German Economy Minister Robert Habeck underlined on Sunday, during a discussion with citizens at the government’s open-door day, that the country will not extend the lifetime of its three remaining nuclear power plants in order to save gas. “It is the wrong decision given the little we would save,” stated Habeck, adding that the nuclear power plans would only be able to save 2% of gas use at most. He noted that such savings are not ample enough for Germany to reconsider its plans to exit nuclear energy. Nevertheless, Habeck noted that he might consider extending Bavaria’s nuclear power plant lifespan, should a stress test, results of which will be revealed in the coming weeks, display that such an action would be necessary for ensuring the stability and supply of the electricity network in the winter months. NN: Mistakes are amazing things… we all make them. How do you learn from your mistakes…. Well first and foremost you got to own them… You must realize you made a mistake…. and then you have to correct said mistake. Europe is in deep shit. But still they do not realize what the mistake is never mind owning up to them. They still don’t get it the green revolution is not here yet… It is coming but in the 30 years or more between now and then you have to use nukes and fossil fuel….
Gazprom Will Halt Nord Stream Gas Flows On Aug 31
Gazprom will stop all gas flows to Europe via the Nord Stream pipeline from August 31 until September 2, Russia’s gas giant Gazprom announced on Friday. The reason for the 3-day suspension of gas flows via the pipeline would be due to maintenance work at the Trent 60 gas compressor station, which would be carried out with Siemens. The maintenance was not planned and is expected to escalate tensions between Russia and the EU, and squeeze Germany, already in the midst of an energy crisis, by restricting gas supplies even more. Flows via Nord Stream have been reduced since mid-June after regularly scheduled maintenance continues to drag out over a gas turbine that was repaired by Siemens but never put back into operation. Siemens claims that the work on the turbine has been complete for weeks, and that it has been waiting in Germany for Gazprom to supply the necessary customs documents for its return. Gazprom, however, has stated that Siemens has not provided it with the necessary documents that would allow the turbine to be returned despite sanctions. The feud—which has now spilled over into Twitter with the two sides battling about the turbine by posting playlists for the lonely turbine—would be comical if it weren’t for the havoc the reduced gas shipments have had on Europe’s gas prices. Before the original turbine was sent off for repair, Germany warned that Russia may not resume the flow via Nord Stream when the repair work was complete—retaliation for the sanctions against Moscow. “Based on the pattern we’ve seen, it would not be very surprising now if some small, technical detail is found and then they could say ‘now we can’t turn it on any more’,” Germany said at the time. As it turns out, that “small, technical detail” is the hiccup in the return of the turbine. NN: Its called a vice. Why would Europe ever let itself get so dependent, especially German on a historic enemy. The atrocities the Russians committed on the Germans right after WW2 are unspeakable.
Bull run in stocks to morph into a bear market
Some market gurus are starting to worry the summer rally on Wall Street may be starting to fizzle, after stocks quickly lurched from oversold to overbought. Gene Goldman, chief investment officer of Cetera Financial Group, explained that stocks are likely headed for a pullback, even though the economy is in better shape than many Americans realize. “There’s been plenty of great news but the market needs a little bit of a pause. We’ve moved a little too fast, too quickly right now,” Goldman said, To support this view, he pointed to a handful of reasons why Friday’s slump in stocks might continue into next week, and possibly longer — even though he remains bullish on stocks over a longer time horizon. Cyclical sectors outperformed as stocks rallied in July and early August. But that trend appeared to come to an end this week, as defensive sectors retook the lead. “One sign that investors are getting nervous is cyclicals underperforming defensive sectors, and we’re starting to see that now,” Goldman said. Over the past week, consumer staples stocks and utilities were two top performers among the S&P 500’s 11 sectors. As a result, the Consumer Staples Select Sector SPDR fund XLP, -0.32%, an exchange-traded fund that tracks the sector, has risen 1.9%, while the Utilities Select Sector SPDR Fund XLU, -0.05% gained 1.3%. On the other hand, the two worst-performing sectors were materials and communications services, two cyclical sectors. The Materials Select Sector SPDR fund XLB, -1.84% was down 2.4% for the week, while the Communications Services Select Sector SPDR fund XLC, -1.62% shed 3.1%. Rising bond yields are another sign that the rally in stocks could be about to turn, Goldman said. Higher Treasury yields can pose a problem for stocks because they make bonds a more attractive investment by comparison. Stocks and bonds often moved in unison to start of the year, as expectations of tighter monetary policy from the Federal Reserve rattled both assets. But that dynamic appears to have shifted in August. Treasury yields turned higher earlier this month and started rising before stocks hit a rough patch late this week. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note TMUBMUSD10Y, 2.973% increased 35 basis points since Aug. 1, and it climbed 14 basis points since Monday to 2.897%. Bond yields rise as prices fall, and Goldman and others on Wall Street are now waiting to see if stocks will follow bond prices lower. Continue reading “Bull run in stocks to morph into a bear market”
Fed united on need for higher rates, divided over how high
Aug 18 (Reuters) – The Federal Reserve needs to keep raising borrowing costs to bring high inflation under control, a string of U.S. central bank officials said on Thursday, even as they debated how fast and how high to lift them. St. Louis Fed President James Bullard, who was among the central bank’s earliest advocates last year of a more muscular response to fast-building price pressures, said that given the strength of the economy he is currently leaning toward supporting a third straight 75-basis-point interest rate hike in September. “I don’t really see why you want to drag out interest rate increases into next year,” Bullard told the Wall Street Journal, saying he would like to get the Fed’s benchmark overnight interest rate to a target range of 3.75% to 4.00% by the end of this year. The Fed’s policy rate is currently 2.25%-2.50%. Earlier on Thursday, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said hiking rates by 50 or 75 basis points at the Fed’s next policy meeting on Sept. 20-21 would be a “reasonable” way to get short-term borrowing costs to “a little bit above” 3% by the end of this year, and on their way to a little bit higher in 2023. The exact pace would depend on employment data, which has shown brisk growth in recent months, and inflation, Daly told CNN International. Inflation, by the Fed’s preferred measure, is running at more than three times the central bank’s 2% target. With the global economic slowdown acting as a headwind on U.S. growth, she said “we have to take that into consideration as we ensure that we don’t overdo policy.” Fresh data on Thursday showing a dip in the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits last week added to evidence that, save for the fast-cooling housing market, the economy is holding up despite the steepest round of Fed rate hikes since the 1980s. Investors may get a better read on the Fed’s likely actions in coming months next Friday, Aug. 26, when Fed Chair Jerome Powell gives a highly anticipated speech on the economic outlook at the annual global central bankers’ conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Powell last month held the door open to another “unusually large” rate hike at the Fed’s next meeting, but also said “it likely will become appropriate to slow the pace of increases” to give policymakers time to take stock of how higher borrowing costs are affecting the economy. Fed officials’ remarks Thursday suggest an emerging split in the central bank between those who want to push rates higher quickly, and those who are more cautious because of potential damage to the job market and the risk of a rise in the U.S. unemployment rate, now at 3.5%. But both Bullard and Daly said they felt that once rates get to a certain level, the Fed will not quickly reverse course. Bullard said market expectations of rate cuts were “definitely premature.” Daly said she supported a “raise-and-hold” strategy. “The worst thing you can have as a business or a consumer is to have rates go up and then come rapidly down… it just causes a lot of caution and uncertainty,” Daly said. “I do think we want to not have this idea that we’ll have this large hump-shaped rate path where we’ll ratchet up really rapidly this year and then cut aggressively next year – that’s not what’s on my mind.” Trading in futures contracts tied to the Fed’s policy rate suggested investors see that rate rising to a range of 3.50%-3.75% by March of next year, but then starting to fall a few months later. Speaking at a separate event, Kansas City Fed President Esther George said she and her colleagues would continue to debate the question of how fast to raise rates, but that they would not stop tightening policy until they are “completely convinced” that inflation is coming down. The recent easing of U.S. financial conditions, including a surge in stock prices, may have been based on an overly optimistic sense that inflation was peaking and the pace of interest rate increases was likely to slow, she said. Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari, the most hawkish of Fed policymakers, said the central bank needs to “urgently” bring down inflation. “The question right now is, can we bring inflation down without triggering a recession?” he said at an event in Wayzata, Minnesota. “And my answer to that question is, I don’t know.” NN: I Know: Its never happened before and it will not happen this time. The only way to stop inflation is to stop inflation expectations and demand. And the only way that happens is a recession… the bigger the inflation the more the FED raises rates and the bigger the economic downturn… We have over 150 years of history on this…..
US Is in a Bear Market Rally….. that is DOOMED
- BofA says the S&P 500’s summer surge of 17.4% in 41 trading days is a ‘classic’ bear market rally
- The Fed still has to work to bring down inflation and that could mean another pullback for stocks.
- The bank found that just four large-cap stocks contributed 30% of the index’s recent gain.
The summer surge in the S&P 500 should be considered an average bear-market rally and the index remains vulnerable to falling under its recent lows, according to Bank of America. The investment bank in its weekly Flow Show note published Friday looked at 43 bear-market rallies, marked by gains of more than 10%, since 1929. It found the average of those past bear-market rallies was 17.2% in 39 trading days. The S&P 500 in 41 trading days piled on 17.4% through the close of Thursday’s session. The index on Friday moved at around 4,226. “Thus far [a] classic bear rally, and ultimately self-defeating rally…you think SPX >4500 and Fed going to stop hiking?,” said BofA, referring to the Federal Reserve’s rate-hike campaign to cool down the hottest inflationary environment in four decades. The S&P 500’s jump from its June 16 low found fuel from investors interpreting comments by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell as a “pivot” toward policy makers considering cutting interest rates in the face of a slowing economy and potentially cooler inflation. Headline inflation did ease in July, to 8.5% from June’s 9.1% rate which marked a 41-year high. The “pivot” trade and the resurgence of meme stocks underscored the market’s waning fear of Fed policy. But investors this week heard Fed officials voice support for a third consecutive rate hike of 75 basis points at the Fed’s September meeting. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell will speak next Friday at the central bank’s symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Bank of America said it holds the “cyclical bear” view that stocks have moved near the top of their trading range and that the market has yet to see “ultimate lows” which may come next year.
U.S. Natural Gas Storage Sees Minimal Injection as Exports Rise and you thought it was a European problem
Falling far short of market expectations, the United States added only 18 billion cubic feet into its natural gas inventories for the week ending August 12, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) noted in its weekly natural gas inventory report on Thursday.
The low injection rate for the week, compared to expectations of around 30 Bcf, pushed natural gas futures up early on Thursday, according to Natural Gas Intelligence. Heading into the fall and winter, this is a comparatively low injection rate. During the same week last year, the inventories gained 46 Bcf. Recently, U.S. natural gas futures have been gaining significant ground at highs surpassing anything seen in well over a decade due to increased momentum in exports that could leave the country short of supplies.
Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that U.S. supplies are still more than 10% below normal levels for this time of year.
Natural gas futures had slipped somewhat earlier in the week as traders calculated the supply was recovering, ahead of the EIA’s Thursday report. Overall, natural gas prices have remained highly volatile throughout the year. On Monday, U.S. natural gas futures slipped. On Tuesday, they surged 7%. On Wednesday, prices rose to fresh highs but closed with slight losses. On Thursday, at the time of writing, U.S. natural gas futures were trading up around 0.80%, shortly after the EIA’s inventory release. The EIA also noted on Thursday that natural gas exports from Texas into Mexico have increased significantly, based on the most recent data from May 2022. During May, exports from pipelines in West Texas heading to Mexico averaged 1.6 billion cubic feet per day. That is a record level and represents a 12% increase from January through May. Increases in exports for West Texas to Mexico have doubled since 2019. NN: their is one hell of a winter time energy crises brewing. Reality is US natural gas producers are starving US market because their gas is worth 600% more when exported….
Millennials the most useless generation until…. Generation Z came along
Study Claims American Millennials Are The Most Useless Population In The World
A study seeking to measure the overall competency of age groups throughout the globe has found that American Millennials are without a doubt the least skilled population in the world. The ETS study tested individuals aged 16 to 65 across 23 countries, and measured Literacy, Numeracy, and “problem-solving in technology-rich environments.” Across the board American Millennials scored a ‘feeble wet fart’ on the competency scale when compared with their foreign counterparts. Long thought to be the most technologically savvy and educated generation in history, American Millennials (people aged 16-34) just can’t hack it when it comes to the skills employers are looking for. Japan crushed it, but there was no indication as to whether or not the Japanese culture’s infatuation with tentacle porn had any bearing on workplace competency.
Here are some key findings from the ETS study:
- In literacy, U.S. millennials scored lower than 15 of the 22 participating countries. Only millennials in Spain and Italy had lower scores.
- In numeracy (ability to apply math to everyday situations), U.S. millennials ranked last, along with Italy and Spain.
- In PS-TRE (problem solving in a technology rich environment), U.S. millennials also ranked last, along with the Slovak Republic, Ireland, and Poland.
- The youngest segment of the U.S. millennial cohort (16- to 24-year-olds), who could be in the labor force for the next 50 years, ranked last in numeracy along with Italy and among the bottom countries in PS-TRE. In literacy, they scored higher than their peers in Italy and Spain.
- Top-scoring U.S. millennials (those at the 90th percentile) scored lower than top-scoring millennials in 15 of the 22 participating countries, and only scored higher than their peers in Spain.
- Low-scoring U.S. millennials (those at the 10th percentile) ranked last along with Italy and England/Northern Ireland and scored lower than millennials in 19 participating countries.
- Although a greater percentage of young adults in the U.S. are attaining higher levels of education since 2003, the numeracy scores of U.S. millennials whose highest level of education is high school and above high school have declined.
- U.S. millennials with a four-year bachelor’s degree scored higher in numeracy than their counterparts in only two countries: Poland and Spain.
To summarize: American Millennials are the overall worst generation in the world when it comes to useful skills. Even if American Millennials didn’t finish dead last in EVERY SINGLE CATEGORY, they managed to finish at or near the bottom across the board. Now I’m still a little confused as to how American Millennials shit the bed so hard on this one. I even took some of the practice questions and found them to be pretty damn easy…So what gives? ETS, the firm who administered the test, is based out of Princeton, New Jersey. That threw out my idea that maybe there was a cultural bias in the test. So for now I’m going to just watch this video below on repeat while I sit around and try and come up with any logical explanation as to why American Millennials failed so hard compared to our global counterparts:
Here are the signs that the bear-market rally in stocks won’t last long – Citi ….. Not only won’t it last… IT HAS ENDED!!
“Bear market rallies are often sentiment driven, as the market just becomes too bearish,” wrote Citi Research strategists led by Dirk Willer, the managing director and head of emerging market strategy, in a note on Thursday. “More fundamentally, many bear-market rallies are driven by hopes that the Fed comes to the rescue. The current one is no different, as the Fed pivot narrative has been an important catalyst.” In particular, the chart below shows that the AAII bull-bear indicator, one of the closely-watched investor sentiment surveys, is almost back to levels where bear market rallies peak out, with expectations that stock prices will rise over the next six months, increasing 1.2 percentage points to 33.3% in the week of August 15, while the bearish sentiment increased 0.5 percentage points to 37.2%.
SOURCE: CITI RESEARCH, BLOOMBERG
Meanwhile, the SKEW index for the S&P 500, which measures the difference between the cost of derivatives that protect against market drops and the right to benefit from a rally, normalized almost as much as it does in the median bear market rally (see chart below), said Citi Research. The index can be a proxy for investor sentiment and volatility.
SOURCE: CITI RESEARCH, BLOOMBERG
Federal Reserve officials in July agreed that it was necessary to move their benchmark interest rate high enough to slow the economy to combat high inflation, while raising concerns that they may tighten the stance of monetary policy by more than necessary, according to minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee’s July 26-27 meeting released Wednesday.
Powell to tell Jackson Hole that recession won’t stop Fed’s fight against high inflation
After the release of minutes of the meeting, the Federal Resserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said he is leaning toward another large rate rise of 75 basis points at the central bank’s September meeting. Meanwhile, Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin said the Fed “will do what it takes” to drive inflation back toward its 2% target, according to a Bloomberg report, while Reuters reported that Barkin saying the Fed’s efforts needn’t be “calamitous.” According to Citi Research, the bear-market rally refers to a bounce equal to or larger than 10% that takes place between the peak and the trough. “If a new low is made after a 10% rally, the next rally of more than 10% is a separate bear market rally (or a bull market, if no new lows are made subsequently),” wrote strategists. The S&P 500 SPX, -1.29% was up 15.4% from its 52-week low of 3666.77 on June 16, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.86% rallied 12.9%, and the NASDAQ Composite COMP, -2.01% jumped 19.4% since their mid-June lows, according to Dow Jones Market Data. In total, Citigroup noted three indexes have experienced a 17% rally in the past 42 trading days since June 16. U.S. stocks finished the week sharply lower. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.86% dropped 292.30 points, or 0.9%, to finish at 33,706.74. . The S&P 500 SPX, -1.29% was down 55.26 points, or 1.3%, to finish at 4,228.48. The Nasdaq Composite COMP, -2.01% decreased 260.13 points, or 2.0%, to 12,705.22. NN: This bear market rally ran far longer then higher then i imagines…… It is beyond crazy what they have doe. The nice part is i have plenty of runway to recoup my losses and still make a tidy profit…… Hopefully i called the top (finally) and got you in a great trade… we shall see
Iran Nuclear Deal Is Not Going to happen… Iran Wants Nukes MORE Then It wants Money and Russia Is Glad To Help!
- The prospect of an imminent new “nuclear deal” between the West and Iran is looking increasingly unlikely.
- A senior political and oil industry analyst highlights that there is very little chance that Iran will be willing to make the one concession the U.S. needs to move the deal forward.
- The cementing view of the United States came on 9 August with the launch of Iran’s ‘Khayyam’ satellite, built almost entirely by Russia and powered into orbit from the Russia-controlled Baikonur cosmodrome.
The European Union (EU) last week tabled a ‘final text’ of a new iteration of the nuclear deal – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – to Washington and Tehran. However, it is equally true, as conveyed by several senior political and oil industry sources close to proceedings, that there is virtually no chance of such a deal being done without a massive concession coming from Iran that it is impossible to see the current regime making. “Nothing has changed in the past few months from when the U.S. decided that Iran was just trying to buy time for its nuclear weapons development program by continuing to submit new clauses to the text of the new version of the JCPOA agreement,” a senior energy source who worked closely with Iran’s Petroleum Ministry said “And Washington has told everyone else in the P5+1 group [the U.S., the U.K., France, China, and Russia ‘plus’ Germany] that it will not budge from its position on the IRGC, which is aimed – as Iran knows – at destroying the IRGC’s influence, and by extension Iran’s influence – in the world,” he said. “As far as the U.S. is concerned, everything is now focused on ensuring that Iran does not get the three months it needs to finish the guidance systems it requires, with the help of Russia, to deliver weapons-grade nuclear material in the missiles it already has,” he added. A cementing of the U.S. view that “we are not going to change a single word or add a single comma in the current draft [of the new version of the JCPOA] on the table” – quoted a senior European Union energy source. Do not underestimate the concern abut the August 9th launch of Iran’s ‘Khayyam’ satellite, built almost entirely by Russia and powered into orbit from the Russia-controlled Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. According to Iran, the satellite will be “used to monitor Iran’s borders and improve the country’s capabilities in management and planning in the fields of agriculture, natural resources, environment, mining, and natural disasters.” According to the U.S., the satellite is to be used for spying on its neighbors. The U.S. did hint at how serious it is when a State Department spokesman said last week of the Khayyam launch: “Russia deepening an alliance with Iran is something that the whole world should look at and see as a profound threat.” What the Khayyam satellite was launched for is to provide the final piece of the missile guidance systems that Russia and Iran have been working on for years – this one relating to improving the accuracy of missiles (by up to 25 percent for short- and medium-range missiles and by up to 70 percent for long-range missiles) according to the Iranian source. This latest advance by Iran in its quest to be able to deliver a fully functioning nuclear warhead to anywhere within a few-thousand-mile radius should come as no surprise, given that the same sponsor for North Korea’s nuclear program – China – is the key state sponsor of Iran, as analyzed in depth in my latest book on the global oil markets. After the landmark 25-year deal was struck in August 2019 between Iran and China – a story exclusively broken by me in September 2019, nearly two years before it was officially announced or reported on by anyone else – China (and Russia) gradually and quietly began to increase their cooperation on key elements of Iran’s nuclear weapons development program. In China’s case, the level of intermediation between middle-men connected to it and to North Korea and Iran was stepped up using a triangular system of technology supplies (from China to North Korea via middlemen, and then from North Korea to Iran), and payment principally in oil (from Iran to North Korea, with some also sent from Iran to China directly). Russia had agreed to take a back seat to China in Iran’s nuclear weapons program in the year or two after the 25-year China-Iran deal had actually been made (in August 2019), but shifted back to a front seat position from September 2021 (when it began to activate its plan to invade Ukraine), as China remains wary of overtly challenging the U.S. outside its own perceived area of influence in the Taiwan Strait. Iran and Russia still need two to three months to finalise its overall missile guidance system, although it already has a vast array of missiles already in place with varying range applications. This leaves the nuclear material itself for the warheads as the third element it needs to line up before it rates as a clear and present nuclear threat. According to the 30 May 2022 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA): “Due to the growth of Iran’s 60 percent enriched uranium stocks, Iran has crossed a dangerous new threshold: its breakout timeline is now at zero. It has enough 60 percent enriched uranium, or highly enriched uranium [HEU] in the form of uranium hexafluoride [UF6] to be assured it could fashion directly a nuclear explosive. If Iran wanted to further enrich its 60 percent HEU up to 90 percent HEU, typically called weapon-grade uranium [WGU], used in Iran’s known nuclear weapons designs, it could do so within weeks utilizing only a few advanced centrifuge cascades.” Given this, it could be argued that bringing Iran back into the fold of global diplomatic relations by agreeing to a new iteration of the nuclear deal might be the way forward. However, for Washington, it appears that an inflection point has been reached in the Oval Office over the JCPOA: “We are not going to change a single word or add a single comma in the current draft [of the new version of the JCPOA] on the table.” The only thing that the U.S. will now accept from Iran is – in essence – the neutering of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which it is seeking to do via Iran signing up to the regulations of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and then to becoming a fully-regulated and constantly-monitored FATF member. With its 40 active criteria and mechanisms in place to prevent money laundering (an activity that is vital to the IRGC’s activities across the world) and nine criteria and mechanisms in place to do the same for the financing of terrorism and related activities (a core of the IRGC’s role in promoting Iran’s brand of Islam around the globe), the FATF has swingeing powers to wield against individuals, companies, or countries who transgress any of its standards and is extremely aggressive in using them by degrees, depending on whether the sanctioned entity is on its ‘grey’ or ‘black’ list. A sure sign of the U.S. has reached the end of the line regarding Iran is that – as of now – even if Iran does sign up to the FATF, Washington will not remove the designation of the IRGC as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organisation’ (FTO) immediately, as it had promised a while ago, but will keep the damaging designation in place for at least two years, whereupon it will be reviewed, This review will assess whether all Iranian military and intelligence elements of influence have been removed from several countries, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, or Iran fails the review anyway. NN: The oil market has priced in a Iranian deal that will ha ha ha provide the market with a badly needed 1.5 MBD of desperately needed oil… That is NEVER going to happen and their will be no Iranian deal. And if their was one it would takes years to produce that amount of oil. .I am so negative on oil prices going down…. Its not going to happen and $150 a barrel oil here we come….
Housing crash started……. They are always first in line! You got 90 days at best to get out!
It never ceases to amaze me that people cannot accept the fact that residential real estate property can actually decline in price. Sure, a lot of first-time buyers now are in their thirties which means that during our last crash which occurred around 2006 to 2008, they may have been just 15 years old. So, I’m sure they weren’t paying attention to real estate values back then. In most markets over the last two years on average residential real estate prices increased by over 25% a year!, if there was ever a prime example of the irrational exuberance in the real estate market. It seems that a lot of these first-time buyers just cannot accept the fact that the residential real estate market has hit a ceiling and has now taken 180 degree turn toward the downside. Facts are facts oh, and there can be no doubt that this Market and the huge housing bubble that was created has now burst. Because the average escrow can run between 45 to 60 days, many areas are still reporting increasing housing prices. But, don’t be fooled by this wagging indicator. These same areas are also showing huge price drops on listed properties as well as increased inventories of homes for sale. The sales price drops will follow, and we should see those within about 60 days. Once the sales price drops are reported the downward trend and property values will have been well underway. NN: I cannot think of a more interest rate sensitive market. Or one that has wiped out more often in a recession……. Fuck with real estate and your flirting with disaster. You have a 90 day window at best to finish up your projects and liquidate all the real estate you can… Let the dreamers and deniers take the risk!!! DO NOT GET GREEDY…