Layoffs Expected to Decimate Wall Street Ranks

steve, i agree- this will have virtually no impact whatsoever on manhattan real estate prices

Phew, thank goodness this will not affect Manhattan prices. NOw I can keep flipping condos and get rich.

Wow, there are layoffs in the financial services industry. I'm sure no one was expecting that, good thing steve posted this article so now we all know.

There are always layoffs..it doesn't mean people are moving out of their million dollar apartments and heading to the south bronx.

Steve... keep on posting and ignore

julia, you're not serious are you??
this layoffs is similar to that of the great depression's http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28099104/ (don't read the whole thing, just look at the headline)

I was at northside piers earlier today and the agent sounded like she wanted to cry if nobody buys in 3 months.

"it doesn't mean people are moving out of their million dollar apartments and heading to the south bronx."

err, umm....... tell me that again, please? And how is it that you know what I've done?

Anyone who thinks this is remorely close to the great depression is delusional.

anyone who claims this is no where near as bad as the depression, simply has their head in the sand and is in line with economists downplaying this crisis for the past 15 months.

Like those economists expecting a 2nd half recovery in 2008, about 10 months ago..there were tons of them

this has already proven to be the worst downturn since the depression, hands down. Of course it wont be like the 30s, but it will be a new age style of depression, whether its a very deep recession or light depression

I had this same argument on severity of the crisis with Spunky in DEC-APRIL...been there, done that for 4 full months...no point to it now, its here

addressed to stevehjx:

Every single post or input on every thread regarding the negativity of the New York real estate market has your opionion blaring all over it.

As someone who is a real buyer and is attempting to use the resources of streeteasy to become an educated consumer, I find it deeply distrubing that you constantly feel the need to spread doom and gloom and troubling economic news about our great city in every possible way you can.

In life, there are people that contribute to resolve problems and others that contribute to the problems. You, stevejhx, are obviously a person that contributes to problems. I am sure you lead a very distrubing, lonely and unsatisfying life. I cannot even imagine anyone being so miserable that they have to post negativity after negativity on here. It is obvious your only goal is to spread your misery to others, until they are possibly more miserable or nervous than you, if possible.

Yes, the economy in NY is in great trouble, and housing prices are tumbling by the day. You don't need to post this anymore. You will not find anyone to try and convert. Even the most glib and arrogant real estate broker will agree that prices and market activity are way down. POINT TAKEN!

I am doubtful you are a New Yorker. I envision you being an overweight, balding, lonely man sitting in your 2nd floor condo in Jersey City trying to bring others down to the level you are. You obviously have a lot of resentment and hatred for the real estate industry and the City of New York. I know you are NOT a real NYer, because even the most jaded and cynical NYer would not feel the need to post so much negativity about their city.

I am not defending real estate brokers or flippers at all. They all contributed to the problem. I felt the same arrogance and elitism that you frequently post about. I heard the same phrases over and over during the last two years trying to buy. "Multiple offers above asking," "bidding war," and "New York is immune" were making me sick. But now that those same people are begging for more to submit any offer, I don't feel empowered or get off on the power change. Life is cyclical and this is just another cycle.

It is deeply disturbing to someone like me that you can be so negative and feel compeled to spread your negativity to others. Obviously, from the time you spend on here, you don't have any family, minimal friend or outside activities, but maybe if you try changing your attitude and approach, life will change for you. Streeteasy.com is not intended to be your therapy and lashing out at an industry and a world you feel so burned by. Your posts and contributions have gone beyond pathetic. They are troubling.

Hey guys let's not get personal and move on .. if you don't want to read his posts
Tell us something interesting about real estate.. we all have something to share

"Tell us something interesting about real estate.. we all have something to share"

stevejhx only has doom and gloom to share..

well unfortunately things are bad. True, Steve is the one that starts most of the doomy articles here, but I wonder if it is more to educate and discuss, then a scare tactic to depress the market or buyers here.

He has been very consistent for the past 12 months. Nothing has changed except the fundamentals continued to deteriorate. We need to consider options and protest really bad behaviors, like this latest auto bailout. Mish does a great job for this. We are about to get a HUGE stimulus package, and it will be timed for release days after Obama officially takes office. Its in works now. It appears they want to make this the final move, so if anything, it will be bigger than they are advised to make it. Thats my feeling anyway. Hopefully this new package creates jobs for the right reasons, and focuses on innovation and enhancement of this country, instead of to wasted antiquated business models

I agree, urbandigs, things are bad. And I agree that the auto bailout is bad all around. Throwing money at an industry with a terrible business plan is not going to do anything but create more federal debt with zero prospects on recovering the loan within the next 10 years.

If the big 3 did file for bankruptcy, that would be good all around. Maybe some of the reorganization under chapter 11 would benefit the industry immediately. Honda, Toyota, Kia and Hyundai all assemble their U.S. sold products in the U.S. They don't have the huge UAW contracts that the big 3 have to pay. With benefits, the average UAW worker earns $78/hour. That goes a long way in states like Michigan and Ohio.

Before the big 3 and the UAW president stood up to Congress asking for a loan, they should have made internal concessions like pay and benefits. All for unions here, but the UAW is a perfect example of how a union con ruin an industry.

tiburon
I agree with you
stevehjx is indeed the most powerful downer ever encountered in the drug scene
One would need to take ALL the uppers available on the planet to counteract his 1 message/sec of doom
Prior to perusing streeteasy, I did not believe a human could possibly post messages at the rate that steve does
it is peculiar -- he has no interest in buying or selling real estate. he rents and drives a lexus and does other misc things that dont bear mention, yet he pontificates gloom at a sustained rate.
Impressive indeed
I actually went to look at gloom.com to see if he owned the site, and it appears that he might
doom.com it turns out is already registered to ea.com
looked for buyingrealestateisstupid.com and yes Steven Hanley has it
looked for brokersareshill.com and Steven Hanley has it
looked for stevehjxisright.com and he has it
looked for alwaysignorestevehjx.xom and surprisingly it is available

But hopefully, at least, our government is trying to be proactive in addressing the problem now, and realizing that the whole slowdown happened when housing prices took a freefall and homeowners began defaulting on their mortgages. The US government investing in the mortgage market is a big step forward and in the right direction.

I hope that mortgages rates do fall to the predicted 4.5 or 5%. That would generate a lot of renewed consumer spending that would spread outwards, naturally, into all sectors. Otherwise, every important industry is going to be making trips to D.C. to beg for a bailout.

I hope that the end is within 6 months and that this is a good solution.

Its good, yes, but if its directly due to govt meddling, it will be short lived and may have unintended consequences. Id rather have 5.5% rates, deal with that very high level (sarcastic sigh here), have no side effects of govt meddling. But lets see how it works out. I hope that when the ultra low rate party is over, rates dont surge higher fast, which I fear they may and prove to be a shock at a very bad time.

agree urbandigs,

i also don't like the gov enticing naive first-time home buyers into catching falling knives. this for moral reasons.

tiburon speaks for 99% of the SE community. stevejhx is a one-dimensional person because all of his posts fall into one of the following two categories:

1) He will hijack someone else's thread and go off-topic and drone on with his 50% rant. Here is a classic example:
http://www.streeteasy.com/nyc/talk/discussion/6533-attention-buyer-of-30-c-stop

2) He will start a new thread where he copies a doom-and-gloom story from another site verbatim, without adding any meaningful or anything new insight. For example:
http://www.streeteasy.com/nyc/talk/discussion/6532-wall-street-bonus-picture-goes-from-bad-to-worse-

> also don't like the gov enticing naive first-time home buyers into catching falling knives. this for moral reasons.<

Agree as well. Prices will ultimately find their own levels and not much will alter the course over the longer term. What can one say.....there was a housing price bubble that's in the process of correcting itself.

The Fed gov meddlers should concentrate on job creation. The rapid increase in unemployment and continued down-sizing across most industry sectors is now the largest obstacle facing the housing market & commercial RE. The lack of liquidity of the mortgage backed market should have been addressed at a much earlier stage of the process.

UD - where do you see the unemployment rate going? What is the highest you think it will get before things get better?

Steve, you ought to know that decimate means 1 in 10. That ain't bad given the severe problems on Wall Street after a huge run-up.

LICComment, do you mean the NYC unemployment rate? I'm guessing 15%.

ps - to Tiburon who said "You, stevejhx, are obviously a person that contributes to problems. I am sure you lead a very distrubing, lonely and unsatisfying life."

well, we did hear that he got laid 3 times in the past 3 weeks, and the prior Friday's was the best.

and re "I am doubtful you are a New Yorker. I envision you being an overweight, balding, lonely man sitting in your 2nd floor condo in Jersey City trying to bring others down to the level you are. You obviously have a lot of resentment and hatred for the real estate industry and the City of New York. I know you are NOT a real NYer, because even the most jaded and cynical NYer would not feel the need to post so much negativity about their city."

I think among other things, Steve is a real NYer, and has a lot of historical NYC perspective when things were bad ... 80s, 70s, even earlier and especially when some of the current "hot" neighborhoods like Chelsea were crap. So from that point of view, among countless other things, he's very negative.

Keep up the good work stevejhx....the truth hurts but ignorance hurts more!!!!!

jsmith, joedacis, tiburon: I don't think you can call someone a "doom and gloomer" once the doom and gloom has already come to fruition. Doing so calls out to the fact that you are living in total denial. A year ago you could have called him a doom and gloomer, and you would have been wrong to accuse him of such. Now you are just dumber than dirt. If you don't like him pointing out today's headlines in a blog, if today's current news bothers you, please do us all a favor and don't come online and bitch to us about how you hate this guy who posts news for discussion in a blog (what a concept!) We are here, the recession is upon us - the only question is how much is this going to affect real estate in this city before the economy pulls out of this tailspin. I think historically you are looking at a 2 year lag from the stock market.

McHale, If someone wanted additional info on the truth to its bitter core they should read Oppenheimer's banking analyst Meredith Whitney's research reports. She has consistently painted one ugly picture for some time and her outlook remains the same. She is the only research analyst that I'm aware of that has not underestimated this credit fiasco & it's long term impacts from the early stages.

I agree that having one's head in the sand is not exactly the best road to take whatever the circumstances.

this is silly - to blame stevejhx is to blame the messenger. he could say whatever he wanted to, and he's just one individual, and cannot be but a drop in the ocean of opinions on this topic, even in streeteasy.

you guys need to go back and read posts from a year ago and see the degree of vitriol spewed at him because he saw the early unraveling in process, and said, loudly, "this emperor [of 2007 prices] has no clothes." now, make mo mistake, steve gave back as good as he got, but his speaking the truth (or what has turned out to be closer to the truth, in contrast to the "New York is different, can't be hard hit by this crisis") is nothing to criticize or condemn. he probably helped a lot of people look more critically at their own personal risk tolerance, rather than just being distracted by the much larger body of loud and flashy interested parties (sellers, many brokers, and the popular media with their "dream home" tv shows) who had more to gain from overoptimism and from pooh-poohing the doubters.

well anotherguy, that is a charitable view on steve, especially where you say "he probably helped a lot of people look more critically at their own personal risk tolerance" because it looks singlemindedly at his views on real estate but not on the alternative class he suggests. Steve is famous for the "renting is ALWAYS better than buying" mega-discussion where he said that buyers should rent and plow their excess payments into the equities markets. That might be forgivable if it was just theory, but Steve has also acknowledged (when pressured) that he lost the overwhelming majority of his worth in US and BRIC equities - that's a huge amount of risk gone wrong.

link to the "renting is always better than buying" http://www.streeteasy.com/nyc/talk/discussion/3410-real-estate-is-a-bad-investment

well, steve was a lot more candid than i would be on a message board about my individual investment performance !

but my point is just that he refused to be bullied [excuse the pun] by the bulls, and it has indeed now looked like we were in a classic bubble. when a bubble is aging, and has refused to succumb to gravity (like the Internet bubble by late 2000), it takes on a life of its own, as people come up with some revision of traditional economics to explain these over-the-moon price appreciations that, by standard reasoning, look too good to be true. in such a case, the bulls are armed with many intelligent-sounding arguments for why things are different this time, and the longer the bubble lasts, the more sophisticated the arguments sound, and the greater the body of opinion the bulls can point to.

steve just kept battling away against these as they kept cropping up (remember things like "foreign buyers will prop up the Manhattan market because it's just too desirable a place to live -- even if quite a few local jobs are lost"?), and i think his ferocity in doing so, along with the other bears, really did a service.

there were other good blogs on this point, one was http://nychousingbubble.blogspot.com/ it was started by this woman who just lived in an out-of-the-way section of brooklyn, and just couldn't believe the aggressive development and pricing she saw coming to her neighborhood. she was a lot more diplomatic than steve, but she sounded a note of caution at what in retrospect looked like a good time to do so.

"If you don't like him pointing out today's headlines in a blog, if today's current news bothers you, please do us all a favor and don't come online and bitch to us about how you hate this guy who posts news for discussion in a blog (what a concept!)"

I don't hate the guy and I'm not ignorant of the news around me.. just don't know why a RE board can't focus primarily on RE without the discussion being hijacked for the same reasons over and over and over again.. simply reposting today's headlines is highlighting the obvious and adds no value..

now is certainly a good time for banks and companies to " re-engineer" and restructure. ie. Get rid of expensive folks. Over time, they will hire people again- younger, cheaper ones that will keep people flowing into NYC. There will no doubt be a buying window in 2009 due to supply and deand forces. If yu are forced to sell in 2009, tough luck i guess.

jsmith, how can we have a discussion about NY RE if we can't determine what the market is likely to consist of in the short, medium and long term? If jobs (in number and pay rate) will or won't be there to support the RE market; if credit is or isn't likely to flow freely; if other investments will or won't perform well enough to support RE buy/sell/rent decisions? Are we supposed to just assume that the RE market will oscillate in a manner worthy of New York State's motto "Excelsior!"?

Also, the relevance of the day's headlines might not be obvious in their relevance to NY RE to *all* those who post and lurk here, or visit for one or two days. So maybe Steve is doing those people a favor, and the regular Streeteasy Irregulars can just move on to other posts if nothing in his posts seems talkworthy.

I'm wondering what UD expects for the national unemployment rate.

"Fortunately, absolutely ZERO effect on Manhattan real estate."

I'm not sure that's right. Why are you so optimistic?

anotherguy: he refused to be bullied [excuse the pun] by the bulls

sure, you can make that argument, it is valid, except when you turn it around to other areas... He refused to be bullied in areas where he was wrong. So is fortitude a good characteristic? Sure. Is pig-headedness a good characteristic? Seems like two sides of the same coin.

LIComment - nat'l rate? U3? Likely around 9.5%-10% or so. U6 is already 12.5% which is why it feels much worse than the 6.7% number is.

"As someone who is a real buyer"

Good for you! Why, then, is your name "tiburón," meaning "shark"?

"and is attempting to use the resources of streeteasy to become an educated consumer"

Fair enough.

"I find it deeply distrubing that you constantly feel the need to spread doom and gloom and troubling economic news about our great city in every possible way you can."

Why would you find it "disturbing" that I spread the truth, if your stated goal is "to become an educated consumer"? If by "doom and gloom" you mean that real estate prices will fall back to more reasonable, accessible levels, then I feel that that is not doom and gloom at all, but rather the happy sign of a deflating bubble.

I will ignore all the personal attacks against me, and what you imagine me to be like, as I don't care. But I think you've proved yourself to be a real estate broker, not a buyer.

ccdevi - I found the Jets loss to be more demoralizing than all of the doom and gloom on this site. Not sure about effect on Manhattan RE.

newbuyer - yea me too.

"I found the Jets loss to be more demoralizing than all of the doom and gloom on this site"

agree

"Not sure about effect on Manhattan RE."

me either, although I suppose it can't help, presuming that more money in the nyc area was bet on the Jets. of course then the nyc bookies made money. maybe the bookies will prop up the RE market.

uh oh - the stock market is soaring today based on investors approval of Obama's plans. Steve please stay off the internet today or you may be exposed to good news.

You are all morons if you think that no one is making large amounts of money in RE in this market. Times of greatest turmoil is also the time of greatest upside. You just have to be smart in your investments.

You are all so scared that you are paralyzed. You are doing nothing except losing your money day by day. Fortunes are being made - just not by you naysayers.

Steve - sorry to hear the per word translation rate is plummeting faster than the S&P

Are you actually making money today in RE, petrfitz? What happened to the units that went to contract for you? Did they all sell?

You just wish people are scared and hoarding cash. Unfortunately, most are losing money in the stock market and some are losing jobs while others cannot get mortgage approval. I'm not sure who the heck is your audience and who you're kidding around.

yes my units sold. I am now sitting on cash looking at all the great deals that are out there. I am looking at townhouses in Manhattan and Brooklyn. also another beach house on the jersey shore.

I also have had several unsolicited offers on other properties that I own in manhattan. The offers are a significant profit. I am not ready to sell these yet as I am sure better offers will be coming shortly.

I love this market.

petrfitz, what's the going rate on posts written by obviously lying broker shills? Hell, you talk about the S&P "soaring" and "plummeting" in the very same post - do you honestly think *anyone* takes you seriously anymore? And here I thought broker shills were supposed to be good liars...

Good for you, petrfitz. What can I say? You're such a lucky guy! Everything goes your way no matter how bleak the situation is. And worst case scenario, there's still the trust fund. Not everybody is as loaded as you though or is in a perfect situation as you are. In which case, I'm still not sure who your audience or who you are persuading, i.e. who else here is as lucky as you are.

tech guy you know i am not a broker. so stop lying. my comments on the market were obviously playing on the sheep mentality of posters like yourself who hop on negative news like Steve on Fire Island man boys.

Please ad credibilty to all your posts by starting with "I currently live in a studio, hoping to upgrade to a tiny 1 bedroom and that is the basis of my real estate knowledge...."

petrfitz telling me to stop lying! Hilarious. Tell me more about your made up media company :) I love laughing at the simple basics you can't get right in that fantasy. Or give more details about your supposed real estate holdings - I'm no expert there, but I love reading when real experts tear those stupid and obviously made up claims apart.

I own the not-at-all-tiny 1 bedroom I live in now, for your information.

I don't think petrfitz is a broker shill at all, but tech_guy your point about him posting about the soaring and plummeting S&P in the same post was true and funny.

I do wonder however if petrfitz has done well, why he needs to look down on others? What if someone isn't focused on the real estate market for a living or profit but did buy and thinks he or she will get appreciation and an opportunity to upgrade too - why is that a bad thing?

tech-guy - congratulations on your 1 bedroom. You are now officially a really small fish in a infitiely large pond.

When oyu buy your first building you can give actual insight in the NYC RE market.

now go back to your back office programming gig otherwise the accounting data will not be processed for the month.....

"I do wonder however if petrfitz has done well, why he needs to look down on others?"

Which was the very first clue that he hasn't done well at all. His lame bullying attempts reek of someone with no underlying self confidence. Others here will tell you that he's claimed to sponsor coops, but the details provided made absolutely no sense at all. He's made claims about the ownership makeup of the LES that were disproven by actual articles.

Personally, I realized he was completely full of shit when he talked about technology, and the media company he pretends to own. He knows so embarrassingly little about technology that I'm positive he doesn't own anything. I suppose its possible that his parents handed him ownership stake in a company he understands nothing about, but judging by his other lies (and his claims that he really does know the technology), I'm much more inclined to believe that he's just a broker shill.

Now that tech_guy has posted, his alter-ego LICComment is sure to agree with him soon.

tech_guy - please prove your lie that I dont know anything about technology. Please post 1 post where I made a correct statement? You are a back office programming monkey.

I create, design, architect and market applications on the web, mobile phones, and video game consoles as well as broadband VDN's. Ask me a question, I will be able to answer it.

then after I prove you wrong, I will ask you questions on buying multi unit properties in NY and you can prove to the board how much you know about Real Estate.

all you do is lie and attack and cant back any of it up....

You're the only one who thinks I'm LICComment, and you only think that because we both understand the mortgage deduction, and you don't. Reposting this link just to embarrass you - petrfitz attacks you, I attack him, and your response is to attack me? Are you really such an attention whore? You feel the need to attack me because I defended you against petrfitz, thereby taking the attention off you?

http://www.streeteasy.com/nyc/talk/discussion/6009-same-apartment-for-rent-and-for-sale

"Please post 1 post where I made a correct statement?"

I can't - there are none :) I'll post the thread where I showed how little you know about technology (ironically, in the same thread, stevejhx confirms my knowledge of technology. Now he claims I'm a broker... odd)

http://www.streeteasy.com/nyc/talk/discussion/4938-crains-huge-job-cuts-on-wall-street-forecast

oh that post where you argued that code that goes on thousands to millions of users machine's cannot in anyway violate trademark rights and can not cause an infringement.

Its hiliarious that you keep bringing up your ignorance. It is so obvious that you are a young back office monkey who only writes code for internal systems......

My favorite was when you made fun of me for programming in Java (which isn't even true) while bragging that you code in J2ME. The "J" in "J2ME" quite obviously standing for Java. The very first 2 words in any J2ME code is always "import java." Do you just copy this crap from a real company's "about us" webpage?

I guess that was a different thread:
http://www.streeteasy.com/nyc/talk/discussion/5868-everyone-can-make-money-in-this-market

> whether its a very deep recession or light depression

A light depression is just a recession. All recessions are deep.
Depression means 10% annual decline in output.

UD, you think we're going sub 10%?

Ignoring comment by petrfitz.
Ignoring comment by tech_guy.
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Ignoring comment by tech_guy.
Ignoring comment by nyc10022.

Aaah! What joy!

java = back office code monkey

J2ME = hot shot mobile device content and applications.

which do you do tech guy?

Not all recessions are deep. I wouldnt call 2001 recession deep. You think depression you think 25% unemployment, bread lines, etc...Certainly I do not see this.

The early 80s recession saw UE around 11%, the early 90s around 7.8%, the 2001 recession around 6%. Certainly there are depths to these 3 recessions.

I do not think we will see -10% GDP here. But I could envision the next 2 quarters showing something like -5% and then -4-6% or so..back to back, before the rate of decline slows. Just a hunch. There are those with complex models for these predictions, and even they get it wrong often. So who knows.

In one thread you make fun of Java, in the other you say this: "Tech Guy - i have owned now 4 tech media companies - ... another was a mobile content company that focused on WAP and java (j2me) apps"

As for your code question, as I've told you 10 times before: The companies you're stealing "about us" information from never load human readable code onto their users' machines. If they heard you mention this as a possibility while you interviewed for a code monkey position, they'd laugh you out of the building.

I could give you a few tips. Real estate brokers are really hurting these days, so I know you'll be interviewing around at other professions soon. You just might be reporting to me! (not really, no way in hell would you survive an interview with any of my colleagues)

tech guy in his brilliance says "never load human readable code onto their users' machines" so then Tech Guy two questions for you:

1 - the code that is obfuscated is it OK to write things like "Apple (TM) certified"? Would your companies legal department approve of that practice?

2 - do programs and applications that have obfuscated code have any readable text on a users machine? are there any copy lines like (click here to run, or instructions?) do you say that a major company that is putting out that application not want legal to review before it goes out?

also I never interviewed for a code monkey position, coders work for a guy who works for a guy who works for a guy that works for me.

Please keep on displaying your ignorance. It is so much fun to play with you.

It is so obvious that you are way down the pecking order and never have anything to do with actual apps that go out to the public...

I take back my offer to help you prepare for your interviews - your questions are too ridiculous! Do your clients ever ask you "what if the back of the drywall says 'Apple (TM) certified' - will I get sued?" That's how ridiculous your questions sound to anyone who knows what they're talking about. Shows extreme stupidity in just asking them.

I had been thinking 8% was a line for us for unemployment, but I think that if it doesn't go over 8.5% we could be okay. We have lost 1.9 million jobs in '08, so let's assume another 200,000 lost for December brings it to 2.1 million and 6.9% unemployment. This is a very rough math-guess here, but if we averaged about 185,000 lost jobs per month for 2009 we would be around 8.5% unemployment.

That is a ton of jobs lost, plus the fact that UE doesn't really give an accurate read on the unemployed. We are really sitting around 12.4% right now, so if that ticked up to 14% or so that would be a lot of people in a bad spot. More than this and we could be in a very bad or very long recession from a jobs perspective.

We need to bottom and stabilize for a quarter before firms will start to hire people back.

Can we stop talking about code and get back to doom and gloom? The only code I use is M4T.

I was at Hugo Boss in Time Warner last night buying my wife some clothes for christmas when I asked the woman helping me how slow things have been. She told me I was the second person she had helped all day that was buying a gift. Almost everything in the store was 40% off, and it was closing time. Whatever you think about how the job losses will or will not affect our economy and real estate, there is a chill in the air when you speak to shopkeepers.

tech guy you are a moron - if the back of drywall said 'Apple (TM) certified' the manufacturer would get their asses sued unbelievably fast. Why? Because it can be seen in the store before it is installed. you are such a moron.

Your youth and ignorance becomes more on display with every post. Now go back to writing back office reports for monthly data pulls. you genius.

stevejhx
about 1 hour ago
ignore this person
report abuse Ignoring comment by petrfitz.
Ignoring comment by tech_guy.
Ignoring comment by tech_guy.
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Ignoring comment by nyc10022.
Aaah! What joy!

Stevejhx keeps the best list of people to ignore. Unfortunately, one has to unignore stevejhx in order to get an update on the list. Major dilemma.

wait steve ignores nyc10022?

I'm confused.

Yes, the ironic thing is, I didn't insult him or even counter any of his arguments.

I simply pointed out that he said the market was going to 6500 right before it shot up from 8k to about 9k... then he tried to deny he said it and I simply pasted his quotes.

would be interesting to know if Stevejhx also ignores EddieWilson

tech guy - the more i think of it the more of moron you are. The manufacturer always prints their brand name and other text on the back - that is how you know it is the back when you are installing.

therefore all the stores show the back on display it is the most read surface! any other genius to show us today? 1001100010110001011011011011011011000101

positivecarry: That's NYC specific though, right? Of course retail numbers here will be hurting more than nationwide, as we have all the financial jobs. Nationwide, weren't Black Friday numbers relatively positive? I still don't understand how this can go into such a deep recession. Almost 10% negative GDP? Really?

Most industries don't really care about the name brand of the financial institutions that service them. Sure, there was a bunch of upheaval, failures, mergers, but a year from now... will Main St. care that a few banks failed but everything is fine now? Will production actually drop due to the financial changes? Will non-finance-related unemployment really shoot up that high? If so, why?

It seems people here are too closely tied to finance and think the turmoil in the financial world (which is certainly real) also exists equally strong in the non-finance world. I'm not seeing that.

As for my back and forth with petrfitz, apologies to others who don't care. I just find myself compelled to attack those who are so demeaning to everyone else for no good reason. Especially when I know for a fact that they're pathological liars.

Seriously, if you are looking to get respected from these boards by boasting about yourself, that's actually the easiest way to actually lose your credibility. And anyone who has the perverse need to boast to bunch of strangers so they can prove their self-worth has self-esteem issues.

Just an FYI, because obviously some people's motives and messages are not getting across and being dismissed, and they may not know why, so they start sounding more frustrated and they try to keep proving themselves. :)

petrfitz: If you knew anything about technology, you'd be telling me technological reasons why you're right, not talking about drywall. That was a quick and dirty analogy that I threw out there to make everyone else understand. The fact that you bit down so hard on it is pretty telling by itself, however.

why do people let Streeteasy forums get them so worked up?

http://www.hulu.com/watch/47604/saturday-night-live-snl-digital-short-j-in-my-pants?c=Comedy/Sketch

Tech_guy,

Yes, my post was NYC centric, but this is a NYC board.

Can someone go to the NYT website and post the link for the article in business titled "In string of bad news, omens of a long recession". Thanks.

We're JUST starting to see the pullback in spending and hiring. Normally, by the time we announce we're in a recession, we're already loking at good news and starting to come out. Do you see anything positive at the moment? Retail sales not being so bad means nothing, when everything is 70% off.

BTW, I'm sure you know that consumer spending is 2/3 of GDP, so seeing sales drop to their weakest level in 35 years means we are in some deep shit. When your 401k drops 40%, and home prices drop 20something% nationally, people don't want to shop. It's a downward spiral. We could back to early 2000's real estate prices with ease.

positivecarry: Thus far, the stock market has been going up from the bottom. Typically, the stock market bottoms 50% into a recession. You mention the 401k's dropping - with the stock market returning, people will feel better off there. Home prices dropping is very old news - except for Manhattan, that's been going on for years. Are we really seeing this year being so much worse as to impact consumer spending?

You ask for good news to indicate that we're heading out. My question is the opposite though - what's the bad news (for the economy as a whole, not the financial sector specifically) that justifies such a harsh past few months? Why was the stock market down 40% to begin with? Are the tiny P/E ratios of the S&P really justified, or should this stock market crash really have been isolated to financial stocks?

"seeing sales drop to their weakest level in 35 years means we are in some deep shit"

I don't remember the last big recession being ushered in by such a sudden dose of so much bad news on so many fronts at once. Although we've been looking at signs of a perfect storm for over a year now, still, the October/November period, the 533,000 jobs lost in one month figure, these all lead me to hope (as opposed to predicting...) that we'll take our poison quickly and move on. I guess what was so awful about the '70s was that we had a string of recessions interrupted by lame, brief recoveries, so that it felt like an endless recession. We can always just hope that this will be brief and deep, and the climb up the other end of the tunnel begin sooner rather than later. It feels more like a prayer at this point, of course.

The Dow hit mid 1990's levels recently. Whatever poison we're supposed to take, I think we've taken it already. Is our economy really in worse shape than it was in the 90's? Have we had no improvements to production, efficiency, in 13 years?

tech_guy, you're young, right? The economy was much better than it is now in the mid 90s.

My sentence made no sense - great in mid '90s with the start of dot-com and tech boom.

"Are we really seeing this year being so much worse as to impact consumer spending?"

Yes. We are. The worst in 35 years. Home prices are still going down. Unemployment is just starting to get bad. My view is that we have a long way to go. Be defensive.

2001-2002 has nothing on where we are right now.

nyc10023: I am young, but you're talking about a very different metric. You're talking markets response to the economy (positive then, negative now). I'm sure there was a time in the 1800's where market response to the economy was extremely positive, but I'm talking *absolute* terms. Nobody would ever say the economy in absolute terms was better in the 1800's than it is now.

In absolute terms, are we better or worse now than in the mid 90's? Is production the same? Should a car company try to build a line of cars using 1995 standards / safety / etc, would it be cheaper now, or was it cheaper then? That's what I mean by absolute terms.

Our economy now, I believe, is *much* better. Much more efficient, much more productive, able to build better / safer products more easily and for cheaper. Shouldn't that deserve a higher stock market valuation now, than the mid 90's?

What pushed the market down 40%? Do I need to explain the shitstorm we're in? There is no credit. For anyone. The world runs on credit. It's that simple. It affects everyone, from the deli owner to the construction company to your credit card company cutting your lines to the brokers on this site hawking apartments. FUCKED we are, as my man Yoda would say.

But credit is also as much of a commodity as milk. Once the credit market is fixed (and it seems to be getting better as of late, no?) the rest of the world won't care that their credit supplier changed names. I don't know the name of the milk I buy either. I'll be sad if it goes away for a few months, but once its back, I won't even notice that the packaging has a new color and brand name.

Getting better? Really? Let's just say that I work for a top financial firm, and that we're a top lender. We are lending to NO ONE. If your mortgage can't go through FHA, take a hike. Not interested. This isn't just for mortgages. Business lines of credit are getting slashed, our home equity portfolio (almost 100 Billion dollars) is getting slashed and credit cards limits are vanishing into the ether. It's over. M&A is dead, LBO's are dead, traditonal lending is dead. What the F else is out there?

Then why wouldn't your competitor grab all this business and come out on top? They'll have the backing of the fed too since the government desperately wants to bring back the lending market. 700B dollars thrown at it, and I'm sure they'll throw more at it to get lending to happen again.

Dead? This entire business is never going to come back? I know I'm not in the industry, but that seems extremely short sighted to me. We'll see Uncle Sam's Socialized Lending Bank before its dead (not something I want to see at all, but just saying, the business concept of loaning money is a far cry from dead).

it's going to come back, just not anytime soon. Call your banker and ask for a business loan, or tell him you're looking for a pre approval for a loan. See what he says. The fed just auctioned 3 month t bills today at the lowest yield since 1929.

No one is grabbing market share because they're all trying to hold on themselves.

FUCKED

We seem to be at a standstill. I just simply doubt the free market and the government working together won't be able to solve such a simple problem. Consumers want credit, and businesses who's primary reason for existence is to provide credit are instead taking t-bills at such ridiculously low rates. These same businesses need a government bailout, and the government won't give them one unless its used to start lending again.

Either through heavy regulation attached to the bailout, or First Bank of Uncle Sam, I highly doubt we'll be having this problem 2 months from now with Obama and a heavily Democratic Congress.

This didn't come across clear in my last post: it seems like such an unstable equilibrium - that lenders would choose not to lend. It seems like it should be in their own selfish interests to find a way to start lending again. The fact that the government will be helping them do it is all the better.

"The Dow hit mid 1990's levels recently. Whatever poison we're supposed to take, I think we've taken it already. Is our economy really in worse shape than it was in the 90's? Have we had no improvements to production, efficiency, in 13 years?"

Shape doesn't matter, anticpation of future shape does. The outlook today is DEFINITELY much worse than it was in the 90s... they expected things to improve forever, we've now proven they won't.

If I'm wrong, then go talk to some mortgage brokers and see what's up. No one is lending. People are hoarding cash to get ready for all the defaults coming their way. The Tribune company just filed for bankruptcy today. Guess what happens to those bonds? Bye bye! Goldman just put a note out today that we're halfway through the crisis. We have a YEAR and a HALF to go. When you walk away from your mortgage, stop paying your credit card and let your car get repo'ed, guess who that hurts? It's usually the same company, getting stung three times!

"Shape doesn't matter, anticpation of future shape does. The outlook today is DEFINITELY much worse than it was in the 90s... they expected things to improve forever, we've now proven they won't."

So you're saying in 1995, the predictions about the economy in 2000 was better than the current prediction of the economy in 2013? I'm doubtful. I think today's economy is better / more efficient / more productive than the 1995 expectations for 2000. I also think 5 years from now, expectation is we'll be no worse off than today.

"So you're saying in 1995, the predictions about the economy in 2000 was better than the current prediction of the economy in 2013?"

Yup...

"I think today's economy is better / more efficient / more productive than the 1995 expectations for 2000."

We are definitely not more efficient with cripled credit. Companies that can produce can't get the capital to do so.

You might call that "temporary" or whatever, but the effects are real and long term.

Every day we stay in this mode, we kill a LOT of long term productivity.

"If I'm wrong, then go talk to some mortgage brokers and see what's up."

manhattanmortgage.com reports rates on a 1M coop loan at 6.25%. A 400k loan (conforming) was only 5.75%. The difference between jumbo and conforming was well over 1% earlier this year. Looks like things are improving, no?