Month: August 2016

US Home Prices Suffer 3rd Consecutive Decline For First Time Since 2012

For the first time since Feb 2012, S&P CoreLogic’s 20-City Composite price index declined for 3 straight months (dropping 0.07% in August, in line with expectations). The non-seasonally-adjusted annual growth rate of home prices rose just 5.13% – the slowest since since Aug 2015. San Francisco and San Diego showed the weakest growth of the 20-City composite while Portland and Seattle rose the most MoM, and Atlanta and Chicago saw the largest declines in price MoM.

 

 

All 20 cities in the index showed a year-over-year gain, led by a 12.6 percent advance in Portland, Oregon

New York and Washington posted the smallest 12-month advances

 

After seasonal adjustment, Portland had the biggest month-over-month increase at 0.7 percent, while Atlanta and Chicago showed the largest declines at 0.6 percent

 

Nine showed seasonally adjusted price decreases in June over the prior month, including New York, Detroit and Cleveland

“Home prices continued to rise across the country led by the west and the south,” says David M. Blitzer, Managing Director and Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices.

“In the strongest region, the Pacific Northwest, prices are rising at more than 10%; in the slower Northeast, prices are climbing a bit faster than inflation. Nationally, home prices have risen at a consistent 4.8% annual pace over the last two years without showing any signs of slowing.

 

“Overall, residential real estate and housing is in good shape. Sales of existing homes are at running at about 5.5 million units annually with inventory levels under five months, indicating a fairly tight market. Sales of new single family homes were at a 654,000 seasonally adjusted annual rate in July, the highest rate since November 2007. Housing starts in July topped an annual rate of 1.2 million units. While the real estate sector and consumer spending are contributing to economic growth, business capital spending continues to show weakness.”

Chart: Bloomberg

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US Home Prices Suffer 3rd Consecutive Decline For First Time Since 2012

For the first time since Feb 2012, S&P CoreLogic’s 20-City Composite price index declined for 3 straight months (dropping 0.07% in August, in line with expectations). The non-seasonally-adjusted annual growth rate of home prices rose just 5.13% – the slowest since since Aug 2015. San Francisco and San Diego showed the weakest growth of the 20-City composite while Portland and Seattle rose the most MoM, and Atlanta and Chicago saw the largest declines in price MoM.

 

 

All 20 cities in the index showed a year-over-year gain, led by a 12.6 percent advance in Portland, Oregon

New York and Washington posted the smallest 12-month advances

 

After seasonal adjustment, Portland had the biggest month-over-month increase at 0.7 percent, while Atlanta and Chicago showed the largest declines at 0.6 percent

 

Nine showed seasonally adjusted price decreases in June over the prior month, including New York, Detroit and Cleveland

“Home prices continued to rise across the country led by the west and the south,” says David M. Blitzer, Managing Director and Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices.

“In the strongest region, the Pacific Northwest, prices are rising at more than 10%; in the slower Northeast, prices are climbing a bit faster than inflation. Nationally, home prices have risen at a consistent 4.8% annual pace over the last two years without showing any signs of slowing.

 

“Overall, residential real estate and housing is in good shape. Sales of existing homes are at running at about 5.5 million units annually with inventory levels under five months, indicating a fairly tight market. Sales of new single family homes were at a 654,000 seasonally adjusted annual rate in July, the highest rate since November 2007. Housing starts in July topped an annual rate of 1.2 million units. While the real estate sector and consumer spending are contributing to economic growth, business capital spending continues to show weakness.”

Chart: Bloomberg

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Choking the Giggity Economy: If Strippers Are Employees, Can Uber Drivers Be Far Behind?

In a 2015 speech at New York’s New School, Hillary Clinton swore to end what she derisively calls “the gig economy” by “crack[ing] down on bosses who exploit employees by misclassifying them as contractors.”

She had darlings of the sharing economy such as Uber and Lyft in mind. These companies, which are hugely popular with both workers and customers alike, provide not just a new model of delivering services more cheaply and efficiently but a new model for part-time employment. After passing various background requirements, drivers decide when they work, where, and for how long; they function as independent contractors and thus don’t get sick leave, health care, and other benefits that go with being technically designated an “employee” under various state and federal definitions. But like all disruptive businesses, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and others unsettle incumbent firms and their political protectors that don’t like competition. Strongly invested in 20th-century models of HOW STUFF GETS DONE, Clinton doesn’t like it one bit and equates any variance from past-century employment models with exploitation. You can do anything you want, that mind-set says, as long as you don’t do anything different from how we’ve always been doing it.

That said, she’s unlikely to use a recent New York state appellate court ruling to bolster her case against the gig economy. A New York appellate court has ruled that strippers at the go-go club Paradise Found are in fact employees and not contractors. The specific issue at hand in the court case was the covering of unemployment insurance premiums.

From the AP account:

The four Appellate Division justices have rejected the challenge to rulings of Unemployment Insurance Appeal Board by Greystoke Industries, operator of Paradise Found in Dewitt [a town near Syracuse].

They cite “substantial evidence” to support the finding that it exercised sufficient control over the dancers to establish an employment relationship, despite evidence that could support “a contrary result.”

They note that the dancers could set their schedules and provide their own music and costumes.

More here.

This ruling follows other cases that have ruled that dancers are traditional employees. Two years ago, dancers who worked at a New York City club were granted $10 million in back wages. The court ruled that charging the dancers “an appearance fee” and then letting them keep most of the money they made didn’t abrograte minimum wage and other responsibilities for the club owner.

It may be more than a short Uber ride from stripping to the sharing economy, but the distance is actually smaller than it might seem on first glance. Just as technology is changing how we live, there’s every reason to believe that new and more-fluid relationships in the workplace will develop in the workplace too. Businesses struggle to keep labor costs down so they can stay in business. But speaking as a manager myself, I know that businesses are also desperate to attract and keep good workers; you don’t stiff people who are helping to make you succeed. You negotiate to keep them happy and keep your business functioning. That might mean letting certain people work from home or set their own, unconventional hours; paying people as contractors if that’s what they want; reducing hours and overall pay if they only want a part-time gig; and more. The point is that our world is becoming more and more personalized, individualized, and responsive to different people’s needs and wants.

When it comes to jobs, the best way for that to happen isn’t to layer the workplace with requirements and regulations that were created in a very different world under very different circumstances. If every new and innovative businesss must not only struggle to find a profitable market but also adhere to government dictates created 50, 60, or 70 years ago, well, good luck with economic growth and innovation.

In this short video clip, Whole Foods co-founder and co-CEO John Mackey discusses how labor regulations make it more difficult to do business in a way that ends up punishing employers, employees, and customers of forward-looking businesses (disclosure: Mackey is a donor to Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website). Keep in mind that Mackey doesn’t run a shop like Paradise Found. He runs a business that has influenced all supermarkets in the country, even traditional ones, and he’s done it by being responsive both to customers and his workers. And he’s had to fight just about every step of the way to be free to try new ways of doing things.

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US Home Prices Suffer 3rd Consecutive Decline For First Time Since 2012

For the first time since Feb 2012, S&P CoreLogic’s 20-City Composite price index declined for 3 straight months (dropping 0.07% in August, in line with expectations). The non-seasonally-adjusted annual growth rate of home prices rose just 5.13% – the slowest since since Aug 2015. San Francisco and San Diego showed the weakest growth of the 20-City composite while Portland and Seattle rose the most MoM, and Atlanta and Chicago saw the largest declines in price MoM.

 

 

All 20 cities in the index showed a year-over-year gain, led by a 12.6 percent advance in Portland, Oregon

New York and Washington posted the smallest 12-month advances

 

After seasonal adjustment, Portland had the biggest month-over-month increase at 0.7 percent, while Atlanta and Chicago showed the largest declines at 0.6 percent

 

Nine showed seasonally adjusted price decreases in June over the prior month, including New York, Detroit and Cleveland

“Home prices continued to rise across the country led by the west and the south,” says David M. Blitzer, Managing Director and Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices.

“In the strongest region, the Pacific Northwest, prices are rising at more than 10%; in the slower Northeast, prices are climbing a bit faster than inflation. Nationally, home prices have risen at a consistent 4.8% annual pace over the last two years without showing any signs of slowing.

 

“Overall, residential real estate and housing is in good shape. Sales of existing homes are at running at about 5.5 million units annually with inventory levels under five months, indicating a fairly tight market. Sales of new single family homes were at a 654,000 seasonally adjusted annual rate in July, the highest rate since November 2007. Housing starts in July topped an annual rate of 1.2 million units. While the real estate sector and consumer spending are contributing to economic growth, business capital spending continues to show weakness.”

Chart: Bloomberg

via http://ift.tt/2copEP1 Tyler Durden

US Home Prices Suffer 3rd Consecutive Decline For First Time Since 2012

For the first time since Feb 2012, S&P CoreLogic’s 20-City Composite price index declined for 3 straight months (dropping 0.07% in August, in line with expectations). The non-seasonally-adjusted annual growth rate of home prices rose just 5.13% – the slowest since since Aug 2015. San Francisco and San Diego showed the weakest growth of the 20-City composite while Portland and Seattle rose the most MoM, and Atlanta and Chicago saw the largest declines in price MoM.

 

 

All 20 cities in the index showed a year-over-year gain, led by a 12.6 percent advance in Portland, Oregon

New York and Washington posted the smallest 12-month advances

 

After seasonal adjustment, Portland had the biggest month-over-month increase at 0.7 percent, while Atlanta and Chicago showed the largest declines at 0.6 percent

 

Nine showed seasonally adjusted price decreases in June over the prior month, including New York, Detroit and Cleveland

“Home prices continued to rise across the country led by the west and the south,” says David M. Blitzer, Managing Director and Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices.

“In the strongest region, the Pacific Northwest, prices are rising at more than 10%; in the slower Northeast, prices are climbing a bit faster than inflation. Nationally, home prices have risen at a consistent 4.8% annual pace over the last two years without showing any signs of slowing.

 

“Overall, residential real estate and housing is in good shape. Sales of existing homes are at running at about 5.5 million units annually with inventory levels under five months, indicating a fairly tight market. Sales of new single family homes were at a 654,000 seasonally adjusted annual rate in July, the highest rate since November 2007. Housing starts in July topped an annual rate of 1.2 million units. While the real estate sector and consumer spending are contributing to economic growth, business capital spending continues to show weakness.”

Chart: Bloomberg

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The Promise of Obamacare vs. the Reality of Obamacare

There’s a strain of pro-Obamacare sentiment which acknowledges it flaws—or some of them, anyway—but argues that it’s worth it because the law has helped so many people by expanding coverage. It’s an argument that essentially ignores the people that Obamacare has made worse off.

Consider, just to take the most prominent recent example, the more than 9,000 residents of Pinal County, Arizona, who relied on the exchange set up by Obamacare for subsidized health coverage this last year. None of those people will be able to get subsidized coverage through the exchange next year, because no insurer will serve the county’s exchanges; it is an illustration of what could happen inside Obamacare’s insurance marketplaces should more insurers follow Aetna, UnitedHealth, and others in scaling back their exchange participation.

It is also a reminder of the ways in which the law has made life worse for some people. As the Cato Institute’s Health Policy Director Michael Cannon notes in a piece for Time, the lack of any insurer serving Pinal County’s exchange means is that “if you’re a Pinal County resident who had a pre-Obamacare plan that covered your (now-preexisting) medical condition, Obamacare took away your coverage and the long-term protection it provided. It has left you either with far more expensive coverage, or no coverage at all.”

Perhaps supporters of the law believe that this is just an acceptable tradeoff, a cost that is worth the law’s other gains. After all, this affects less than 10,000 people. But Pinal County looks like it could be just the beginning: Next year, about a third of counties in the country will be served by just one insurer. At least one state health insurance regulator has reported allowing insurers to raise individual insurance premiums by significant margins out of fear that more carriers will drop out of the exchanges, leaving more counties like Pinas.

In any case, this is not how the law was sold to the public in 2009 and early 2010, when it was being debated. The promise of the law was that individuals could keep their health plans and their doctors, and that families would save money on health care in the process. The inevitable tradeoffs and ungainly realities of the law were ignored or downplayed or denied altogether—probably because if they had been acknowledged from the beginning, the law would not have passed.

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Supreme Court Rejects Ohio Libertarians, EU Says Apples Owes Billions, U.N. Calls Burkini Bans ‘Stupid’: A.M. Links

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When Medicine Serves the Police: A Cautionary Tale from Burning Man

The Burning Man festival, that week long experiment in temporary art-centered community in Nevada’s difficult Black Rock desert, is in full swing as of yesterday. (And my book about the event’s history and culture, in a conveniently updated 10th anniversary e-book edition, is for sale for $4.99 for your Kindle.)

A series of documents made public recently document a grim incident from the event last year that spotlights the crummy things that can happen when medical care is mixed with law enforcement.

In a letter in my possession sent in May by the state’s Division of Public and Behavioral Health, a medic who worked the event last year was put on warning for, as the letter stated, administering ketamine (a powerful tranquilizer that is also sometimes used recreationally) unasked for to a Burning Man attendee “as necessary for the overall safety of law enforcement officials who were in contact with the attendee.” (The state later rescinded the warning, on the stated grounds that their investigation had happened too late after the actual event being investigated, though the letter rescinding the warning said nothing to suggest the event she was originally warned for had not happened.)

In a letter sent earlier this month from Harley Dubois, a member of Burning Man’s board of directors, to Mel Hummel, president of the board of trustees of Humboldt General Hospital who supplied the medic in question, she noted the woman shot with the ketamine was 110 pounds, had been drinking alcohol, and as a result of the ketamine injection the woman “went into respiratory failure—twice—and nearly died.”

The Reno Gazette-Journal reported on the incident in the context of wranglings between Burning Man, Humboldt General Hospital, and law enforcement last week over how to set and obey protocols for medical issues at Burning Man moving forward. The medic injected the ketamine “while serving as a special reserve deputy under Pershing County Sheriff’s Office, according to contracts with the Pershing County Sheriff’s Office,” reported the Gazette-Journal.

Like ketamine and alcohol, medical care and police work can be a very dangerous combination. See my previous reporting on hospitals who decide to conduct unasked for anal probes to help cops search for drugs, and then bill the unwilling “patient”/victim.

My 2000 Reason cover story on the event’s fractious relationship with government authorities. My reporting from last year on the fruitless and aggravating practice of the Bureau of Land Management law enforcement running mail sent to Burning Man by drug dogs.

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How the NSA Prizes Online Surveillance Over Online Security: New at Reason

With a name like the National Security Agency, America’s chief intelligence outfit might at least attempt to promote American security online. At the veryleast, one would hope its activities don’t actively undermine U.S. cybersecurity. But—bad news—a recent leak of the agency’s digital spy tools by a myterious group called the Shadow Brokers shows how the agency prioritizes online surveillance over online security.

For years, there have been rumors that the NSA was stockpiling a secret cache of powerful computer bugs to exploit for cyber-snooping. Recent revelations by the Shadow Brokers appear to confirm these allegations. On August 13, the group published a number of “cyber weapons” that it claims were used by an NSA-linked hacking outfit known as the Equation Group. The dumped information appears to be legitimate, and is dated from around 2013.

View this article.

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Retired Green Beret Rages “How Can Hillary Still Be In The Running For President?”

Submitted by Jeremiah Johnson (nom de plume of retired Green Beret of the US Army Special Forces) via SHTFPlan.com,

It is literally amazing how an individual so crooked, so duplicitous, and with so many chargeable offenses can actually stay in the running for the presidency of the United States.

Mac Slavo recently penned a piece on the $32-million-dollar donation from the Prince of Bahrain to Hillary Clinton (indirectly), via the Clinton Foundation.  The battle for the presidency is won with the bank account, and Clinton is leaving Trump behind in the starting gates.  Just in the month of July, Clinton raised $90 million for her campaign.

$90 million.

Now her new television ad campaign, coincidentally, is running her a cool $80 million.  She has a virtually unlimited amount of cash to throw into this election, and remember the beauty of it all…anything she takes in at this point, she keeps, whether she wins the election or not, and it’s not taxable income.  She’s operating in the green, and it’s all going to be profit at this point.

There is a list of donors to Hillary Clinton that is circulating on the internet.  Among these (and these are ones that are known, mind you) are such notables as Chelsea Handler, the comedienne, donating $100,000.  There’s nothing funny about that.  Peter Angelos, owner of the Baltimore Orioles, giving Clinton $500,000.  The Tulalip [Indian] Tribe of Washington, $125,000.  The list has individuals, unions, PAC’s…a “smattering” of virtually every demographic.

There’s a Muslim fanatic by the name of Kase Lukman Lawal of Nigeria, an oil billionaire with known operations and ties to known and well-established terrorist individuals and organizations, such as Bosco Ntaganda and Al Shabaab respectively.  This Lawal bundled more than $100,000 for Clinton for her 2008 run.  She returned the favor when she was Secretary of State by blocking any charges of association with known terrorists from reaching him, charges that could have meant 20 years on a conviction.  Ready for the punch-line?

This guy is living in Houston and is a Commissioner for the Port Authority of Houston.

You can read more about it in an article dated July 28, 2016 by IWB entitled HIGH TREASON: Hillary Sells Arms to Qatar, Transfers 20% of US Uranium Production To Russia, Sides With BLM Over Land Grab, Receives TONS of Money from Nigerian Terrorist Billionaire.

You can also read about the $2.35 million given in four donations from a Russian Uranium mining concern to the Clinton Foundation, signed off and shifted by Clinton when she was Secretary of State and headed the State Department.  These donations came between 2009 to 2013.

Trump is a “penny ante” operator in comparison to Clinton.  He backed a deal to keep the Ukrainian administration intact prior to the U.S. Victoria Nuland-led coup, and allowed his campaign manager to get “sucked” into public view, necessitating his resignation.

Clinton?  She practically orchestrated the whole “Arab Spring,” and threw all of Egypt into turmoil, was one of the “jeering” principals involved in killing Kaddafi in Libya, and managed to allow the “removal” of the American ambassador in Libya and his staff…no real questions asked.

If Clinton’s leaked classified e-mails pertaining to the defense and national security of the United States were ignored, then how many e-mails listing her donations from foreigners and foreign entities were swept under the rug?

We haven’t even touched on some of her more well-known “big” backers, such as Soros, Warren Buffet, and (recently announced) CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Meg Whitman.  How much are they donating under the table in addition to what they’re giving that is visible?

Even more: how much of an effect unable to be measured in dollars are their influences having to generate both opportunities and support for her?

The media is firmly in her pocket.  The polls (not much different from polling regarding the removal of horns from cattle) are manipulated and skewed, and all of the printed drivel, the blathering over the airwaves, and the scripted circus of the television stations are all in her corner.  She has the funds to “recreate” herself in the “mom and apple-pie” image…an image that appeals to women, minorities, and liberals…an image they are gobbling up in the manner of the “TV parlor-watchers” of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.”

She generates more and more money every day, and spends more of it every day.  One thing about the Clintons: they know how to spend money to make more of it.  As the Secretary of State, she sold this country down the river.  Now she’s buying it back, but for her own possession.  The ironic thing is she’s buying it back on the backs of the American taxpayer with her tax-free campaign funds.

Trump may have his Trump Towers and his casinos, but the true tower is the “towering inferno” that Clinton created with her destabilization of the Middle East and the former Soviet republics that she profited from greatly.  And the casino she’s vying for is the United States, where the cards are all marked and the deck is stacked in her favor.  The gamble she’s betting on is whether the American people are dumb enough to make her the “pit boss.”  She’s winning that gamble…by buying their votes long before the ballots are cast.  In the battle of funds, she’s riding into the sunset (of the U.S., that is) and leaving Trump in the dust.  In the end, only the American people lose the whole shooting match.

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