Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Ghosts

Ireland...






Spain (I've linked to this one before)...




Detroit (a long video but a good one)...



.

22 comments:

Anonymous said...

Only 12 years of squatting without owner intervention before you own the place... :p

gyg3s said...

I have a pal whose analysis of the property market is subtly flawed. He patiently explains to me that it's all about supply and demand and that there's a huge demand for housing, in other words, a re-hash of pig-dog Kirsty's argument.

The flaw in the argument comes from its lack of accuracy. It's not the supply and demand of property, instead, it's the supply and demand of credit.

Imagine a hundred empty houses and a thousand homeless families. If the poorest of the families can get a mortgage for GBP200k; that's the price of the cheapest of the one hundred houses.

Imagine the same set up but with only ten of these one thousand homeless families being able to get credit. If the maximum amount of credit available to the 'richest' of these ten families is GBP100K this is the price of the most expensive of these one hundred houses.

I know that as I write here I'm preaching to the converted. I know that the obviousness of the point may even become tiresome. But trying to explain this to almost everyone else I know ... is such a chore that I needed to say it here.

Stef said...

lol

I know that feeling

Michael Hudson from my earlier link once complained that a lot of the best economics students he encountered gave up economics (as it is currently being taught) to do something else - because their motivation for studying economics in the first place was to learn how the world worked

Stef said...

another thing I try and explain to people, in a similar vein to the scenario you describe, is the illusory nature of the wealth people attribute to investing in houses, or shares

over the last few years, thanks to easy credit pushing up prices, people started valuing houses, or shares, not on the basis of their rent value or dividend but what the last one sold for

Imagine you've got ten identical houses on a street, market value £100k

Some muppet with an easy loan from the bank buys one of them for £125k

At which point, every other muppet on the street values their house at £125k

That's £225k (9*25) of 'wealth' conjured up out of thin air, off the back of £25k of lax credit

The entire housing stock of the UK is currently valued in this way and a shit load of 'wealth' is there just waiting to evaporate in the blink of an eye

Stef said...

... I've been taught classic supply and demand several times over the years and I never heard, not once, any mention of the supply and demand of the cash used to buy the theoretical commodity

Land and housing are certainly big issues but I twigged some time ago that money supply is the daddy.

I wish someone had pointed out and explained that Jefferson quote to me a long time ago and saved me much fucking about

http://www.moneyreformparty.org.uk/money/about_money/quotes.php

anon 22:41 said...

I lived in Dublin in the early 2000s, when many new sprawling estates were being built all over. Prices could go up 30% from one week to the next for low quality flats that were not even finished. Two years after, most of these flats and houses were already falling apart(including mine but I was renting).
I remember power cuts because a whole new estate nearby had been connected without any form of planning or authorization, and whole areas totally ruined after heavy rains because they were built up on floodplains. Etc.
Anybody with a job in Ireland seemed to have a house and a car on a 20 years mortgage.

I am still amazed it could actually last so long.

Stef said...

and whilst I'm blathering on, a word or two on the subject of investment

if you save or borrow some money and then use that money to develop something that produces something that's investment

if you save or borrow some money to buy an existing property or traded share in the hope that the price will go up that's speculation

they're not the same thing

a fact which seems to have eluded millions of people

Stef said...

@anon 22:41

the insanity in Ireland goes way back, even before the current bubble

I was over there a couple of times in the 90s and marveled at all the lovely, new gleaming EU roads and infrastructure going from nowhere, to nowhere

I also recall that everyone I met below a certain age seemed to work in customer support for large multinationals. I recall asking a few of them what they thought would happened when another country played Ireland at its own game and undercut their country. They hadn't thought about it very much

Eire is so very, very fucked

Stef said...

I just played that first Irish ghost town video again

for some reason, I felt an irresistable urge to rest my forehead on the palm of my hand

Anonymous said...

Didn't Dell abandon their big Irish operations recently, causing something in the order of 16,000 job losses?

Anon said...

The money supply comment is a fair point, I would suggest decentralising it and allowing people to use gold\silver\other precious metals (going back to silver coins would be one way of doing this).

Stef said...

it doesn't matter what you use provided the supply of money/ credit is managed transparently and honestly

Going back to the famous (on the Internet anyway) Jefferson quote...

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

Jefferson doesn't specify what the money actually is, just who controls its supply

All this stuff was sussed out centuries ago and people have spent the last couple forgetting about it

the problem with gold or silver, as I've mentioned before, is that the supply of those commodities has already been sewn up long ago

Stef said...

love this line from the Wikipedia entry on fractional reserve banking...

"A full-reserve banking system with a fixed money supply would result in deflation as the economy grows. However, this deflation is likely to have deleterious consequences if some prices are stickier than others; in particular, wages are often significantly stickier than other prices. Most economists believe that given wage stickiness, the adjustment costs of deflation are significantly higher than an equivalent inflation. As such, mainstream economic thinking prefers the inflation brought about by fractional-reserve banking to the necessary deflation of a full-reserve banking policy regime."

which, translated into English, says 'mainstream economic thinking prefers that the purchasing power of ordinary people's wages does not increase as the economy does '

Anon said...

I'm not convinced that the globalists control all of the precious metals reserves.

The reason why I mentioned gold and silver is it's harder to forge them. You can print paper but gold is easy to test...

They do also serve functions outside of stores of value. If you want we could use, I don't know, rice instead. The problem with that is it's easier to inflate than a more limited item.

Stef said...

as Lord Patel used to say, fill yer boots...

http://www.tungsten-alloy.com/en/alloy11.htm

Stef said...

if you used rice people could, at least, if all else failed, eat it

you were on the money choosing silver over gold, as silver has heaps of industrial uses and gets consumed as fast as it's being extracted, some say faster

gold is an altogether more peculiar, faith based, option

I don't fundamentally disagree with what you are saying but all I am saying is that if the system you live under is managed by crooks it doesn't matter what is used as currency, they'll find some way to manipulate the supply - be it paper, shiny stuff or beans

and if we moved over to a gold-backed system tomorrow I'm quite confident that there would be all sorts of surprises when it came to discovering who really held how much gold where

the resulting transfer of wealth would be mind-boggling

Stef said...

from that Chinese website I just linked to...


"Notice: Chinatungsten Online (Xiamen) Manu.&Sales Corp. is a very professional and serious company, specializing in manufacturing and selling tungsten related products for more than two decades. Our gold-plated tungsten alloy products are only for souvenir and decoration purpose. Here we declare: Please do not use our gold-plated tungsten alloy products for illegal purpose."

oh, alright then

Anon said...

It would be interesting to observe the government's reaction if I paid my land value tax in bushels of rice/...

Anon said...

I was arguing with some professionals about living off the land versus remaining in the current paradigm and working for fiat GBP (notwithstanding issues surrounding recruitment). Their beef was that a) not enough land exists in the UK for the former and b) that it would be harder work, leaving the individual poorer.

Then again there's no knocking sense into empty jars...

Anonymous said...

`Charles Geisst, Professor of Finance at Manhattan College, has recounted how Greenspan undermined the Glass-Steagall Act first as a JP Morgan director and then as Chair of the Federal Reserve: “When he [Greenspan] was a director of J.P. Morgan & Company in the 1980s, Morgan produced a pamphlet called "Rethinking Glass-Steagall," in 1984, which he was obviously privy to and had contributed to…The pamphlet was advocating getting rid of the Glass-Steagall Act and the separation between commercial and investment banking, so that commercial bankers particularly could begin to underwrite corporate securities again, as they hadn't done since before 1933.” [19]`

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=JPMorgan_Chase

Zeitghost said...

I suppose that was just the spirit of the age.

romantik komedi izle said...

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