Gloom, Doom, or Boom? Finance and Economics

[skyhook77sfg]

A cunning plan


1. Arab potentates across the Middle East decamp with their money to Europe. No scratch that: they just decamp to Europe where their money already is hidden in various money laundering havens.

2. As a condition for tolerating the presence of these geriatric autocrats and their forbiddingly fundamentalist entourage, European governments require them to purchase a bunch of assets - nothing dangerous you understand, just a bunch of European government bonds selected at "random"; so let's say Ireland, Greece, Portugal shall we. "Would the emir like some Spain with that?"

3. A wholesale departure of rulers from the Middle East of course pushes up oil prices dramatically, so America immediately enlists a million unemployed folks and flies them down to man the oil pipelines from refineries like Al-Khobar to the nearest ports. Whatever happens to the rest of these countries is of course no one's specific concern.

4. The Arab masses in places like Libya, Syria, Jordan etc all decide that with their rulers gone far away, there isn't much point to protesting and so go back to lounging around street corners.

And so the headlines all improve:
A. Stability in the Middle East
B. European debt crisis is over
C. America shows strong jobs growth
D. Oil prices fall

Or something like that.

by chan akya

[Colonel Sun]

[Rhapsody]

[Demon of Undoing]

I expect Col Sun to be the new Warren Buffet

[Colonel Sun]

[monster_gardener]

[Colonel Sun]

Turning Japanese?

[Alph]

Housing numbers out today are bad.

Very bad.

12.6% in year over year decline against the worst housing year in 50 years. Public inventories are up to between 8-11 months of sales, depending on whose figures you use. (With 6 months of sales being the long term average, and the 11 month figures being much more believable to me due to their source.) And that doesn't begin to take into account the shadow inventory of houses being held back by the banks, either on their own books, off their books, or in the hands of people they haven't bothered to foreclose on yet but surely will.

I think that we'll be lucky if we only get another 25% decline. Too many unemployed people. Too much available housing. Too little reasons to pay so much for living in one place as opposed to another in the age of universal chain stores and modern telecommunication. The great cities just might end up being the new rustbelt.

[HAL9000]

[Colonel Sun]

[AzariLoveIran]

[Alph]

[AzariLoveIran]

[monster_gardener]

[Mr. Perfect]

[Colonel Sun]

[AzariLoveIran]

[noddy]

[monster_gardener]

[AzariLoveIran]

[monster_gardener]

[AzariLoveIran]

[Caskhades]

Monster Gardner,

Just the usual warning to take anything by Azari with a large bucket of salt.

The Bullshit about Shanghai is a case in point - US now has 4 times more (known) billionaires than China (and since Chinese tax avoidance can be a literal death sentence, well you get the point).
As to China's divine right to pollute, one might wish to point out that at current rates the glorious Chinese produce and burn more coal in one year (think 3 billion tonnes) than the Brits (home of the fucking industrial revolution) produce in 200 years. How long has it been since that Industrial Revolution again?

[AzariLoveIran]

[AzariLoveIran]

.




.