Back to work after the Fourth! It was a strange day. I couldn't get in the groove yet I pushed through as always. Last week Mamaw flew home with her new cell phone and she is enjoying having it. It should make it easier for the family to stay in touch with her. I drove to Casper in my truck with Sara and the kids in her car. The trip was to bring back the last of her furniture etc, the sale of the house fell through so she is in a hard way. I wish we could help her out but we are doing all we can to hold on as well. I stayed Thursday night and had dinner with Micah and we then went to see Transformers 2. Good movie, loved the military aircraft scenes especially the B-1 dropping ordinance, felt that in my back side. Micah like the Megan Fox scenes, I don't blame him. It just isn't right for someone to look that good and not be married to Micah. Yep, I'm pulling for a hottie for Micah. Gotta find a way to get that son of mine to SLC. I stayed the night and was gone at the crack of dawn. Grammy and I unloaded the trailer and paddle boats all by ourselves. Not bad for folks in our "later" years. Saturday Grammy had to work until midnight so Martha and I drove to the base and found a spot that must be fairly popular with the base folks as we were able to see the entire valley and fireworks from the base to SLC. Pretty cool. Sunday was different as it was just Grammy and I. No kids to watch after. We were able to hear every testimony.
Now on to something I promised Micah I would do. For the past few months Micah has been telling Grammy that he is learning that the commercial side of the economic downturn will be the next thing to hit. Then a month or so ago a short article from the Business Week magazine we get said the very same things. I can only hope that things will turn around but I will leave that discussion to Micah. I spent Thursday night with him showing me YouTube videos and talking about the economy. Yes, he educated his ol' man a bit. I'm grateful he is interested and wants to learn and track this stuff. I hope he can put it to use some day soon. Anyway I wanted to give Micah a chance to tell us all some of what he is learning. So here you go Micah explain away - educate us! Please respond to what he says if you are interested.
Pictures I've taken the last few months
13 years ago
So much has been happening ive had a hard time staying on top of it all. I just got back from a train ride to Guernsey and back and I was discussing the economy with my engineer. I was informed by him that I was a negative nancy. That may be so, but its just too unfortunate that the news is no longer independant enough to report on these major changes within our economy that will surely change our way of life for a long, long time to come.
ReplyDeleteSo in response to pop's blog post, yes there will be a commercial bubble much worse than the residential bubble that we've seen. I dont have the numbers in front of me at the moment but basically the commercial real estate sector is just as over-leveraged as the residential market was. This continuing reccession is making it very hard for companies to rent out commercial space because business's are either going bust or experiencing much lower profits. So therefore theres a crazy amount of commercial space sitting vacant at the moment. How long can companies or banks afford to keep these lots vacant while still paying their mortgage, taxes, upkeep, etc.. I read a figure once that stated something like for every person layed-off in America equals 500 sq. ft of unused commercial real estate. Considering the recent jobs report of 9.6% unemployment which is higher than they predicted and will soon pass the 10% mark, thats ALOT of vacant space.
As posted in the Financial post in Canada: "'This is the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all jobs growth from the previous business cycle, a testament both to the enormity of the current crisis and to the extreme weakness of jobs growth over the business cycle from 2000 to 2007,' said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at Washington-based think tank The Economic Policy Institute. 'It is apparent that, despite the substantial positive impact of the February recovery package, the economy's dramatic deterioration from November to March was even greater than anticipated." The full Article is linked here http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=1752178
But honestly if it was just the commercial real estate bubble that we had to worry about, id be alot more optimistic.
There is some interesting news posted recently about Goldman-Sachs and a certain stolen trading code. Basically, GS makes alot of trades based on a computer program that makes the money for them by trading instantly when it detects certain market moves. This type of automated trading equals about 49% of all trading done on the NYSE and GS represented about 60% of that. The very interesting thing now is that the NYSE reports weekly on what companies are doing the most volume, GS has been the #1 on that list for quite ahwile(accounting for 60% of all trading) and as soon as this code was stolen they went to N/A. Which means they shut down, that portion of thier trading activites.
It was well known that Goldman-Sachs has the best program and was making the most money of all the others. In a federal affidavit of the FBI agent who arrested the man responsible, GS reported they were making millions of dollars on this one program alone. The full article and affidavit are linked here, http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/07/is-case-of-quant-trading-industrial.html
I wonder if our ever faithfull American news companies will fully report on this.