Thursday, September 26, 2019

THE REAL ECONOMY - AMERICA DROWNS IN DEBT - REAL ESTATE IS ABOUT TO COLLAPSE

IF THE ECONOMY IS REALLY THAT GOOD, WHY ARE PEOPLE CHARGING IT UP AND NOT PAYING CASH?

 

"But other counties saw price retreats: median prices for existing homes dropped 8.1 percent in Santa Clara to $1.13 million, and fell 4.2 percent in Alameda to $862,000."

Credit card debt has reached $868 billion in the United States, and delinquencies are on the rise, the report note

 

Amid recession fears, almost half of Americans have anxiety over debt

One fifth of adults feel sick about money they owe

By KAREN D'SOUZA | kdsouza@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED:  | UPDATED: 
Being buried by mountains of debt can make you feel sick. Forty five percent of Americans said that their debt makes them feel anxious at least once a month, according to Northwestern Mutual’s 2019 Planning and Progress Study, and 20 percent said it makes them physically ill at least once a month.
Amid mounting fears of recession, more people are grappling with the physical and mental toll caused by financial stress. The study also showed that 15 percent of Americans think they will be in debt for the rest of their lives and 35 percent feel guilty about debt they are carrying. Adults now shoulder an average of $29,800 in personal debt, the report showed. It should be noted that there has been an improvement over last year’s debt loads, which reached the crushing level of $38,000 in personal debt, but experts are still ringing the alarm bell.
“The road to financial security is long, even in the best of circumstances,” Emily Holbrook, senior director of planning at Northwestern Mutual, said in a release. “By carrying high levels of personal debt that road gets even longer, often requiring all kinds of detours and other twists and turns. The fact that there’s been some year-over-year improvement in debt levels is good, but the numbers still remain worryingly high.”
The generation with the most reported personal debt was Gen X, citing personal debt at $36,000. Baby Boomers chalked up $28,600 while millennials tallied up $27,900 in debt. Gen Z had a mere $14,700.
This data tracks with recent reports from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York which show that consumer debt is now well above where it was during the last housing crisis. The leading sources of debt are mortgages and credit cards, according to the Fed. Car loans and student loans also play a role.
“Our data, along with national numbers, show that people continue to struggle with finding the right balance between spending now versus saving for later,” said Holbrook. “But it’s important to understand the impact that spiraling debt can have on a financial plan. There are steps people can take to get control of their debt. It might start with loan consolidation and a budget, then move to a longer-term plan that includes guardrails to help people stay on track. The most important part is to take action. It’s often those first few steps that can be the hardest and most important.”
Credit card debt has reached $868 billion in the United States, and delinquencies are on the rise, the report note


Report: California’s Middle-


Class Wages Rise by 1 


Percent in 40 Years

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
3 Sep 2019172
6:24

Middle-class wages in progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.

“Earnings for California’s workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have generally declined or stagnated for decades,” says the report, titled “California’s Workers Are Increasingly Locked Out of the State’s Prosperity.” The report continued:
In 2018, the median hourly earnings for workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1% higher than in 1979, after adjusting for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars) (Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for low-wage workers, those at the 10th percentile, increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in 1979 to $11.12 in 2018.
The report admits that the state’s progressive economy is delivering more to investors and less to wage-earners. “Since 2001, the share of state private-sector [annual new income] that has gone to worker compensation has fallen by 5.6 percentage points — from 52.9% to 47.3%.”
In 2016, California’s Gross Domestic Product was $2.6 trillion, so the 5.6 percent drop shifted $146 billion away from wages. That is roughly $3,625 per person in 2016.
The report notes that wages finally exceeded 1979 levels around 2017, and it splits the credit between the Democrats’ minimum-wage boosts and President Donald Trump’s go-go economy.
The 40 years of flat wages are partly hidden by a wave of new products and services. They include almost-free entertainment and information on the Internet, cheap imported coffee in supermarkets, and reliable, low-pollution autos in garages.
But the impact of California’s flat wages is made worse by California’s rising housing costs, the report says, even though it also ignores the rent-spiking impact of the establishment’s pro-immigration policies:
 In just the last decade alone, the increase in the typical household’s rent far outpaced the rise in the typical full-time worker’s annual earnings, suggesting that working families and individuals are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. In fact, the basic cost of living in many parts of the state is more than many single individuals or families can expect to earn, even if all adults are working full-time.
Specifically, inflation-adjusted median household rent rose by 16% between 2006 and 2017, while inflation-adjusted median annual earnings for individuals working at least 35 hours per week and 50 weeks per year rose by just 2%, according to a Budget Center analysis of US Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.
The wage and housing problems are made worse — especially for families — by the loss of employment benefits as companies and investors spike stock prices by cutting costs. The report says:
Many workers are being paid little more today than workers were in 1979 even as worker productivity has risen. Fewer employees have access to retirement plans sponsored by their employers, leaving individual workers on their own to stretch limited dollars and resources to plan how they’ll spend their later years affording the high cost of living and health care in California. And as union representation has declined, most workers today cannot negotiate collectively for better working conditions, higher pay, and benefits, such as retirement and health care, like their parents and grandparents did. On top of all this, workers who take on contingent and independent work (often referred to as “gig work”), which in many cases appears to be motivated by the need to supplement their primary job or fill gaps in their employment, are rarely granted the same rights and legal protections as traditional employees.
The center’s report tries to blame the four-decade stretch of flat wages on the declining clout of unions. But unions’ decline was impacted by the bipartisan elites’ policy of mass-migration and imposed diversity.
In 2018, Breitbart reported how Progressives for Immigration Reform interviewed Blaine Taylor, a union carpenter, about the economic impact of migration:
TAYLOR: If I hired a framer to do a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was the minimum for a framing contractor, a good carpenter. For a helper, it was about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about $45 an hour. That was the going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically got $25 an hour.
Now, the average wage in Los Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099, which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Diversity also damaged the unions by shredding California’s civic solidarity. In 2007, the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center posted a report with the title “Latino Gang Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing Blacks.” In the same year, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times described another murder by Latino gangs as “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”
The center’s board members include the executive director of the state’s SEIU union, a professor from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the research director at the “Program for Environmental and Regional Equity” at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Outside California, President Donald Trump’s low-immigration policies are pressuring employers to raise Americans’ wages in a hot economy. The Wall Street Journal reportedAugust 29:
Overall, median weekly earnings rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same quarter in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between the ages of 25 and 34, that increase was 7.6%.


The New York Times laments that reduced immigration does force wages upwards and also does force companies to buy labor-saving, wage-boosting machinery. Instead, NYT prioritizes "ideas about America’s identity and culture.” http://bit.ly/2Zp2u2J 

NYT Admits Fewer Immigrants Means Higher Wages, More Labor-Saving Machines



.
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.S

THE INVITED INVADING HORDES: IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED!
"In the decade following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic hardship not seen since the 1930s."

"Inequality has reached unprecedented levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net worth of the poorest half of the US population."

Warren's core insight was fascinating: She argued that massive expansion of the labor force had actually created more stressful living and driven down median wages. BEN SHAPIRO

 

BLOG…. SO, WHAT DOES LA RAZA WARREN THINK WILL HAPPEN WHEN SHE HANDS 40 MILLION LOOTING MEXCIANS AMNESTY SO THEY CAN BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY???

 

How the Quest For Power Corrupted Elizabeth Warren

I first met Elizabeth Warren when she was a professor at Harvard Law School, in 2004. She was fresh off the publication of her bestselling book, "The Two-Income Trap." There's no doubt she was politically liberal -- our only face-to-face meeting involved a recruitment visit at the W Hotel in Los Angeles, where she immediately made some sort of disparaging remark about Rush Limbaugh -- but at the time, Warren was making waves for her iconoclastic views. She wasn't a doctrinaire leftist, spewing Big Government nostrums. She was a creative thinker.
That creative thinking is obvious in "The Two-Income Trap," which discusses the rising number of bankruptcies among middle-class parents, particularly women with children. The book posits that women entered the workforce figuring that by doing so, they could have double household income. But so many women entered the workforce that they actually inflated prices for basic goods like housing, thus driving debt skyward and leading to bankruptcies for two-income families. The book argued that families with one income might actually be better off, since families with two incomes spent nearly the full combined income and then fell behind if one spouse lost a job. Families with one income, by contrast, spent to the limit for one income, and if a spouse was fired, the unemployed spouse would then look for work to replace that single income.
Warren's core insight was fascinating: She argued that massive expansion of the labor force had actually created more stressful living and driven down median wages. But her policy recommendations were even more fascinating. She explicitly argued against "more government regulation of the housing market," slamming "complex regulations," since they "might actually worsen the situation by diminishing the incentive to build new houses or improve older ones." Instead, she argued in favor of school choice, since pressure on housing prices came largely from families seeking to escape badly run government school districts: "A well-designed voucher program would fit the bill neatly."
Her heterodox policy proposals didn't stop there. She refused to "join the chorus calling for taxpayer-funded day care" on its own, calling it a "sacred cow." At the very least, she suggested that "government-subsidized day care would add one more indirect pressure on mothers to join the workforce." She instead sought a more comprehensive educational solution that would include "tax credits for stay-at-home parents."
She ardently opposed additional taxpayer subsidization of college loans, too, or more taxpayer spending on higher education directly. Instead, she called for a tuition freeze from state schools. She recommended tax incentives for families to save rather than spend. She opposed radical solutions wholesale: "We haven't suggested a complete overhaul of the tax structure, and we haven't demanded that businesses cease and desist from ever closing another plant or firing another worker. Nor have we suggested that the United States should build a quasi-socialist safety net to rival the European model."
So, what happened to Warren?
Power.
The other half of iconoclastic Warren was typical progressive, anti-financial industry Warren. In "The Two-Income Trap," she proposes reinstating state usury laws, cutting off access to payday lenders and heavily regulating the banking industry -- all in the name of protecting Americans from themselves. While her position castigating the credit industry for deliberate obfuscation of clients was praiseworthy, her quest to "protect consumers" quickly morphed into a quest to create the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau -- an independent agency without any serious checks or balances. But despite her best efforts, she never became head of the CFPB, failing to woo Republican senators. The result: an emboldened Warren who saw her popularity as tied to her Big Government agenda. No more reaching across the aisle; no more iconoclastic policies. Instead, she would be Ralph Nader II, with a feminist narrative to boot.
And so, she's gaining ground in the 2020 presidential race as a Bernie Sanders knockoff. Ironically, her great failing could be her lack of moderation -- the moderation she abandoned in her quest for progressive power. If Elizabeth Warren circa 2003 were running, she'd be the odds-on favorite for president. But Warren circa 2019 would hate Warren circa 2003.
Ben Shapiro, 35, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of "The Ben Shapiro Show" and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is the author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller "The Right Side Of History." He lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles.

Munro: Cornell Study Shows Stagnant Wages Hurting Marriage in U.S.

Getty Images
 6 Sep 2019334
4:14

Fewer women get married when fewer men earn a decent salary in an unstable economy, says a study from Cornell University.

“Most American women hope to marry but current shortages of marriageable men—men with a stable job and a good income—make this increasingly difficult, especially in the current gig economy of unstable low-paying service jobs,” said lead author Daniel Lichter, a professor at Cornell University. He continued:
Marriage is still based on love, but it also is fundamentally an economic transaction. Many young men today have little to bring to the marriage bargain, especially as young women’s educational levels on average now exceed their male suitors.
The study looked at wages and marriage rates from 2008 to 2017, and concluded that “promoting good jobs may ultimately be the best marriage promotion policy,” says the study, which is titled “Mismatches in the Marriage Market,” and was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family.
The study is useful for the populist wing of the GOP, because it shows that rising wages for men in President Donald Trump’s low-immigration economy is good for women’s romantic aspirations and marriage rates. Other data shows that married people — especially women — are far more likely to vote GOP than single people.
Correspondingly, the bad news about wages and marriage is good news for the Democratic Party, which will get extra votes from women if federal policies continue to suppress wages for American men.
The study did not try to show how marriage rates have been impacted by the various federal policies which have flatlined men’s wages for 40 years.
For example, the federal policy of flooding the labor market with immigrants has flatlined wages nationwide for at least two decades. Also, President Barack Obama’s failure to curb opioids — and his reluctance to favor American workers over ‘DACA’ illegals — helped to push millions of Americans out of the workforce and many into their graves.
The Cornell study validated conservatives’ view that women are different from men, and prefer to marry men who earn a higher wage or salary. The press statement said:
The study’s authors developed estimates of the sociodemographic characteristics of unmarried women’s potential spouses who resemble the husbands of otherwise comparable married women. These estimates were compared with the actual distribution of unmarried men at the national, state, and local levels.
Women’s potential husbands had an average income that was about 58% higher than the actual unmarried men currently available to unmarried women. They also were 30% more likely to be employed and 19% more likely to have a college degree.
Middle-class women have the best chance of finding a man who earns more money, the study says.
Low-income women live among men with very little income, partly because they are in jail or are suffering from drugs. And the many women who earn above $40,000 a year face intense competition for the relatively fewer number of men who make more than $65,000 a year.
This shortage of prosperous men means that many high-income women must marry down, the study said. “Women may instead ‘settle’ for a marital match that falls short of their aspirations in a spouse ... This will be expressed in new patterns of marital hypogamy or downward marital mobility,” the study said. 
The problem is worse for women who seek husbands later in life, for example, after spending years in university education:
For example, older women on average were much less likely a suitable marital match ... This is especially true among women who were highly educated ... A 10% increase in age among women with a college degree was associated with a 24.48 percentage point decrease in the likelihood of a suitable match. In contrast, age mattered much less among the least-educated women—those with a high school degree or less who had only a 4.47  percentage point decrease in finding a match. One implication was that delaying marriage, for whatever reason but perhaps especially if pursuing college degrees, had the effect of reducing women’s local-area access to demographically suited marital partners.
Future studies will examine divorce rates among marriages where women recognize that they earn more than their husbands. 


Young Americans got a pay raise of 7.6 percent from late 2017 to late 2018 -- bigger than other groups -- b/c they are more likely to switch jobs in Trump's low-immigration economy. http://bit.ly/2lWHQUD 

Job-Hopping Young Workers Getting Huge Wage Gains, Says Business Center | Breitbart





Bay Area home sales fall steeply

 

High prices lead to lowest home sales in nearly a decade




Bay Area home sales fell in August 2019 for the 13th consecutive month, according to report from real estate data firm CoreLogic. (File Photo: Dan Coyro — Santa Cruz Sentinel)

By LOUIS HANSEN | lhansen@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED:  | UPDATED: 
Prospective Bay Area home buyers abandoned the market in August, as home sales dipped to a nine-year, monthly low despite falling interest rates and more choices.
Sales of existing and new homes fell 5.3 percent from the previous August, and were off more than 20 percent from the historic norms for the month, according to a report released Thursday by real estate data firm CoreLogic. Residential real estate transactions have dropped 13 straight months.
Existing home prices remained stable — at budget-busting levels for most buyers — in the nine-county Bay Area region. The median home price in August was $843,000, down 2 percent from the previous year, according to CoreLogic data.
Sales could have been even worse, cautioned CoreLogic analyst Andrew LePage. “The recent drop in mortgage rates likely helped temper that decline,” he said.
Bay Area home sales have slid, year-over-year, for the last 13 months. High demand and low inventory have driven prices to among the highest in the country, squeezing many buyers looking to get into a house or condo.
The region saw hotspots in August in different counties: median prices jumped 4.7 percent to $649,000 in Contra Costa, grew 2.8 percent in San Mateo to $1.45 million, swelled 7.2 percent in Marin to $1.23 million, and increased 1.4 percent to $1.5 million in San Francisco, according to CoreLogic data.
But other counties saw price retreats: median prices for existing homes dropped 8.1 percent in Santa Clara to $1.13 million, and fell 4.2 percent in Alameda to $862,000.
Local agents said the market has cooled since a peak last spring, when the median sale price hit $928,000. Buyers have more options and have been more willing to wait for the right home, neighborhood and school district. Entry-level homes, priced around $1 million in Silicon Valley communities, have been the quickest sellers.

Construction jobless hits high, as the downturn bites

construction companies collapse
In NSW, 556 construction companies went bust in 2018-19 – 101 more than in 2017-18. Photo: ABC
SHARE
TWEETSHAREREDDITPINEMAILCOMMENT
Underemployment in construction is close to hitting an all-time high, as the sector shows further signs of the impact of the nation’s economic slowdown.
Data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on Thursday found underemployment in the construction sector has hit 81,100 workers – or 6.9 per cent of the workforce.
The figure is among the highest underemployment in construction since the ABS began collecting the data – only twice since 1991 has underemployment in construction been greater than it is today.
(Underemployment is the measure of how many of those working in a sector would like to have more work, and it’s become a nagging problem for Australia’s economy.)
The data is another symptom of the fallout from a consistent slide in dwelling approvals, which have seen dramatic falls in the 2018 and 2019 financial years.
Approvals apartment and house approvals have slumped 47.28 per cent and 11.68 per cent respectively over the past two years.
Construction is hugely important to the Australian economy, accounting for almost one in 10 jobs, and has done much of the heavy lifting in the economy, as the mining boom busted.
During the GFC, underemployment leapt 54 per cent between November 2008 and February 2009 from 4.34 per cent to 6.7 per cent – a rate of underemployment for construction workers lower than it is today.
The sobering news also came as ASIC released data showing the downturn was sparking the failure of many more businesses, with 556 construction companies going bust in 2018-19 in NSW – 101 more than in 2017-18.
Jobs vacancy data, also released on Thursday, backed up the bad news for the construction sector showing a 1.3 per cent decline in new job listings over the past quarter, suggesting the growth in jobs generally was also slowing.
Callam Pickering, economist at jobs site Indeed, told The New Daily it was clear things were looking bad, and worse was coming with unemployment set to rise.
“When people finish up projects they’re left with no new jobs to go to, which is why a lot of construction workers are looking at new sectors of the economy,” he said.
“Over the next couple of years, from a worker perspective, employment is likely to decline.”
He said the high rate of underemployment suggests businesses were “trying to keep on good workers but are doing that by reducing hours”.
But if things don’t pick up, he said they’ll unlikely be able to maintain that arrangement.

Infrastructure not the holy grail for jobs, says experts

There’s less work around, and commentators are tipping there to be even less in the future.
Indeed’s Mr Pickering said the widely expected employment windfall of major infrastructure projects, to pick up the slack from falling residential construction, wasn’t coming true.
“What we’re seeing here is that a lot of these big infrastructure projects are capital-intensive but not labour-intensive – residential construction is labour-intensive,” he said.
Steve Jovcevski, Mozo’s property expert and a property developer in Sydney, told The New Daily things weren’t looking good for construction, but that wasn’t unexpected.
“We were building so many apartments in Sydney and Melbourne it was getting to an area of oversupply,” he said.
“The industry is in holding mode. If things do pick up, then all well and good, but if they don’t they’ll look at sacking staff.”
But, he said, the latest figures didn’t look like they were turning around, and that the impact will flow through the construction chain from top to bottom as the downturn rolled on.
“It will start to affect sales staff in the real estate industry first, the people selling off the plan and people lending,” he said.
“As time goes on it’ll be project managers, construction managers on-site, then tradespeople – a lot of their contracts will be terminated.”
But he said the problems around building quality issues weren’t doing construction any favours, leading many to put off buying into new buildings and that the downturn may be good for the industry in the long run as it put less pressure on getting jobs done and more on getting them done right.
“Slap it up and make your money – that model will disappear,” he said.
“That’s the other problem. Scrutinising the industry, people are scared to buy new products. Banks are also concerned.”
All that said, tradies – the clock is ticking.


No comments: