Housing prices recover slowly from bottoms.

don't worry high speed rail on the way...shuttle around all those unemployed...

Todays bargain is tomorrows financial disaster.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) - When it comes to the $787 billion in federal stimulus money flowing from Washington to the states, it will cost money to spend money.
Nebraska's governor's office told lawmakers it expects to spend more than $1.2 million over two years to oversee disbursement of about $1.5 billion Nebraska stands to receive in federal stimulus funds.
Other states are in similar straits. But Washington - at least for now - isn't handing out money for states to hire auditors and accountants, and the stimulus law requires stringent reporting from states to ensure transparency and curb abuses.
"I don't really have a good solution of where to come up with the money," the Nebraska governor's chief of staff, Larry Bare, told lawmakers this week on the Appropriations Committee. Not doing so isn't an option: "We ignore doing a good job of that at our own peril," Bare said.
Under the law, if states miss a deadline or don't spend the money fast enough, they lose the cash. Vice President Joe Biden warned last month that if states misspend the money, "don't look for any help from the federal government for a long while."
But states across the country are asking how they're supposed to oversee the disbursement of billions of dollars intended to boost the economy with no budget to do so. At a conference last month at the White House, state officials asked whether they should use templates for reporting, and if there's any way of centralizing the information among states.
The White House said help is on its way, and it is looking at ways for states to get more money more quickly for oversight.
"The administration has been working with state officials to tackle the oversight challenges that they are facing," said Tom Gavin, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget. "We want to states to have the resources and the flexibility - on top of what is already in place - to make sure that Recovery Act funds are invested smartly to create jobs today and build a foundation for the country's long-term economic growth."
As with all federal money distributed to states, government rules allow states to allocate a portion for administrative costs. But states are complaining that the money isn't enough to cover the cost of increased oversight and reporting obligations, and that it may arrive too slowly to cover expenses they need to pay immediately.
In South Carolina, staffers are working nights and weekends.
"We're doing it on the cheap because we really don't have a choice," said Richard Eckstrom, South Carolina's comptroller general. Eckstrom is head of a task force that will set up a state system to track how federal stimulus money is used.
"We're not being paid to do it," Eckstrom said. "We're doing it with existing staff. We're doing it with existing technology."
In Colorado, state officials have complained they're trying to make stimulus spending transparent but haven't been given money for a Web site or publicist.
Don Elliman, Colorado's economic development director who also chairs a volunteer oversight panel set up to audit Colorado's spending, called sorting through the stimulus particulars "a major time suck."
"We're doing the best we can," he said. A spokesman for Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter says Colorado officials have no estimate how much they'll spend administering stimulus spending.
In Nebraska, coordination costs include salaries for three new staff members: two accountants, an information officer and a budget analyst.
Every state is moving through the same process at the same time, said Todd Haggerty, research analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures, so if one state solves a problem, another state could benefit.
But with new directions coming daily from Washington, "it's definitely a moving target," Haggerty said.
Meanwhile, Nebraska, like many other states, faces a budget shortfall, and some lawmakers are skeptical of the high cost.
"There's no rubber stamp on this," said state Sen. Heath Mello of Omaha. "We're going to have to ask more questions and they're going to have to provide more information as we go down the road."
Other lawmakers wonder if the state is being realistic. But they have different concerns about the cost of distributing all the stimulus money.
"The amount of money coming is overwhelming," said Sen. John Harms of Scottsbluff. "Is this enough?"

San Ramon getting hit know of a couple of people ready to foreclose by July on 900k mortgages.

Here come the write ups!

SRS is digging a DEEP hole now !!

shorts beware. goog today. C/GE tomorrow. BAC Monday

No widespread price reductions in southern Marin. Still hear talk of insulation from the declines elsewhere.

Remember when in December/January we were holding the "bottom" of 9000 for about a month?

the Kondratieff Cycle is real, it's in its "winter" phase, and the outlook for the next several years as a grim as it gets. "We are in a 15-year deflationary depression that will be worse than 1929-32," he warned. There will be a collapse in real estate prices - as much as two-thirds in the U.S. World trade will collapse. Government revenues will dry up and they will be unable to provide needed services. Pension plans will fail. The Dow will bottom out at around 1,000. Feel depressed yet?

The only answer, the ex-military officer intoned, is to buy gold, just as people did in a massive way during the Great Depression. Don't say you weren't warned!
--Ian Gordon

Wow! sign me up for a 30 year mortgage and a 7 year car loan too. I know my cash flow will remain steady and uninterrupted throughout this cycle! We don't have depressions in the USA anymore. And certainly not bad ones. Plus the pain from September to this year's April was as bad as it gets. Those gloom'n'doomers are just nutjobs.

So World War III is going to be Civil War II.

Rick Perry = Jeff Davis and Philippe Pétain rolled into one.

When was the 1st time any of you heard of the Red State-Blue State gig?

It's as if they set us up for a Civil War, by giving us identifying labels.

My guess is house prices bottom out at somewhere around the early '80s prices. Can't say if the stock market will do the same. Wonder what will happen to salaries?

So what's the market all pumped up about today?

There does seem to be a pattern where you should by at open and sell at the close:

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=SSO#chart1:symbol=sso;range=5d;indica...

I hate the tease - when I read these headlines, I'm curious about the actual Zip Code $/sqfts were someone objectively might want to live, as opposed to the 200K sales in places like Richmond.

"So what's the market all pumped up about today?"

shorts climbing on top of each other, egged on by flippers that love to goose them. that's about it. GOOG and JPM aren't worth 13 billion bucks in the long term, much less 130 billion. but that has nothing to do with short-term mechanics.

bgates wrote on Thu, 04/16/2009 - 12:01pm.
"So World War III is going to be Civil War II."
Are you kidding? I wouldn't even throw a pebble, much less pick up a gun, to keep TX in the union. If anything, I'd rather throw a bake sale to encourage them.

I don't understand why everyone assumes there has to be violence associated with this "sucede from union" topic. Based upon the serious polarization between the left and right, why don't we just agree to "part ways" without the bloodshed. It's the perfect solution. The country can be peacefully split. The liberals can live in a social utopia of big government, big taxes, and big intrusion in one's life. The conservatives can live in sort of a "Darwinian survival of the fittest" freedom utopia. No one needs to kill or be killed.

Reading the previous paragraph, I've noticed something quite ironic. Liberals who will fight to the death for the questionable theories of Darwin, want nothing to do with living that way. On the other hand, conservatives, who typically feel intelligent design to be a superior explanation, want to live as Darwinians. Go figure.

Blackhalo, do you have a working link re: the NAFTA superhighway? I-35?

Muricains have been conditioned to short downdraft, v-shaped recovery economic episodes and therefore (not wanting to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow) not wanting to miss that next great speculative updraft are going to go diving in hard to distressed real estate.

Problem is the theory of relativity. Price relativity. What is distressed today and a bargain is horridly bloated and overpriced in morrowyear's terms.

Like drunks who have survived periodic episodes where their body let them down, but rose on the morrow to imbibe again.

The day of reckoning like liver failure surprises, devastates, eventually kills the optimist.

"So if Liberals fear guns and don't have many and the conservatives do have lots of guns, who would win a civil war of the left against the right?"

The one with the most money will be the winner. They are the ones that can afford to hire the mercinaries!

Median price is a flawed measure - but it is the least bad of the widely available measures. If you are relying on such data be sure you understand the weaknesses, and can adjust for them.

I find that the most reliabe measure is to use the "going rate" market price levels in a neighborhood that I know well. In other words, the price I would have to pay to buy the same amount of housing in that neighborhood. This eliminates the changing mix issue.