{"id":196057,"date":"2008-05-27T16:31:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-27T21:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/05\/27\/economics-update-452\/"},"modified":"2008-05-27T16:31:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-27T21:31:00","slug":"economics-update-452","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/05\/27\/economics-update-452\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, the Oracle of Omaha very bearish on the economy. Warren Buffett is predicting a long and deep recessions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is not all that surprising a conclusion seeing as how consumer confidence index fell to 57.2<\/a>, well below the prediction of 60, and the lowest number since October 1992.<\/p>\n

On the brighter side, the dollar has strengthened a bit<\/a>, and crude prices have fallen<\/a>, though Gas prices hit a new all time high for the 20th time in 20 days<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even if oil prices moderate, the bond prices are falling because of inflation fears<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Basically, if you expect inflation, you don’t want to hold a bond with a fixed interest rate, and so if you want to sell your bond, the buyer wants a bigger discount.<\/p>\n

In real estate, we have home prices falling an eye popping 14.1% year over year<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The S&P\/Case Shiller composite index of 20 metropolitan areas fell 2.2 percent in March from February and plummeted a record 14.4 percent from March 2007.<\/p>\n

Economists expected prices for the 20-city index to fall 2.0 percent on month and 14.0 percent from a year earlier, according to the median forecast in a Reuters survey.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is ugly for anyone who wants to buy a home, and the fact that we are seeing skyrocketing property tax delinquencies<\/a> means that people who want to stay in their houses may find that municipal services are shrinking.<\/p>\n

In banking, we have UBS saying that the mortgage bloodletting is not over<\/a>, and US savings & loans setting aside $7.6 billion<\/a> against potential losses in the home market, so if anyone is telling you that this has bottomed out, don’t believe them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, the Oracle of Omaha very bearish on the economy. Warren Buffett is predicting a long and deep recessions. This is not all that surprising a conclusion seeing as how consumer confidence index fell to 57.2, well below the prediction of 60, and the lowest number since October 1992. On the brighter side, the dollar …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1080,973,1135,1200,1089],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-currency","category-economy","category-energy","category-inflation","category-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196057"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196057\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}