Is the stock market going to tank?

[Rideski]

oh relax....

[Toadman]

Assessed values are nothing more than your local municipality getting some of your hard earned tax dollars. It's not a true indicator of your homes worth. Neither is a home appraisal. It's just the agents telling the appraiser what to appraise the home for in order for the appraiser to get paid.

[Benny Profane]

Locally here in New Jersey and New York, and I'm guessing elsewhere, politicians are pushing bills to "help" poor little homeowners who are threatened with foreclosure due to their stupidity and greed by taking out one of those subprime loans over the past few years. But I'm sure that they aren't concerned about the homeowners, as much as they are about (1) the banks that stand to lose a ton, and (2) the municipality, county, and state tax coffers that stand to lose a ton of revenue if these bloated home values turn out to be the fiction that they are.
Ouch, it hurts a little more when I bend over.

[Toadman]

^Exactly. Foreclosures will have a ripple effect on the tax revenue. A lot of subprime companies are looking for relief by trying to refinance the loans that are more favorable to the homeowner just to keep from the prospect of massive foreclosures and bankruptcies of the subprime market.

[SquawMan]

bubble, bubble, toil & trouble....

[Benny Profane]

And, Oh yeah, this is next. Everyone who is sitting on equity loans for home values that don't exist anymore, and may not for 5-10 years. And I still see ads on the TV for "cash out, no money down" deals. This is why 75% of boomers will work 'til they die - they have to pay for yesterday's big screen TV and Range Rover.

[Rideski]

Lest it be misconstrued that I derailed the thread, I will state that I was simply responding to Benny’s dire prediction of real estate market collapse. I am more than happy that my home value has continued to appreciate by all measurable standards; although I feel for people in other locales who have not been so fortunate.

I also do think the two markets are connected in some regard.

Fini

[iceman]

I saw where Squawman gave me a mention before he edited his post, thanks for thinking of me dude, but since we got in here before the boom kicked off, and I'm in a 30-year-fixed at just over 5%, and I have no intention of selling within at least the next ten years I think I'm in an okay spot.

[Benny Profane]

Yeah, Ice, you're in a good spot. Now you just have to avoid tapping in to buy that walk in humidor or the live in Japanese masseuse. Or the thoroughbred.

[SquawMan]

I saw where Squawman gave me a mention before he edited his post, thanks for thinking of me dude, but since we got in here before the boom kicked off, and I'm in a 30-year-fixed at just over 5%, and I have no intention of selling within at least the next ten years I think I'm in an okay spot.

it wasn't a slight, I just see you posting in every single thread that's ever put up so I thought I'd address it to you

btw, re: the stock market

one big reason why it's been going up is because government's around the world are printing money like crazy and liquidity (M3 and MZM) are spiking like never before

what nobody seems to be worried about is that tides go in both directions and when this liquidity boom reverses, look out below

my call for what causes the reversal? Pakistan going into chaos and the US needing to occupy a third Islamic country when we don't have the resources or the support of the rest of the world to do it

I hope I'm wrong, but it's looking more likely by the day





May 15th 2007 | DELHI
From Economist.com

Pervez Musharraf's grip may be loosening
================================================== ======

AFP
IN THE past few days the port mega-city of Karachi, a seething Asian bazaar, has been restored to the violence that has scarred its modern history. At least 41 people were killed and scores injured in gun-battles at the weekend. Corpses were dragged from shot-up cars and displayed on the tarmac. Shop-fronts were smashed and set ablaze. Buses and lorries were used as road-blocks and also torched. As the carnage spread, 15,000 police and paramilitary troops stood idly by.

Many reports suggest the violence was perpetrated by Karachi’s ruling party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM). The MQM is an ethnically-based mafia and ally of Pakistan’s president and army chief, General Pervez Musharraf. Its target was an anti-government rally by thousands of lawyers and opposition supporters that was scheduled for Saturday May 12th. Their main gripe was an ongoing effort by General Musharraf to remove Pakistan’s chief judge, Iftikhar Chaudhry, who was supposed to address the rally.

If the MQM meant to deter the opposition with violence, it failed. On Monday opposition parties held a national strike to condemn the slaughter. They included the parties of two exiled former prime ministers, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, and a coalition of Islamists, the Muttahida Majilis-e-Amal (MMA). The MMA formerly backed the general, as Islamists in Pakistan usually have. But not any more. With an election planned for this year, Pakistani democracy appears to be stirring from the coma it slipped into eight years ago, when General Musharraf seized power in a coup.

Its awakening, if that is what it is, may be traced to March 9th when General Musharraf ordered Mr Chaudhry to resign. Eccentric, vain, some say incompetent, he had upset his fellow judges. He had also given populist rulings against the government, for example blocking the sale of an ailing state steel-mill. More audaciously, he had demanded an investigation into the disappearance of some 400 people, mostly from his native Balochistan, where an insurgency is flickering. Probably, this was the work of the army’s powerful Military Intelligence agency.

Indeed, wherever Mr Chaudhry heard so much as a rumour of injustice, for example, in the reports of kidnapping and rape that decorate the margins of Pakistani newspapers, he summoned officials and demanded investigations. Yet few people seem to have loved Mr Chaudhry, at least until he refused General Musharraf’s order to resign.

This ethnic conflict raises fears of a return to a tribal war that raged in Karachi in the late 1980s.

[iceman]

You can get a live-in Japanese masseuse? hmmm...

[lemon boy]

just the copper in Ice's house would buy and keep a thouroughbred.

[Benny Profane]

just the copper in Ice's house would buy and keep a thouroughbred.

hmmm.....let's wait til his next Utah trip and strip the sucker.

[lemon boy]

I dunno, seems like strippers are getting awfully expensive here:


how about Puerto Rico?

[Tippster]

Yeah, Ice, you're in a good spot. Now you just have to avoid tapping in to buy that walk in humidor or the live in Japanese masseuse. Or the thoroughbred.

That's what his portfolio is for, and ergo the worried tone in his posts....