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Funny Business
Text Size 
It hard enough to get me to eat broccoli generally. Now I may never be able to eat it again. In what may have been an inside marketing joke--or really really subtle subliminal advertising--the Bread and Honey blog discovers faces in the broccoli.
Of course, the whole thing may be a Photoshop web hoax, but it got picked up by Digg and now, as I'm told, "thousands of people are virally discussing broccoli." And perhaps that's a good thing, after all.
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SIGNS THAT HOUSING IS NEARING A BOTTOM
1) I'm talking about how bad housing is on our air. I'm the ultimate lagging indicator.
2) Deutsche Bank (see my post last week) suggests prices in some markets, like San Diego and Stockton, have fallen to where they should be historically.
SIGNS THE BOTTOM WILL LAST A LONG TIME
1) The credit crisis has thrown a new wrench into escrows. Since the mid-September meltdown began, one homebuilder tells me buyer traffic is off by more than 60 percent. Realtor Bill Kerbox, who sells high-end homes on the west side of Los Angeles, says in the last few weeks, "I've had a number of escrows where after a bad day on Wall Street, the buyers came back to renegotiate as much as a quarter million dollars."
2) Unemployment is going up.
3) During the 1990's in California, it took about seven years for prices to bottom and then return to where they were.
I talked about the California market on "Power Lunch" today--and was told I could go 75 seconds on my story. 75 seconds to sum up this disaster. One friend suggested I say, "Let's see, a financial crisis, Socializing the Banking system, higher mortgage rates, tighter underwriting standards, a backlog of foreclosures, 7.7% CA Unemployment Rate (and rising), a $17B CA budget Deficit, 30+% CA price declines, and the impending de-leveraging of the Consumer who must get used to going from a 'Suburban to Saturn'. I know there is a Rainbow somewhere (lower gas and commodity prices, better affordability, the history of CA Real Estate, demographics, household formations, etc.), but the uphill climb is going to take a while." That actually only took 33 seconds to say, leaving me 42 seconds to add in tidbits like an LA Times analysis suggesting mortgages made to people who didn't have to prove citizenship have much lower delinquency rates.
NOW THEY TELL US
Thanks to Bill Singer for alerting me to this one. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) is censuring Lehman Brothers THIS MONTH for problems. It's fining the now-defunct firm $250,000, claiming things like, "The firm's supervisory system did not provide for supervision reasonably designed to achieve compliance with applicable securities laws and regulations..." Really? "FINRA found that the firm's ability to ensure the accuracy of its trade reports as to whether a particular trade was long or short, and whether a particular short sale was prohibited, was impaired and that, in some instances, this impairment resulted in flawed calculations of net positions..." You don't say.
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