Aug012016
High house prices slowing California home sales
Since most people no longer fear being priced out, prospective home buyers see high prices as a deterrent rather than an incentive to recklessly jump into the market.
Generally, when the price of any good or service goes up, buyer demand at the higher price diminishes because fewer people can afford higher prices. This isn’t a particularly difficult economic concept to understand except that housing markets violated this idea repeatedly over the last 40 years.
In the past, rising house prices often led to an increase in the quantity demanded, not because more people could afford it, but because buyers became more motivated in order to capture home price appreciation.
When prices rise faster than their wages, people can obtain less real estate with their income, so there is a natural tendency for people to react with urgency because they don’t want to be forced to accept lower quality accommodations later on.
When people react to the fear of being priced out, they often act irrationally and buy whatever is available, and in their buying, they contribute to the problem of rapidly rising prices that prompts even more irrational buying. A frenzy results.
Lenders enabled buyer foolishness with affordability products that destabilized the market and lead to a crash. Affordability products were subsequently made more difficult and costly to underwrite, effectively removing them from the mortgage finance system.
Without affordability products to enable a mania, when home prices go up, buyers react in textbook fashion by reducing demand. Rather than stoke a mania, higher prices become a major turnoff to buyers, so demand wanes.
Lenders and underwater borrowers both demanded (and received) massive government bailouts both directly and indirectly. The biggest indirect intervention was the federal reserve’s hastening the decline of mortgage rates to make the unstable and unsustainable debts of the bubble mania both stable and sustainable. While buyers couldn’t possibly afford peak prices at 6.5% mortgage rates 10 years ago, with meager wage gains and 3.5% mortgage rates, bubble era home prices are now financeable with stable loan terms.
Supply Shortage Continues to Squeeze Homebuyer Demand, Down 17 Percent in June
Written by Rachel Musiker on July 26, 2016
Homebuyer demand fell 17 percent in June, the fifth-consecutive month of year-over-year declines in early-stage homebuyer activity. The Redfin Housing Demand Index, based on thousands of Redfin customers requesting home tours and writing offers, fell 7 percent from May to a seasonally adjusted level of 88 in June.
Today Redfin unveils an improved version of its Demand Index, which tracks the earliest stages of homebuyer demand across 15 major metro areas. The Demand Index uses a new methodology that computes a seasonally adjusted value to reflect the level of homebuyer activity, enabling us to compare demand from one month to another accounting for expected seasonal changes. Redfin also introduces seasonally adjusted metro-level Demand Indices for 14 markets.
The Redfin Housing Demand Index, the industry’s first and only measure of homebuyer activity prior to purchase, has a benchmark of 100, representing the three-year historical average from January 2013 through December 2015. A Demand Index reading over 100 reflects high, or stronger-than-expected demand. A reading below 100 means demand is relatively weak and there is less activity than expected. The Demand Index is a forward-looking metric that is highly correlated with existing-home sales levels seen two months later as reported by the National Association of Realtors.
In the past I criticized Redfin for failing to adjust for the growth in their business. I give them the benefit of the doubt that they now make the property adjustments.
The number of Redfin customers requesting tours in June was up 9.2 percent year over year, the smallest increase in tour activity seen since August 2014. Customers requesting tours fell 6 percent from May. Seven percent fewer people wrote home-purchase offers in June than did a year earlier and there was a 5.6 percent drop in offer-writing activity from May.
Based on June’s demand decline, we expect sales to slow from their current pace in August.
Even though the market feels hot, with 7.6 percent ranches for sale across the 15 metros tracked by Demand Index, there simply wasn’t much for buyers to act on last month. Still, there were more buyers than homes, which meant homes sold quickly, many over list price and often in bidding wars.
“These major metro areas have all felt the squeeze from inventory, meaning there was just less for buyers to look at,” said Redfin chief economist Nela Richardson. “It’s not surprising that demand reflects that squeeze. Even strong buyer interest can’t squeeze a fresh listing from what’s become a dry turnip of housing supply.”
The housing supply in Orange County was up 12.5% year-over-year in June. Sales were flat.
Southern California Home Sales Dip
July 19, 2016 2:18 PM
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Home prices are way up, and that may be the reason why the number of home sales has slowed in Southern California.
Yes, that’s exactly why.
According to Core Logic, the median price of a home in Los Angeles County rose by 6.2 percent in June to $530,000, up from $499,000 in June 2015. A total of 7,869 homes were sold in the county, a dip of 3.5 percent, from the 8,152 sold during the same month the previous year.
Orange County saw a similar trend. The median price of a home was $657,500 last month, up 4.6 percent from $628,500 in June 2015. The number of homes sold dropped by 1.7 percent, from 3,850 in June 2015 to 3,786 last month.
Interest rates are near record lows, inventory is coming back to the market, and the economy is producing good jobs, so home sales should be better — and sales would be better if house prices were more affordable to more people.
Where we go from here is unclear, but my guess is that the overhang of cloud inventory sellers will start to be a barrier to prices rising too rapidly. Since these listings are suspended in the clouds by the large mortgage debt, this won’t act as a weight pushing prices lower. I expect we will see more of the same as the market limps along with tepid sales volumes propped up to the limit of affordability.
[listing mls=”OC16167507″]
I am trying something a little different with scheduling posts.
I am going to publish posts at 6:00 PM Sunday through Thursday.
I struggle each morning to put articles I’ve read into the comments, and I have to check each post for last-minute edits. Rather than have the time pressure to do this early in the morning, I will get the comments going each evening after I publish.
I don’t think this will disrupt the conversation, but if it does, I will go back to the old schedule.
You need a three year old who awakes at 5:00 am daily. 😉
My 15-year old wakes up at 6:00, which is why the old system worked as long as it did. Doing this work in the evening at my leisure is much less stressful.
How Would a New Democratic President Affect the U.S. Housing Market?
With email leaks showing that Democratic National Committee staffers criticized presidential contender Bernie Sanders, leading to the resignation of the party’s chair (we won’t even go into the Russian hacker allegations), U.S. politics seem like a soap opera right now.
But despite the scandal (and who doesn’t love a bit of juicy intrigue?), the Democrats did pass their 55-page party platform at their party’s convention in Philadelphia, outlining what they plan to accomplish if Hillary Clinton becomes the nation’s first female president. While the agenda was thin on specifics—much like its GOP counterpart—it did give us a sneak peek of what her election could mean for the U.S. housing market.
For starters, the Democratic agenda is pretty much the opposite of the Republican platform put out last week, which we also covered. Instead of getting rid of—or shrinking—the federal government’s role in the housing market, the Dems plan to amp it up instead. No big surprise there.
The party also plans to focus on the housing needs of minorities as well as the poorest and most vulnerable Americans.
“We will help those who are working toward a path of financial stability and will put sustainable homeownership into the reach of more families,” the platform reads. It later goes on, “Democrats believe that we should provide more federal resources to the people struggling most with unaffordable housing: low-income families, people with disabilities, veterans, and the elderly.”
Could rents go down?
A major thrust of the Democrats’ agenda is to create more affordable rental units by doing things like increasing the budget of the National Housing Trust Fund to build, preserve, and rehabilitate homes for the poorest Americans. The party hopes millions of new jobs will also be created as a result.
But creating these new rentals could drive down rents for everyone, if a flood of new and cheaper rental units hits the market, says Andrew Hanson, an economics professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee.
On the other hand, that could also result in lower homeownership rates across the country. That’s because renters may not see the point of buying if they’re not shelling out all that much for rent, he says.
Freddie Mac posts $993M profit in 2Q; paying $933M dividend
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/freddie-mac-posts-1b-profit-124219875.html
Mortgage Principal Forgiveness Policy Is a Bad Idea
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2016/08/mortgage-principal-forgiveness-policy-is-a-bad-idea
Well written. I agree with him.
All the reasons it’s so much harder to buy a home than it was for your parents
Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors in Washington, has a natural inclination to promote the health of the housing market, since NAR members depend on home sales to make a living. So when Yun warns about affordability issues causing a potential slowdown in home sales, people listen.
“Right now affordability is a flashing yellow light on the housing market, and I just hope it doesn’t become a red light that stops the housing recovery,” Yun says.
The housing recovery has pushed home prices higher, with the median national price reaching $247,700 in June, the highest recorded since NAR began tracking prices in 1968, which Yun attributes to inventory issues.
“People need to focus on the fact that we have a major housing shortage in this country,” Yun says. “This is a direct result of nearly a decade of sluggish home building, and there’s no sign that builders will be able to kick-start construction now. We’re only seeing incremental increases in home building.”
Yun is among a growing number of experts saying the housing market may be heading toward a cliff if the inventory and affordability issues are not addressed.
Bryan Sullivan, executive vice president and chief financial officer of loanDepot in Foothill Ranch, Calif., shares Yun’s concern about the potential stalling-out of the housing market.
“The affordability crunch tells us that the increase in home prices needs to slow down,” Sullivan says. “Even when interest rates are low, if prices rise too fast, buyers will be kept out of the market.”
Sullivan says millennials don’t yet have the opportunity to create wealth because their earning power has been reduced by the lingering effects of a recession. Homeownership has long been considered an important factor in wealth formation for middle-class households. The recent decline in homeownership, which has dropped to 62.9 percent, the lowest rate since 1965, could exacerbate income inequality.
The housing market “is like an onion that’s so vibrant and healthy on the outer layer but decaying on the inside,” says Nela Richardson, chief economist for the Redfin real estate brokerage. “Sales are hitting record highs, prices are growing — that’s the market we can see. But if you dig deeper, there’s chronic inventory shortage. We don’t have enough homes for sale or rent. We certainly don’t have enough affordable homes, and that’s a problem.”
“For decades, homeownership served as the most reliable seed of wealth creation for the middle class,” Richardson adds. “But there’s now a risk that this seed will remain dormant for far too many families due to a chronic shortage of affordable homes in thriving neighborhoods, limited access to financing even with record-low mortgage rates and sky-high rents that eat into down payment savings.”
In the face of wage stagnation, a sputtering employment recovery and global instability — problems that worry many analysts — Yun says the U.S. economy is “muddling along.” He sees some cause for optimism in the labor market.
“Tightening labor markets mean that wages should be picking up in the future,” he says.
San Francisco: A fool’s paradise for investors?
Disagreement over San Francisco’s real estate investment prospects prompt concerns for investors. Is San Francisco a good investment for its astronomical demand, or is it a bad investment due to excessive prices for both residential and commercial property?
San Francisco and other large California cities, like Los Angeles, are “dangerous to the investor,” according to Forbes’ analysis of the best investments of 2016. High prices for single-family residences (SFRs) and lagging multifamily construction starts deter these investors, foreshadowing low returns on dramatically expensive investments.
Their concerns are well justified by current housing conditions in the Bay Area. Multifamily construction starts decreased 5% from May 2015 to May 2016. San Francisco home prices across the low, middle and top tiers increased 13%, 9% and 7% respectively from Q1 2015 to Q1 2016. Demand for housing in the Silicon Valley shows no sign of slowing despite lack of inventory, although home sales volume suffered a brief dip in early May 2016.
In spite of the above, a handful of gutsy investors continue buying Bay Area properties, mostly commercial sites. An analysis on GlobeSt.com, the online commercial news source for ALM Real Estate Media, outlines the city’s investment potential by comparing it favorably to global investment leaders. For example, San Francisco has been ranked globally as:
the fourth top city for investment in the Global Cities Investment Monitor 2015 by Paris-based investment agency KPMG;
the top city for business potential in the Global Cities Outlook 2015 and 2016 by international management firm A.T. Kearney; and
fifth best for commercial property investment by the Association of Investors in Foreign Real Estate (AFIRE).
These rankings are supported by the strong presence of foreign investors in Bay Area real estate, despite expectations of a significant decrease in foreign investment due to global economic turmoil — an issue perhaps more relevant following the cultural shock of Brexit.
These investors willing to take on the risks that deter others see potential in the Bay Area’s thriving tech industry and employment recovery. San Francisco’s job market quickly recovered from the Great Recession and financial crisis, catapulting per capita income for tech employees and other top earners able to purchase homes with record-high prices.
So, is Bay Area investment safe?
For the time being, investment in San Francisco real estate is risky due to the very low rate of return. Although residential property investment seems alluring (who doesn’t want a cut of those atrociously high rents?), high-cost housing drives buyers and renters out of the city with each uptick in price. When the lack of housing supply causes the exodus of working residents, businesses struggle to maintain workforce and income — threatening commercial property investment, as well.
Additionally, current housing conditions harken back to the surge of Japanese investors in California real estate in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Japanese investors pumped billions into major California real estate markets — Los Angeles and San Diego, specifically. However, when the then-powerful yen succumbed to Japan’s economic collapse, investors pulled out of California en masse in 1991, sinking the Japanese investment rate by 83% statewide.
Likewise, although foreign investors in San Francisco real estate are currently holding steady, the city isn’t impervious to fallout. Japanese investors affected by the aforementioned crisis reduced investments in San Francisco real estate by 74% — a possible side effect of overeager investment in bloated urban markets today. If precarious foreign markets (such as in China) crack under pressure as they may well do, foreign investors will likely retreat, taking their invested funds with them and subsequently devaluing California real estate once more.
San Francisco is definitely in greater fool territory. Rents are doubling at a rate of every 5 years, so that is providing some support to the market, but if a tech recession ever hits, those rents will decline and take the housing market with it. Foreign buyers won’t shoot themselves in the foot by withdrawing from the market on their own. They will join the existing rush to the exits if a tech recession hits.
The Most and Least Affordable Places to Buy Your First Home
Being a first-time homebuyer often comes with a lot of advice. Make sure you can afford your mortgage. Pick a real estate agent who knows the market. Scrape together a good-sized down payment.
We’ve got one more to add to the list: Don’t buy out West.
Bloomberg News analyzed the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas to determine the least and most affordable places for people between ages 25 and 44, a proxy for those in their prime home-buying years. We ranked places by the difference between the median household income for that age group and the estimated minimum earnings needed to purchase a single-family home in the region as of 2015.
Affordability Gap
There were six locations that registered an affordability gap—where the minimum salary needed to afford the mortgage outstripped actual income. Urban Honolulu took the top spot, with the following five regions all located in California.
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-housing-affordability/img/map_desktop.svg
The reason for the slow sales with rising prices is STAGFLATION. Thanks to the policies of the Fed and other central banks, we have inflation and slow growth. This gives us steadily rising home prices coupled with low GDP and wage growth. If you want more of this, just vote for Clinton. She will keep the Fed on the same track and you will enjoy more inflation coupled with slow growth. And if you want something different, vote for Trump. The only problem with Trump is you do not really know what you would get. It could be better or worse. However, with Clinton, if this stagflation works for you and yours, she is your candidate. If you are stuck as a renter, low wage growth with rising home prices is a disaster, so you might be better off pulling the Trump lever.
Thanks for the election advice, but we live in CA. Our vote is going to the Democrat. Sorry. Doesn’t “stagflation” require “inflation”? Oh well, details…
Buffett Rips Trump on Tax Returns, Bankruptcies at Rally
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-08-01/clinton-looks-for-buffett-s-help-to-burnish-economic-credentials
It’s nice to see the billionaires openly stating that “I’m with her.” We already knew it, but it’s nice to see it explicitly out in the open. It really removes any pretense that she will carry on the legacy of Bernie Sanders or champion the rights of the little guy.
Clinton’s gonna need to get to work, if her sole support is from billionaires.
Has Hillary released her tax returns? If she has I missed it. I could have missed it as I try not to watch too much campaign coverage. It is depressing.
I think she’s released many years:
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/page/tax-returns/
About that Rightist “voter fraud” meme regurgitated here:
“Trump’s remarks have capitalized on a belief among conservatives that voter fraud is a rampant problem, even though studies find it to be extremely rare—31 credible cases have been identified out of one billion ballots cast from 2000 to 2014, according to one study.”
A comprehensive investigation of voter impersonation finds 31 credible incidents out of one billion ballots cast
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-comprehensive-investigation-of-voter-impersonation-finds-31-credible-incidents-out-of-one-billion-ballots-cast/
Court strikes down North Carolina voter ID law
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/court-strikes-down-north-carolina-voter-id-law-226438
I was actually only bringing it up in a lighthearted way to point out that it’s harder to get into an Irvine school than to cast a fraudulent ballot. I really had no idea it would set you off like this.
My personal feeling is that there should be some barriers to voting. There are so many uninformed people that vote without studying the issues. It makes me cringe when I see people standing in a voting booth agonizing over how to vote on Propositions without having studied them. If it take you longer than 2 minutes to vote your ballot, something is wrong.
By making it easier to register and vote it really opens things up to the know-nothings in both parties. I would rather see fewer advanced polling places and more time needed to register in advance. It would also help if schools and voter drive advocates would emphasize how important it is to study the issues and candidates before you vote, instead of just getting people to the polling place. If somebody doesn’t care enough to vote without prodding, they are probably not informed about the issues either, and I would rather not have them deciding the fate of our country.
FutureBuyer and El O were the regurgitating principals.
I agree. Democracy is terrible. Imagine how many people would be allowed to vote on propositions or for candidates, if we were required to answer simple multiple choice questions supporting our position.
When the people of California gained the right to legislate by proposition it set us onto a horrendous path. I have yet to see a massively wasteful spending project or debt issuance fail in any election.
It will eventually bankrupt the state.
It’s not perfect, by any means, but it did provide us the opportunity to create Prop 13 protections.
IRS Increases ‘Marriage Penalty,” Unmarried Cohabitants To Get Twice The Mortgage Interest Deduction
http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonynitti/2016/08/01/irs-increases-marriage-penalty-unmarried-cohabitants-to-get-twice-the-mortgage-interest-deduction/#11cdee9714c8
You have to wonder what legislators are thinking with that one.
It’s completely annoying. The tax code should neither reward, nor punish, folks for being married or unmarried.
The tax laws were written at a time when society generally valued marriage and discouraged cohabitation, so it wasn’t much of an issue when the laws were written.
IR,
Just provide the main article and commentary. Try working a little less hard.
There is plenty of inflation and deflation depending upon where you look. Regardless of who is elected in November, there will be another economic downturn.
Neither Hillary or Donald can prevent it.
Homeownership is at an all-time low — and good luck getting a mortgage
Years after the housing market imploded, home equity held by U.S. homeowners is closing in on its previous peak even as the total amount of mortgage debt outstanding remains well below past highs.
It’s good news that homeowners have spent the years since the crisis repairing their balance sheets—and that lenders are more prudent. But with the homeownership rate falling to a 51-year low, it’s worth a closer look at the story behind the levels of debt and equity, shown on this chart.
http://ei.marketwatch.com//Multimedia/2016/07/28/Photos/MG/MW-ES714_home_e_20160728145347_MG.jpg?uuid=9d85039e-54f4-11e6-90f5-0015c588dfa6
There are many reasons equity rebounded. Home prices nationally have nearly regained their earlier peak: in May, Case-Shiller’s national Home Price Index was just 2.1% shy of the 2006 high.
Equity is also more concentrated. The existing inventory of mortgage debt outstanding has aged over the past decade as buying and selling slowed. That means mortgage payments are further along in the amortization process, so principal, rather than interest, is being paid down.
As the Urban Institute has shown, homeowners 65 and above had 44% of what Urban calls “accessible housing wealth”—the 75% of home equity that can be tapped—despite owning only 30% of the units. That makes sense, since those people are more likely to have paid down more debt.
The reasons mortgage debt growth has stalled, however, are completely different. Even as more than 6 million homes were lost to foreclosure, lenders have clamped down on new mortgages.
Urban researchers found that credit tightened further in the first quarter of this year from the last three months of 2015. In a July note, they said their measure of how many mortgages are likely to default—an indication of lenders’ standards—fell between the end of last year and March, and was at half its 2001-2003 levels.
Laurie Goodman, a co-director of Urban’s Housing Finance Policy Center, told MarketWatch that the tightening was likely a temporary blip, and that the mortgage market is “generally on the way to flat to loosening.”
While supply of mortgages may pick up slightly, demand remains a question. The homeownership rate slid 0.6 percentage point to 62.9% in the second quarter, the Census Department said Thursday.
Goodman believes the homeownership rate will continue to decline. “I’m surprised at how quickly it’s happening,” she said.
There are many reasons for lower levels of homeownership, Goodman said, including delayed marriages, higher student loan debt for those who don’t graduate, flat incomes since the recession, and what she calls “a subtle shift in attitudes” toward homeownership.
Trump Men Disagree With The Concept Of Sexual Harassment
http://www.atlredline.com/trump-men-disagree-with-the-concept-of-sexual-harassmen-1784708074
Donald Trump’s support of deposed mogul Roger Ailes has been strangely under-reported. When Trump was asked about the allegations surrounding Ailes, Trump said: “Well I don’t want to comment. But he’s been a friend of mine for a really long time. And I can tell you that some of the women who are complaining, I know how much he’s helped them.”
That is among the worst possible ways to defend a “friend” accused of sexual harassment. You’ll note that Trump is not saying that he doesn’t believe Ailes harassed these women, he’s saying that if he did, it’s okay because he “helped” his victims.
Trump “stands by” his comments, because Trump thinks second thoughts are a sign of weakness.
Yesterday, he decided to reveal additional ignorance about sexual harassment. When asked about how he would feel if Ivanka were treated the same way Ailes is accused of treating his employees, Trump told U.S.A. Today:
“I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case.”
Obviously, Trump here mistakes the economic mobility of his wealthy daughter with that of most American women. Obviously, Trump here reveals that he has no concept of a world where a women’s salary is economically crucial to the family. And obviously, Trump is blaming women who are sexually harassed instead of the men who harass them.
But all of that is somewhat besides the point. Because the larger issue that Trump doesn’t even get is that Ivanka shouldn’t have to. Women should not have to find alternate careers to avoid sexual harassment. That is an unacceptable standard in a free, modern society.
WHAT KIND OF FATHER tells his daughter to find another career if she is the victim of crime in the workplace? What kind of parent tells their children, of any gender, to abandon their profession if their boss refuses to acknowledge their basic human rights? We have workplace laws in this country specifically so employees aren’t harassed right out of the workforce by hostile employers.
The hypocrisy of Donald Trump here is also unbelievable. Trump, we know, is a man who will sue somebody at the drop of a hat. He spends half of his time on television bitching about how he’s being treated “unfairly.” But he doesn’t say he’d tell his daughter to sue to protect her rights. He doesn’t say his daughter would demand fair treatment in a court of law. No, he’s saying that women should just retreat from their life’s work and find something else to do if they don’t like how they’re being treated.
Ivanka should not have to find another job because her boss illegally harasses her. If Trump won’t defend his own daughter, where does that leave the American employee under a Trump administration?
While Papa Trump was busy telling his daughter she has no rights worth fighting for, Brother Trump went in the opposite direction and revealed that his sister was protected by magic strength we should all aspire to. Eric or Don Jr. or Gimli or Dopey (they all look the same to me) offered this cacophony of good words to Charlie Rose:
I think what he’s saying is, Ivanka is a strong, powerful woman, she wouldn’t allow herself to be objected to it, and by the way, you should take it up with Human Resources, and I think she would as a strong person, at the same time, I don’t think she would allow herself to be subjected to that. I think that’s a point he was making, and I think he did so well.
In a way, “she wouldn’t allow herself to be objected to it,” is the turn of phrase that explains the Trump worldview on sexual harassment. Men are the subjects, women are their objects to be sexually acted upon. It is up to the female/object to… object if they don’t like it.
It is classic legal burden shifting.
The through line between Roger Ailes, Trump’s “he helped them” defense, the judicial philosophy of Samuel Alito, and the first ape who groped another ape is: “She was cool with it.” That’s the subtext here, and in pretty much every case of sexual harassment. A sexual harasser could be stabbed to death by a female co-worker, and as he lies gutted on the break room floor, his last words would be “I thought that bitch was cool with it.”
Eric is saying that his sister wouldn’t have been cool with it. Thus, his sister could not be sexually harassed. In his world, sexual harassment is a state of mind, not an objective hostility present in the workplace.
Trump is, of course, completely wrong. Ivanka Trump could be a victim of sexual harassment even if she complained to Human Resources, quit her job, bought the company, and made her former harasser walk her dog while wearing a bunny costume. The Trumps think we should focus on a woman’s response to harassment, instead of the inappropriate workplace behavior.
If the Trump line of reasoning makes sense to you, you sir, are a dick. Your sons will be dicks. Your daughters will enter a workforce full of dicks. And you are probably not wealthy enough to leave your hobbled progeny enough money to buy their way out of their problems like the Trumps.
Let’s review the whole sexual harassment paradigm: Few cases of sexual harassment are ever filed over actual harm to women but rather women not being treated like “ladies” and offended over something innocent someone said. The logic is that women are equals, capable of doing whatever a man does, but are easily frightened and offended. In the meantime, bullying and harassment is ok provided it’s not politically incorrect. For men (unimportant to the Democrats) and especially white men, that’s precisely what we live with when we encounter hostile workplaces: move on or stand up for ourselves. How will women ever be equals when they’re continually dependent upon the western patriarchy (that is quickly being replaced with something else?)
TRUMP PUTIN 2016!
‘Is Donald Trump plain crazy?’ Big-name writers now questioning GOP nominee’s sanity
https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-sanity-mental-health-000000384.html
Is Donald Trump insane?
That’s the question being asked in recent days by prominent columnists, both liberal and conservative, about the Republican presidential nominee.
“During the primary season, as Donald Trump’s bizarre outbursts helped him crush the competition, I thought he was being crazy like a fox,” Eugene Robinson wrote in an op-ed (“Is Donald Trump just plain crazy?”) published Tuesday in the Washington Post.
“Now I am increasingly convinced that he’s just plain crazy,” Robinson continued. “I’m serious about that. Leave aside for the moment Trump’s policies, which in my opinion range from the unconstitutional to the un-American to the potentially catastrophic. At this point, it would be irresponsible to ignore the fact that Trump’s grasp on reality appears to be tenuous at best.”
Robinson was not the only newspaper writer to recently ask such a blunt question about Trump’s fitness for office.
“One wonders if Republican leaders have begun to realize that they may have hitched their fate and the fate of their party to a man with a disordered personality,” Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in a separate Washington Post editorial on Monday. “We can leave it to the professionals to determine exactly what to call it. Suffice to say that Donald Trump’s response to the assorted speakers at the Democratic National Convention has not been rational.”
Vox founder Ezra Klein made a similar observation following Trump’s press conference the day after last month’s Republican National Convention. Instead of focusing on a unifying message, Trump resurfaced the debunked conspiracy theory that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was linked to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“Have we stopped to appreciate how crazy Donald Trump has gotten recently?” Klein asked.
“There was no reason for Trump to say any of this,” Klein wrote. “Trump had just accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for president. Cruz had been vanquished, booed off the stage. Trump’s opponent, now, was Hillary Clinton. But he couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t stay on message, he couldn’t suppress the crazy, for 24 hours.”
“Yes, Donald Trump is crazy,” Steven Hayes added last week in the conservative Weekly Standard. “And, yes, the Republican party owns his insanity.”
“I almost don’t blame Trump,” David Brooks wrote in the New York Times on July 29. “He is a morally untethered, spiritually vacuous man who appears haunted by multiple personality disorders. It is the ‘sane’ and ‘reasonable’ Republicans who deserve the shame.”
It’s not just op-ed columnists questioning Trump’s sanity.
At last week’s Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg endorsed Hillary Clinton while suggesting his fellow billionaire is not of sound mind.
“Let’s elect a sane, competent person,” Bloomberg said.
Another billionaire, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, also questioned Trump’s sanity.
“Donald initially — I really hoped he would be something different, that as a businessperson, I thought there was an opportunity there,” Cuban told CNN while campaigning with Clinton in his hometown of Pittsburgh on Saturday. “But then he went off the reservation and went bats*** crazy.”
“We can gloss over it, laugh about it, analyze it,” Stuart Stevens, chief strategist to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, wrote on Twitter. “But Donald Trump is not a well man.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But whenthe Toronto Star asked about the recent onslaught of questions surrounding his mental health, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks referred him to the candidate’s medical report.
“I’m sure you saw Mr. Trump’s medical report released in December of last year, which described him as perhaps the healthiest individual to ever be elected President,” Hicks wrote in an email to the paper. “I refer you to that.”
But as the Star’s Daniel Dale noted, that report addressed physical — and not mental — health.
This is a legitimate question, no? At this point, we have enough evidence to make presumptions about his mental health. I thought he was being crafty playing to the Republican base for months, but I changed my opinion the day after the RNC when he attacked Cruz with the inflammatory lie about his father once again.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
—Apple
I’m glad you’re optimistic that this behavior can somehow be beneficial. Call me skeptical.
You’re focusing on exactly what the MSM wants you to, the handful of off-the-cuff, politically incorrect remarks he has made, as opposed to the many other excellent points he makes on a daily basis. It’s like you can’t get over the fact that he won’t talk like a regular politician, but if he had pursued that course, nobody would have been interested. We don’t need a non-politician businessman pretending to be a politician. What you refer to as crazy talk is him speaking his mind, like a regular person, which is a refreshing development in the world of politics.
I’m not being duped by the MSM, and we have far more than a handful statements. They’re measured in the many dozens as of today, and growing daily. They’re not just “politically incorrect.” They’re crazy, inflammatory, backwards, pointless and/or bigoted. I expected him to pivot from the crazy, but he’s not doing it.
What would actually be refreshing, is someone being completely honest, sane, and civilized, while offending the base in both parties with the brutal honesty.
He is offending the base in both parties with brutal honesty. Elitists can’t stand him, which is why they are trying to make various labels stick. This week it’s “He’s crazy for criticizing a grieving mom.” Never mind that they had no concern when Hillary did the same thing to the Benghazi mom, calling her a liar on national television just after the RNC.
Complaining about labels, while labeling folks “elitist” sort of moots the point, no?
It’s difficult to compare and contrast nuanced events. Suffice it to say, were I Trump, I would’ve simply responded that “I have read the Constitution, and I understand it very well. Thanks for asking.”
I’m not complaining or labeling anybody. Try again.
I won’t attempt to classify the MSM’s characterization of Trump’s comments about the Khans. My thoughts are:
1) Responding to them was completely unnecessary. Saying nothing likely results in them disappearing from MSM coverage. Responding then, suggests something in his psyche that is forcing him to due things detrimental to his goals.
2) If you’re going to respond, don’t make a bigoted comments about someone’s religion. You’ll appeal to a large percentage of your base, but you’ll be answering more questions about your bigotry.
Not responding implies that the Khans were correct. That wasn’t an option. He had to respond in some way, and he chose to remind people that Islam is horribly oppressive to many people, particularly women. That probably worked against him given the backlash. In my mind, he should have responded by saying “The US honors and embraces the sacrifices of this family. My policy is about keeping radical jihadists out of the country, not all Muslims.” That would have made the story fizzle out.
I’m open to discussing all criticisms of all religions’ terrible treatment of certain groups, historical and current. There’s a time and a place to do this, and a tactful respectful approach to be taken.
Entering a position in GLD at 130.36