Triple 7's- Good luck or ?

Normally if you're in Vegas and you hit three 7's you'd be ecstatic. Not today. With the DOW dropping 777.68 it's like three 7's in a jackpot. Heck let's round off the .68 to .7 and call it four 7's in a row. Only the results were in reverse. Big time. In fact the market lost about 1.1 trillion today. That's a lot of Wall street bonus's that are not going to happen and more.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the market bounce back up tomorrow but not back to the level it started today.
Still there's a big part of me along with lot of other people that hope this bill or the new form of this bill never passes. Let prices drop down to normal levels. Let people learn, albeit the hard way for some, that you need to save and be prudent before taking out loans that you can't afford to pay. And giving out loans that are unreasonable also. It's time to pay the piper.

Trash can sales-Knucklehead of the week

With all the seriousness of the bailout plan I couldn't resist throwing in some pictures of why some places probably never sell. Pick any of the following for the knucklehead of the week.
Here's a brand new listing today at 9846 Coral Cove Cir. http://www.redfin.com/CA/Huntington-Beach/9846-Coral-Cove-Cir-92646/home/3775846

Could you have at least picked up the s*** in your living room? (or is that a bedroom?) I bet some of the better realtors in the area laugh when they see this also.

Do you like the gin bottle on the dresser? How about the fraternity brothers inflatable Coors-like bottle in the center? And WTF is that thing hanging from the ceiling? I think it's a noose so the owner can hang himself. Maybe he already did and the leftover rope is for the realtor who was too stupid to post this picture. They must think their place is so special they don't even need to clean up their crappy, boxy 1965 place. And the realtor's last words in the description: "This one's a winner." Umm..right.

I'm on a roll tonight so I'll throw another one out there in a minute. Today I took my wife out to test drive a car. She's never gone through the fun experience of dealing with car salespeople. I figure some of the ex realtors are probably working at some of these places now since they are loaded with slimeballs galore. She took one for a testdrive of which I asked her beforehand to have them give back the copy of your license they made when you are done. When she returned she watched our kid and I took it out. When I was done I walked inside and asked him for a copy of the license back. You can't be too protective of your personal information these days. Think I'm kidding? Read about Douglas Nissan of Orange: Four defendants: 43 counts of forgery, 31 counts of grand theft and one count of conspiracy to defraud. Sounds like a nice place to do business with. http://orangecountyda.com/home/index.asppage=8&recordid=1015&returnurl=index.asp?page3D8

When we were driving back home I asked my wife did she get the copy of her license back? She told me the guy said he never made one, he just entered the information in their computer. Lovely. I then handed her the piece of paper and told her rule number one: all these guys are liars and they will do what they can to sell you a car today.
Pretty much like many realtors. Here's a listing with only two pictures and this is one of them. Can you believe it?

And here's one for a backyard in Fountain Valley. I can see the realtor now. It has "plenty of potential."

And here's one with curb appeal in Long Beach. Just that someone ran over the curb a little too far in their excitement to see this place I guess:

Maybe the flip side of putting pictures up here like this is that the realtor doesn't want you to have any surprises when you see the property. The only surprise I would have is if one of these dumps actually sold.

Unemployment up up up

The unemployment numbers came out on Fri. and like I said in my previous post it was going to go up out here in la la land. For CA the July unemployment number was revised from 7.3 to 7.4. The new preliminary number for August is 7.7%. Not good. The O.C. fared a little better than it's neighbor up north at 5.8% while L.A. County climbed to 8.2%. Yikes!
In CA. that accounts for a total of 1,417,175 people unemployed. That doesn't account for the "underemployed" and for those that didn't file which would push the truer number over probably 10%.
Interesting none of the news stations I watched on Fri. said anything about this. Too giddy about the 700B bailout. Did anyone ask them how the taxpayers are going to pay for this if we all keep losing jobs?
http://wwwedd.cahwnet.gov/About_EDD/pdf/urate200809.pdf

Two years ago we were at 4.9% with 873,145 unemployed people
http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?data_tool=latest_numbers&series_id=LASST06000003
It's going to be a bleak Christmas season for a lot of people this year and I'm not talking about the wingdings on Wall St. I'm talking about the average Joe having to cut expenses. Wait until stores report earnings and see how many of those have to lay off more workers or close entirely. Do you see how this downward spiral is going to affect sector after sector more and more?

Oh and by the way, it'd be nice if the goonies in Sacramento pass a budget soon.

Black Sunday? Should be Red Sunday

I haven't posted in quite a bit. My summertime vacation is over and now I'm back at work. In addition everything that's been happening with housing and the financial markets is a bit depressing. I'm not sure why they called it Black Friday. With Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy shouldn't it be titled Red Sunday? Afterall, being in the black to me always meant you were running a profit while being in the red was losing money. Or maybe they should have titled it "Sunday, Bloody Sunday," with my apologies to U2.

While what's happening at the National level is amazing and will have some profound effects down the line I'm looking with as much interest at California where I live. The unemployment numbers for Aug. come out this Fri http://www.bls.gov/LAU/ and I can't imagine it's going to be good. I'm sure it will go up from July's 7.3%. The Bureau of Labor Statistics stated: In July, 43 states and the District of Columbia recorded over-the-month unemployment rate increases, 6 states registered decreases, and 1 state had no change. That's not what I call a good track record nationally either.

Take a look at some of these graphs from the bls site:

As you can see here the labor force for CA has increased every year since 98. No big surprise there.As you can see with the next one that employment was steadily growing until 1/08 when all those running the Ponzi scam in the mortgage industry started losing jobs. Along with construction, etc..it continues.

Next we have the unemployment growth chart. Yikes! I haven't seen that steep of an incline since I climbed Mt. Baldy. Noticed when it started climbing. Right about the time people had to start paying the piper for the subprime mess:

Lastly we have the unemployment rate expressed in percentage.

The last four months have been grim. While March and April were at 6.2%, May moved to 6.8%, June jumped to 7.0%, and July was a juggernaut at 7.3%,. August might be the start of the Apocalypse we'll have to wait and see what Friday brings.