Very interesting thought. Is their data that shows economic sentiment by level of affluence?
Housing prices in the midwest are in much better shape than the rest of the country. My 22 year old nephew whose a high school dropout and working at a manufacturing plant making $20/hr just bought a $77k house. It’s small and not in perfect shape but looks comparable to stuff you see selling in Cali for like $500K.
I think I heard that something like near 50% of home purchases are being made by trust funds now. That’s totally fucked. I’m not sure how that’s contributing to the problem, and if it’s more common in other parts of the country because it doesn’t seem to happen here, but it sure as fuck aint helping and those corps need to be taxed into extinction.
I’m assuming you mean hedge funds instead of trust funds. If so, that statistic is one that has been thrown around a lot in the last few weeks, but it has been debunked. It’s off by a couple of orders of magnitude. Someone posted about this in the home ownership thread.
Yeah Hedge funds. Just some shit I heard on social media. At least anecdotally it’s not playing out here. Most people either own their homes here or are renting from a small time landlord.
the study i saw said about 26% of homes on the market per month in 2023 are bought by “investors” and used the term as any entity already owning 75 homes or more… i’m sure there are lots of word games going on to massage the numbers.
but i think anyone with common sense should believe that “entities” shouldn’t own “homes”, and it would be something worth stopping.
1 Like
yeah that “debunked” study only defined institutional investors as entities owning 1000 or more properties, anybody else is defined as a “mom and pop landlord” like gtfoh if you own 50 homes or even 5 homes you are still part of the problem
Democrats have a plan for that
I’m sure our resident fanboy @spidercrab can set me straight, but I seem to remember 10-20 years ago Warren Buffet saying that one of the best investments he could think of would be to buy a fuckton of single family homes. I’m not sure how popular it was when he said it, but it looks many took his advice. I don’t think Berkshire Hathaway did anything like that directly, though.
Interesting article about whether the value of goods in a criminal case should be based upon the retail price or the sales price of an item on the day it was stolen.
Especially interesting because Kohl’s is a scam store where literally everything is always on sale to some degree.
Like those furniture stores where everything is always on Super Clearance Everything Must Go in fluorescent signage.
I swear there is a furniture store near me that has a going out of business sale every 6 months.
1 Like
There’s a whole street of them near me that are always going out of business.
Grand opening and already going out of business. Sad.
10 Likes
Clearly the economy is bad, those poor business owners are getting crushed
1 Like
https://x.com/jdcmedlock/status/1736423832049832270?s=20
Good ol’ Larry Summers
Back then: It gives me no pleasure in saying this but we need massive unemployment to lower inflation
Now: Look guys, we all knew that inflation was transitory so there was no need in increasing unemployment
is there any compelling reason it shouldn’t be the price of the stolen goods on the date and time it was stolen? i’m failing to see any.
Because fuck the crims that’s why. I’d be interested in seeing what price their insurance is paying for those lost goods…
There’s this from about 10 years ago:
More generally, he’s talked a lot about farmland as an intuitive way to understand the businesses underlying stocks. For eample, in the 2013 annual letter:
If “investors” frenetically bought and sold farmland to each other, neither the yields nor prices of their crops would be increased. The only consequence of such behavior would be decreases in the overall earnings realized by the farm-owning population because of the substantial costs it would incur as it sought advice and switched properties.
And a while ago, he bought a brokerage service to get that sweet, sweet slice of every home transaction (and one that’s probably been impaired by the recent realtor lawsuit). As of last year, that reflected either 50k or 100k real estate agents (I can’t tell at a quick glance if 100k would be double-counting the franchisees).
1 Like
Yes! That’s exactly what I was thinking of.
Had a friend share his frustration about the economy via a group chat. He’s pretty center of the road politically with a slight right lean thanks to growing up in a rural, Bible-thumping town but eventually was able to get out of the corn fields and moved to Orlando area. He’s never supported Trump and has made jokes about him.
Anyway, he shared a video that showed him looking at the price sticker for an 18 pack of XL eggs for $2.84, then he flipped up the sticker to show the sticker underneath with a price of $1.93. I noticed the stickers showed price per egg at $0.158 and $0.161 respectively. Obviously the math isn’t mathing correctly if the cheaper overall price has a higher unit price. I had to point out that $0.161x12=$1.93 and thus the sticker underneath was actually for a dozen eggs, not 18.
He also complained that it cost $64 to get a new propane tank. I had to point out that was mostly the deposit cost and a tank swap at Home Depot only costs ~$20 even in my expensive city.
I think this is pretty illustrative of the general vibes of the economy. People are being fed a negative narrative about Bidenflation, etc and many people believe it without investigating further and doing the math.
3 Likes