Bankers Gone Wild! - #Ireland 's Ghost Homes!

Ghost Estates of Ireland: Symbols of an Economic Collapse

 

 

 

 

 

Article by Steph,

Built with visions of suburban prosperity in more optimistic times, the empty shells of former dream homes dot the countryside among piles of construction rubble and fallen-down fences. Economic highs and lows have led to abandonments of entire villages all over the world, from China to the Mediterranean, but Ireland is among the nations that was particularly hard-hit.

 

 

Photographer Valérie Anex captures Ireland’s ‘ghost estates’ in a series of striking images that juxtapose a fading hope for sanitized suburbia with the current reality, which is simply that nobody can afford to live in these houses. The National Institute for Regional and Spacial Analysis defines ‘ghost estates’ as developments of ten houses or more in which fifty percent or less of the homes are occupied or completed.

 

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Insights

There is little difference between between somber banking types and the wild party girls on videos. Both are the same too when the party's over and their respective worlds come crashing down. 

You think we are being funny, but actually we are quite serious. The facts speak for themselves...

Investors' Insights

June 3, 2014

Girls or Bankers?

 

China ALERT: Super Rich "KASH-lNG" Out

The Richest Man in Asia is Selling Everything in China

By Simon Black

Here’s a guy you want to bet on– Li Ka-Shing.

Li is reportedly the richest person in Asia with a net worth well in excess of $30 billion, much of which he made being a shrewd property investor.

Li Ka-Shing was investing in mainland China back in the early 90s, way back before it became the trendy thing to do. Now, Li wants out of China. All of it.

Since August of last year, he’s dumped billions of dollars worth of his Chinese holdings. The latest is the $928 million sale of the Pacific Place shopping center in Beijing– this deal was inked just days ago. 

Once the deal concludes, Li will no longer have any major property investments in mainland China.

This isn’t a person who became wealthy by being flippant and scared. So what does he see that nobody

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Getting to know you

Fed Tightening Can Trigger Market Crash - No Kidding

 



Don't Be Surprised

 If This Is The Start Of A 

Stock Market Crash ...

 

Business Insider

 


Stocks are tanking again. 

The sudden dives in recent weeks have taken the tech-heavy Nasdaq down 7% from its highs and the S&P and Dow about 3% from their highs.

Drops like that are no big deal. 

But some signs suggest that this pullback — or another one sometime soon — could get much more severe.

Why?

Three basic reasons:

• Stocks are still very expensive
• Corporate profit margins are at record highs
• The Fed is now tightening
•  

Let's take those one at a time.

First, price.

Even after the recent drops, stocks appear to be very 
expensive.

The chart below is from Yale professor Robert Shiller. It shows the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio of the S&P 500 for the last 130 years. As you can see, today's P/E ratio of 25X is miles above the long-term average of 15X. In fact, it's higher than at any point in the 20th century with the exception of the peaks of 1929 and 2000 (you know what happened after those).

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Lots of Talk Out There

 

No Doubt Economic Recovery Just A Story

Global economic recovery may be an illusion: Experts

London: The global economy seemed to be on the mend when the International Monetary Fund met for its spring meeting in Washington 10 years ago. Alan Greenspan had cut official interest rates in the US to 1 percent after the collapse of the dotcom boom and the world’s biggest economy had responded to the treatment. Gordon Brown was Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister) and the country was in its 12th year of uninterrupted growth.

Companies in the west were flocking to China now that it was part of the World Trade Organisation. The talk was of offshoring, just-in-time global supply chains and integrated capital markets. The expectation was that the good times would last for ever. No serious thought was given to the notion that total system failure was just around the corner. Faith in the self-correcting properties of open markets was absolute. When the crash duly came, a self-flagellating IMF confessed that it had been guilty of groupthink. Downside risks to the forecasts in its half-yearly World Economic Outlook (WEO) are now exhaustively catalogued.

Guess What ? NO END IN SIGHT!

  The world of 2014 is not dissimilar to that of 2004. The boost provided by cheap money has got the global economy moving. Inflation as measured by the cost of goods and services is low but asset prices are starting to hum. Financial markets have got their mojo back. Deals are being done, big bonuses paid. Some analysts believe that the Great Moderation — the period of low inflation and continual expansion — has returned after the hiatus caused by the crash. The optimists could be right. Recessions tend to be the exception rather than the norm and countries eventually revert to a trend rate of growth.

Imagine, therefore, that in five years’ time the IMF is doing its postmortem on another period of global turbulence. What will it say were the warning signs missed during 2014? Here are five to be going on with.

The first will doubtless feature in the WEO due to be published on Tuesday: the global economy’s dependency on exceptionally low interest rates. Since peaking in the 1970s, the trough in interest rates has been lower in each subsequent cycle and they are now barely above zero. The second threat is a bond market crash as the world’s central banks try to return monetary policy to a more normal setting. Central banks are adopting a cautious approach to this process, with the Federal Reserve gradually reducing the amount of bonds it buys under the quantitative easing programme and the Bank of England using forward guidance to reassure borrowers that any increase in official interest rates will be modest and gradual.

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Lots of Ideas Out There!