Lazy Sunday Tabs
- From Paul Krugman: Why Aren’t Markets Freaking Out?
- Via The Handbasket: Federal agent during violent DC arrest: “Liberals already ruined” this country.
- Via The Atlantic: Show Me the Person, and I’ll Show You the Crime.
- Via the Seattle Times: Federal agents arrest firefighters working on WA wildfire. “It is unusual for federal border agents to make arrests during the fighting of an active fire, especially in a remote area.” Gee, you don’t say?
- Via Politico: Trump administration plans to limit how long foreign students can study in the US. I continue to marvel at the stupidity of making getting a US degree less and less attractive. It is yet another example that xenophobia trumps all other factors. (See also, arresting people while fighting fires).
- Via Politico: ‘We’re trapped’: Trump’s tariffs lock US businesses in China. Brought to you by the party of entrepreneurs and small business.
That squeeze is creating an existential crisis for many small- and medium-sized American retailers. While big-box stores have the market power to negotiate lower prices from suppliers and the capacity to absorb a chunk of the tariff costs, that approach is not sustainable for more specialized companies.
“Why Aren’t Markets Freaking Out?”
To use a Keynes quote different than the one Krugman included in his article, “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”.
Regarding mortgage fraud, I don’t think that a few politicians should be targeted for doing what many are obviously doing. But it’s a testament to how philistine the media is when it comes to actual wealth accumulation. They almost write these situations like they’re populist struggles. These buyers are just ordinary people with three homes, you know, trying their best to get a mortgage. The tone is so crazy, like it’s an ordinary thing to have a vacation home and then lie on a mortgage application. Meanwhile the same writers offer nothing but sneers at the ‘privileged’ when it comes to something like forgiving college debt or using words like the unhoused.
Re Krugman, as I recall from reading The Big Short, the expectation among those who bought credit default swaps to short the securitized mortgage market was that the bottom would fall out when housing prices dropped. It actually took some months after that for the market to collapse.
BTW, there’s another movie partly based on the crisis, Margin Call. It’s far more generic than The Big Short, but far less compelling, too, focusing on one short-sighted company that realizes just in time that the trump is about to hit the fan.
@Moosebreath: Agreed. I believe it was in 2004 or 2005 when I learned that Liars loans were making up nearly 50% of new mortgages and Alt-A loans, with little or no documentation, made up over 60% of those loans. As a result I shorted some stocks and was cash heavy, while I watched the market keep going up. Got out of the shorts with a small loss, then not long after market crumpled.
Steve
I just sent the Krugman piece to my ‘financial advisor’ and instructed her to get further out of the stock market. I also think AI is a bubble with not enough real-world usability and a future of chip shortages. I’d rather pass up some gains than suffer a big loss. And at 71 I am not interested in holding stocks that may take a decade to recover.
@Kathy:
I love Margin Call. The cast is pretty good across the board, but Irons is fantastic.
What does “lie on a mortgage application” mean? I probably listed the value of my car and household furnishings for more than the price at auction. The exact date of my last employment might also be debatable. Isn’t everybody’s net asset value stretched a bit?
I do have NFT pictures of Melania that are worth beaucoup bucks.
@Kurtz:
Oh, it wasn’t bad at all.
Though Spock figuring things out was a bit too on the nose 😀
The uber rich are loving this. Soon they’ll have 2008 all over again but better this time. They’ll come out of this with vastly more property and wealth than before. This gives big businesses the chance to gobble up the smaller competitors for cheap.
I’m pretty sure the 0.1% learned the wrong lesson from the 2008 collapse..
@Michael Reynolds: AI already has a ton of use in making sense of large databases. AKA great for the NSA CIA FBI and such. Now they can actually make some detailed sense of the huge amount of data they have.
You’re going to see camera networks connected to AI systems to monitor for criminal activity. +8 years ago a big tech company was testing such a system in their parking lot. The system caught a thief while he was still scoping out cars. Cops came and the guy had a full set of tools to break into the cars.
Overall AI is vastly over hyped but there are some very real and very scary applications for AI. Palantir is one to watch since they’ve gotten access to government systems. Peter Thiel has access galore to the current regime..
I still don’t get Trump’s war on international students. Students from the “shithole countries” sure, that’s predictable, but he seems to have it in for all international students.
It’s a marked contrast to this promise from last year: