Just When We Thought Housing Couldn’t Get Worse

The number of nails needed for the housing market’s coffin box has yet to be finalized. Consider just some of these startling numbers and trends:

The median price of a resale home in the U.S. fell 5.2% in February 2011 to $156,100 (the lowest level since April 2002) from $164,600 in February 2010, according to the National Association of Realtors. Some other interesting facts reported from the association:

• Purchases of homes fell 9.6% in February to an annualized rate of 4.88 million.

• Cash purchases accounted for 33% of all transaction in February, as homebuyers continue   to experience difficulties in obtaining mortgages.

• The number of resale homes on the market rose to 3.49 million homes. Based on the current sales rate, it would take 8.6 months to sell these homes.

Other startling numbers, this time from RealtyTrac Inc.:

• Homes in the foreclosure process sold at an average discount of 28% from the foreclosure price in 2010, with properties in distress accounting for about 26% of all home sales.

• Foreclosure filing will rise 20% this year.

The new home market is in worse condition than the resale market:

• In 2010, new home buyers purchased the fewest number of homes in 47 years, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.

Where are property prices headed? I believe home prices will drop between 5.0% and 7.5% this year. It’s no longer a case where property prices had gotten too ahead of themselves and needed to come down. The problem now is that the high unemployment rate is making it difficult for homeowners to keep up with their mortgage payments. One in five homes in this country is worth less than the mortgage on it.

Should I buy real estate now? The year 2011 may be the best year ever to buy a second home or a rental home, because prices have fallen so low, but here is my caveat: don’t expect housing prices to rise for years to come. Just when we thought housing couldn’t get worse, the housing market now has the added stress of rising interest rates to deal with.

For months, I have been writing about why I expect interest rates to rise (as support for the declining greenback and an incentive for foreigners to buy U.S. Treasuries, and to offset rising inflation). Unfortunately, the coming high interest rates are the last thing the housing market needs—the final nail in housing market coffin.

Michael’s Personal Notes:

Effective tomorrow, the world’s second biggest economy will require its banks to set aside even more cash before it makes new loans. It is the third time this year that China has asked its banks to increase their reserve requirements. Starting Friday, reserve requirements for China’s biggest banks will rise to 20%.

Consumer prices rose rapidly in China in February, up 4.9% on annualized rate, well above the government’s target rate of 4.0%.

Raising the reserve requirement of Chinese banks is usually a preceding move to higher interest rates. The one-year lending rate in China (its benchmark) sits at 6.06%, having risen three times in six months. I expect the next interest-rate increase to be announced in April.

Must be nice; a country where you can increase bank cash reserve requirement and interest rates aggressively and the country still continues to boom. Unlike North American governments, China’s leaders are proactive, not reactive. The balance of economic power is shifting. While economic and social risks remain very high in China given its accelerated rate of inflation, I’m continuing with my prediction: By the end of this decade, by 2020, the Chinese economy will be equal to and maybe larger than the U.S. economy.

Where the Market Stands; Where it’s Headed:

In the immediate term, stocks are headed higher. The bear market rally in stocks that started in March of 2009 has yet to complete its work. While the short- and long-term outlook for stocks is negative, I continue to expect higher prices in the immediate future.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average opens this morning up 4.4% for 2011.

What He Said:

“Recipe for Catastrophe: To me, the accelerated rate at which American consumers are spending, coupled with the drastic decline in the amount of their savings, is a recipe for a financial catastrophe.” Michael Lombardi in PROFIT CONFIDENTIAL, September 7, 2005. Michael started talking about and predicting the financial catastrophe we started experiencing in 2008 long before anyone else.

Michael bought his first stock when he was 17 years old. He quickly saw $2,000 of savings from summer jobs turn into $1,000. Determined not to lose money again on a stock, Michael started researching the market intensely, reading every book he could find on the topic and taking every course he could afford. It didn’t take long for Michael to start making money with stocks, and that led Michael to launch a newsletter on the stock market. Today, Michael only employs the top market analysts and editors. Some of our recommendations have posted gains in excess of 500%! Michael has authored and published over one thousand articles on investment and money management. Along the way to building Lombardi Publishing Corporation, now with over one million customers in 141 countries, Michael became an active investor in real estate, art, precious metals and various businesses. Readers of the daily Profit Confidential e-letter are offered the benefit of the expertise Michael has gained in these sectors. Michael believes in successful stock picking as an important wealth accumulation tool. Married with two children, Michael received his Chartered Financial Planner designation from the Financial Planners Standards Council of Canada and his MBA from the Graduate Business School, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland. Follow Michael and the latest from Profit Confidential on Twitter

No comments yet.

View the original article here

Just When We Thought Housing Couldn’t Get Worse

The number of nails needed for the housing market’s coffin box has yet to be finalized. Consider just some of these startling numbers and trends:

The median price of a resale home in the U.S. fell 5.2% in February 2011 to $156,100 (the lowest level since April 2002) from $164,600 in February 2010, according to the National Association of Realtors. Some other interesting facts reported from the association:

• Purchases of homes fell 9.6% in February to an annualized rate of 4.88 million.

• Cash purchases accounted for 33% of all transaction in February, as homebuyers continue   to experience difficulties in obtaining mortgages.

• The number of resale homes on the market rose to 3.49 million homes. Based on the current sales rate, it would take 8.6 months to sell these homes.

Other startling numbers, this time from RealtyTrac Inc.:

• Homes in the foreclosure process sold at an average discount of 28% from the foreclosure price in 2010, with properties in distress accounting for about 26% of all home sales.

• Foreclosure filing will rise 20% this year.

The new home market is in worse condition than the resale market:

• In 2010, new home buyers purchased the fewest number of homes in 47 years, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.

Where are property prices headed? I believe home prices will drop between 5.0% and 7.5% this year. It’s no longer a case where property prices had gotten too ahead of themselves and needed to come down. The problem now is that the high unemployment rate is making it difficult for homeowners to keep up with their mortgage payments. One in five homes in this country is worth less than the mortgage on it.

Should I buy real estate now? The year 2011 may be the best year ever to buy a second home or a rental home, because prices have fallen so low, but here is my caveat: don’t expect housing prices to rise for years to come. Just when we thought housing couldn’t get worse, the housing market now has the added stress of rising interest rates to deal with.

For months, I have been writing about why I expect interest rates to rise (as support for the declining greenback and an incentive for foreigners to buy U.S. Treasuries, and to offset rising inflation). Unfortunately, the coming high interest rates are the last thing the housing market needs—the final nail in housing market coffin.

Michael’s Personal Notes:

Effective tomorrow, the world’s second biggest economy will require its banks to set aside even more cash before it makes new loans. It is the third time this year that China has asked its banks to increase their reserve requirements. Starting Friday, reserve requirements for China’s biggest banks will rise to 20%.

Consumer prices rose rapidly in China in February, up 4.9% on annualized rate, well above the government’s target rate of 4.0%.

Raising the reserve requirement of Chinese banks is usually a preceding move to higher interest rates. The one-year lending rate in China (its benchmark) sits at 6.06%, having risen three times in six months. I expect the next interest-rate increase to be announced in April.

Must be nice; a country where you can increase bank cash reserve requirement and interest rates aggressively and the country still continues to boom. Unlike North American governments, China’s leaders are proactive, not reactive. The balance of economic power is shifting. While economic and social risks remain very high in China given its accelerated rate of inflation, I’m continuing with my prediction: By the end of this decade, by 2020, the Chinese economy will be equal to and maybe larger than the U.S. economy.

Where the Market Stands; Where it’s Headed:

In the immediate term, stocks are headed higher. The bear market rally in stocks that started in March of 2009 has yet to complete its work. While the short- and long-term outlook for stocks is negative, I continue to expect higher prices in the immediate future.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average opens this morning up 4.4% for 2011.

What He Said:

“Recipe for Catastrophe: To me, the accelerated rate at which American consumers are spending, coupled with the drastic decline in the amount of their savings, is a recipe for a financial catastrophe.” Michael Lombardi in PROFIT CONFIDENTIAL, September 7, 2005. Michael started talking about and predicting the financial catastrophe we started experiencing in 2008 long before anyone else.

Michael bought his first stock when he was 17 years old. He quickly saw $2,000 of savings from summer jobs turn into $1,000. Determined not to lose money again on a stock, Michael started researching the market intensely, reading every book he could find on the topic and taking every course he could afford. It didn’t take long for Michael to start making money with stocks, and that led Michael to launch a newsletter on the stock market. Today, Michael only employs the top market analysts and editors. Some of our recommendations have posted gains in excess of 500%! Michael has authored and published over one thousand articles on investment and money management. Along the way to building Lombardi Publishing Corporation, now with over one million customers in 141 countries, Michael became an active investor in real estate, art, precious metals and various businesses. Readers of the daily Profit Confidential e-letter are offered the benefit of the expertise Michael has gained in these sectors. Michael believes in successful stock picking as an important wealth accumulation tool. Married with two children, Michael received his Chartered Financial Planner designation from the Financial Planners Standards Council of Canada and his MBA from the Graduate Business School, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland. Follow Michael and the latest from Profit Confidential on Twitter

No comments yet.

View the original article here

Ancient “Hyperthermals” aka global warming, more frequent than previously thought

Ancient “Hyperthermals” a  Guide to Anticipated Climate Changes

Scripps researchers document the history of sudden global warming events, impacts on marine life

By Mario Aguilera, Scripps Institute News (h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard)

Sediment samples in the lab of Richard Norris obtained by the Ocean Drilling Program reveal the mark of “hyperthermals,” warming events lasting thousands of years that changed the composition of the sediment and its color. The packaged sediment sample on the left contains sediment formed in the wake of a 55-million-year-old warming event and the sample on the right is sediment from a later era after global temperatures stabilized.

Bursts of intense global warming that have lasted tens of thousands of years have taken place more frequently throughout history than previously believe, according to evidence gathered by a team led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego researchers.

Richard Norris, a professor of geology at Scripps who co-authored the report, said that releases of carbon dioxide sequestered in the deep oceans were the most likely trigger of these ancient “hyperthermal” events. Most of the events raised average global temperatures between 2° and 3° Celsius (3.6 and 5.4° F), an amount comparable to current conservative estimates of how much temperatures are expected to rise in coming decades as a consequence of anthropogenic global warming. Most hyperthermals lasted about 40,000 years before temperatures returned to normal.

The study appears in the March 17 issue of the journal Nature.
“These hyperthermals seem not to have been rare events,” Norris said, “hence there are lots of ancient examples of global warming on a scale broadly like the expected future warming.  We can use these events to examine the impact of global change on marine ecosystems, climate and ocean circulation.”

The hyperthermals took place roughly every 400,000 years during a warm period of Earth history that prevailed some 50 million years ago. The strongest of them coincided with an event known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, the transition between two geologic epochs in which global temperatures rose between 4° and 7° C (7.2° and 12.6° F) and needed 200,000 years to return to historical norms. The events stopped taking place around 40 million years ago, when the planet entered a cooling phase. No warming events of the magnitude of these hyperthermals have been detected in the geological record since then.

Richard Norris in his lab with ancient sediments obtained by the Ocean Drilling Program reveal the mark of “hyperthermals,” warming events lasting thousands of years that changed the composition of the sediment and its color. The dark color in the large sediment core sample at left depicts the onset and aftermath of a 55-million-year-old warming event when changes in ocean temperatures altered the composition of marine life.

Phil Sexton, a former student of Norris’ now at the Open University in the United Kingdom, led the analysis of sediment cores collected off the South American coast. In the cores, evidence of the warm periods presented itself in bands of gray sediment layered within otherwise pale greenish mud. The gray sediment contained increased amounts of clay left after the calcareous shells of microscopic organisms were dissolved on the sea floor. These clay-rich intervals are consistent with ocean acidification episodes that would have been triggered by large-scale releases of carbon dioxide. Large influxes of carbon dioxide change the chemistry of seawater by producing greater amounts of carbonic acid in the oceans.

The authors concluded that a release of carbon dioxide from the deep oceans was a more likely cause of the hyperthermals than other triggering events that have been hypothesized. The regularity of the hyperthermals and relatively warm ocean temperatures of the period makes them less likely to have been caused by events such as large melt-offs of methane hydrates, terrestrial burning of peat or even proposed cometary impacts. The hyperthermals could have been set in motion by a build-up of carbon dioxide in the deep oceans caused by slowing or stopping of circulation in ocean basins that prevented carbon dioxide release.

Norris noted that the hyperthermals provide historical perspective on what Earth will experience as it continues to warm from widespread use of fossil fuels, which has increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere nearly 50 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Hyperthermals can help scientists produce a range of estimates for how long it will take for temperatures to fully revert to historical norms depending on how much warming human activities cause.

“In 100 to 300 years, we could produce a signal on Earth that takes tens of thousands of years to equilibrate, judging from the geologic record,” he said.
The scientists hope to better understand how fast the conditions that set off hyperthermals developed. Norris said that 50 million year old sediments in the North Sea are finely layered enough for scientists to distinguish decade-to-decade or even year-to-year changes.

Co-authors of the paper include researchers from the National Oceanography Centre Southampton at the University of Southampton in England and the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, University of Bremen, Germany.

View the original article here

Waiter cleared by rape jury said he thought I was his BRUNETTE girlfriend

I wonder if I can get away with “I was so drunk, I didn’t realise I was driving”?

- trevor, Ammanford, Wales, 8/3/2011 7:51

I find this story very worrying. So someone can get away with violating another person by claiming they were too drunk to know what they were doing? Given that he really was drunk and had not intended to rape surely a crime has still been committed? What would have happened if there had been a young girl of 14 or 15 years old in that room with long brown hair? Would he have gotten away with having sex with her?

- Leslie, London, UK, 8/3/2011 7:45

DRUNK AND BLIND AND DISCONNECTED THE PHONE– WHAT AN EXCUSE!

SHOW US THE JURY!!!!

By Louise Eccles
Last updated at 10:50 AM on 8th March 2011

A woman who woke to find a man having sex with her has told of her disbelief at his acquittal on rape charges after he claimed he had stumbled into the wrong bed.

Haydor Khan, 22, said he was so drunk that it was not until he was having sex with Joanne Freeman that he realised she was not his girlfriend and that he was in the wrong hotel room.

But Miss Freeman, 39, said she struggled  to understand how Mr Khan could have mistaken her – a petite, size six blonde – for his tall, size 12 brunette girlfriend Nicola Wood, 19.

Disgusted: Joanne Freeman, 39, said the defence of Mr Khan, who claimed he was so drunk that he went into the wrong hotel room and started having sex with her, was absurd

Mr Khan told a jury he was ‘****** out of my nut’ and only realised his error when he caught a glimpse of Miss Freeman’s face in the dark.

The court heard that his first thought was not of guilt, but instead: ‘Bloody hell. I’ve just had sex with someone old enough to be my mum.’ He was cleared of rape two weeks ago.

Yesterday Miss Freeman, a mother of two who has waived her right to anonymity, said she would never forget ‘seeing his face above me that night’ and that she felt ‘humiliated and ashamed’.

She said: ‘I wish I could erase from my memory what he has done, but I can’t. It is so hard to understand how he confused me with his girlfriend because we are physically so different.

‘Since it happened he has shown no remorse. Instead he was repulsed he accidentally slept with someone “old enough to be his mother”.

‘Well, look at it the other way. A boy half my age came into my room and had sex with me while I was asleep. I am the one who feels disgusted.’

Miss Freeman, who worked as a catering manager, and Miss Wood worked and lived at the Royal Arms Hotel in Farnham, Surrey, when the incident happened on August 31 last year.

Mr Khan, a waiter in an Indian restaurant, told Guildford Crown Court that his girlfriend had promised to have sex with him that night but had decided she was not well enough. After midnight he went downstairs to shower and, upon his return, drunkenly wandered into Miss Freeman’s room.

Couple: Haydor Khan with his dark-haired 19-year-old girlfriend Nicola Wood. He said he only realised his error when he caught a glimpse of Miss Freeman’s face Wrong room: All three were at The Royal Arms hotel in Farnham, Surrey

Miss Freeman said: ‘I woke up and he was on top of me.

‘He must have taken off all my clothes, because the room was freezing that night so I had gone to sleep with all my clothes on.

‘When I realised what was happening I just tensed up and froze. I felt disbelief at what was happening.’  Miss Freeman said she was a very heavy sleeper, and believes this is why she did not wake up as she was undressed.

Mr Khan told the court she had touched him in a way that made him think he had the consent of his ‘girlfriend’.

But while he was still on top of her, he stopped abruptly and left the room without saying a word.

Miss Freeman said: ‘My first thought was, “Help, somebody help me”. I grabbed my clothes and ran to the landlord’s bedroom. I said, “Wake up, I’ve been raped”. As I said it, it hit home what had happened and I burst into tears.’

The police were called and Mr Khan was arrested in his girlfriend’s bedroom, where Miss Freeman’s dismantled phone was found in his sock. He told officers he had taken it accidentally as he picked up his clothes.

There was no evidence that Mr Khan used protection, so Miss Freeman faced an excruciating wait to find out if she had contracted any sexually transmitted diseases. She had not. Miss Freeman, who now runs her own restaurant and lives with her partner and teenage children, said the verdict made her feel suicidal, adding: ‘It was excruciating telling a jury of strangers what happened. It has devastated the whole family. My father is heartbroken and my own daughter had to sit through the court case.’

Her friend Karen Berry, 43, said Miss Freeman had ‘changed completely’, adding: ‘She is a shell of her former self. She tries to be strong but then you see she has a vacant look in her eyes or she breaks down.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1363964/Haydor-Khan-cleared-rape-said-thought-I-BRUNETTE-girlfriend.html#ixzz1G0Z7orHC

Hammered out of his skull he walks away from a bar,up some stairs,down a corridor or two,perhaps some more stairs,then goes downstairs to take a shower-presumably after collecting toileteries and a towel from his own room,dresses again,back up-stairs,corridors again?,quietly enters her room and proceeds to remove all of her clothing with surgical precision in the freezing pitch blackness of night,proceeds to precisely mount her and do his deed until she awakens,he then gathers up his clothes and heads to his own room,all without disturbing a soul. Excuse me,these are most definately not the actions of person whom is consumed with drink to the point of being paraletic.

- Greg, W.Yorkshire, 8/3/2011 7:04

The police were called and Mr Khan was arrested in his girlfriend’s bedroom, where Miss Freeman’s dismantled phone was found in his sock. He told officers he had taken it accidentally as he picked up his clothes.

NOT TOO DRUNK THEN EH?

View the original article here