A Tale of Two Housing Markets: Hot, And Not So Hot

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

If we had to guess which areas will likely experience the smallest declines in prices and recover the soonest, which markets would you bet on?

Though housing statistics such as average sales price are typically lumped into one national number, this is extremely misleading: there are two completely different housing markets in the U.S. One is hot, one is not so hot.

Just as importantly, one may stay relatively hot while the other may stagnate or decline.

All real estate is local, of course; there are thousands of housing markets if we consider neighborhoods, hundreds if we look at counties, cities and towns and dozens if we look at multi-city metro regions.

But consider what happens to average sales prices when million-dollar home sales are lumped in with $100,000 home sales. The average price comes in around $500,000– a gross distortion of both markets.

Here's a real-world example of what has happened in hot markets over the past 20 years. The house in question is located in a bedroom community suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area metro area. The home was built in 1916 and has 914 square feet, no garage and a small lot.

It sold in 1996 for $135,000. This was a bit under neighborhood prices due to the lack of garage and small size, but nearby larger homes sold in the $145,000 to $160,000 range.

The house was sold in 2004 for $542,000, and again in 2008 for $575,000. It is currently valued at $720,000. The neighborhood average is $900,000.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator, inflation since 1997 has added 50% to the cost of living: $1 in 1997 equals $1.50 in 2016.

Adjusted for inflation of 2.5% annually, calculated cumulatively, the home would be worth a shade over $220,000 today. Long-term studies have found that housing tends to rise about 1% above inflation annually, so if we add 1% annual appreciation (3.5% calculated cumulatively over the 20 years), the home would have appreciated about $47,000 above and beyond inflation, bringing its value to $268,000–almost double the purchase price.

But being in a hot market, this little house appreciated a gargantuan $450,000 above and beyond inflation and long-term appreciation of 1% annually.

Those who bought in hot markets are $500,000 richer than those who bought in not-so-hot markets.

Another house I know in a hot metro market sold for $438,000 in 1997 and is currently valued at $1.4 million. The owners picked up substantially more than $500,000 in bonus appreciation.

Or how about a home that sold for $607,000 in 2010 and is now valued at $960,000? (Note that I have picked neighborhoods and metro areas I have known for decades, so I can verify the current valuations are indeed in the real-world ballpark.)

Inflation alone added about $60,000 to the value since 2010; the $300,000 appreciation above and beyond inflation is pure gravy for the owners.

It's easy to dismiss these soaring valuations as credit-driven bubbles that will eventually pop, but that narrative misses the enormous differences in regional incomes and GDP expansion. The little 900 square foot house that's barely worth $100,000 in most of the country may well fetch $700,000 in hot markets for far longer than we might expect if it is in a metro area with strong GDP and wage growth.

To understand why, look at these three maps of the U.S. The first reflects the GDP generated within each county; the second shows real growth in GDP by region, and the third displays the wages of the so-called "creative class"–those with high-demand skillsets, education and experience.

The spikes reflect enormous concentrations of GDP. This concentrated creation of goods and services generates jobs and wealth, and that attracts capital and talent. These are self-reinforcing, as capital and talent drive wealth/value creation and thus GDP.

Unsurprisingly, there is significant overlap between regions with high GDP and strong GDP expansion. The engines of growth attract capital and talent.

Creative class wages are highest in the regions with strong GDP expansion and concentrations of GDP, capital and talent. Attracting the most productive workers requires hefty premiums in pay and benefits, as well as interesting work and opportunities for advancement.

That people will make sacrifices to live in these areas should not surprise us–including paying high housing costs. This willingness to pay high housing costs attracts institutional and overseas investors, a flood of capital seeking high returns that further pushes up the cost of housing.

The rising cost of money will impact all housing. So will recession. But if we had to guess which areas will likely experience the smallest declines in prices and recover the soonest, which markets would you bet on?

Markets that are "cheap" because wages are low and opportunities scarce, or high-cost areas with high wages and concentrations of the factors that drive growth and innovation?

The point is that hot housing markets are hot for reasons beyond low interest rates for mortgages. These islands of concentrated capital, GDP growth and talent are magnets that attract global capital and talent, even as prices notch higher.

via http://ift.tt/2ii9t4s Tyler Durden

Thursday Humor? Oman To Join Saudi “Anti-Terror Alliance”

When we first heard about this story, we thought it was a joke.

As it turns out, it was dead serious, and as Bloomberg reports, in an attempt to cozy up with Riyadh, Oman has told Saudi Arabia – perhaps the biggest single state sponsor of terrorism, one which even Americans can now sue for its involvement in the September 11 terrorist attack – that it will join “a Saudi-led military alliance”, a sign that Iran’s closest ally in the region is ready to improve its ties with the kingdom and/or sever ties with Tehran. Oman’s ties with Saudi Arabia and its allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council have been strained because of its close relationship with Iran, the kingdom’s biggest regional rival.

But while we can understand shifting regional alliances, we – and everyone else – laughed out loud when reading that in order to show his “ideological proximity” to the Saudis, Oman’s defense minister sent a letter to Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in which the small Gulf nation decided to join the… wait for it, Islamic Military Alliance Against Terrorism.

Amusing.

But back to the latest Gulf state entrant in the Saudi sphere of influence. As Bloomberg reports, the Saudi Prince will go to Oman in the coming weeks to pave the way for a visit by King Salman. The king’s trip would help re-establish security, military and economic cooperation.

The Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia and Shiite-led Iran are on the opposite sides of Middle East conflicts from Syria to Yemen. The kingdom suspended ties with Iran last year after its embassy in Tehran was attacked in a protest over the execution of a prominent Shiite cleric. Other Gulf countries, except Oman, also took diplomatic steps against the Islamic Republic.

 

“From a political standpoint it’s a Saudi win bringing in Oman back to the GCC fold,” said Ghanem Nuseibeh, founder of London-based consulting firm Cornerstone Global Associates. “It will give Saudi greater regional influence and greater geopolitical leverage.”

 

Oman’s Foreign Minister Yousef Bin Alawi Bin Abdullah, in an interview with Egypt’s Al-Akhbar newspaper published this week, said his country “has common interests with everybody, but each country has its own ways of achieving these interests and goals.”

To be sure, a diplomatic rapprochement would help boost cooperation between Oman, one of the region’s smallest oil producers, and the bloc’s richest members. The GCC is a six-member group that also includes Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

But where things get bizarre is that in the Gulf every day appears to be opposite day: the Saudi-led military alliance is a reference to an anti-terror coalition formed last year at the initiative of Prince Mohammed, King Salman’s son, to face security threats against Muslim nations. Apparently, it does this by either bombing thousands of innocent civilians in neighboring countries like Yemen, or simply creating and funding the Islamic State. Recall that in what may have been one of the most significant email discoveries from the entire Podesta batch, in a leaked email sent on August 17, 2014 by Hillary Clinton to her current campaign manager, John Podesta, who back then was counselor to Barack Obama, she admitted that Qatar and Saudi Arabia “are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”

But aside from providing financial and logistic support to ISIS and other radical Sunni groups, Saudi Arabia is fully on board with the whole “alliance against terrorism” thing.

We next await for Oman to join the Qatari “anti-terror organization”, especially since in the next few years Qatar will be rather stumped at finding out new and more deadly ways of sending its natgas pipeline to Europe via Syria, a venture which after 5 years of desperate attempts to remove Assad and install a puppet regime, has failed following today’s official ceasefire announcement involving Russia, Turkey and Syria.

via http://ift.tt/2iIY4cX Tyler Durden

Police Taser Report Watered Down By NYPD Civilian Complaint Review Board

Nothing to report here.New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) watered down the conclusion and recommendations of its own report on police use of Tasers, after a “collaborative” process of revisions with the NYPD and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office.

CCRB had released a draft of the report earlier this year which concluded that in most of the reviewed cases, police were using Tasers on unarmed people. The board’s initial recommendation was to end the deployment of Tasers on handcuffed detainees, but both that proposal and much of the language emphasizing how prevalent the use of Tasers is on unarmed suspects was excised from the final report, according to The New York Times‘.

The executive summary of the report’s original draft also recommended the department create an annual comprehensive report detailing each time a Taser is used by an officer, but the final report buried that recommendation on the very last page.

The Times reports:

The draft, in describing the roughly 30 percent of Taser complaints that came while a subject was in police custody, observed that “these were the most troubling.” That sentence was removed. Also removed was a statement that “a review of several of the police custody complaints supports the perception that the Tasing may have occurred unnecessarily.”

Elsewhere, the draft report found that “there is also evidence” that Tasers were being used in response to unruly or obstinate behavior by suspects. That phrase was changed in the final version to say that “there is concern.”

CCRB senior adviser Jerika Richardson was quoted by The Times‘ as saying that revisions like this are typical and “changes were made to the superfluous language that skewed its findings,” but some critics think the CCRB is failing in its mission as a supposedly independent oversight agency.

Police reform advocate Josmar Trujillo described CCRB as an “ornamental agency” that is far too cozy with the department it is meant to place a check on, and whose recommendations for officer discipline and greater departmental accountability are all too easily dismissed by the NYPD and City Hall.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/2iJ2oca
via IFTTT

Mainstream Media is Now Whining About the “Fake News” Hysteria It Created

After coming under attack, term “fake news” has been rightly and successfully appropriated by the infinitely more clever and creative alternative media and reapplied to a variety of disingenuous mainstream media outlets. The corporate media is not too happy about this, and it’s doing what it does best (aside from cheerleading for war); it’s whining about it to its readers.

Nothing more perfectly highlights the mainstream media’s instinctual response to complain than an article published on Christmas Day in The New York Times, which reinvents history by claiming that alternative media is to blame for turning “fake news” into an overly expansive and thus meaningless term. Here are a few excerpts:

WASHINGTON — The C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the White House may all agree that Russia was behind the hacking that interfered with the election. But that was of no import to the website Breitbart News, which dismissed reports on the intelligence assessment as “left-wing fake news.”

Rush Limbaugh has diagnosed a more fundamental problem. “The fake news is the everyday news” in the mainstream media, he said on his radio show recently. “They just make it up.”

continue reading

from Liberty Blitzkrieg http://ift.tt/2ichda9
via IFTTT

Relationship Between The Dollar And Inflation Expectations Has Completely Reversed Since Summer

Submitted by Eric Bush via Gavekal Capital blog,

At least since 2003 (which is when our data on TIPS begins), the dollar and breakeven inflation expectations have had a negative relationship. Said differently, when the dollar strengthens (as it has done recently) inflation expectations tend to fall and vice versa. (note: the USD index is inverted in all the charts below)

 

A strong negative relationship has been especially true since 2010 when the correlation between the USD index and 10-year TIPS implied breakeven inflation has increased to a robust -80%. We know, of course, that in the short-term strong relationships can break down and sometimes completely reverse. This type of complete reversal is what has occurred since this summer.

 

Since 6/30/2016, the correlation between the dollar and inflation expectations has skyrocketed to +92%. So the dollar has gone up AND inflation expectations have increased as well step for step. Ultimately, we believe that these two series will likely revert back to the more traditional relationship and the “gap” that has opened up in the first and second chart below should close.  

 

A similar episode, granted to a much lesser degree, occurred at the beginning of 2015 and by August 2015 the dollar and inflation expectations had synced back up. To us, a similar reversion to the norm seems like the most probable outcome at the moment.

via http://ift.tt/2ht8fS7 Tyler Durden

2 Books To Help You Thrive in Trump’s America!

I didn’t vote for Donald Trump (I proudly voted for Gary Johnson, thank you very much) and I do worry about some (most?) of his policy ideas. Yet unlike many progressives, liberals, Democrats, libertarians, conservatives, and #NeverTrump, I’m not trembling in fear or quaking in anger over the transfer of power that happens on January 20. Part of the reason for my lack of pants-wetting is because of two books I’ve read in the past year. Neither is specifically about Trump—or even contemporary politics—but each holds some great lessons about how to deal broadly with the billionaire developer and the bigger question of out-of-control government power.

Penn Jillette’s Presto! How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales is a lean, mean diet memoir by the well-known magician that is leavened with tales of his two tours on the Trump-hosted Celebrity Apprentice. You’ll not only learn how to go cold turkey from what Jillette calls the “Standard American Diet” (or SAD!) but get a strong sense of what makes the Donald tick. The other is a sobering book about the long-range hangover from the “noble experiment” in banning booze during the 1920s. Harvard historian Lisa McGirr’s The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State is a tour de force of deep, serious research and analysis that’s also a real page-turner. Most important to the current moment, she documents how federal powers don’t ever really disappear. Instead, like parasites they find a new host to do their bidding after their original purpose is served.

Presto! begins a couple of years ago, with Jillette weighing in somewhere north of 330 pounds (folks that fat, he notes, stop weighing themselves). After years of high-blood pressure, self-delusion about what a “fat fuck” he had been for years, and a serious cardiac event, he’s given an ultimatum by his doctor to lose lots of weight in six months or submit to stomach stapling. Jillette follows the diet advice of his friend Ray Cronise, a former NASA engineer turned nutrition guru. He eats nothing but plain potatoes for a couple of weeks and then slowly adds back other vegetables, fruits, and whole plants, all while losing almost a pound a day. Once he hits his target weight of around 230 pounds, he settles into a version of the “nutritarian” approach elaborated by Joel Fuhrman, the medical doctor behind Eat To Live and an ever-expanding web empire. It’s a rollicking and profane story of self-control and literal and figurative reinvention. “The kind of guy I am,” writes Jillette, “if I couldn’t eat nothing, I was going to eat everything….There is nothing fun and sexy about moderation. To be thin, I needed to find a way to make my diet as extreme as my other lifestyle choices.”

But what about Trump? As a very public libertarian who supported Gary Johnson throughout the presidential race, Jillette had little love for the Democratic nominee. “Eating pizza is voting for Hillary Clinton,” he writes, meaning that casting a ballot for her would be the equivalent of one of his old comfort-food binges during which he would slather a hunk of cheese with peanut butter while driving to The Cheesecake Factory and eating two entrees and a dessert or three before heading to the movies and downing a bucket of buttered popcorn in which he’s tossed a boxful of Milk Duds. And yet, he has warmer feelings for her than his TV boss on Celebrity Apprentice (indeed, in a complicated vote-swapping gambit, he actually voted for her in tightly-contested Nevada in exchange for a dozen other people voting for Johnson). “I really thought there could be no one worse than Hillary Clinton, and there is no one worse than Hillary Clinton except Donald Trump.” Jillette likens Trump’s hair to “cotton candy made from piss” and that’s the closest he comes to a compliment.

Trump, Jillette says in a characteristic passage, has “filled our country with embarrassment, hate, and fear…fuck Trump in the neck.” Presto! doesn’t suggest that we can simply shed Trump the same way Jillette lost weight, but there’s a clear lesson that we can at the very least take control of our own bodies and lives in profound ways that minimize the ability of Trump (or any other politician) to screw us over. And we can remain outspoken in our defiance of illegitimate power, wherever we find it. “Everything you love in life, everything you’re proud of, you had to work for,” he writes. “Live outside the law.”

That’s often easier said than done. Indeed, Lisa McGirr’s profoundly disturbing The War on Alcohol underscores the high price paid by many of the people who did live outside the law during Prohibition. In New York (state and city) under the governance of Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt, the ban on liquor wasn’t particularly harshly enforced, but other parts of the country were a different story. Part of the power of McGirr’s account is that revises our understanding of Prohibition as a set of rules that were widely scoffed at. In many—perhaps most—parts of the country, there were no loopholes to enforcement, especially if you were poor, female, immigrant, or black. Indeed, Prohibition is best understood as a means by which Progressives and Ku Klux Klanners alike could control undesirable behaviors and populations. “I believe in Prohibition” declared Eleanor Roosevelt in 1930 while Progressive leaders railed that “Alien illiterates rule our cities today; the saloon is their palace; the toddy stick their scepter.” A Dallas-based Ku Klux Klan paper spoke in similar terms of the “fight…against the Homebrew and the Hebrew.”

Prohibition, writes McGirr, gave rise the first truly national forms of law enforcement and, as important, to a then-unprecented state and federal prison boom. What became the FBI was empowered by Prohibition and so were other federal agencies that were created to enforce national liquor laws. When “the war on alcohol was over…the expansion of state authority that the war had engdendered…did not disappear; it merely lurched forward in new directions.” The war on booze explicitly morphed into a war on drugs, with different “illicit” substances being identified with different sub-populations (marijuana was a Mexican threat, cocaine a Negro menace, opium a uniquely Chinese vice). Richard Nixon reinvigorated the war on drugs as part of his “law and order” campaign promises, but every president since Nixon, whether liberal or conservative, has increased the amount of money, resources, and prison beds for drug offenders. McGirr says that Prohibition was figuratively a “dry run” for the drug war by giving rise to a “carceral state” which has resulted in the United States holding the dubious honor of being the world’s greatest jailer-nation.

Which brings us yet again to Donald Trump, who explicitly called back to Nixon by announcing he was a “law and order” candidate. It’s not simply, or even mostly, drug laws that empower the president of the United States in the 21st century to do whatever he pleases. First under George W. Bush and then under Barack Obama, we’ve witnessed an incredible expansion of executive-branch power in which secret interpretations of law gave rise first to torture and later to a “secret kill list,” among other awful things. Presidents no longer even pretend to consult Congress when engaging in war-making, for instance, and the use of so-called signing statements, executive actions and orders, and the use of recess appointments vastly multiplied first under a Republican and then a Democratic president.

And now whatever power has accrued to the Oval Office will be at the service of Donald Trump, a man who has shown little interest in or patience for limits on his behavior. Beyond telling the stories of people who had been ignored in previous histories of Prohibition, The War on Alcohol lays out why it’s never a good idea to cede power to the government simply because you agree with the people wielding it at the moment. Sooner or later, McGirr’s book reminds us, your enemy is going to be king of the hill.

That’s the whole point of a principled libertarianism, which argues for a limited government, regardless of who is wielding power. It’s not enough to change your positions on, say, executive power, simply because your tribe is calling the shots. Trump will enter office having garnered just 46 percent of the popular vote and even though he will work with a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, the Party of Lincoln is fractured enough that they will hopefully not work in lockstep. Despite winning the popular vote in the presidential race by almost 3 million votes, the Democratic Party, like its conservative counterpart, is not really a national party in any real sense of the word. Rather, each is governs different regions of the country when it comes to national politics.

If Donald Trump’s victory bothers you—and there are many good reasons to be worried—this is the time to start whittling down what the president, Congress, and the federal government can do to you, me, or any us.

Watch Penn Jillette talk with Reason about Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bob Dylan’s genius, and losing 100 pounds:

Full transcript here.

Don’t miss a single Reason podcast or video! Subscribe, rate, and review!

Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes.

Follow us at Soundcloud.

Subscribe to our video channel at iTunes.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Like us on Facebook.

Follow us on Twitter.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/2hRb3JJ
via IFTTT

Dan Loeb Will Pay More Than $2 Million To His New 32-Year-Old Head Quant

It was some time back in 2009 when we first predicted that in a world in which central banks have taken away the “fun” from fundamental analysis (having effectively nationalized capital “markets”), that in the not too distant future quants – or “traders” whose only value added is to react rapidly after the news and/or be the fastest to chase any given momentum wave – would be paid far better than plain-vanilla fundamental analysts – those who use conventional financial analysis to make price forecasts, and whose work has traditionally highly prized by hedge funds yet are on their way to becoming obsolete in the New Normal.

For the likes of Dan Loeb, and his Third Point, once a staunchly fundamental-analysis driven hedge fund, that time has arrived.

According to Bloomberg, Dan Loeb will pay Matt Ober, a quant, pardon “data scientist” who left WorldQuant for Third Point more than $2 million according to a breach of contract claim filed by his former employer.

Matt Ober is smiling

Ober, 32, who starts next month as Third Point’s “chief data scientist”, i.e., head quant, said in a filing that he will be paid a base salary of $200,000, the same as WorldQuant gave him, plus bonuses, and disputed that $2 million in compensation is guaranteed.

As Bloomberg adds, Loeb is joining other hedge fund names in developing big data and quantitative investing to boost returns, i.e., phasing out fundamental analysis in favor of simple quant-driven trading.

Scientists and coders who mine, clean and model information are in high demand after being relegated for years to back office status. Experienced data scientists can earn $500,000 to $700,000, and as much as three times that for those with extensive backgrounds, according to recruiter Alexey Loganchuk.

 

“It is too early to call data scientists the new masters of the universe but they are on their way there,” said Loganchuk, founder of Upgrade Capital, a New York recruiting firm that focuses on alternative data. “Because of how new the space is, the transition from entry level to management can happen quickly. There are several people out there making seven figures in their mid-twenties.”

As Bloomberg’s Saijel Kishan notes, Ober joined Igor Tulchinsky’s WorldQuant in 2011 as a data product analyst and was later promoted to co-head of data strategies at the Old Greenwich, Connecticut-based hedge fund, according to the filing. He sought out data from vendors for use in trading.

Ober will help Third Point more quickly get up to speed with bid data, helping identify which datasets could be used for specific trades, according to the filing.

Meanwhile, as quant compensation soars, hedge fund managers and senior analysts are facing smaller paychecks. Those with seven years of experience expect a 14% decrease in total compensation to about $685,000 for 2016, according to a September survey by Odyssey Search Partners. 

Winton Capital Management in London said in April it’s starting a data science center in San Francisco and plans to hire some 40 scientists. Citadel in Chicago picked its former chief risk officer for a new role of chief data officer in September.

And soon, once Ray Dalio manages to upload his brain into a computer and others reverse engineer how he did it, all the quants, pardon “data scientists” will be just other computers, paid nothing, who trade against other computers in a market in which – since logic and common sense no longer matter – humans are no longer required.

via http://ift.tt/2hR8RSv Tyler Durden

Calif. to Treat Smart Phones in Cars as Just Slightly Less Dangerous than Loaded Guns

Texting and drivingThe end of the year brings the whole host of reminders about the new laws that state legislatures have passed through the last term and are finally coming into effect.

California is fertile ground for legislative meddling in lives, and the start of every year brings stories about the hundreds of new rules coming into play. January will see new reasons for police to extract money from citizens—I mean, “protect public safety.” A new state law makes it illegal to even hold your smart phone while you’re driving. The Sacramento Bee (which opens its piece by simply asserting without evidence that “distracted driving has reached dangerous levels”) explains AB 1785:

The law is designed to stop people from holding their phones for a variety of uses that have become popular in recent years, including checking and posting on Facebook, using Snapchat, scrolling through Spotify or Pandora playlists, typing addresses into the phone’s mapping system, or making videos and taking photos.

A California Office of Traffic Safety study this year determined that 1 out of 8 drivers on the road is paying as much attention to his or her smartphone as to the road. State road safety officials estimate that some form of distracted driving is a factor in 80 percent of crashes. That’s prompted numerous education and enforcement efforts in California aimed at reducing distracted driving.

Note the subtle shifting of facts in the second paragraph. More drivers are paying attention to their smartphones, causing distractions. Distractions factor into 80 percent of all crashes. But there is a huge failure there to actually connect smartphone use to an increase in crashes.

Crash stats had been going down in recent years but the trend had recently started reversing. A very, very relevant contributor to the shift is that more people are driving more miles as the economy has recovered. That’s naturally, statistically going to lead to more collisions. Ed Krayewski looked over the fatal collision stats back in September and found the evidence that phones are making driving more dangerous underwhelming.

But politicians see little downside or negative consequence in passing laws that make people feel safer even if they don’t, so here we are. The law does allow use of smartphones with voice activation and to touch the phone simply for the purpose of activating or deactivating an app, but the phone must also be placed in a mounted spot inside the car.

So anybody sitting there with the smartphone in their lap while having their GPS recite instructions to them is going to be breaking the law, even if they aren’t holding it up to their ear or being “distracted” by it. California drivers could face additional fines if they get pulled over even when they aren’t using a phone in a way that distracts them simply because it doesn’t comply with the very restrictive rules on how the state says you should attach the phone to your car: “either a 7-inch square in the lower corner of the windshield on the passenger side, or a 5-inch square in the lower corner of the windshield to the driver’s left.” The fine is $20 for the first offense and $50 for each additional offense.

If only there weren’t some sort of way for police to evaluate and cite people for behavior behind the wheel that is dangerous to others that is not attached to an absurdly overbroad ban on a piece of technology, blaming it for the behavior and not the driver. Maybe something about those who engage in reckless driving habits without regard to others? Something like that?

Read more about the new law here and wonder if it’ll still apply when we’re all using self-driving cars.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/2iJbqtY
via IFTTT

Gold Surges Above $1150 On $3.5 Billion Bid, Bitcoin Dips

Gold is up 5 days on a row and is surging above $1150 today as someone decided to buy $3.5 billion notional of th eprecious metal into the European close.

It appears the rotational year-end flows are rebalancing back into bullion as well as bonds…

 

Bitcoin is leaking after breaking $1000 equivalent in Yuan…

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

Republicans Now More Confident Than Anytime Since Obama Was Elected

Despite Bloomberg’s consumer comfort index declining for the first time since Trump’s election (from 46.7 to 46.0) with confidence in the economy and personal finances dropping, Republicans’ confidence soared to the highest since March 2008 – erasing all of the post-Obama-election decline.

Interestingly, Democrats remain more confident than Republicans still, bouncing back in the last week after an initial plunge post-Trump…

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, consumer comfort among black Americans continues to tumble…

 

It is notable however that White consumer confidence slipped back modestly from 2007 highs in the last week.

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