Outrage Exhaustion
I think Dunc used the phrase "Outrage Exhaustion" a few weeks back in the comments to describe the nature of the comments. He just had an entry on Pegasus that there were only 200+ comments over here. I guess I think that's a little funny; I don't know of any local blogs that get that many, but c'est la vie.
But that's probably how this thing will end, especially locally. With a whimper, not a scream.
People will just slowly mentally succumb to this thing. All the Merenda replacing will have failed. The hottest spot in the hottest town in the West will just be laughable. That Subway will probably hold on by it's fingernails, maybe. But the hoity-toity stuff will all go down hard, and finally no one will step up to replace it.
I even think the Old Mill will suffer a long-term erosion. Some big anchors will close. The Money Losing Trophy Property (MoLo TroPro) concept will die a certain death, and that's much of what's there. I can't see REI staying. Greg's Grill gone. Yumm Cafe, Alisons Kitchen, Community Flatbread... all gone.
And there are no jobs here. The nationwide unemployment rate came out this week at 7.6%. As recently as September, we were at 6.0% nationwide, and it appeared things were stabilizing.
No more. This is a statistic that hardly moves one way or another more than .2% in any given month. It's gone up an average of .5% for the last 3 months. Doesn't sound like much, but I haven't seen any similar period in modern history where unemployment has moved so much, up or down.
And here's a graph of recent unemployment figures for the USA, Oregon, and Bend. You don't have to be Kreskin to see where Bend is going.
Unemployment for USA, Oregon, and Bend; Jul 2008 to present.
I mean, look at that; you tell me where you think it's going. The top of that graph is 14%, and if Oregon stays in it's ways of outpacing the nation by almost double, and Bend outpaces Oregon by 50%, it seems like a slam Dunc that we'll hit 15% for this month. 13% for January seems also within reason.
Towns with 15-20% unemployment are just not vital hubs of commerce. Towns like that are usually in long term decline. Those are your little towns out 30-40 miles SW of Missoula or somewhere (ie Burns), that are just in a secular decline. Outdoor mecca? Beautiful? Nice to visit? Oh yeah, all that. But in long term decline nonetheless.
I saw many towns like this on my last vacation. Beautiful spots. Outdoor activities out the ying yang. I had a great time there too. But get on the outskirts, and it was all decay, rot, malaise, and abandoned malls. You could see it on people's faces, they were in existence mode, just surviving day to day.
Not dying, mind you. There was just this perceptible resignation to a fate that had no chance of any "upside". No excitement, no challenges. People had stopped that, because the remnants of failure were all around them.
I think Dunc had it right: The "excitement" of the decline will be replaced by a real sort of despair that things aren't EVER going to bounce right back. We will become like so many other places in the West: Beautiful, activity-rich, but caught in a molasses-like, moribund economic spiral downward.
And I'm not trying to "drag people down" to my way of thinking, or some such bullshit. I'm trying to talk people out of economic suicide. On the slopes of Everest, when Common Sense Caution is not heeded, people die. It's not so dramatic here. Well, except for the people who have died. My point is, the signs are all around us: STOP THE CLIMB.
Many are still not heeding the advice of the environment around them. Everything points to white-out, 100 below, killer conditions; but still people start to climb.
Why is Merenda II even being considered? Why? Because what killed the last guy, won't kill me. I'm better than him. I'll make it. This. Is. Bend.
It's really incredible. Pahlisch Homes has watched as their subdiv's have imploded (from BendBB):
Just noticed today that all Pahlisch signage has been removed from the Fieldstone Crossing development in Redmond. Looks like their model has been shut down completely. Their is no reference to Fieldstone Crossing on the Pahlisch website.
And yet Pahlish announced they have started building The Bridges At Shadow Glen this week.
Ahhh... the power of LLC's. Failure is not an option.
Even our public servants have jumped on the Bubble Bandwagon.
Bend police captain on leave amid FBI probe
Bend Police Capt. Kevin Sawyer has been placed on administrative leave as the FBI investigates one or more businesses Sawyer and wife Tami have been operating, the police chief confirmed Friday. "I am aware of an investigation going on by the FBI into the finances of a business or businesses that Captain Sawyer is associated with,"said Police Chief Sandi Baxter.
And so it goes. Everyday, we seem to find someone with their twig & berries exposed as the tide rushes out. First Summit, now this guy, and there are, like an iceberg, many others that we aren't even hearing about.
The relentlessness of the pain, the disbelief of the corruption, the resignation that we can't beat The Powers That Be, will finally be the nail in Bend's coffin. There won't be anymore excitement, no more challenges. People's outrage will succumb to despondency. We'll all just give up on this place.
Outrage Exhaustion. Great description. Because the vast majority of people in this town will realize at some point that there is an existing "Aristocracy" of sorts (GOB Network), and if you are not part of it, and you have Big Dreams for your life, that you will Not Make It In Bend. This is Not a meritocracy. Things are NOT done "for the People". They are done for a small inbred cadre of well-defined beneficiaries who rig every election.
That's how it is in Bend, Oregon.
Not real people. Not real children. Spending NOT real money, from not real jobs, in a not real place.
OK, enough bitching about that. I just have a teeny-tiny outrage against my own kind.
And I have to preface this with the idea that what is trying to be accomplished and the means by which so many think it will be acconomplished, is just sheer folly.
And it is the passage of The Bailout. It's not a bank bailout. Nor autos. Nor any other particular thing. It's a bailout of this country. We are falling into the Abyss.
And strangely enough there is an unassailable mentality that a BAILOUT will save us. OK, governements can produce nothing. Except money, which they can produce in unlimited quantities. And governments many times think the printing of it can cure all ills. Of course, that's ridiculous.
Our problems will not be undone, until housing hits bottom. The bailout, and many other government measures are doing everything possible to avoid that. Forebearance on loans, delaying foreclosures, loan renegotiations. All these are failed ideas, and simply prolong the pain.
And prolonging the pain, is just what the RePug's intend to do. These hypocritical, lying, thieving, conniving fuckers are as much to blame as the Lib's for this thing.
But what's just classic, is that BOTH parties agree that the bailout is our only salvation (ridiculous, of course, it will only make things worse). But even in their idiotic agreement, they have put partisan politics FIRST, and the perceived needs of the American people a distant second.
BOTH parties have done this. Yes hbm, BOTH.
This is indicative of a country in decline. The elected aristocracy could give a fuck about the rank-and-file. Even when they are implementeing the most ass-backwards stupid plans imaginable, partisan wrangling is far more important than saving their own civilization.
The most depressing part of this implosion will NOT be the dire & near-catastrophic economic consequences, it will be the loss of will, the loss of drive, the loss of cause-and-effect thinking that people have, where if they struggle, work hard, and strive against the odds, that they can make something of themselves in this country.
That is what we are losing. We are rewarding FAILURE, EXCESS and EXTRAVAGANCE, and punishing prudence, thrift, and spending within your means. We're sending a message here with this bailout: Graft, corruption, and theft will be rewarded.
We are a nation in decline.
OK, finally I want to do a little re-print of an MSN article. It's got good info, but I suppose the big shocker is that mainstream press is starting to use The D Word. There is actually starting to be an open debate about whether a modern-ear Depression is possible. Maybe you & I are getting a tin-ear to this, because I have been banging this drum for 2 years.
But you could NEVER find mainstream press even discussing it. NEVER. Until now.
THAT is how BAD it is. All the hopeful sentiment that we are about to bottom imminently, has been replaced by How Low Can We Go? I think the past 60 days have been a wakeup call.
Too late to avoid a depression?
Policymakers are quickly running out of time and room for error. And even a brilliant plan -- which we haven't seen yet -- could fail without some good luck.
By Jon Markman
Over the past week, the world's intellectual, business, government and philanthropic elite emerged from World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland, with grim faces and warnings of financial doom.
You'd almost think they'd met to plot a suicide pact rather than global trade, as the headlines were so gory they could have been mulched into meals for vampires. Are things really that bad? Maybe not.
Your contrarian antennae really have to go up in the face of consensus from a cohort of eggheads, politicos and jet-setters not exactly known for clairvoyance. Their big idea last year: that emerging markets' domestic economies had become so strong that a decline in U.S. and European growth would not derail them. Oops.
Credible economic analysts now say there is still a narrow window of time in which policymakers in the United States, Europe and Asia can avoid a meltdown over the next year by immediately coordinating the injection of real financial adrenaline to banks, companies, households and local governments -- not just rhetoric and indiscriminate spending.
Yet that window is closing fast, and if the right steps are not taken soon it may be shut for years. But governments don't know which steps work because economic theory breaks down at the level of human psychology.
Given a set of stimuli -- ranging from tax cuts and longer unemployment benefits to new construction jobs and wider broadband access -- economists try to mathematically determine the choices citizens are likely to make, then use the results to recommend a policy mix to legislators.
The problem is that the models often fail to accurately forecast human behavior, and politicians regularly screw it all up by ignoring the data and diverting funds to pet projects.
History is rife with successful financial episodes, such as the New Deal, in which luck and coincidence are later misinterpreted as results of prescient planning. Slim hopes of an end-zone dance To prove the Davos set wrong, in short, congressional leaders must make the right choices at warp speed under pressure from special interests.
It's a public-policy version of the Steelers' final drive Sunday with time running out in the Super Bowl. Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, scrambling to elude a rush, had one good shot at throwing the football at an oblique angle to a receiver leaping among three defenders in the corner of the end zone.
In times like these, the result set is stark and binary: hero or goat in football, recovery or disaster in the economy. The Davos pessimists' case for a severe economic dislocation over the next year -- let's go out to the extreme and call it a potential depression -- is easily made, as four key ingredients are in place.
Their recipe calls for a blend of cyclical recession, severe deleveraging, a shift of demographics favoring savings over consumption, and inappropriate fiscal and monetary responses by policymakers. The first three are well under way, so the last one is the decider.
Looking back at the Great Depression of the 1930s and Japan's depression of the 1990s, it's clear that government leaders in each case failed to respond quickly enough, then overcorrected, and in general took steps that at the time were considered best economic practices but actually worsened the problems.
Our leaders will likewise now try to do the right thing based on currently popular theories, but we cannot confidently say whether they will turn out to be appropriate.
You just never know.
The only certainty is that measures must be taken immediately, and every day lost on minutiae such as bank executives' pay or Cabinet nominees' tax follies dampens the likelihood of success. Speed is of the essence, like putting up sandbags to stop a levee break, as we can see in daily headlines now that the darkness of Davos is descending.
The incredible shrinking economies Layoff announcements over the past three months averaged 50,000 a week until they jumped to more than 100,000 last week. In an attempt to outrun revenue shortfalls, businesses are also cutting back on wages, travel and equipment purchases.
But it's a losing battle. ISI Group analysts figure that U.S. corporate profits will decline from their 2007 peak to a 2010 trough by a record 30%, though a 50% fall is not out of the question. They're already down 20%. Customers are disappearing as wages and jobs falter and families raid their emergency funds. U.S. home equity decline has accelerated to a 30% annual rate, which combined with the stock market plunge, has slashed consumers' net worth by $12 trillion.
The pervasiveness of the plunge in demand that animates doomsayers is breathtaking. Reis, a real-estate research firm, this week said rents nationwide fell in 43% of buildings of all types in the fourth quarter, up from an average of 25% in the first nine months of the year. In New York, where financial layoffs are surging, rents fell in 75% of apartment buildings last quarter. This puts securitized loans on U.S. commercial and apartment buildings on track for a default rate of 6% this year, up from 1.1% at the end of 2008.
"We haven't seen this speed of decline before," one Reis analyst told Bloomberg. In Asia, the momentum of deterioration and thus the need for policy speed is even more dramatic. Japan's industrial production is falling at a stunning 63% annual rate; in South Korea, it's falling at a 43% rate.
In China, real gross domestic production was unchanged in the fourth quarter, and ISI analysts expect it to be unchanged in this quarter, which would smash the GDP growth down to just 4% year over year, a stunning comedown for an economy that was growing at better than 10% last year and was once believed to be invulnerable.
In contrast, government leaders appear to be moving in slow motion. The Federal Reserve last week said it was "prepared" to buy Treasurys to push down interest-rate costs even though 10-year-note yields are up a lot in the past two months.
The Obama administration, meanwhile, has dawdled on plans to try to recapitalize the banking system or buy soured assets, and the fiscal stimulus package winding its way through Congress appears by independent estimates to be too small, insufficiently focused on real job creation and overly weighted on fiscal 2010 rather than 2009.
Meanwhile, the head of the European Central Bank is dragging his feet, stating that he would not back an interest-rate cut. I would love to see the smug Davos crowd proved wrong, but the forces at work may have gone too far to be stopped. The nation may be on track now to spend $4 trillion -- more than on anything short of war -- to prevent the credit hole from getting so big we can't climb out.
It's especially worrisome to see so much money used to shore up the worst-managed banks, a misallocation of resources that could haunt us for decades. In summary, total ruin can be averted and the Davos prophecy squelched if lawmakers seize the moment, aim true and get lucky.
Even if the result is low growth amid a newly chastened business and social culture, re-ranking of national priorities to celebrate saving over consumption and acceptance of a lower stature in the world, it's superior to depression and chaos.
Cross your fingers.
Oh right, I did want to let you guys in on a little secret: I was one of the attending physicians when Thomas Beatie gave birth to the first goat-human. There's been quite a bit of consternation about how someone could possibly push a goat out through their cock. I am here to tell you that after I, and assisting physician Neil Patrick Harris (aka Doogie Howser, MD) crammed a giant metal spear into that bastards cock, the end result was not pretty:
Asshole: The Other Pussy
I also want to address the delicate topic of where a man holds a baby goat. It's not in the belly, it's quite a bit lower. Here is a never-before-seen picture of Beatie posing completely naked, just prior to birth:
"Hi, I'm Thomas Beatie and there's a mother fuckin' goat in my nutsack! I'm calling Oprah!"
OK, I'll wrap it up by throwing Dunc a Betty Boop Pinup bone'r two here:
Please Dunc, don't hurt me!
Dunc, I'm hankerin' for some spankerin'!
And squat, and thrust, and in and out!
I wish someone would go apeshit on me right about now...
I wish there was a big strong Comic book retailer here to help me pet my pussy...
I'll give you this Dunc, She Hot. If I was born during the Civil War, I'd also find this 1930's style porno pretty hot. There ain't many chicks that look bad in a ball gag.
But that's probably how this thing will end, especially locally. With a whimper, not a scream.
People will just slowly mentally succumb to this thing. All the Merenda replacing will have failed. The hottest spot in the hottest town in the West will just be laughable. That Subway will probably hold on by it's fingernails, maybe. But the hoity-toity stuff will all go down hard, and finally no one will step up to replace it.
I even think the Old Mill will suffer a long-term erosion. Some big anchors will close. The Money Losing Trophy Property (MoLo TroPro) concept will die a certain death, and that's much of what's there. I can't see REI staying. Greg's Grill gone. Yumm Cafe, Alisons Kitchen, Community Flatbread... all gone.
And there are no jobs here. The nationwide unemployment rate came out this week at 7.6%. As recently as September, we were at 6.0% nationwide, and it appeared things were stabilizing.
No more. This is a statistic that hardly moves one way or another more than .2% in any given month. It's gone up an average of .5% for the last 3 months. Doesn't sound like much, but I haven't seen any similar period in modern history where unemployment has moved so much, up or down.
And here's a graph of recent unemployment figures for the USA, Oregon, and Bend. You don't have to be Kreskin to see where Bend is going.
Unemployment for USA, Oregon, and Bend; Jul 2008 to present.I mean, look at that; you tell me where you think it's going. The top of that graph is 14%, and if Oregon stays in it's ways of outpacing the nation by almost double, and Bend outpaces Oregon by 50%, it seems like a slam Dunc that we'll hit 15% for this month. 13% for January seems also within reason.
Towns with 15-20% unemployment are just not vital hubs of commerce. Towns like that are usually in long term decline. Those are your little towns out 30-40 miles SW of Missoula or somewhere (ie Burns), that are just in a secular decline. Outdoor mecca? Beautiful? Nice to visit? Oh yeah, all that. But in long term decline nonetheless.
I saw many towns like this on my last vacation. Beautiful spots. Outdoor activities out the ying yang. I had a great time there too. But get on the outskirts, and it was all decay, rot, malaise, and abandoned malls. You could see it on people's faces, they were in existence mode, just surviving day to day.
Not dying, mind you. There was just this perceptible resignation to a fate that had no chance of any "upside". No excitement, no challenges. People had stopped that, because the remnants of failure were all around them.
I think Dunc had it right: The "excitement" of the decline will be replaced by a real sort of despair that things aren't EVER going to bounce right back. We will become like so many other places in the West: Beautiful, activity-rich, but caught in a molasses-like, moribund economic spiral downward.
And I'm not trying to "drag people down" to my way of thinking, or some such bullshit. I'm trying to talk people out of economic suicide. On the slopes of Everest, when Common Sense Caution is not heeded, people die. It's not so dramatic here. Well, except for the people who have died. My point is, the signs are all around us: STOP THE CLIMB.
Many are still not heeding the advice of the environment around them. Everything points to white-out, 100 below, killer conditions; but still people start to climb.
Why is Merenda II even being considered? Why? Because what killed the last guy, won't kill me. I'm better than him. I'll make it. This. Is. Bend.
It's really incredible. Pahlisch Homes has watched as their subdiv's have imploded (from BendBB):
Just noticed today that all Pahlisch signage has been removed from the Fieldstone Crossing development in Redmond. Looks like their model has been shut down completely. Their is no reference to Fieldstone Crossing on the Pahlisch website.
And yet Pahlish announced they have started building The Bridges At Shadow Glen this week.
Ahhh... the power of LLC's. Failure is not an option.
Even our public servants have jumped on the Bubble Bandwagon.
Bend police captain on leave amid FBI probe
Bend Police Capt. Kevin Sawyer has been placed on administrative leave as the FBI investigates one or more businesses Sawyer and wife Tami have been operating, the police chief confirmed Friday. "I am aware of an investigation going on by the FBI into the finances of a business or businesses that Captain Sawyer is associated with,"said Police Chief Sandi Baxter.
And so it goes. Everyday, we seem to find someone with their twig & berries exposed as the tide rushes out. First Summit, now this guy, and there are, like an iceberg, many others that we aren't even hearing about.
The relentlessness of the pain, the disbelief of the corruption, the resignation that we can't beat The Powers That Be, will finally be the nail in Bend's coffin. There won't be anymore excitement, no more challenges. People's outrage will succumb to despondency. We'll all just give up on this place.
Outrage Exhaustion. Great description. Because the vast majority of people in this town will realize at some point that there is an existing "Aristocracy" of sorts (GOB Network), and if you are not part of it, and you have Big Dreams for your life, that you will Not Make It In Bend. This is Not a meritocracy. Things are NOT done "for the People". They are done for a small inbred cadre of well-defined beneficiaries who rig every election.
That's how it is in Bend, Oregon.
Not real people. Not real children. Spending NOT real money, from not real jobs, in a not real place.
OK, enough bitching about that. I just have a teeny-tiny outrage against my own kind.
And I have to preface this with the idea that what is trying to be accomplished and the means by which so many think it will be acconomplished, is just sheer folly.
And it is the passage of The Bailout. It's not a bank bailout. Nor autos. Nor any other particular thing. It's a bailout of this country. We are falling into the Abyss.
And strangely enough there is an unassailable mentality that a BAILOUT will save us. OK, governements can produce nothing. Except money, which they can produce in unlimited quantities. And governments many times think the printing of it can cure all ills. Of course, that's ridiculous.
Our problems will not be undone, until housing hits bottom. The bailout, and many other government measures are doing everything possible to avoid that. Forebearance on loans, delaying foreclosures, loan renegotiations. All these are failed ideas, and simply prolong the pain.
And prolonging the pain, is just what the RePug's intend to do. These hypocritical, lying, thieving, conniving fuckers are as much to blame as the Lib's for this thing.
But what's just classic, is that BOTH parties agree that the bailout is our only salvation (ridiculous, of course, it will only make things worse). But even in their idiotic agreement, they have put partisan politics FIRST, and the perceived needs of the American people a distant second.
BOTH parties have done this. Yes hbm, BOTH.
This is indicative of a country in decline. The elected aristocracy could give a fuck about the rank-and-file. Even when they are implementeing the most ass-backwards stupid plans imaginable, partisan wrangling is far more important than saving their own civilization.
The most depressing part of this implosion will NOT be the dire & near-catastrophic economic consequences, it will be the loss of will, the loss of drive, the loss of cause-and-effect thinking that people have, where if they struggle, work hard, and strive against the odds, that they can make something of themselves in this country.
That is what we are losing. We are rewarding FAILURE, EXCESS and EXTRAVAGANCE, and punishing prudence, thrift, and spending within your means. We're sending a message here with this bailout: Graft, corruption, and theft will be rewarded.
We are a nation in decline.
OK, finally I want to do a little re-print of an MSN article. It's got good info, but I suppose the big shocker is that mainstream press is starting to use The D Word. There is actually starting to be an open debate about whether a modern-ear Depression is possible. Maybe you & I are getting a tin-ear to this, because I have been banging this drum for 2 years.
But you could NEVER find mainstream press even discussing it. NEVER. Until now.
THAT is how BAD it is. All the hopeful sentiment that we are about to bottom imminently, has been replaced by How Low Can We Go? I think the past 60 days have been a wakeup call.
Too late to avoid a depression?
Policymakers are quickly running out of time and room for error. And even a brilliant plan -- which we haven't seen yet -- could fail without some good luck.
By Jon Markman
Over the past week, the world's intellectual, business, government and philanthropic elite emerged from World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland, with grim faces and warnings of financial doom.
You'd almost think they'd met to plot a suicide pact rather than global trade, as the headlines were so gory they could have been mulched into meals for vampires. Are things really that bad? Maybe not.
Your contrarian antennae really have to go up in the face of consensus from a cohort of eggheads, politicos and jet-setters not exactly known for clairvoyance. Their big idea last year: that emerging markets' domestic economies had become so strong that a decline in U.S. and European growth would not derail them. Oops.
Credible economic analysts now say there is still a narrow window of time in which policymakers in the United States, Europe and Asia can avoid a meltdown over the next year by immediately coordinating the injection of real financial adrenaline to banks, companies, households and local governments -- not just rhetoric and indiscriminate spending.
Yet that window is closing fast, and if the right steps are not taken soon it may be shut for years. But governments don't know which steps work because economic theory breaks down at the level of human psychology.
Given a set of stimuli -- ranging from tax cuts and longer unemployment benefits to new construction jobs and wider broadband access -- economists try to mathematically determine the choices citizens are likely to make, then use the results to recommend a policy mix to legislators.
The problem is that the models often fail to accurately forecast human behavior, and politicians regularly screw it all up by ignoring the data and diverting funds to pet projects.
History is rife with successful financial episodes, such as the New Deal, in which luck and coincidence are later misinterpreted as results of prescient planning. Slim hopes of an end-zone dance To prove the Davos set wrong, in short, congressional leaders must make the right choices at warp speed under pressure from special interests.
It's a public-policy version of the Steelers' final drive Sunday with time running out in the Super Bowl. Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, scrambling to elude a rush, had one good shot at throwing the football at an oblique angle to a receiver leaping among three defenders in the corner of the end zone.
In times like these, the result set is stark and binary: hero or goat in football, recovery or disaster in the economy. The Davos pessimists' case for a severe economic dislocation over the next year -- let's go out to the extreme and call it a potential depression -- is easily made, as four key ingredients are in place.
Their recipe calls for a blend of cyclical recession, severe deleveraging, a shift of demographics favoring savings over consumption, and inappropriate fiscal and monetary responses by policymakers. The first three are well under way, so the last one is the decider.
Looking back at the Great Depression of the 1930s and Japan's depression of the 1990s, it's clear that government leaders in each case failed to respond quickly enough, then overcorrected, and in general took steps that at the time were considered best economic practices but actually worsened the problems.
Our leaders will likewise now try to do the right thing based on currently popular theories, but we cannot confidently say whether they will turn out to be appropriate.
You just never know.
The only certainty is that measures must be taken immediately, and every day lost on minutiae such as bank executives' pay or Cabinet nominees' tax follies dampens the likelihood of success. Speed is of the essence, like putting up sandbags to stop a levee break, as we can see in daily headlines now that the darkness of Davos is descending.
The incredible shrinking economies Layoff announcements over the past three months averaged 50,000 a week until they jumped to more than 100,000 last week. In an attempt to outrun revenue shortfalls, businesses are also cutting back on wages, travel and equipment purchases.
But it's a losing battle. ISI Group analysts figure that U.S. corporate profits will decline from their 2007 peak to a 2010 trough by a record 30%, though a 50% fall is not out of the question. They're already down 20%. Customers are disappearing as wages and jobs falter and families raid their emergency funds. U.S. home equity decline has accelerated to a 30% annual rate, which combined with the stock market plunge, has slashed consumers' net worth by $12 trillion.
The pervasiveness of the plunge in demand that animates doomsayers is breathtaking. Reis, a real-estate research firm, this week said rents nationwide fell in 43% of buildings of all types in the fourth quarter, up from an average of 25% in the first nine months of the year. In New York, where financial layoffs are surging, rents fell in 75% of apartment buildings last quarter. This puts securitized loans on U.S. commercial and apartment buildings on track for a default rate of 6% this year, up from 1.1% at the end of 2008.
"We haven't seen this speed of decline before," one Reis analyst told Bloomberg. In Asia, the momentum of deterioration and thus the need for policy speed is even more dramatic. Japan's industrial production is falling at a stunning 63% annual rate; in South Korea, it's falling at a 43% rate.
In China, real gross domestic production was unchanged in the fourth quarter, and ISI analysts expect it to be unchanged in this quarter, which would smash the GDP growth down to just 4% year over year, a stunning comedown for an economy that was growing at better than 10% last year and was once believed to be invulnerable.
In contrast, government leaders appear to be moving in slow motion. The Federal Reserve last week said it was "prepared" to buy Treasurys to push down interest-rate costs even though 10-year-note yields are up a lot in the past two months.
The Obama administration, meanwhile, has dawdled on plans to try to recapitalize the banking system or buy soured assets, and the fiscal stimulus package winding its way through Congress appears by independent estimates to be too small, insufficiently focused on real job creation and overly weighted on fiscal 2010 rather than 2009.
Meanwhile, the head of the European Central Bank is dragging his feet, stating that he would not back an interest-rate cut. I would love to see the smug Davos crowd proved wrong, but the forces at work may have gone too far to be stopped. The nation may be on track now to spend $4 trillion -- more than on anything short of war -- to prevent the credit hole from getting so big we can't climb out.
It's especially worrisome to see so much money used to shore up the worst-managed banks, a misallocation of resources that could haunt us for decades. In summary, total ruin can be averted and the Davos prophecy squelched if lawmakers seize the moment, aim true and get lucky.
Even if the result is low growth amid a newly chastened business and social culture, re-ranking of national priorities to celebrate saving over consumption and acceptance of a lower stature in the world, it's superior to depression and chaos.
Cross your fingers.
Oh right, I did want to let you guys in on a little secret: I was one of the attending physicians when Thomas Beatie gave birth to the first goat-human. There's been quite a bit of consternation about how someone could possibly push a goat out through their cock. I am here to tell you that after I, and assisting physician Neil Patrick Harris (aka Doogie Howser, MD) crammed a giant metal spear into that bastards cock, the end result was not pretty:
Asshole: The Other PussyI also want to address the delicate topic of where a man holds a baby goat. It's not in the belly, it's quite a bit lower. Here is a never-before-seen picture of Beatie posing completely naked, just prior to birth:
"Hi, I'm Thomas Beatie and there's a mother fuckin' goat in my nutsack! I'm calling Oprah!"
Please Dunc, don't hurt me!
Dunc, I'm hankerin' for some spankerin'!
And squat, and thrust, and in and out!
I wish someone would go apeshit on me right about now...
I wish there was a big strong Comic book retailer here to help me pet my pussy...I'll give you this Dunc, She Hot. If I was born during the Civil War, I'd also find this 1930's style porno pretty hot. There ain't many chicks that look bad in a ball gag.
