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Femtosecond posted:What I've been hearing is that there's a staggering shortage of industrial land (and I posted about this a while back in the stock thread). Blackstone REITs (among others) have had great success in industrial/logistics facilities over the last decade. From what I understand, you're right--increasing demand for industrial land near city-centers is outpacing new supply. Speaking of which, I find this related chart very interesting: 
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Jun 8, 2023 23:32
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The collapse of auto ABS has been predicted for like half a decade now. I suppose eventually the bears will be right on it.
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Jul 6, 2023 14:24
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Hadlock posted:I have not historically been much of a bear but in one of the AI threads someone posted a $150,000 corvette z06 new in factory shipping wrap that went for $100,000 over sticker on Bring a Trailer (BaT). To me that feels a bit like tulip mania and the (beginning of?) the edge of a collapse. I know boomers are awash in paid off real estate wealth but come on Sure but like... there's a roughly zero percent chance that an auto loan written against that 'vette (if there was one, it seems pretty unlikely!) would end up securitized somewhere. To be clear: new and used car prices coming down? Definitely, it's happening right now. Auto asset backed securities blowing up? I have my doubts.
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Jul 6, 2023 21:45
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Just for reference, if anyone's looking for a comprehensive (but not perfect) overview of the '08 crisis and what led to it, it's worth your while to read the 2011 Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's report. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf For a taste, here was one of their conclusions regarding the ratings agencies (with supporting material in the main text): FCIC posted:The Commission concludes that the credit rating agencies abysmally failed in their central mission to provide quality ratings on securities for the benefit of investors. They did not heed many warning signs indicating significant problems in the housing and mortgage sector. Moody’s, the Commission’s case study in this area, continued issuing ratings on mortgage-related securities, using its outdated analytical models, rather than making the necessary adjustments. The business model under which firms issuing securities paid for their ratings seriously undermined the quality and integrity of those ratings; the rating agencies placed market share and profit considerations above the quality and integrity of their ratings.
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Jul 10, 2023 21:11
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bob dobbs is dead posted:1. huge drought means agricultural production went and died Forgive me for being somewhat off-topic, but I really like the post/avatar synergy here.
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Aug 8, 2023 23:06
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Bremen posted:I took part in a big discussion of diet and weight loss a month or two ago and Ozempic came up a lot. I have to admit I wondered what the manufacturer's stock price was doing because a common mention was it's used as a diabetes drug, so many insurance companies won't cover it for weight loss, but some people were still paying like a thousand dollars cash a month for it. That kinda seems like the holy grail of modern pharmaceutical companies to me. Americans are rich and fat, the synergy! Shares are up nearly 100% this year, and have quadrupled over the past five years: 
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Oct 11, 2023 19:11
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Hadlock posted:I hadn't heard of this. Looks like it's an injection, but a daily pill form was recently put on the market this year (Rybelsus) and also costs about $1000/mo. Comparing that to birth control sounds about right There was an excellent article I read a few weeks back about the history of semiglutide--it was developed as a diabetes treatment, the anti-obesity part of it started as an off-label use--but I can't seem to find it now. 
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Oct 12, 2023 01:38
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DNK posted:
Fed funds really isn't the best comparison--traditionally you look at mortgages versus the 10-year. Spreads there are actually pretty high right now. The Richmond Fed has an article about it from a few months ago: https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_brief/2023/eb_23-27
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Oct 16, 2023 18:52
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According to Mortgage News Daily--no article as of yet, just the numbers--average 30-year mortgage rates hit 8.0% today. https://www.mortgagenewsdaily.com/mortgage-rates I cannot imagine current housing prices staying at these levels with these rates. Something's gotta give... (edited because this post was previously just a tweet) Agronox fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Oct 18, 2023 |
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Oct 18, 2023 18:23
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Leperflesh posted:I can easily imagine it, and in fact I can imagine prices continuing to rise, because that's what usually happens: I see two things weighing against this: 1. Housing affordability is the worst it's been right now since the last bubble. Take a look at this, from the Atlanta Fed, which takes into consideration incomes, mortgage rates, and housing prices:  2. We're already seeing volumes dropping off, and with rates up another quarter point since the below I'd expect it to get worse: Mortgage Bankers Association posted:Mortgage applications decreased 6.9 percent from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending October 13, 2023. Anyway, just something to think about. If either of us remember, let's come back to this in two years or so to see who was right.
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Oct 18, 2023 20:41
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The US economy grew at a torrid pace last quarter:Washington Post posted:The U.S. economy grew by an annual rate of 4.9 percent in the third quarter, the strongest pace since 2021, as spending — by families, businesses and the government — accelerated, even in the face of fast-rising borrowing costs.
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Oct 26, 2023 15:47
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hypnophant posted:Unless PCE is down to 2 tomorrow, there will certainly be another hike next week, and good odds of another in December. The Fed signaled it in September and they have not yet failed to follow through. For what it's worth, the futures have an implied 98% odds of no hike. That seems the right call to me, anyway--long rates going up as they have recently have done a whole hell of a lot of tightening work.
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Oct 26, 2023 16:45
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Hadlock posted:Also apparently hardly any high school kids have jobs anymore. In high school 20+ years ago everyone had one job, and if you had a big family often you had two jobs, or at least mowed lawns on the side Here are those two data series since: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000012 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300012 Which is kind of interesting in that it implies that there wasn't a huge change in teenage behavior compared to say, the early 2000s, just that the post-GFC recovery was freaking awful. In 2021 if you were a late teen looking for a job you'd have to literally go back to the 1950's to find a better environment.
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Oct 27, 2023 01:03
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As an interested observer, could you clarify what you're actually arguing about? I don't mean that to be snarky--I legitimately can't tell what the point of contention is in this conversation.
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Oct 28, 2023 18:45
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Thank you!
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Oct 29, 2023 19:38
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This is interesting:WSJ posted:Jury Finds Realtors Conspired to Keep Commissions High, Awards Nearly $1.8 Billion in Damages It always surprised me how well real estate agents have been able to protect that 6%. Maybe there's a crack in the dam.
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Oct 31, 2023 20:29
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Bright Bart posted:My apologies if I'm barging into a conversation, but something has been on my mind for years. I am just re-reading Yuval Noah Harari and he is hardly the only one sounding the alarm that all jobs including artists and architects and game designers and sex workers and politicians might be out of jobs within a generation. And that "robot technician" will not replace even some of these jobs as is oddly suggested by some (why would they??). Well I guess it's worth noting a sci-fi short story that gets into the exactly the dilemma you foresee, Manna. It's twenty years old and not wonderfully written but I found it thought-provoking at the time. But really, there isn't and probably never will be a shortage of poo poo that needs to get done in this country, whether that's building things or performing services or whatever. You may not get to pick and choose your ideal job, but most people can't do that already. If technological revolution results in massive involuntary unemployment, that's a failure of politics, not technology.
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Nov 11, 2023 18:28
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Inflation coming in pretty cool: Headline CPI up 0.0% Core up 0.2%
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Nov 14, 2023 15:10
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Bar Ran Dun posted:I’ll have to play with that Fed page when I’m at a computer to see if I can get it to break out by income percentile. There was an EPI study that contained this chart (which unfortunately stops at the end of 2022, but gets you some interesting info):  It seems at least anecdotally reasonable. I keep in touch with some people in those lower percentiles and the hot labor market has been boosting wages a lot, though more from quitting and doing something better than staying where you are and getting 5% or whatever.
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Nov 28, 2023 01:46
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quote is not edit
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Nov 28, 2023 01:47
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Cyrano4747 posted:When we moved there all three of the grocery stores with about 30 minutes of the house were owned by, two families, who slso had a lock on drug stores and iirc most of the gas stations. My mom was loving flabbergasted when she found out a loaf of generic whole wheat bread cost $2. Keep in mind this is around 1992 or so. Weird coincidence that you say this... After Charlie Munger died a few days ago, somebody sent me a commencement speech he made in 1995. He made exactly the point you make here: don't romanticize the local merchants, on the whole, net-net, Walmart ended up being a big positive for a lot of places.
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Dec 1, 2023 20:11
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Leperflesh posted:I think you are a domain expert but are really struggling to present a coherent, clear argument for why we see inflation falling off without an loss of jobs. I'm kind of shocked no one has mentioned "productivity gains" in the last few pages, because that would be the easiest way to square that circle. Problem is, it's hard enough to measure it well in the US (particularly since the pandemic threw a lot of stats out of whack) and totally impossible in, for instance, China.
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Dec 31, 2023 23:54
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Boris Galerkin posted:It does seem like they ought to go after Tim Apple et al who famously get paid “$1/year” but we all know that’s not true. Cook has been drawing a multi-miilion dollar salary for many years.  And, yeah, the majority of his pay package is actually those stock options, but he gets taxed on them, so...?
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Jan 10, 2024 15:23
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hypnophant posted:i think it's also worth pointing out that the BLS is huge and employs a ton of trained econometricians and statisticians whose job is to think about these problems all day. you're not going to do better as a guy with a laptop, you're not even going to do better as an independent academic with a lab and some grad students. you don't have nearly the resources. Traveller, my statistics are too strong for you. You cannot handle my statistics.
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Mar 4, 2024 22:48
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Leperflesh posted:I forgot they still track tobacco lol The price of Zyn is too drat high! 
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Mar 12, 2024 22:51
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The FT's reporting is sort of vague about this, but there are apparently reports that the admin might try to block the buyout of US Steel by Nippon Steel. https://www.ft.com/content/7ff471b1-a3c6-4d3d-bc45-eb482f81d74d I guess the optics of the Japanese buying one of the companies who helped supply the war effort during WW2 doesn't look great, but that was a long time ago.
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Mar 13, 2024 19:01
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It's probably inevitable that the US steel industry slowly divests from their BOFs anyway. Their emissions are vastly higher than EAFs and EAFs are more flexible. US Steel is getting a large modern EAF online down in Arkansas. It's likely to be their crown jewel asset. The facility cost like $3b to build and with today's construction prices its cost to replace would be a lot more. I suspect that's why Nippon was really interested in the first place.
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Mar 13, 2024 23:32
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hypnophant posted:what's the japanese case for buying US Steel? it seems like they were willing to pay a pretty large premium over the other offers. Is US Steel complementary to their production methods? Is there some benefit to having a plant on US soil? US Steel's proxy for the shareholder vote tips us as to what Nippon Steel was most interested in early on: US Steel DEF14a posted:On October 5, 2023, following discussions between representatives of Barclays and Goldman Sachs and NSC’s financial advisor, based on feedback from the Board of Directors, NSC submitted a written, non-binding indication of interest to acquire USS’s Mini Mill segment and its Keetac mining operations for an enterprise value of $9.2 billion or, in the alternative, to acquire all of the outstanding shares of USS common stock for consideration of $41.40 per share in cash. That'd be the Big River (mini mill) facility I mentioned earlier and the iron ore mines (Keetac). Come to think of it, that also points to a possible compromise, if the politics gets too heated; NSC buys Big River (which is non-union, and not in a swing state) and Keetac, and a rump US Steel keeps those union-contracted basic oxygen furnaces. I don't know if that rump US Steel would do well though. Big River was the future.
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Mar 15, 2024 02:41
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Hadlock posted:Wrapping back around to the Nippon steel purchase conversation, if the US only has two blast furnaces for steel, would a strike there be crippling to a war effort? Detroit is a long ways from any nearby enemies but if steel production (or, pick your favorite defense industry feed stock) was at risk would that temper the desire to meddle in affairs elsewhere Well just for clarity’s sake: there are two blast furnace operators, but there are more than two blast furnaces (though, at this point, probably less than two dozen). The majority of American steelmaking is via EAF, and most of those are non-union, smaller, and better distributed throughout the country. No opinion on potential wartime strikes. I don’t even know if they’d be legal. (edit: lol just realized you meant drone strikes, not labor strikes) Agronox fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 17:47
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I guess this is  but the trick to cheap fast food these days is to always use the apps and, I cannot stress this enough, always pick it up yourself.The McD app is great for getting free McMuffins, fries, and coffee. Right now over at Wendy's there's an NCAA promotion where you can get a $2 Dave's Double while the tournament is going on, and that's a fantastic burger for the price. Taco Bell has $5 or $6 value boxes that you can only order through the app. And so on... Lockback posted:I remember when small mom and pops could give you two slices of pizza and a fountain drink for under $5. That disappeared well before COVID and I feel like there was just a timer on when fast food would finally abandon that layer. Even as late as early 2022 there were still $1 slice joints in the heart of Manhattan. (Maybe they're still around, I haven't been to the city much since.)
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Mar 30, 2024 12:56
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Hadlock posted:1. Could not find this blog post/commentary on their website Yeah, that’s propaganda. I guarantee they know better, they’re just trying to score political points. There’s an actual statistic that gets at what he’s pretending to care about, prime age empop ratio. (You need to control for age because otherwise “boomers are retiring” starts to look like “holy poo poo everyone is losing their jobs”) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 Take a look at the five or ten year chart.
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Apr 8, 2024 22:40
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The Maestro! I'm shocked that he's still alive
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Apr 13, 2024 21:16
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I haven’t seen the stats lately, but Fed remittances to the US Treasury dried up as well. It used to be over $50b a year.
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Apr 16, 2024 21:02
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Hadlock posted:So is small retail dead? I think you might be overgeneralizing from local conditions. Strip mall vacancies are very low and so far as I know have been a pretty bright spot lately for CRE overall.
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Apr 17, 2024 14:14
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From the perspective of the building as a whole it can make perfectly good sense to accept some vacancies versus lowering lease costs… some easy hypotheticals: 1. An upscale mall might keep a storefront vacant if the only alternative is, say, a 99 cent store, because your other tenants don’t want to be situated next to one and upscale customers don’t want to be around them either. 2. Apartments over retail has to be pretty careful with the retail tenants for similar reasons. Vacancies might be better for overall revenues versus renting to CASH4GOLD and weed dispensaries and scaring off your apartment tenants. 3. You might also find it more effective to have a few vacancies versus cutting your rents and then facing everyone who renews their leases wanting those lower rents as well. Obviously a lot of this stuff is very fact- and location-dependent and maybe there are some retail vacancies caused through sloth or stupidity or whatever… but I doubt it’s a huge deal.
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Apr 18, 2024 20:18
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Femtosecond posted:Probably one of the most significant causes is No One Has Any Money which is filtering down into less discretionary spending, thus killing retail and restaurants. I do have to stop you right there. People have shitloads of money. Barring the pandemic stimuli it's never been higher! 
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Apr 19, 2024 21:10
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Cyrano4747 posted:If the economy is doing great but only a fraction at the top (even if it's a relatively large fraction like the upper quartile - you don't really have to just be talking about the 1% here) then yeah, a poo poo ton of people are going to look at things like rising prices of daily goods and their stagnating wage and not really feel like the economy is going great. Wall Street doing great doesn't matter if you don't have any investments. However, this is probably the first economic expansion in my life where income gains are accruing more to the lower-wage workers than the higher:  (Note, these are inflation-adjusted, so the guys at the top aren't getting pay cuts, they're just not necessarily keeping up with inflation.) Anecdotally at least this makes sense. I know some people who went from minimum wage plus a bit pre-pandemic to 2-3 times that now. And honestly I agree with the guy up thread that you shouldn't watch what people say, but what they do. Revealed preference shows that people have a lot of money, and they're very happy spending it.
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Apr 20, 2024 21:21
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Baddog posted:All the while letting Kroger's buy Albertsons almost untouched. The FTC sued to block this one as well.
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Apr 24, 2024 23:32
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Americans everywhere are demanding BEV El Caminos Wait, just me?
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May 17, 2024 15:49
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:my initial impression listening to the interview, which has been bolstered by reading the transcript, is that the essential problem michael is seeing is not so much an inherent function of passive or index investing, but that the last 40 years and the last decade especially have been a lesson that there is no alternative to equities for significant long term real returns, especially in comparison to the flatlining real value of your lifetime human capital. the regulatory and general philosophical shifts of the 70's and 80's which put a pointed emphasis on shareholder value over both management and labor, combined with increased access to the market, simultaneously allowed and forced everyone to become shareholders to an extent not previously seen This was from a few weeks ago but good post. I've thought about this before--equities having a sort of permanent weekly inflow that they didn't in decades past--but I'm not sure what you do with that. I agree with you that I don't think passive funds are a big problem. If they ever actually become one it just incentivizes active management to "solve" it.
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May 19, 2024 22:03
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