Housing sputters and starts

The single greatest item to the US economic recovery has to do with consumers and their single largest debt item--homes.

The housing market must recover in order for any sizeable and sustainable recovery to happen. For 4+ years now the housing market has been in tough. People looking to sell can't because nobody will buy. Those who want to move to find jobs can't accept because they can't sell their home or the mortgage is worth far more than the home.... They're stuck putting consumers in an even deeper cyclical problem. Others would like to move up but can't because their current property won't sell to anyone. Basically a holding pattern exists in the market.

New starts are in the same boat. New home builds were in fact up in October, so that's a strong sign that builders think that things are, albeit really tiny, slowly picking up. But then with new housing start numbers slightly up, new housing SALES were in fact down in October 2012. So you have more houses on the market but even fewer people buying them.

Long story short the American economy still needs help. Primary driving force behind that will be job creation. More folks with more money will then help push the housing market (so long as the banks also do their part and lend at these historic interest rate lows).

When will this happen? Well no time soon and certainly not quickly. We're in it for a long time, perhaps a decade, in fact, certainly a decade (if you start counting fro m2008).


-- With notes from Calgary real-estate law firm TC.

Nail bitter to the end

For a moment a nation was on the edge, and if you were (are) a Republican then you had increasing expectations leading up to election day that perhaps this was the year Mitt was going to pull it off. Democrats on election day itself had an early scare as results trickled in.

But after all was said and done the contest wasn't close, there was a clear victory. Despite what Karl 'Idiot' Rove suggests, the election results were never in doubt. Obama handedly won his second term and the Democrats took the popular vote.

It was close, however. The nation itself remains polarized. And frankly, what's causing us to stay in the miry clay is the ineptitude of Congress. Republican President may have meant the cry babies in Congress would've been working rather than stalling.

But now we have another frustrating four years. If Obama could get work done he would, but lawmakers need to work together, we hope, to pull the nation out of its economic slump and push it as leaders for the world tomorrow.

Duo-tangs Full of Women

Unlike my buddy (he's not my buddy) Mitt, I do'nt have binders full of women. I mean, think about it, that's A LOT of women. But thru my travels living in the same city for most of my life, I have added up my women and they fit quite nicely in a couple of duo-tangs. Sure, I haven't spent enough time as Mitt has building up a war chest of women raring to go (for what purpose I don't know), but I think my duo-tang set is a good asset given I havent procured women for very long.

It's going to make complete sense when women flock to vote for Romney and his Republican cronies given their copious amounts of empty binders--women just wanna get a chance to be filed away in Mitt's arsenal of women.

Election day should be a doozy.