Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Bull Market? Short it and GTFO, NOW!

There is a HUGE threat to pretty much all the retail sector, major parts of the health sector, and slices of a few others, such as banking and insurance. That threat is liability for data-breaches. The Street is one liberal judge away from a BAD crash, which WILL happen when one of the 77% of the Federal Courts' liberal judges decides to rule that all the phony, unconstitutional protections that companies have bribed into effect against liability for data breaches, ARE actually unconstitutional. Imagine YOU lost your identity to the hackers of Kohl's, Target or ANY company which, mostly for greed reasons, refused to use the best practices of information security. You have suffered a big loss, and if ALL your loss would be ruled compensible, you would receive somewhere in the five-figures area of compensation. Now multiply that figure by hundreds of millions, the TOTAL number of data breach victims. That adds up to doom for the entire retail sector, the health-care sector & probably the banking sector. The economy fails at that point. No one will invest in any company having had anything to do with digital records-keeping, which is pretty much everyone, isn't it?

Bottom line? The entire Bull Market Bottom Line can be removed by ONE Judge writing ONE opinion which survives thru the SCOTUS. No, I'm not going to tell you what to do if you can't invest. No, strike that, I WILL tell you, bercause that's why I blog! Buy land you can farm on. Buy guns to defend it with and buy plenty of beans and bullets for the Militia you will raise for that defense. NOW, I'm done warning you!

Pharisees of our time - House flippers

House flipping, and why we need to ban it. (Cross-posted on my Facebook page)

 

The whole process of  "flipping" is a tit on a boar. Useless. The idea starts with the usual scammer's dream: buy a house on the cheap because it's in terrible shape, then do cosmetic fix-up, resulting in the proverbial silk purse made from a sow's ear, sell it, get obscene profit. Do it enough times, and you get a TV program on the HGTV channel, THEN you can fly into a City, rent their basketball arena, conduct a half-day seminar on How To Flip for $500 each person, make even MORE obscene profit and fly back out of town...

 

Okay, take an attrractive city, put an army of house-flippers to work in it. What's the result? Housing which isn't technically improved all that much, and the improvements which ARE made are cosmetic, so in ten years, the house will be a crap-hole all over again (and it's usually in a crappy neighborhood anyway). But Wait! There's More! The flipper is going to SELL this house immediately, and make maybe 20% to 50% on their "investment dollar" doing so, then THEY leave, take that money with them, so your CITY makes almost nothing from the deal and life DOES NOT IMPROVE FOR YOU.

 

The result of this flip, multiplied by hundreds to thousands of them in your City, means a huge jump in the value of YOUR home, much higher taxes, and the loss of "affordability" in your housing market, which means YOU are now stuck with the crowds of yuppies who buy the flips. They come in to town, earn obscenely high salaries for doing something with bits and bytes, stay a couple of years, invariably vote Democratic, then leave.

 

I have a solution to all this malaise. We use the power of taxation to keep the flippers away. Here's how we do it: First, define property owners by how long they have LIVED IN their homes: over 30 years, they are "Pioneers". Over 10 years up to 30, they are "Sustainers". 5 to 10 years, they are "Locals" and under 5 years, they are "Transients". Real estate taxes are assessed on a sliding scale by these categories. Pioneers pay the smallest RATE, Transients the highest. Any tax rate higher than Local, the difference is used to LOWER the rate for Pioneers. Now for the flippers: their obscene profit is taxed at 50%, and that money is used SPECIFICALLY to lower the homeowner taxes, across the board, except for the Transient level. Secondary idea: use this tax money to fund a grant system for those who actually want to build NEW housing, because new houses are built with new materials to new codes, are more efficient, by far, than cosmetically-changed 40-70 year-old housing stock.

 

Make these changes, and the flipper-scammers will put your City in the rear-view mirror, and within 10 years, real estate values will start to return more towards normal, more towards what they were before the flipping-craze hit town.

 

Oh, by the way, those Pioneer home owners? They are amost invariably more fiscally responsible, are better neighbors than the yuppie hordes anyway.

 

Goldman Sachs trashes the US Economy, AGAIN

Fifty-eight years ago, I wrote this all down...

The money-pundits are full of themselves this morning. Fox' usual Saturday-morning gang, are blasting the very heavens with "Three Trillion Dollars Lost to the Economy"...

That's bullcrap. Yes, the total losses WERE that high, but only if you also consider the failed gambles of derivatives trading the same as stock losses.

Nowhere do I see the figures on the losses of the actual market value of companies such as Caterpillar, US Steel, Ford Motor Co. etc.

This wild sell-off see-saw started with Investment Bankers tinkering with Derivatives, especially Goldman's Vix funds. There is NO earthly reason that actual investment funds should EVER be spent on wild gambles such as betting how wide the sweeps between losses and gains will be in certain time frames (that's "Vix", or in long-form, Variability-factor X).

Vix is a calculated factor used in the Arbitrage Theory of predicting price variations in equities, but it's only one such factor of many. Paying for "Vix Shares", or guesses where the swings will wind up, makes no more sense that betting on the daily "Handle" (total amount bet at the betting windows) for a horse or dog-racing track.

I don't follow the pricing of Vix Shares a sold by Goldman, but I DID hear a blurb on the news about a week ago which said that GS had somehow jacked up the price of those shares to over three thousand dollars per share, and their scarcity is one of the things that started this sell-off.

Yours Truly went to a private high school in DeeCee, the Maret School, and as a Junior, my Annual Thesis (long term-paper, got A-minus on it) was about how Goldman Sachs created the Crash of 1929 by introducing a CHAIN of three investment banks so as to allow highly leveraged trading. By running your funds through this chain, you could buy on 10% margin, so 0.1% actual cash went into your stock purchases (ten percent of ten percent of ten percent). They did this AGAIN with Derivatives trading in 2009, and now they have their Vix Bank (CBOE) trying it again, right on the heels of messing with the cryptocurrencies, which RAISED the Vix and helped them make their Vix shares so expensive. It's all in here.

If the entire brain trust of Goldman Sachs were frog-marched off to Gitmo tomorrow, first, they would be in the right place, and second, that would leave fiscal-advisor vacancies on the Trump Team, another benefit, because we can ALL do without the historic fiscal meddling of this cabal of bankers.

 

The Tax Bill

(Cross-posted from my Facebook page).

 

The Tax Bill is on my mind. It's really TWO tax bills, welded into one. This is a strange turn of events, historically. Read on.

 

The Tax bill has two major parts, Corporate Tax Relief and Personal Income Tax Reform. Those two parts are widely separated in their economic details, yet both are being written into one bill. Why is that?

 

The answer lies in the leftward surge of the Democratic Party. As of now (at least until HRC is jailed), the Democratic Party is more Marxist than American. We see that every day, where the primary purpose of Democrats seems to be to tear down this Nation rather than see to it's excellence. Consider the (D) view of the two parts of this Tax Bill: they might be able to swallow their bile and accept "Tax Relief for the Middle Class" (as long as it doesn't make the Free Shit Army have to pay taxes), but they will NEVER accept Corporate Tax Relief. The Ds are anti-capitalist to the max. Well, except for their own limousine liberals, that is.

 

By attaching despised Corporate Tax Relief to the acceptable Middle Class Tax Relief, the GOPe hopes that they can eke both by the Ds. That's the game plan.

 

It's a losing game plan, and the dollars prove it. Corporate Tax Relief is a huge negative to the Treasury, some say as much as $US1.25T/year. No way that passes muster. How to deal with that Deficit Hog? The easy answer is to increase taxes on the personal side, and THAT.WILL.BE.DONE.

 

The "Bracket Adjustments", the loss of the un-reimbursed Medical Deductions, the loss of the State/Local Tax Deduction and the loss of at least half the Mortgage Interest Deduction will RAISE taxes for the average middle class family, about $4K/yr in my case. This Tax Bill, as proposed, will HAMMER the middle class, probably kill off the current growth surge in the GDP.

 

It's a Bad Deal for us. Send this bill to the dustbin of Deep State FUBARS, quickly, my friends.

It's THURSDAY !

On Thursdays, this blog has a Tradition, listing the Thursday Thuds, those items of national interest, the owners of which have tried to make us believe are important, but they attract our attention ONLY by the huge thud-sound they make as they crash. Without further ado, here are the thuds:

• Trump thudded: he tweeted this morning: "The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don't get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!"  Of course, the so-called "freedom caucus" is a group of constitutional conservatives in Congress. Trump threatens them and by doing so, marginalized at least 30% of his own base. That's stupid, Mr. Trump. T.H.U.D.
• Congress thuds (again): "The "Russia hacked US Elections" bulltwaddle: now Congress puts in an Escape Strategy, telling We The Peeps how it will all wind up: more blather in committee, then some SECRET blather in committee, then we are done. Okay, Congress, WHAT about that process of secrecy will convince any of We The Peeps that any of this actually happened, and who would be at fault for it? Answer is NONE. T.H.U.D.
• Fox News thuds (again): Headline: "I.C.E. shames sanctuary cities", followed by a list of places where I.C.E. has issued deportation detainers which have been ignored. The failure here is the whole idea of "shaming". As I understand the PeeCee world, the very idea of using shame to accomplish a goal is supposed to be wrong, wrong, wrong. I.C.E. is not shaming anyone, it is just providing a list of which political jurisdictions ignore the Federal requests for local law enforcement to help them do their job. Fox, you leaned left again and your message is a T.H.U.D.
• Trump thuds again: This one is a missed opportunity, but it reveals a bad policy failure in the Trump White House. Trump has taken action to remove the Left's agenda item of restricting the supply of cheap power in the power grid. Doing that gave the Left, or would have given the Left if Hillaroon had been elected, a huge tool of control over the economy. Electric power turns the wheels of the economy. When there isn't enough, parts of the economy must beg for more and kiss Leftie ass to get it. THAT is the most important factor behind ending the War On Coal, but all Trump can blather about is "Holy" Jobs. Look, jobs are an important INDICATOR of the health of our economy, but restoring the FREEDOM in the economy is FAR more important. Tell us that, Mr. Trump, your current Jobs blather falls a little flat, and does so with a T.H.U.D.
• Trump thuds again, part trois: Mr. Trump, Obama and Kerry signed some sort of an accord in Paris last year to perpetuate the CLIMATE SCAM. This accord was never presented to the Senate to ratify, so it is NOT a "Treaty", just an Executive Order of Obama. Mr. Trump, RESCIND that turd, and while you're doing that, make it a personal habit whenever you mention Climate to include the word SCAM along with it. If you are pressured to suggest what the POLICY of the USA is towards "Climate Change", simply reply, "It's God's work, our job is to notice it and marvel at how He works" or something like that. Every time the Left mentions Climate (Scam), there is a YUGE opportunity to hammer them with the fraud aspects involved. You aren't doing that, Mr. Trump, so your Policy wonks have made a big T.H.U.D.

Okay then, a Quinella of Thuds, and the majority of them are from Mr. Trump's place. That should tell us all something.

Martial Law - Why it fails

• It is obvious that it is only a means to an end, killing the Constitution. Even the so-called "low information voters" will see that it is.
• For it to have ANY chance of acceptance, it would have to be announced by a leader with far more credibility than Obama. None such exist at the moment.
• For it to work, it would have to be accepted by the entire military. I would be surprised if it gets 20% acceptance in the ranks. There would be even less acceptance from the National Guard.
• Martial Law means using military force on US citizens. The dumbest and most dependent of them will fail to support it when their Free Shit ends.
• Martial Law means cutting off the people's ability to communicate with each other. Can you imagine the ill-will generated by no more Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Pokemon and all? The kiddies will be the first to rebel against it.
• Martial Law means introducing artificial shortages in food, fuel, power. That will NOT go over well at all. Can you imagine the yuppies in Seattle without their fancy coffee, or Portland without it's craft beers?
• Martial Law collapses the economy: cash flow tanks, no one pays taxes. Sure, the gov't can hide the effects for a while, they screw with all the money supply data now, but I am talking a DEPRESSION. International trade tanks, the dollar dies on the exchanges, etc. This is too big an economy for Saudi princes to keep afloat.
• While the US military is supposedly running the country, we WILL get attacked by most of our enemies. We will lose most of our overseas personnel quickly, and the shrunken military will not be able to replace them. We will have to fly a lot of white flags, especially in the Middle East.

Notice I didn't even discuss gun confiscation?

 

 

Take THAT, socialists, and THAT, and THAT!

Heh. I just filled up my anti-socialist Lexus LS Guzzlemobile with Premium, for which I paid the paltry price of $1.84/gallon with my Freddy's (Kroger) Fuel Rewards card. The discount was 60 cents, which made the pump price of the fuel $2.44, still decent for top-grade.

The wannabe-socialist President has definitely failed his base on THIS one.

Oh, and this tankful is for YOU too, yer Holiness hollowness.

Commerce lesson

Your blogger was on a fandamily picnic yesterday. After unloading the gear at the lovely Oak Grove area of Champoeg State Park, I was relaxing with a Shiner Octoberfest brew, just kicked back on the warm afternoon, watching the world circulate around me.

It occurred to me that none of my grandchildren had given me a hug yet. The excitement of a new place to play, or something. The light bulb went on... I fish in my jeans pocket and there is about $2 in change in there. I hail my oldest grandkid, and she comes over. I hold out the money, and her eyes light up (she's six, knows that money buys stuff). I asked her if she ever earned any money. Blank stare. Apparently, my crassly capitalist son does not use that form of rewards system. I explain that earning money involves performing some work or selling something. The concept of "sell" seemed to ring a bell with her. I said, "I have money to buy things, what do you have to sell?" She looks over at the picnic table I am seated near to. I said, "No, most of that stuff is mine already, and what isn't, is not yours to sell." She throws up her hands in frustration. I continue, "You have no THINGS to sell me, so how much is a hug worth." She hesitated, so I held up a quarter, and the light bulb went on for HER. Four bits and two hugs later, it was time for the next part of the lesson. "Do you know you can make money by selling something that is NOT part of you?" Vacant look and negative head-shake. I said, "Go get your brother, and tell him he can sell me a hug, too. When you bring him to sell me a hug, I will pay you a dime COMMISSION." Oops, "commission was to big a word. "Over-ride" was too much also. Too late, though, she skipped away to get her younger brother, and was instructing him as they walked back to my chair. He came up, climbed up in my lap (he is quite the climber at age four) and gave me a big hug. I paid him his hug-fee and his big sis her vig. This scene was repeated until I was out of change. How would YOU teach the concept of commerce? Believe me, you do NOT want to wait for the publick schule to do this.

Putin whipsaws the markets

Notice how Putin's words and non-words are whipsawing the world's stock exchanges? What do you bet that Russian oligarchs with advance notice are raking in the moolah in those markets? The markets have these derivative betting instruments which are perfect for making money from the planned volatility. If there was ever a reason to ban derivatives trading, Putin is showing us why we should enact a ban now.

S.O.P., Part One

No, not Standard Operating Procedures.

Save.Our.Pensions.

Okay, any of you who have trouble with keeping promises, leave now. Ditto anyone who believes that pensions are ANYTHING but deferred compensation. Ditto anyone who thinks that pensions and pensioners are one sided, for those folks forget that those pensioners ALLOWED their employers to USE employees' money for at least a quarter-century in most cases, money that those employers either invested to their profit or spent on improvements.

Now, with all of the prejudiced people gone (or driven underground to lurk!), let me address all of those who had the discipline to stick to a job long enough to get vested in a defined-benefit pension, and lived long enough to start collecting it.

An audience of maybe enough to fill a bridge table in the old-folks' home?

Pressing on.

I'll relate my case, because I'm a pensioner. My case is NOT typical, because I held down two careers, both offering defined-benefit pensions, and I completed both careers, so I am what is derisively known to many as a "double-dipper". Make that triple dipper, because I have lived and paid into Sociable Seguridad long enough to collect THAT as well.

(waits for the audible level of derision, apoplexy and just plain retching to subside)

First, let's look at my military pension: I am a retired USAF Reserve Major, and my pension is about $25K/year. While on Active Duty in the USAF, I fought in a foreign war, getting shot at in the unfriendly skies of Vietnam in I-Corps, the DMZ and on 20 occasions, over North Vietnam. I flew as a crew member in the ancient but honorable B-52D and later, the B-52H. Long days, physical danger, some hardship, but I stayed with my Reserve career and retired from it in 1995 with 22 years served, thereby earning a pension which I had to wait until 2003 to begin collecting.

Then there is my Public Service pension. Yes, I am one of those oft-reviled Oregon Public Employee Retirement System "hogs at the trough". We OPERS people seem to have targets on our backs, or so it would seem by the way our right to our defined-benefit pensions keeps getting eroded to pay for OTHER "hogs at the trough", namely the HUGE load that illegal aliens and their offspring put on our State, particularly our school systems (roughly 20% of the entire K-12 budget is provided for schooling the children of illegal immigrants who are not even legal to be in the country). 

Following the rules set down as State Law in my employment as a Patrol Deputy Sheriff for 25 years, I earned and paid into the OPERS system enough to retire with around $50K/year in OPERS pension. My pension's base level is 50%, but pension accrues on overtime pay, and I worked a lot of overtime (12,500 hours or so over my career), so I retired with 89% of my base salary, also equal to 67% of my Final Average Salary.

With Sociable Seguridad, according to my final annual statement, I had worked 47 years of full-time credit, but I didn't get the maximum because I elected to take my payments at age 62 instead of waiting until 65. SSA gives me about $18.7K/year, so I total $93.7 in deferred compensation per annum.

That's me. The gudwife had to retire medically 20 years ago, and her SSA is far less than mine, but taking it all together, we're comfortable enough, WHICH IS WHAT I INTENDED TO HAPPEN ALL ALONG!

Yes, Sweetpea, I did my retirement planning back when I was still in my teens, pushed in that direction by my wise father and mother, didn't YOU? Oh, I'm sorry you didn't, here, let me educate you with one simple parable. It is known as the Fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant.

Into the present.

Nowadays, defined-benefit pensions are rare, most "pensions" amount to nothing more than savings accounts which your employer may or may not contribute to, but 55 years ago, when I started working, defined-benefit pensions were the rule, and anything past casual day labor earned a pension. My reading tells me that in the Nation's struggle to pull out of the bad recession of the late 70's (the Carter Recession or "stag-flation" or whatever you want to call it), most companies started to cut down on pension contributions. Those companies with strong Unions and the States with their strong public-employee unions were the last employers to begin to chop up their defined-benefit pension systems. This was done in most cases by phasing new employees onto the new, more thrifty systems, and who can argue with that? Perfectly legal, and even moral, that.

Where it gets dicey is when employers start to cut back payments to those already retired and on payments from the older defined-benefit systems. This brings on the legal issue of "what does that contract really say", and that will all have to be decided by the courts, which of course, are led by judges with lots of conflicting interests (Oregon Appellate Judges are in OPERS, just as I am). Just recently, military retirees were told that their COLA payments ("inflation-proofing"*) were being cut by 1%, or over half. We OPERS retirees also had our COLA payments cut this year.

Oh well, the Judges will sort it all out. We're a Nation of Laws, right?

The thing that gravels my butt and motivated me to spend a couple of hours writing this morning was the moral issue here. What does it mean when our leaders can't keep their promises?

What it means is that if they can't keep their promises to pensioners, they will not keep them to their Nation insofar as the Constitution requires them to in other cases. The same mindset that trashes the pensioners trashes the entire Constitution, and then what do we have?

None dare call it Liberty anymore.

Note: In Part Two, we will look at the only thing that will save the present older generation, which the Dear Leaders and the youth seem hell-bent on tossing into the dustbin. That thing is civic activism, and it can be brought into action in time to affect next year's elections, and those of 2016 as well.

***************************************************

* today's COLA does little in the way of "inflation-proofing". The actual rate of inflation, with all goods and services included, is between 5% & 9%, depending on how honest the economist is. The present method of calculating inflation, disregarding the "volatile" elements of the economy as it does, is simply lying with statistics, nothing more.