bulk imports. ‘And all the while many retailers proudly proclaim their support for our local farms,’ Spencer said. ‘In no world does it make sense to ship bulk wine from across the globe to sit on a shelf in Lodi while thousands of tons of California wine grapes go unharvested and local growers remove family vineyards and take out loans to pay their farming bills’
So yer saying we should put our own people first?
Grateful Dead — Casey Jones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d160GSGtPxY
‘It was a tough decision to make for longtime wine grape growers like us, but we planted 130 acres with almonds in October,’ he said. In March, Sacramento-based Blue Diamond Growers, a cooperative of almond growers, eliminated 38 corporate jobs as part of an effort to remain cost efficient amid challenges including an oversupply of almonds’
Good call Greg, you gotta be in it to win it!
‘The project has also drawn criticism from neighboring residents, with more than 300 people recently signing an online petition that raises concerns about blowing dust coming from the project. Only one resident, Ron Holmes, spoke during the council’s discussion Tuesday, saying it ‘sounds like a leap of faith that a lender is going to come in and bail them out’
via GIPHY
‘explained that in most cases, lenders are loath to take back and operate commercial buildings themselves. ‘They just want to get paid,’ Kaplan said of lenders, and because commercial deals are mostly transacted through limited liability companies, recouping value on the property is their only recourse. ‘The figures that borrowers and owners got [before the pandemic] are not as relevant anymore as the facts on the ground,’ Kaplan said. ‘Forget about the original money, it’s gone’
Now Gary, it sounds like yer thinking of giving it away?!
survey last year found around a fifth of those without shelter had a substance use disorder and more than a quarter reported serious mental health diagnoses — and the ripple effects are profound…‘It’s horrible,’ Moe Girton, owner of the Hillcrest restaurants Gossip Grill and Barrel & Board, said about nearby encampments. Sidewalks were stained with feces. Needles could be found by asphalt. A man had recently tried to burn down one of her buildings, she added. Stefan Chicote, general manager of the nearby restaurant Baja Betty’s, said confrontations with unstable passersby had led him to hand out pepper spray to staff. ‘It feels like nobody’s on our side’
All that aside Moe and Stefan, how’s the weather?
‘the latest example of Newsom’s calling for more accountability from local governments as California’s unhoused population has ballooned to an estimated 181,000 people despite more than $24 billion in state funds spent over the past five years to combat homelessness. ‘I’m not interested in funding failure any longer’
Finger point all you want guvnah, the mission plan is faulty.
‘I’m not interested in funding failure any longer’
Newsom wants to spend it on reparations.
SW Florida is OUT OF CONTROL
Ben Grieco
8 minutes ago
Southwest Florida’s Housing Market is going mad in a variety of ways as listings with “Motivated Sellers” explode. Interest rates continue to climb creating a buyer divide nationwide. Now price drops in Punta Gorda have surged into the stratosphere while agents beg for offers right in the listing description. Meanwhile, North in Sarasota, Prices continue to climb in spite of declining sales.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfcJlbu8AAI
14 minutes.
ChatGPT 3.5
User
What makes Bitcoin valuable?
ChatGPT
Bitcoin derives its value from several key factors:
Limited Supply: Bitcoin has a finite supply capped at 21 million coins, making it scarce similar to precious metals like gold. This scarcity drives up demand and consequently its value.
Decentralization: Bitcoin operates on a decentralized network, meaning it is not controlled by any single entity like a government or central bank. This decentralization adds to its appeal as a hedge against traditional financial systems and inflation.
Utility: Bitcoin can be used as a medium of exchange, store of value, and a unit of account. Its utility in facilitating peer-to-peer transactions across borders without the need for intermediaries adds value to the network.
Security: The blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin provides robust security features, making it resistant to censorship and fraud. This security adds to its perceived value as a reliable store of wealth.
Adoption and Acceptance: As more individuals, institutions, and businesses adopt Bitcoin, its network effect grows, increasing its value as a widely accepted form of currency and investment.
Speculation: Like any asset, speculation plays a role in Bitcoin’s value. Its price is influenced by market dynamics, investor sentiment, and macroeconomic factors.
Overall, the combination of these factors contributes to Bitcoin’s perceived value and its position as a prominent digital asset in the global financial landscape.
User
You are misleadingly applying the definition of money to a speculative asset.
ChatGPT
You’re right; I may have leaned too heavily on the attributes typically associated with money. Bitcoin, while often referred to as a digital currency, also functions as a speculative asset and store of value for many investors. Its value is influenced not only by its utility as a medium of exchange but also by speculative trading, investor sentiment, and market dynamics. While it shares some characteristics with traditional money, its primary value proposition lies in its potential as a decentralized, digital store of wealth and its perceived scarcity.
User
Assets subject to speculative bubbles do not work well as a store of value. Bubbles inflate rapidly and then they pop.
ChatGPT
You make a valid point. Assets susceptible to speculative bubbles, by nature, can experience rapid price increases followed by sharp declines. While Bitcoin has shown remarkable growth over the years, it has also experienced periods of volatility and price corrections. This volatility can challenge its role as a stable store of value, particularly in the short term.
However, some argue that Bitcoin’s long-term value proposition as a store of value lies in its scarcity, decentralization, and adoption as a digital asset. Over time, as adoption and infrastructure continue to mature, Bitcoin may potentially become more resilient to speculative bubbles and market volatility. Nevertheless, it’s important for investors to approach Bitcoin and other speculative assets with caution and to diversify their portfolios accordingly.
User
How many Beanie Babies are there on the planet? Aren’t they subject to scarcity?
ChatGPT
While Beanie Babies were initially marketed as collectible toys with limited production runs, they are not comparable to Bitcoin in terms of scarcity or value. While scarcity can drive demand for collectibles like Beanie Babies, their value is primarily subjective and based on factors such as nostalgia, popularity, and collector sentiment.
Beanie Babies experienced a speculative bubble in the late 1990s, with some rare or limited edition models fetching high prices in the secondary market. However, the bubble eventually burst, and their value plummeted. Unlike Bitcoin, Beanie Babies do not possess inherent scarcity in the same way. Their production can be increased or decreased by the manufacturer based on demand, and they lack the decentralized, immutable ledger that underpins Bitcoin’s scarcity.
In summary, while both Beanie Babies and Bitcoin have experienced speculative interest, they differ significantly in terms of scarcity, utility, and value proposition.
User
If we run out of Bitcoin, aren’t there thousands of other cryptocurrencies which provide a near-perfect substitute, pretty much demolishing the scarcity claim?
ChatGPT
You bring up a valid point. While Bitcoin is indeed capped at 21 million coins, the cryptocurrency market is vast, with thousands of alternative cryptocurrencies, often referred to as altcoins, available. Many of these altcoins offer similar features and functionalities to Bitcoin, and some even claim to improve upon its technology.
However, the scarcity of Bitcoin isn’t just about the number of coins in circulation; it’s also about its network effect, brand recognition, and first-mover advantage. Bitcoin’s scarcity is tied to its specific protocol, which has been established since its inception. While alternative cryptocurrencies may offer substitutes, they often face challenges in achieving the same level of adoption, trust, and security as Bitcoin.
Additionally, the decentralization of Bitcoin’s network and its consensus mechanism, proof-of-work, contribute to its scarcity and value proposition. Altering the protocol to increase the supply of Bitcoin would require widespread consensus among its participants, making significant changes unlikely.
While alternative cryptocurrencies may provide substitutes, Bitcoin’s unique combination of scarcity, decentralization, and adoption sets it apart and contributes to its perceived value as a digital store of wealth.
User
You say “however” too much.
ChatGPT
I’ll keep that in mind! Let me rephrase that:
While Bitcoin’s scarcity is a defining feature, it’s true that the cryptocurrency market offers numerous alternatives, potentially diluting the exclusivity of Bitcoin.
ChatGPT can make mistakes. Consider checking important information. Read our Terms and Privacy Policy.
WATCH NOW
Local
70-year-old Carlsbad retiree loses life savings in scam involving Bitcoin
by: Amber Coakley
Posted: Apr 19, 2024 / 08:00 AM PDT
Updated: Apr 19, 2024 / 09:06 AM PDT
CARLSBAD, Calif. (FOX 5/KUSI) — A multinational fraud conspiracy robbed a Carlsbad woman of her life savings and a suspect is now facing charges.
U.S. attorney Tara McGrath’s office said Xilin Sun, a 35-year-old Ontario man, made his first appearance in federal court Thursday. He’s accused of tricking a 70-year-old woman into handing over $1.33 million over a period of months.
The San Diego Elder Justice Task Force learned of the fraud scheme after the victim reported to Carlsbad police that she was duped by fraudsters posing as government, bank and tech-support employees, the complaint noted.
…
https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/70-year-old-carlsbad-retiree-loses-life-savings-in-scam-involving-bitcoin/
NYC high school soccer game canceled after group of about 30 migrants refuse to leave the field — even after cops showed up
By Social Links forDeirdre Bardolf
Published April 20, 2024, 7:42 a.m. ET
A high school soccer game at a public field in East Harlem was canceled after a group of migrants refused to leave the pitch so the kids could play.
“I directly asked them to leave and some of them kind of took it into consideration, but then four or five of them said, ‘You know what, f–k it, we don’t have to leave, we can do whatever we want,’” said Erik Johansson, the coach of the Manhattan Kickers 17-year-old boys travel team.
About 40 boys from both teams showed up on Sunday, April 14 at Thomas Jefferson Park for the 5 p.m. matc
But a group of about 30 men who appeared to be African migrants and spoke little English, wouldn’t leave — even when the cops showed up.
To resolve the conflict, the cops asked to see a copy of the club team’s city permit.
“When you show up with two teams in uniform, a ref and two coaches, usually nobody is asking to see your permit,” said Johansson.
By the time Johansson’s assistant was able to forward a copy of the Kickers’ permit, the game had been delayed 30 minutes and the teams didn’t feel safe.
“Even when the game is over, you don’t know if they’re waiting for you, so even if the cops kicked them out, it may not be over. So we just all agreed, this is too dangerous,” Johansson said.
In his home country of Sweden — which saw a massive influx of migrants in recent years — the clashes on the pitch were all too common.
“I have seen this before, I know how bad it can get,” he said.
Parents told him they were rattled by the incident, and don’t want to play at the field anymore. Johansson said they don’t plan to return.
At other fields, like in East River Park, they don’t have these issues — but field space in the city is limited and they take what they can get.
“It’s so frustrating that the guys who refused to follow the rules won,” Maud Maron, a SoHo mom whose son plays on the team, told The Post.
“That’s the message the kids got.”
She said it is a sign of the Big Apple becoming “lawless.”
https://nypost.com/2024/04/20/us-news/nyc-high-school-soccer-game-canceled-after-group-of-about-30-migrants-refuse-to-leave-the-field-even-after-cops-showed-up/