From CNBC:
More Boomers Selling Homes, but Who Will Buy Them?
Baby Boomers putting their house up for sale could flood the market in coming years, while the younger generations may not be interested in buying, a new report says.
“It’s already happening in some states like Michigan,” says Rolf Pendall of the Urban Institute and a co-author of the report by the Bipartisan Policy Center.
“Seniors there are already putting their homes on the market and the absorption of housing is less and creating more inventory,” Pendall explains. “There’s hesitancy on the buyer’s part.”
As boomers downsize because of retirement, finances, health or death, they’re expected to release some 26 million homes onto the market by 2030, according to the Policy Center paper.
The problem is that echo-boomers, or Generation Y—those born between 1982 and 1995—may not be buying up the inventory, says Pendall, whose retired mother is trying to sell a home and downsize.
“Whether it’s jobs, confidence, tight credit or a slowdown in immigration, there could be a real slowdown in buying from the younger generation,” Pendall explains.
The Bipartisan Policy Center’s report states that young adults are struggling with higher levels of credit card and student loan debt than their elders—some of which could take decades to pay off.
…
Couple that with the current housing struggles and the report concludes that young people are just not in the buying mood—now or anytime soon.“Certain areas of the country are better off than others,” Pendall says. “But if we look at the Northeast and Midwest, seniors are going to be putting homes on the market and moving to warmer climates. That means more inventory to sell. Housing will depend on the echo-boomers, and it’s not known what they will do.”
But some analysts don’t see the explosion of seniors selling homes as a hit on housing.
“It’s not that big because when you look at the market, it’s pretty good right now and getting better,” says Walter Maloney of the National Association of Realtors (NAR).
“Besides, seniors have been selling homes for years, and overall inventories are going down. We believe there is pent-up demand,” Maloney adds.
Some experts say a final verdict on any kind of senior housing glut is too hard to make right now.
“The extent to which baby boomers unload their homes is a projection at this point,” says Greg McBride, senior analyst at Bankrate.com.
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2012/03/13/the-stress-test-league-tables/
stress test results
Sorry for the late post, woke up in a pub with a pint of Guinness and Arsenal on the tele. Welsh guy next to me could barely speak English. Still trying to figure out why Cheltenham is such a big deal. Is Liverpool winning? Heading down to London tomorrow. Biggest news out here is how to build a 5% down mortgage market to kickstart housing, as goes housing, goes the world.
“It’s not that big because when you look at the market, it’s pretty good right now and getting better,” says Walter Maloney of the National Association of Realtors (NAR).
“Besides, seniors have been selling homes for years, and overall inventories are going down. We believe there is pent-up demand,” Maloney adds.
Dear Mr. Maloney,
The roar of laughter on this blog after reading that statement is deafening.
“Sell? Sell to Whom?”
One of the three best phrases in the history of this blog.
From the Courier News:
Where is Central Jersey real estate headed this spring?
As New Jersey homeowners, bankers and real-estate agents struggle with the weakened real-estate market, they have to balance hopeful signs with sobering ones this spring. Whether you are buying or selling, here are the factors to watch.
Underwater mortgages
CoreLogic, a company that tracks statistics about foreclosures and homes in danger of foreclosure, reported on March 1 that nearly 79,000 or 14.2 percent of all homes in the four-county area of Somerset, Middlesex, Monmouth and Ocean counties are underwater on their mortgages. Underwater is defined as owing more money on a mortgage than the home currently is worth.
Jeffrey Otteau, president of Otteau Evaluation Group in East Brunswick, confirmed that figure is similar to what he’s seeing. He said home prices have receded to 2003 levels, so people who bought their home after 2003 probably now are facing negative equity in their homes. This is especially true for people who bought homes with little or no down payment.
“And what’s also worrisome is that 4.3 percent will be underwater if market prices fall another 5 percent,” Otteau said.
…
Increases in foreclosures
John McWeeny, president of the New Jersey Banker’s Association, said that a New Jersey Supreme Court decision on Feb. 27 has defined how banks can now go forward on foreclosures where the original paperwork was faulty. With this ruling, he said, the banks can now process many of the thousands of foreclosures that have been held up in the courts for the last couple of years. As a result, he expects a high number of foreclosed homes to become available for sale in the next six months.
Add to this, the number of homes in the foreclosure process is growing. CoreLogic reported Tuesday that the rate of foreclosures among outstanding mortgage loans in the four-county area is 5.25 percent for the month of December 2011 — that’s 0.59 points higher than December of 2010, when the rate was 4.66 percent. The national foreclosure rate was only 3.37 percent for December 2011.
…
Increase in the number of sales
In spite of the flood of new foreclosures expected to hit the real-estate market this year, bankers, agents and homeowners alike are taking heart from the fact the sale of homes in Central Jersey has picked up significantly in recent months. Otteau reported a 31 percent increase in home sales in New Jersey in January alone.
“I’m with Otteau on that (increase),” Boniakowski said. “Since the day after Christmas, my office has seen a significant increase in calls about homes for sale. Our open houses are well attended, and we also see a great response to our Internet advertising.”
Bobo soprano
By Dario Maestripieri
Mar–Apr/12
How monkeys, the Mafia, Italian academia—and, increasingly, American society—illustrate the biological impulse and social peril of nepotism.
http://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/bobo-soprano?msource=MAG10&tr=y&auid=10441948
I guess I’m the only one staying at work past 5.
Speaking of hiring people (in the last thread), my firm is interested in people who graduated in the top 5% of their class in coursework relevant to global investing, have good communication and quant skills, and are working toward CFA charters. Not many can make it through the gauntlet of interviews we do.
Full court press on TV for cutting NY Pensions or layoffs are coming.
“Not many can make it through the gauntlet of interviews we do.”
If they wince at a few taser shots, you probably don’t want them anyway.
re #2 – Grim if you see any of the lads passed out near the tube entrances be sure to avoid them the smell alone will kill you. The are also much more aggressive and sometimes violent panhandlers than you would see in NY and they will know you are a tourist by your shoes.
Grim there is a Starbucks near Charing Cross Station near Trafalgar square if you are planning on walking that area and seeing Parliament and the London eye. I think there is another Starbucks near the eye too.
re: “gauntlet of interviews”
So are you saying you ask the red paint question about a 10 x 10 x 10 cube made up of 1 x 1 x 1 smaller cubes?
Tide Detergent is the new liquid gold lol.
#2 grim
If Megan Fox is cooking breakfast, you are in Heaven!
If Ascot is the equivalent of the Kentucky Derby, you can think of Cheltenham as the Belmont Stakes.
Anyone know some hard-pipe hittin’ home inspectors?
mocha (16)-
I’m pretty sure at some point in his life, moose hit the pipe.
Rage grows over mortgage deal
http://cnnmoney.mobi/primary/wk_article?articleId=urn:newsml:CNNMoney.com:20120313:mortgage-settlement:1&category=cnnm_business&pagesize=10
How will this price?
UK Treasury considers super long-term borrowing plan
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17361330
http://realestate.msn.com/looking-for-an-affordable-rental-market-study-says-youre-out-of-luck
Why do we call the last group Generation Y?
Y should I get a job?
Y should I leave home and find my own place?
Y should I get a car when I can borrow yours?
Y should I clean my room?
Y should I wash and iron my own clothes?
Y should I buy any food?
We call their parents “boomers” because everything they touched goes “BOOM” and then look to their “lazy” kids to clean up the leavings.
Juice,
I saw that news item, too, about people stealing Tide and selling it for drugs.
Incredible.
Do you have any positions for undergrad summer interns?
A.West says:
March 13, 2012 at 4:55 pm
Speaking of hiring people (in the last thread), my firm is interested in people who graduated in the top 5% of their class in coursework relevant to global investing, have good communication and quant skills, and are working toward CFA charters. Not many can make it through the gauntlet of interviews we do.
Das Uberinspektor….
http://www.afullhouseinspection.com/
Mocha says:
March 13, 2012 at 7:04 pm
Anyone know some hard-pipe hittin’ home inspectors?
The End Is Nigh (Digital Edition):
WSJ
BOOKS
March 14, 2012
Books Women Read When No One Can See the Cover
By KATHERINE ROSMAN
If that woman next to you on the train seems unusually engrossed in her e-reader, there may be a good reason.
Electronic readers, and the reading privacy they provide, are fueling a boom in sales of sexy romance novels, or “romantica,” as the genre is called in the book industry.
As with romance novels, romantica features an old-fashioned love story and pop-culture references like those found in “chick lit.” Plus, there is sex—a lot of it. Yet unlike traditional erotica, romantica always includes what’s known as “HEA”—”happily ever after.”
Publishers are on to a dirty little secret: women are huge users of e-readers on which they are reading books they’d be embarrassed to open in public. Katherine Rosman has details on Lunch Break.
Mainstream publishers are launching digital-only erotic labels to feed demand. At the end of the month, HarperCollins UK will launch Mischief Books, with the tag line “private pleasures with a hand-held device.”
Tori Benson, a 41-year-old married mother in Eustis, Fla., reads 10 to 15 books a week, about half of them erotic. She began reading romance novels as a young girl and graduated to erotica a few years ago, when she got her first Kindle. She now has two, one of which her 10-year-old daughter calls “Mommy’s naughty reader.”
Ms. Benson says the digital format helped her get over her embarrassment. She reviews romance books for Smexybooks.com and erotica for the website Heroes and Heartbreakers. Even so, she says she wouldn’t read these books in print if she were in view of anyone. “Some of the covers are very explicit,” she says.
‘ “Thank you for spilling wine on my shirt,” Elec said, stepping back and unbuttoning his shirt. He yanked it off with little care or concern for the fabric and tossed it on the floor with hard movements. His T-shirt, which also sported a smaller wine stain, was peeled off and sent after the dress shirt.
Erotica on the Mischief Books site is tagged with icons. Handcuffs denote “kinky”; an upraised palm means “discipline.” The HarperCollins imprint says it plans to publish at least 60 e-titles a year. “It used to be a long walk to the counter with an erotica selection, but now that’s a thing of the past,” says Adam Nevill, Mischief Books’ editorial director. (HarperCollins, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp. )
The genre even has its first best-seller, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” by E L James, a British mother and former TV producer. It’s a novel about the steamy love affair between a college student and a billionaire businessman, littered with contemporary references to Apple computers, personal trainers and songs from bands like Snow Patrol and Kings of Leon.
“Fifty Shades” was released last May through the Writer’s Coffee Shop, an Australian independent e-publisher, and by fall it had become a grassroots sensation in the U.S., as affluent young mothers devoured the racy tale and recommended it to friends. Last week, Vintage Books signed a seven-figure deal with the Australian publisher for rights to the book and the next two in the series, “Fifty Shades Darker” and “Fifty Shades Freed.” Vintage plans initially to print a total 750,000 paperback copies of the books.
The ease of downloading to an e-reader is a huge factor in erotica’s growth. The minute a reader hears about a book from a friend, she can buy her own copy.
And in a series, as soon as she finishes the first book she can download the next. Some readers load all the novels about a favorite heroine onto their e-readers at once.
“This is an online market,” says Rachel Kramer Bussel, a writer of erotica and editor of the anthology “Best Bondage Erotica 2012,” from Cleis Press.
Fans of romantica say they like the heroines—educated, professionally successful, morally centered characters who are swept up by unexpected, intense sexual desire. Readers also are drawn to the love stories.
“Flat-Out Sexy,” published by Penguin Group’s Berkeley Trade unit, is set in a Nascar-like racing circuit. It depicts the torrid attraction between a rookie driver, Elec, and Tamara, the widow of a beloved driver who died in a crash.
“Tempted,” published by Harlequin’s Spice label, concerns happily married Anne, who is drawn into a relationship with her husband and his best friend, Alex. The sequel, “Naked,” is an account of the affair from Alex’s point of view.
Erotica used to be difficult to find. Chains and independent bookstores might have carried a few titles, but they were hidden away, and inventory was scarce.
Self-publishing made it easier for first-time authors to get distribution online. As women began to write erotica and post it online, demand grew.
Since Cleis Press started selling digital books in 2008, its sales have grown 30%, and the publisher attributes 40% of its dollar volume to e-books. It is expanding its erotica list this year from 48 books to 60. Among its offerings: “Fast Girls” and “Frat Boys.”
The romance genre—encompassing a range of fiction types, from traditional romance to Christian romance, Amish romance and erotica—makes up 17% of sales of adult fiction, says Brent Lewis, Harlequin’s executive vice president for digital.
Romance fans were among the earliest adopters of e-reading. Nearly 40% of all new romance books purchased are in digital form, says Kelly Gallagher, vice president of Bowker Market Research. In erotica, the digital portion is that high or higher, he says. It is about 20% for other adult trade genres—except for mysteries, which have recently caught up with romance.
Jill Lascher, a 42-year-old Los Angeles mother of three, bought a Kindle so she could read “Fifty Shades of Grey,” whose print availability is limited.
In December, she was on a family vacation in Florida with her sister, Nicole Beit, a 39-year-old Manhattan mother of three, who barely looked up from her Kindle.
“I said, ‘You’re missing this, you’re not present,’ ” Ms. Lascher says.
“I said, ‘If you were reading this, you would understand,’ ” Ms. Beit says.
Ms. Lascher’s Kindle arrived four days later, and for the rest of the vacation and several weeks afterward, the sisters read all the books in the “Shades” trilogy and talked about them often.
“I was very happy having no one know what I was reading,” Ms. Lascher says. “You blush when you read it.”
The End Is Nigh (Digital Edition):
WSJ
BOOKS
March 14, 2012
Books Women Read When No One Can See the Cover
By KATHERINE ROSMAN
If that woman next to you on the train seems unusually engrossed in her e-reader, there may be a good reason.
Electronic readers, and the reading privacy they provide, are fueling a boom in sales of s-xy romance novels, or “romantica,” as the genre is called in the book industry.
As with romance novels, romantica features an old-fashioned love story and pop-culture references like those found in “chick lit.” Plus, there is s-x—a lot of it. Yet unlike traditional erotica, romantica always includes what’s known as “HEA”—”happily ever after.”
Publishers are on to a dirty little secret: women are huge users of e-readers on which they are reading books they’d be embarrassed to open in public.
Mainstream publishers are launching digital-only erotic labels to feed demand. At the end of the month, HarperCollins UK will launch Mischief Books, with the tag line “private pleasures with a hand-held device.”
Tori Benson, a 41-year-old married mother in Eustis, Fla., reads 10 to 15 books a week, about half of them erotic. She began reading romance novels as a young girl and graduated to erotica a few years ago, when she got her first Kindle. She now has two, one of which her 10-year-old daughter calls “Mommy’s naughty reader.”
Ms. Benson says the digital format helped her get over her embarrassment. She reviews romance books for Smexybooks.com and erotica for the website Heroes and Heartbreakers. Even so, she says she wouldn’t read these books in print if she were in view of anyone. “Some of the covers are very explicit,” she says.
‘ “Thank you for spilling wine on my shirt,” Elec said, stepping back and unbuttoning his shirt. He yanked it off with little care or concern for the fabric and tossed it on the floor with hard movements. His T-shirt, which also sported a smaller wine stain, was peeled off and sent after the dress shirt.
Erotica on the Mischief Books site is tagged with icons. Handcuffs denote “kinky”; an upraised palm means “discipline.” The HarperCollins imprint says it plans to publish at least 60 e-titles a year. “It used to be a long walk to the counter with an erotica selection, but now that’s a thing of the past,” says Adam Nevill, Mischief Books’ editorial director. (HarperCollins, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp. )
The genre even has its first best-seller, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” by E L James, a British mother and former TV producer. It’s a novel about the steamy love affair between a college student and a billionaire businessman, littered with contemporary references to Apple computers, personal trainers and songs from bands like Snow Patrol and Kings of Leon.
“Fifty Shades” was released last May through the Writer’s Coffee Shop, an Australian independent e-publisher, and by fall it had become a grassroots sensation in the U.S., as affluent young mothers devoured the racy tale and recommended it to friends. Last week, Vintage Books signed a seven-figure deal with the Australian publisher for rights to the book and the next two in the series, “Fifty Shades Darker” and “Fifty Shades Freed.” Vintage plans initially to print a total 750,000 paperback copies of the books.
The ease of downloading to an e-reader is a huge factor in erotica’s growth. The minute a reader hears about a book from a friend, she can buy her own copy.
And in a series, as soon as she finishes the first book she can download the next. Some readers load all the novels about a favorite heroine onto their e-readers at once.
“This is an online market,” says Rachel Kramer Bussel, a writer of erotica and editor of the anthology “Best Bondage Erotica 2012,” from Cleis Press.
Fans of romantica say they like the heroines—educated, professionally successful, morally centered characters who are swept up by unexpected, intense s-xual desire. Readers also are drawn to the love stories.
“Flat-Out S-xy,” published by Penguin Group’s Berkeley Trade unit, is set in a Nascar-like racing circuit. It depicts the torrid attraction between a rookie driver, Elec, and Tamara, the widow of a beloved driver who died in a crash.
“Tempted,” published by Harlequin’s Spice label, concerns happily married Anne, who is drawn into a relationship with her husband and his best friend, Alex. The sequel, “Naked,” is an account of the affair from Alex’s point of view.
Erotica used to be difficult to find. Chains and independent bookstores might have carried a few titles, but they were hidden away, and inventory was scarce.
Self-publishing made it easier for first-time authors to get distribution online. As women began to write erotica and post it online, demand grew.
Since Cleis Press started selling digital books in 2008, its sales have grown 30%, and the publisher attributes 40% of its dollar volume to e-books. It is expanding its erotica list this year from 48 books to 60. Among its offerings: “Fast Girls” and “Frat Boys.”
The romance genre—encompassing a range of fiction types, from traditional romance to Christian romance, Amish romance and erotica—makes up 17% of sales of adult fiction, says Brent Lewis, Harlequin’s executive vice president for digital.
Romance fans were among the earliest adopters of e-reading. Nearly 40% of all new romance books purchased are in digital form, says Kelly Gallagher, vice president of Bowker Market Research. In erotica, the digital portion is that high or higher, he says. It is about 20% for other adult trade genres—except for mysteries, which have recently caught up with romance.
Jill Lascher, a 42-year-old Los Angeles mother of three, bought a Kindle so she could read “Fifty Shades of Grey,” whose print availability is limited.
In December, she was on a family vacation in Florida with her sister, Nicole Beit, a 39-year-old Manhattan mother of three, who barely looked up from her Kindle.
“I said, ‘You’re missing this, you’re not present,’ ” Ms. Lascher says.
“I said, ‘If you were reading this, you would understand,’ ” Ms. Beit says.
Ms. Lascher’s Kindle arrived four days later, and for the rest of the vacation and several weeks afterward, the sisters read all the books in the “Shades” trilogy and talked about them often.
“I was very happy having no one know what I was reading,” Ms. Lascher says. “You blush when you read it.”
The End Is Nigh (Digital Edition):
WSJ
BOOKS
March 14, 2012
Books Women Read When No One Can See the Cover
By KATHERINE ROSMAN
If that woman next to you on the train seems unusually engrossed in her e-reader, there may be a good reason.
Electronic readers, and the reading privacy they provide, are fueling a boom in sales of s-xy romance novels, or “romantica,” as the genre is called in the book industry.
As with romance novels, romantica features an old-fashioned love story and pop-culture references like those found in “chick lit.” Plus, there is s-x—a lot of it. Yet unlike traditional erot!ca, romantica always includes what’s known as “HEA”—”happily ever after.”
Publishers are on to a dirty little secret: women are huge users of e-readers on which they are reading books they’d be embarrassed to open in public.
Mainstream publishers are launching digital-only erotic labels to feed demand. At the end of the month, HarperCollins UK will launch Mischief Books, with the tag line “private pleasures with a hand-held device.”
Tori Benson, a 41-year-old married mother in Eustis, Fla., reads 10 to 15 books a week, about half of them erotic. She began reading romance novels as a young girl and graduated to erot!ca a few years ago, when she got her first Kindle. She now has two, one of which her 10-year-old daughter calls “Mommy’s naughty reader.”
Ms. Benson says the digital format helped her get over her embarrassment. She reviews romance books for Smexybooks.com and erot!ca for the website Heroes and Heartbreakers. Even so, she says she wouldn’t read these books in print if she were in view of anyone. “Some of the covers are very explicit,” she says.
‘ “Thank you for spilling wine on my shirt,” Elec said, stepping back and unbuttoning his shirt. He yanked it off with little care or concern for the fabric and tossed it on the floor with hard movements. His T-shirt, which also sported a smaller wine stain, was peeled off and sent after the dress shirt.
Erot!ca on the Mischief Books site is tagged with icons. Handcuffs denote “kinky”; an upraised palm means “discipline.” The HarperCollins imprint says it plans to publish at least 60 e-titles a year. “It used to be a long walk to the counter with an erot!ca selection, but now that’s a thing of the past,” says Adam Nevill, Mischief Books’ editorial director. (HarperCollins, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp. )
The genre even has its first best-seller, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” by E L James, a British mother and former TV producer. It’s a novel about the steamy love affair between a college student and a billionaire businessman, littered with contemporary references to Apple computers, personal trainers and songs from bands like Snow Patrol and Kings of Leon.
“Fifty Shades” was released last May through the Writer’s Coffee Shop, an Australian independent e-publisher, and by fall it had become a grassroots sensation in the U.S., as affluent young mothers devoured the racy tale and recommended it to friends. Last week, Vintage Books signed a seven-figure deal with the Australian publisher for rights to the book and the next two in the series, “Fifty Shades Darker” and “Fifty Shades Freed.” Vintage plans initially to print a total 750,000 paperback copies of the books.
The ease of downloading to an e-reader is a huge factor in erotica’s growth. The minute a reader hears about a book from a friend, she can buy her own copy.
And in a series, as soon as she finishes the first book she can download the next. Some readers load all the novels about a favorite heroine onto their e-readers at once.
“This is an online market,” says Rachel Kramer Bussel, a writer of erot!ca and editor of the anthology “Best Bondage Erotica 2012,” from Cleis Press.
Fans of romantica say they like the heroines—educated, professionally successful, morally centered characters who are swept up by unexpected, intense s-xual desire. Readers also are drawn to the love stories.
“Flat-Out S-xy,” published by Penguin Group’s Berkeley Trade unit, is set in a Nascar-like racing circuit. It depicts the torrid attraction between a rookie driver, Elec, and Tamara, the widow of a beloved driver who died in a crash.
“Tempted,” published by Harlequin’s Spice label, concerns happily married Anne, who is drawn into a relationship with her husband and his best friend, Alex. The sequel, “Naked,” is an account of the affair from Alex’s point of view.
Erot!ca used to be difficult to find. Chains and independent bookstores might have carried a few titles, but they were hidden away, and inventory was scarce.
Self-publishing made it easier for first-time authors to get distribution online. As women began to write erot!ca and post it online, demand grew.
Since Cleis Press started selling digital books in 2008, its sales have grown 30%, and the publisher attributes 40% of its dollar volume to e-books. It is expanding its erot!ca list this year from 48 books to 60. Among its offerings: “Fast Girls” and “Frat Boys.”
The romance genre—encompassing a range of fiction types, from traditional romance to Christian romance, Amish romance and erot!ca—makes up 17% of sales of adult fiction, says Brent Lewis, Harlequin’s executive vice president for digital.
Romance fans were among the earliest adopters of e-reading. Nearly 40% of all new romance books purchased are in digital form, says Kelly Gallagher, vice president of Bowker Market Research. In erotica, the digital portion is that high or higher, he says. It is about 20% for other adult trade genres—except for mysteries, which have recently caught up with romance.
Jill Lascher, a 42-year-old Los Angeles mother of three, bought a Kindle so she could read “Fifty Shades of Grey,” whose print availability is limited.
In December, she was on a family vacation in Florida with her sister, Nicole Beit, a 39-year-old Manhattan mother of three, who barely looked up from her Kindle.
“I said, ‘You’re missing this, you’re not present,’ ” Ms. Lascher says.
“I said, ‘If you were reading this, you would understand,’ ” Ms. Beit says.
Ms. Lascher’s Kindle arrived four days later, and for the rest of the vacation and several weeks afterward, the sisters read all the books in the “Shades” trilogy and talked about them often.
“I was very happy having no one know what I was reading,” Ms. Lascher says. “You blush when you read it.”
The End Is Nigh (Digital Edition):
WSJ
BOOKS
March 14, 2012
Books Women Read When No One Can See the Cover
By KATHERINE ROSMAN
If that woman next to you on the train seems unusually engrossed in her e-reader, there may be a good reason.
Electronic readers, and the reading privacy they provide, are fueling a boom in sales of s-xy romance novels, or “romantica,” as the genre is called in the book industry.
As with romance novels, romantica features an old-fashioned love story and pop-culture references like those found in “chick lit.” Plus, there is s-x—a lot of it. Yet unlike traditional erot!ca, romantica always includes what’s known as “HEA”—”happily ever after.”
Publishers are on to a dirty little secret: women are huge users of e-readers on which they are reading books they’d be embarrassed to open in public.
Mainstream publishers are launching digital-only erot1c labels to feed demand. At the end of the month, HarperCollins UK will launch Mischief Books, with the tag line “private pleasures with a hand-held device.”
Tori Benson, a 41-year-old married mother in Eustis, Fla., reads 10 to 15 books a week, about half of them erot1c. She began reading romance novels as a young girl and graduated to erot!ca a few years ago, when she got her first Kindle. She now has two, one of which her 10-year-old daughter calls “Mommy’s naughty reader.”
Ms. Benson says the digital format helped her get over her embarrassment. She reviews romance books for Smexybooks.com and erot!ca for the website Heroes and Heartbreakers. Even so, she says she wouldn’t read these books in print if she were in view of anyone. “Some of the covers are very explicit,” she says.
‘ “Thank you for spilling wine on my shirt,” Elec said, stepping back and unbuttoning his shirt. He yanked it off with little care or concern for the fabric and tossed it on the floor with hard movements. His T-shirt, which also sported a smaller wine stain, was peeled off and sent after the dress shirt.
Erot!ca on the Mischief Books site is tagged with icons. Handcuffs denote “kinky”; an upraised palm means “discipline.” The HarperCollins imprint says it plans to publish at least 60 e-titles a year. “It used to be a long walk to the counter with an erot!ca selection, but now that’s a thing of the past,” says Adam Nevill, Mischief Books’ editorial director. (HarperCollins, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp. )
The genre even has its first best-seller, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” by E L James, a British mother and former TV producer. It’s a novel about the steamy love affair between a college student and a billionaire businessman, littered with contemporary references to Apple computers, personal trainers and songs from bands like Snow Patrol and Kings of Leon.
“Fifty Shades” was released last May through the Writer’s Coffee Shop, an Australian independent e-publisher, and by fall it had become a grassroots sensation in the U.S., as affluent young mothers devoured the racy tale and recommended it to friends. Last week, Vintage Books signed a seven-figure deal with the Australian publisher for rights to the book and the next two in the series, “Fifty Shades Darker” and “Fifty Shades Freed.” Vintage plans initially to print a total 750,000 paperback copies of the books.
The ease of downloading to an e-reader is a huge factor in erotica’s growth. The minute a reader hears about a book from a friend, she can buy her own copy.
And in a series, as soon as she finishes the first book she can download the next. Some readers load all the novels about a favorite heroine onto their e-readers at once.
“This is an online market,” says Rachel Kramer Bussel, a writer of erot!ca and editor of the anthology “Best Bondage Erotica 2012,” from Cleis Press.
Fans of romantica say they like the heroines—educated, professionally successful, morally centered characters who are swept up by unexpected, intense s-xual desire. Readers also are drawn to the love stories.
“Flat-Out S-xy,” published by Penguin Group’s Berkeley Trade unit, is set in a Nascar-like racing circuit. It depicts the torrid attraction between a rookie driver, Elec, and Tamara, the widow of a beloved driver who died in a crash.
“Tempted,” published by Harlequin’s Spice label, concerns happily married Anne, who is drawn into a relationship with her husband and his best friend, Alex. The sequel, “Naked,” is an account of the affair from Alex’s point of view.
Erot!ca used to be difficult to find. Chains and independent bookstores might have carried a few titles, but they were hidden away, and inventory was scarce.
Self-publishing made it easier for first-time authors to get distribution online. As women began to write erot!ca and post it online, demand grew.
Since Cleis Press started selling digital books in 2008, its sales have grown 30%, and the publisher attributes 40% of its dollar volume to e-books. It is expanding its erot!ca list this year from 48 books to 60. Among its offerings: “Fast Girls” and “Frat Boys.”
The romance genre—encompassing a range of fiction types, from traditional romance to Christian romance, Amish romance and erot!ca—makes up 17% of sales of adult fiction, says Brent Lewis, Harlequin’s executive vice president for digital.
Romance fans were among the earliest adopters of e-reading. Nearly 40% of all new romance books purchased are in digital form, says Kelly Gallagher, vice president of Bowker Market Research. In erotica, the digital portion is that high or higher, he says. It is about 20% for other adult trade genres—except for mysteries, which have recently caught up with romance.
Jill Lascher, a 42-year-old Los Angeles mother of three, bought a Kindle so she could read “Fifty Shades of Grey,” whose print availability is limited.
In December, she was on a family vacation in Florida with her sister, Nicole Beit, a 39-year-old Manhattan mother of three, who barely looked up from her Kindle.
“I said, ‘You’re missing this, you’re not present,’ ” Ms. Lascher says.
“I said, ‘If you were reading this, you would understand,’ ” Ms. Beit says.
Ms. Lascher’s Kindle arrived four days later, and for the rest of the vacation and several weeks afterward, the sisters read all the books in the “Shades” trilogy and talked about them often.
“I was very happy having no one know what I was reading,” Ms. Lascher says. “You blush when you read it.”
The End Is Nigh (Digital Edition):
WSJ
BOOKS
March 14, 2012
Books Women Read When No One Can See the Cover
By KATHERINE ROSMAN
If that woman next to you on the train seems unusually engrossed in her e-reader, there may be a good reason.
Electronic readers, and the reading privacy they provide, are fueling a boom in sales of s-xy romance novels, or “romantica,” as the genre is called in the book industry.
As with romance novels, romantica features an old-fashioned love story and pop-culture references like those found in “chick lit.” Plus, there is s-x—a lot of it. Yet unlike traditional erot!ca, romantica always includes what’s known as “HEA”—”happily ever after.”
Publishers are on to a dirty little secret: women are huge users of e-readers on which they are reading books they’d be embarrassed to open in public.
Mainstream publishers are launching digital-only erot1c labels to feed demand. At the end of the month, HarperCollins UK will launch Mischief Books, with the tag line “private pleasures with a hand-held device.”
Tori Benson, a 41-year-old married mother in Eustis, Fla., reads 10 to 15 books a week, about half of them erot1c. She began reading romance novels as a young girl and graduated to erot!ca a few years ago, when she got her first Kindle. She now has two, one of which her 10-year-old daughter calls “Mommy’s naughty reader.”
Ms. Benson says the digital format helped her get over her embarrassment. She reviews romance books for Smexybooks.com and erot!ca for the website Heroes and Heartbreakers. Even so, she says she wouldn’t read these books in print if she were in view of anyone. “Some of the covers are very explicit,” she says.
‘ “Thank you for spilling wine on my shirt,” Elec said, stepping back and unbuttoning his shirt. He yanked it off with little care or concern for the fabric and tossed it on the floor with hard movements. His T-shirt, which also sported a smaller wine stain, was peeled off and sent after the dress shirt.
Erot!ca on the Mischief Books site is tagged with icons. Handcuffs denote “kinky”; an upraised palm means “discipline.” The HarperCollins imprint says it plans to publish at least 60 e-titles a year. “It used to be a long walk to the counter with an erot!ca selection, but now that’s a thing of the past,” says Adam Nevill, Mischief Books’ editorial director. (HarperCollins, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp. )
The genre even has its first best-seller, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” by E L James, a British mother and former TV producer. It’s a novel about the steamy love affair between a college student and a billionaire businessman, littered with contemporary references to Apple computers, personal trainers and songs from bands like Snow Patrol and Kings of Leon.
“Fifty Shades” was released last May through the Writer’s Coffee Shop, an Australian independent e-publisher, and by fall it had become a grassroots sensation in the U.S., as affluent young mothers devoured the racy tale and recommended it to friends. Last week, Vintage Books signed a seven-figure deal with the Australian publisher for rights to the book and the next two in the series, “Fifty Shades Darker” and “Fifty Shades Freed.” Vintage plans initially to print a total 750,000 paperback copies of the books.
The ease of downloading to an e-reader is a huge factor in erot1ca’s growth. The minute a reader hears about a book from a friend, she can buy her own copy.
And in a series, as soon as she finishes the first book she can download the next. Some readers load all the novels about a favorite heroine onto their e-readers at once.
“This is an online market,” says Rachel Kramer Bussel, a writer of erot!ca and editor of the anthology “Best Bondage Erot1ca 2012,” from Cleis Press.
Fans of romantica say they like the heroines—educated, professionally successful, morally centered characters who are swept up by unexpected, intense s-xual desire. Readers also are drawn to the love stories.
“Flat-Out S-xy,” published by Penguin Group’s Berkeley Trade unit, is set in a Nascar-like racing circuit. It depicts the torrid attraction between a rookie driver, Elec, and Tamara, the widow of a beloved driver who died in a crash.
“Tempted,” published by Harlequin’s Spice label, concerns happily married Anne, who is drawn into a relationship with her husband and his best friend, Alex. The sequel, “Naked,” is an account of the affair from Alex’s point of view.
Erot!ca used to be difficult to find. Chains and independent bookstores might have carried a few titles, but they were hidden away, and inventory was scarce.
Self-publishing made it easier for first-time authors to get distribution online. As women began to write erot!ca and post it online, demand grew.
Since Cleis Press started selling digital books in 2008, its sales have grown 30%, and the publisher attributes 40% of its dollar volume to e-books. It is expanding its erot!ca list this year from 48 books to 60. Among its offerings: “Fast Girls” and “Frat Boys.”
The romance genre—encompassing a range of fiction types, from traditional romance to Christian romance, Amish romance and erot!ca—makes up 17% of sales of adult fiction, says Brent Lewis, Harlequin’s executive vice president for digital.
Romance fans were among the earliest adopters of e-reading. Nearly 40% of all new romance books purchased are in digital form, says Kelly Gallagher, vice president of Bowker Market Research. In erot1ca, the digital portion is that high or higher, he says. It is about 20% for other adult trade genres—except for mysteries, which have recently caught up with romance.
Jill Lascher, a 42-year-old Los Angeles mother of three, bought a Kindle so she could read “Fifty Shades of Grey,” whose print availability is limited.
In December, she was on a family vacation in Florida with her sister, Nicole Beit, a 39-year-old Manhattan mother of three, who barely looked up from her Kindle.
“I said, ‘You’re missing this, you’re not present,’ ” Ms. Lascher says.
“I said, ‘If you were reading this, you would understand,’ ” Ms. Beit says.
Ms. Lascher’s Kindle arrived four days later, and for the rest of the vacation and several weeks afterward, the sisters read all the books in the “Shades” trilogy and talked about them often.
“I was very happy having no one know what I was reading,” Ms. Lascher says. “You blush when you read it.”
Brian (18)-
Stupid sheep don’t realize it’s just another screw job.
Only banksters and the politically-connected win in Amerika.
gluteus (19)-
Will probably price in a similar fashion to super-long-dated Japanese debt.
Doesn’t matter; all of it will end in default.
The End Is Nigh (Digital Edition):
WSJ
BOOKS
March 14, 2012
Books Women Read When No One Can See the Cover
By KATHERINE ROSMAN
If that woman next to you on the train seems unusually engrossed in her e-reader, there may be a good reason.
Electronic readers, and the reading privacy they provide, are fueling a boom in sales of s-xy romance novels, or “romantica,” as the genre is called in the book industry.
As with romance novels, romantica features an old-fashioned love story and pop-culture references like those found in “chick lit.” Plus, there is s-x—a lot of it. Yet unlike traditional erot!ca, romantica always includes what’s known as “HEA”—”happily ever after.”
Publishers are on to a dirty little secret: women are huge users of e-readers on which they are reading books they’d be embarrassed to open in public.
Mainstream publishers are launching digital-only erot1c labels to feed demand. At the end of the month, HarperCollins UK will launch Mischief Books, with the tag line “private pleasures with a hand-held device.”
Tori Benson, a 41-year-old married mother in Eustis, Fla., reads 10 to 15 books a week, about half of them erot1c. She began reading romance novels as a young girl and graduated to erot!ca a few years ago, when she got her first Kindle. She now has two, one of which her 10-year-old daughter calls “Mommy’s naughty reader.”
Ms. Benson says the digital format helped her get over her embarrassment. She reviews romance books for Sm-xybooks.com and erot!ca for the website Heroes and Heartbreakers. Even so, she says she wouldn’t read these books in print if she were in view of anyone. “Some of the covers are very explicit,” she says.
‘ “Thank you for spilling wine on my shirt,” Elec said, stepping back and unbuttoning his shirt. He yanked it off with little care or concern for the fabric and tossed it on the floor with hard movements. His T-shirt, which also sported a smaller wine stain, was peeled off and sent after the dress shirt.
Erot!ca on the Mischief Books site is tagged with icons. Handcuffs denote “k1nky”; an upraised palm means “discipline.” The HarperCollins imprint says it plans to publish at least 60 e-titles a year. “It used to be a long walk to the counter with an erot!ca selection, but now that’s a thing of the past,” says Adam Nevill, Mischief Books’ editorial director. (HarperCollins, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp. )
The genre even has its first best-seller, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” by E L James, a British mother and former TV producer. It’s a novel about the steamy love affair between a college student and a billionaire businessman, littered with contemporary references to Apple computers, personal trainers and songs from bands like Snow Patrol and Kings of Leon.
“Fifty Shades” was released last May through the Writer’s Coffee Shop, an Australian independent e-publisher, and by fall it had become a grassroots sensation in the U.S., as affluent young mothers devoured the racy tale and recommended it to friends. Last week, Vintage Books signed a seven-figure deal with the Australian publisher for rights to the book and the next two in the series, “Fifty Shades Darker” and “Fifty Shades Freed.” Vintage plans initially to print a total 750,000 paperback copies of the books.
The ease of downloading to an e-reader is a huge factor in erot1ca’s growth. The minute a reader hears about a book from a friend, she can buy her own copy.
And in a series, as soon as she finishes the first book she can download the next. Some readers load all the novels about a favorite heroine onto their e-readers at once.
“This is an online market,” says Rachel Kramer Bussel, a writer of erot!ca and editor of the anthology “Best B-ndage Erot1ca 2012,” from Cleis Press.
Fans of romantica say they like the heroines—educated, professionally successful, morally centered characters who are swept up by unexpected, intense s-xual desire. Readers also are drawn to the love stories.
“Flat-Out S-xy,” published by Penguin Group’s Berkeley Trade unit, is set in a Nascar-like racing circuit. It depicts the torrid attraction between a rookie driver, Elec, and Tamara, the widow of a beloved driver who died in a crash.
“Tempted,” published by Harlequin’s Spice label, concerns happily married Anne, who is drawn into a relationship with her husband and his best friend, Alex. The sequel, “Naked,” is an account of the affair from Alex’s point of view.
Erot!ca used to be difficult to find. Chains and independent bookstores might have carried a few titles, but they were hidden away, and inventory was scarce.
Self-publishing made it easier for first-time authors to get distribution online. As women began to write erot!ca and post it online, demand grew.
Since Cleis Press started selling digital books in 2008, its sales have grown 30%, and the publisher attributes 40% of its dollar volume to e-books. It is expanding its erot!ca list this year from 48 books to 60. Among its offerings: “Fast Girls” and “Frat Boys.”
The romance genre—encompassing a range of fiction types, from traditional romance to Christian romance, Amish romance and erot!ca—makes up 17% of sales of adult fiction, says Brent Lewis, Harlequin’s executive vice president for digital.
Romance fans were among the earliest adopters of e-reading. Nearly 40% of all new romance books purchased are in digital form, says Kelly Gallagher, vice president of Bowker Market Research. In erot1ca, the digital portion is that high or higher, he says. It is about 20% for other adult trade genres—except for mysteries, which have recently caught up with romance.
Jill Lascher, a 42-year-old Los Angeles mother of three, bought a Kindle so she could read “Fifty Shades of Grey,” whose print availability is limited.
In December, she was on a family vacation in Florida with her sister, Nicole Beit, a 39-year-old Manhattan mother of three, who barely looked up from her Kindle.
“I said, ‘You’re missing this, you’re not present,’ ” Ms. Lascher says.
“I said, ‘If you were reading this, you would understand,’ ” Ms. Beit says.
Ms. Lascher’s Kindle arrived four days later, and for the rest of the vacation and several weeks afterward, the sisters read all the books in the “Shades” trilogy and talked about them often.
“I was very happy having no one know what I was reading,” Ms. Lascher says. “You blush when you read it.”
Anybody know where I can offload a few cases of hot Tide?
Will trade Tide for meth.
Logic says boomers will be looking to sell as kids are now adults but I don’t think it’s going to happen as much as it’s being expected. Kids born between 82-95 are saddled with school debt and low quality jobs. They won’t be able to buy a home for years until they can pay down the debt and save up a sizaeable down payment. So boomers will probably transfer the home over to their kids and have the kids pay their rent in a smaller place. You’ll prob see a lot of ownership transfer happen as boomers downsize.
We are buying a 2nd house in a top school town with Midtown direct.
It took us two years to fix current house in the same town and save for 2nd one.
Both cases were boomers moving out in their 70s and 60s with no kids living in house anymore.
We plan to rent out the 2nd house. We followed local rental market for two years and believe we will be ok.
Mortgage company is insane asking everything and we provided more than 200 pages of proofs of where our money coming from. Hopefully, we can close in a week. I think this is part of reason that housing market is not good. Banks are scared to loan you money. Both of us have good paying jobs, 800+ scores, 35% down payment, and we owned three houses before. And I am doing business with the same mortgage company for the last two years.
We just can not believe how much scrutiny they are putting on us. Anyhow, just send latest proof to them and hopefully that is it.
love (33)-
It’s a bitch when you’re borrowing from a bank that’s insolvent.
Chifi[29];
Nothing new under the sun. Pron floated the VHS when there was no movie content because the movie studios were largely waiting on the sideline to see who would win the VHS-BetaMax format war. The only division of GM that consistently made good money was Hughes Satellite communications, which had huge market penetration (ha!) in delivering pay-per-view movies to hotels. The billing on the folio was always discrete, without titles.
LoveNJ [33];
I don’t know the details of your situation, but I think the banks are just scared to loan to amateur landlords, because that hasn’t worked out so well on the most part. They don’t know whether or not you are one of the suspect class.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/9142641/Top-Goldman-executive-quits-over-culture-of-toxic-greed.html
Sell to newlyweds sick of living in their in-laws basement.
Warren Buffett: Pent-Up Demand, Low Interest Rates Will Spur Housing
http://www.zillow.com/blog/2012-03-02/warren-buffett-pent-up-demand-low-interest-rates-will-spur-housing/
[b][url=http://www.dvdru.net/story.php?title=easy-and-fast-communications-through-public-relations-1
]OC public relations firm
[/url][/b]
Flippers beware but new families that are long housing via a 30 year mortgage might be in good shape if they buy today.
“If you can buy a home and stay put for many years, today’s market looks like a steal. But if you’re hoping to buy now and sell a few years down the road, tread with caution.”
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/02/29/is-buffett-right-about-housing/
Another day in hell.
Warren Buffett: Pent-Up Demand, Low Interest Rates Will Spur Housing
This statement doesn’t apply in the NJ/NY area due to property taxes. The question still needs to be answered: how does a lender approve a loan when the property taxes are one third of the monthly PITI? Yes, it’s absolutely true; it’s different here. I see a house that I like and could easily put 30% or better down. Then, I see the property taxes and despite throwing gobs of money in the pot for a down payment, I’m still not able calculate an acceptable income/payment ratio. The model doesn’t work for this area. Solution? The prices of houses in our area will decline further.
Some of these Realtors are absolutely shameless.
It’s not that big because when you look at the market, it’s pretty good right now and getting better,” says Walter Maloney of the National Association of Realtors (NAR).
Cry me a river:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html?ref=opinion
Of course he’s not too offended to live off the money he made from Goldman for the six years since Blankfein took over…
“If they wince at a few taser shots, you probably don’t want them anyway.” Shore Guy.
Another entry into the 3 best phrases in the history of this blog !!
#5Our open houses are well attended, and we also see a great response to our Internet advertising
Yeah, but no mention that you have actually sold anything since the day after Christmas.
General Robert E. Lee: General, you must look to your division.
Major General George E. Pickett: General Lee… I have no division.
Sell? Sell to Whom? lol!
#38 Brian: but we have supposedly had pent up demand, and we have low interest rates, and yet, and yet, where is the demand?
You guys talk like the only place people want to live in NJ is in Bergen or Hudson counties. Most people don’t have 5 figure property tax bills. Yes, mine is higher than what I’d like. And I wonder why, when I look over the border, PA can provide the same services for a few thousand dollars less. We should continue to question government and make sure they are spending the money wisely.
But I think eventually first time buyers are going to come back in at some point. When you’re young and dumb, you want what you want. Eventually, it’s possible the whole housing crisis thing will be a distant memory and people will just want to raise families in their own houses again.
If one of the bedrooms is in the basement, can you really call it a 3 bedroom house?? Just saying.
http://www.njmls.com/listings/index.cfm?action=dsp.info&mlsnum=1209198&dayssince=&countysearch=false
Brian [49];
You guys talk like the only place people want to live in NJ is in Bergen or Hudson counties. Most people don’t have 5 figure property tax bills.
You talk like Passaic, Morris, Union, Hunterdon, Merce, Sommerset, Middles3x, Monmouth, Ocean… counties don’t also slap a decript 40-year old middle class house with a 5-figure tax bill. Trust me, its more than just the haughty Bergen and Hdson counties.
3B [50];
The Eva Peron balconette seals it! Bid above ask with an escalator clause. Where do I sign?
Chifi (24),
Debating summer interns. Seems there’s only an interest in Ivy scholars in junior year, and that’s only a maybe.
NY Times Op-Ed today
Man Escapes Vampire Squid
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
whoops…just saw that someone posted this
You are not buying a house. Since you are putting down 35% you are buying 35% of a house, you are asking the bank to buy 65% of the house. Of course bank cares.
Issue is you did not think house was a good enough deal to risk 100% of your money. For instance the Bank REO I gave up on my wife was if we got it for 140K I would pay cash, at 175K we should get a mortgage. Hence as people get near the upper ranges they want to split risk.
Lets say that house was a fire sale selling for 100K and worth 300K and you had to act quick. You would write a check.
Also do you own a home. If you have a mortgage on first home the answer is no. When I did get pre-approved on my REO the bank liked I owned my first home outright. It goes in the asset column instead of liabilty column. Also by taking on more than one mortgage you are causing systemic risk to the banking industry. Bank of America does not like to give mortgage to people who have mortgage as it causes a systemic risk that could result in a domino effect even if they dont’t own the primiary mortgage.
In general cash deals are better, on average you get 10% off. Plus you can cash out 100K in equity afterwards with no fees at a lower rate than a primary.
LoveNJ says:
March 14, 2012 at 12:26 am
We are buying a 2nd house in a top school town with Midtown direct.
re: # 54- yeah must be no fun when you have to tell someone that you work for the squid. I wonder how much of a short his new firm put on GS before this came out?
#52 Anon: The house was on the market last Spring, but did not sell. It was originally a 3 bedroom upstairs, but they combined 2 of the rooms to make one large master suite. I would have changed it back to 3 bedrooms, after it did not sell last year, but what do I know!!! It last sold in 2003, when it was a real 3 bedroom for 425K
re # 54 – Lol!
Why I am leaving the Empire, by Darth Vader
14-03-12
TODAY is my last day at the Empire.
Image
‘I no longer have the pride, or the belief’
After almost 12 years, first as a summer intern, then in the Death Star and now in London, I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its massive, genocidal space machines. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.
To put the problem in the simplest terms, throttling people with your mind continues to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making people dead.
The Empire is one of the galaxy’s largest and most important oppressive regimes and it is too integral to galactic murder to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of Yoda College that I can no longer in good conscience point menacingly and say that I identify with what it stands for.
For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates, some of whom were my secret children, through our gruelling interview process. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in detecting strange disturbances in the Force for the 80 younglings who made the cut.
I knew it was time to leave when I realised I could no longer speak to these students inside their heads and tell them what a great place this was to work.
How did we get here? The Empire changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and killing your former mentor with a light sabre. Today, if you make enough money you will be promoted into a position of influence, even if you have a disturbing lack of faith.
What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s ‘axes’, which is Empire-speak for persuading your clients to invest in ‘prime-quality’ residential building plots on Alderaan that don’t exist and have not existed since we blew it up. b) ‘Hunt Elephants’. In English: get your clients – some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t – to tempt their friends to Cloud City and then betray them. c) Hand over rebel smugglers to an incredibly fat gangster.
When I was a first-year analyst I didn’t know where the bathroom was, or how to tie my shoelaces telepathically. I was taught to be concerned with learning the ropes, finding out what a protocol droid was and putting my helmet on properly
so people could not see my badly damaged head.
My proudest moments in life – the pod race, being lured over to the Dark Side and winning a bronze medal for mind control ping-pong at the Midi-Chlorian Games – known as the Jedi Olympics – have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts.
The Empire today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about remote strangulation. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore.
I hope this can be a wake-up call. Make killing people in terrifying and unstoppable ways the focal point of your business again. Without it you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much non-existent Alderaan real estate they sell. And get the culture right again, so people want to make millions of voices cry out in terror before being suddenly silenced.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/why-i-am-leaving-the-empire%2c-by-darth-vader-201203145007/
I will leave any necessary comment to others:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304450004577277482565674646.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Anthropologist Elinor Ochs and her colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles have studied family life as far away as Samoa and the Peruvian Amazon region, but for the last decade they have focused on a society closer to home: the American middle class.
Why do American children depend on their parents to do things for them that they are capable of doing for themselves?
snip
By studying families at home—or, as the scientists say, “in vivo”—rather than in a lab, they hope to better grasp how families with two working parents balance child care, household duties and career, and how this balance affects their health and well-being
snip
Ten years ago, the UCLA team recorded video for a week of nearly every moment at home in the lives of 32 Southern California families. They have been picking apart the footage ever since, scrutinizing behavior, comments and even their refrigerators’s contents for clues.
snip
Among the findings: The families had very a child-centered focus, which may help explain the “dependency dilemma” seen among American middle-class families, says Dr. Ochs. Parents intend to develop their children’s independence, yet raise them to be relatively dependent, even when the kids have the skills to act on their own, she says.
snip
By contrast, the U.S. videos showed Los Angeles parents focusing more on the children, using simplified talk with them, doing most of the housework and intervening quickly when the kids had trouble completing a task.
In 22 of 30 families, children frequently ignored or resisted appeals to help, according to a study published in the journal Ethos in 2009. In the remaining eight families, the children weren’t asked to do much. In some cases, the children routinely asked the parents to do tasks, like getting them silverware. “How am I supposed to cut my food?” Dr. Ochs recalls one girl asking her parents.
Asking children to do a task led to much negotiation, and when parents asked, it sounded often like they were asking a favor, not making a demand, researchers said. Parents interviewed about their behavior said it was often too much trouble to ask.
snip
Curious.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/briandomitrovic/2012/03/13/the-weak-dollar-caused-the-great-recession/
Do you have someplace I can send info on my cousin? You can remain anonymous…… Complete crackerjack, albeit no Ivy…..is a junior, top grades, intermediate Econ TA, Chicago Booth Summer Program….
A.West says:
March 14, 2012 at 8:35 am
Chifi (24),
Debating summer interns. Seems there’s only an interest in Ivy scholars in junior year, and that’s only a maybe.
also…working multiple jobs during semesters….
The guy at GS who is quitting is an idiot. An employees primary objective is to increase shareholder value. You should try to maximize profits from customers, work employees hard and reward employees who mazimize employee profits.
widows, union workers, retirees, children and orphans own goldman stocks and bonds in their retirement accounts. That is who the company should be protecting. Not its employees or rich customers. God Bless Goldman they are truly doing the lords work.
Plus this idiot is only at GS 12 years if you count his summer internship. What does that make him 31. Hopefully he is blackballed from the street.
comes from immigrant Albanian parents, so he has been given absolutely nothing…has earned every opportunity by his sheer blood, guts and work.
JJ – relax your high floor river facing corner office is still secure.
Gary 42 Warren Buffet definetly needs to spend some of his billions and take a flight to NJ for a reality check before he makes a statement like that, here’s a home from his neck of the woods in Omaha, NE and the taxes are $621 http://www.weichert.com/40867172/?cityid=38050&mls=195&pg=10
Dogs that bite the hands that feed them end up getting gassed in the dog pound. Notice he did not offer to return a nickle he earned at GS.
BTW the sun off the water is really nice looking today. Doing some interviewing today, it is talent, vs youth, vs qualified. Can I find them all? “Talent” is hard to get. Much higher pay as a trophy wife than actually working.
Juice Box says:
March 14, 2012 at 9:38 am
JJ – relax your high floor river facing corner office is still secure.
#64 JJ 12 years at GS is a long time. Many would not have lasted that long.
I would eat him for lunch and floss my teeth with his bones.
Chifi, Banco Popular almost doubled in six months. You mocked my call on the Puerto Rician bank back in the fall. You need to hit the books again. That was a gimmie.
chicagofinance says:
March 14, 2012 at 9:34 am
comes from immigrant Albanian parents, so he has been given absolutely nothing…has earned every opportunity by his sheer blood, guts and work.
Not really, GS has lots of people there a long time. They did a big lay off in Thanskgiving weekend 2008 but they protected the employees with senority and threw out the recent hires. He would have started in 2002 as a full time employee and as such would have only been there for one round of lay-offs where only bottom 10% and newly hired were really at risk.
3B says:
March 14, 2012 at 9:59 am
#64 JJ 12 years at GS is a long time. Many would not have lasted that long.
JJ – Just had one of our best and brightest resign yesterday. I actually didn’t want to hire him 6 years ago since I wanted to hire a pretty young thing instead. I told him when he was leaving yesterday that he wasn’t my first choice and who I actually wanted to hire,and we had a laugh and he left on good terms and would be welcomed back. Anyway, as you know everyone is replaceable, and no corner office is secure. My whole opinion on Wall St and trust these days is that things have yet to come to a head, just take a look at all the money on the sidelines and low trading volumes. Embrace change because after November all bets are off.
Mike [67],
Of Course. Let the dog sh1t homes in our area rot. Riding the market down a hill of rocks and glass on your bare @ss can be a little painful. So be it.
#71 JJ: Ah no they do not. I worked there for 16 years, I might know just a little bit more about the place than you do. 4 years ago 60% of the employees were there 5 years or less
When the firm went public in 1999 they laid off a massive amount of people who were there 10 years or more; I was one of them.
chi (65)-
Wow. I didn’t know you were related to Scarface.
“…so he has been given absolutely nothing…has earned every opportunity by his sheer blood, guts and work.”
juice (66)-
I just want to know if jj calls his clients “muppets”.
Or, if he is allowed to interface with clients at all.
re: #76 – Meat the call it back office for a reason.
I interviewed at GS many many years ago. I still chuckle by the fact the reason I was not hired was they said “I was overqualified”.
Churn and burn is good, look at the big four. Employees are at peak performance years 1-5. Why keep them beyond that? Better model GS moved to is churn and burn the new MBAs, keep a couple corner offices of old timers to manage the madness.
The muppets are multimillionares who never age and work only a few weeks a year. I want to be a muppet.
3B says:
March 14, 2012 at 10:06 am
#71 JJ: Ah no they do not. I worked there for 16 years, I might know just a little bit more about the place than you do. 4 years ago 60% of the employees were there 5 years or less
When the firm went public in 1999 they laid off a massive amount of people who were there 10 years or more; I was one of them.
#78 JJ I was overqualified
Oh I am sure they did!!!
F*ck it. There was a time when guys like John Bogle and David Longaberger existed. Guys who were competitive, understood business but were also good stewards. Now, everybody is just a wh0re driven by personal gain.
That money on the sidelines will soon flood in and it is a presidential election year. My bigger fear is retail investors may flood in at peak and soon another crash which may turn them off from investing for several years. We cant afford that.
Juice Box says:
March 14, 2012 at 10:05 am
JJ – Just had one of our best and brightest resign yesterday. I actually didn’t want to hire him 6 years ago since I wanted to hire a pretty young thing instead. I told him when he was leaving yesterday that he wasn’t my first choice and who I actually wanted to hire,and we had a laugh and he left on good terms and would be welcomed back. Anyway, as you know everyone is replaceable, and no corner office is secure. My whole opinion on Wall St and trust these days is that things have yet to come to a head, just take a look at all the money on the sidelines and low trading volumes. Embrace change because after November all bets are off.
http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/14/10684063-in-highly-unusual-move-marines-asked-to-disarm-before-leon-panetta-speech
In a highly unusual move, around 200 U.S. Marines were asked to leave their weapons outside the tent where U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was set to speak during his trip to Afghanistan on Wednesday.
snip
According to reporters at Camp Leatherneck, the Marines were waiting to hear Panetta’s speech when they were abruptly told by their commander to get up, leave their weapons, including M16 and M-4 automatic rifles and 9 mm pistols, outside and return unarmed.
snip
Military officials in Washington told NBC News’ chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski that the decision to disarm the Marines was indeed significant.
“It sends the wrong message” that Marines can’t be trusted in the presence of the secretary of defense,” one told him.
According to one official the decision was “stupid.”
Miklaszewski also told NBC’s Chuck Todd Wednesday that the move was “highly unusual” and that Marines in combat zones are always supposed to have weapons within their reach.
Most memoriable interviews.
9 interviews at Bear Sterns for a job including an expensive lunch interview. They never got back to me after second phone call to them to find results I clearly hear hiring manager in background yell out just tell him I am not here.
Goldman claiming I am overqualified.
Snooty white shoe trading desk telling me I should be proud to make it past second round of interviews to be a trader considering I only went to a NY area school and not an Ivy.
Morgan Stanley after multiple interviews actually hiring me as a trader and said offer letter would be in mail and next morning they miss earnings big and all offer letters recsinded as well as announced job lay offs. No Soup for me.
Me accepting a job not showing up to orientation as I got another better job last minute which turn out to be a bad job and then turning around to first company and asking for offer letter back a second time. Which my friend said sounds too ballsy and nervey to do. I did it anyhow and got the offer letter a second time.
JJ, you are a god amongst men. How do you keep your dong from dragging on the floor as you walk?
JJ,
Do you exclusively drink Dos Equis?
Zieba,
He attaches a roller skate to the end. Duh!
JJ – my “bets are off” is in reference to how the O admin will behave when then don’t have to worry about fund-raising for reelection. Muppet Romney and his magic underwear hasn’t a prayer, no matter how much Jamie and Lloyd want him in.
I believe 90% of house sellers in Northern NJ are indeed, muppets.
I’m not sure JJ has a Dong any longer. If I recall, he mentioned he’d lost it due to a Moray eel incident while spear fishing off of Galapagos. He is, however, a Ding Dong so the claims of having said Dong still apply.
Everything has almost doubled in the last six months……WTF?
Brass Balls AKA JJ says:
March 14, 2012 at 10:00 am
Chifi, Banco Popular almost doubled in six months. You mocked my call on the Puerto Rician bank back in the fall. You need to hit the books again. That was a gimmie.
Hey I was thinking of maybe joining the Board of Directors of a Fortune 500 company. How does one apply for such a job. It seems like a good gig. But never see jobs posted anywhere.
Ok I give you that somewhat, but the amount of stocks that rose 100% in last four months such as BPOP are not that big.
I got money to put to work tommorow. My lucaeda bond got called. Whatcha got? Thinking of playing it safe and just do Kicker Muni bonds. Also thinking maybe some perf stk or bonds of GAMC, STI, C, Met the four that failed the stress test.
GMAC/Ally as Fresh Prince once said the Fed just doesnt understand, once they cut Rescap they should be ok.
STI I think the hardert hit areas of RE will recover first .
C I think they are rock solid, Fed just being careful
And Met is an Insurance company Fed just doesnt undertand.
May be trup, pref stk, hunting on these four tommorrow. But only bargains. All bad news priced in and only good news left to happen.
chicagofinance says:
March 14, 2012 at 11:08 am
Everything has almost doubled in the last six months……WTF?
Brass Balls AKA JJ says:
March 14, 2012 at 10:00 am
Chifi, Banco Popular almost doubled in six months. You mocked my call on the Puerto Rician bank back in the fall. You need to hit the books again. That was a gimmie.
gary: The below listing is for you as I know ho much you love those raised ranches,um sorry I mean bi-levels. It can be yours for 569K! It is the Spring selling season you know!!!!
Oh and the taxes are a lyrical $15,300.00 per year!!!!
http://www.njmls.com/listings/index.cfm?action=dsp.info&mlsnum=1209239&dayssince=&countysearch=false
#60 yes, kid gloves. It annoys the heck out of me. I see far too many parents who do not expect their kids to do any chores around the house or take personal responsibility for their actions. “It isn’t my little Aiden’s fault, it is someone elses fault”
Everyone seems to think their kids are unique and special and they will be the best at everything and will not fail (as long as they live in a top school district town). Now enter Generation Y into the workplace. Wow. Just wow.
3B – Dear old mom just got her tax assessment from her haughty Bergen County town town and the house is now reassessed at 80k less than before, but the taxes have not decreased! She is actually livid over it, saying they are stealing her savings. She paid 44k for the place back in the 1970s and I told her about 5 times in 2005 to sell, sell, sell when all of the POS homes were going for about 480k, but at the time believe it or not she did not think real estate would ever go down. Imagine that.
I explained to that her house based upon just inflation it really only worth about 160k and that her investment is really still killing it. That seemed to help.
Safe for work:
http://tinyurl.com/JJ-Pin-up
tbw [94].
In other words, every child gets a pony. :)
3B [93],
The sellers are muppets.
#95 Juice: Amazingly enough the old timers appear to be the worst with the I am not giving my house away.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-americans-avoiding-stocks-ask-225638447.html
..Why Are Americans Avoiding Stocks? Ask a Shrink
Why are Americans avoiding stocks? Experts in the field of behavior finance have a few ideas
By Matthew Craft, AP Business Writer | Associated Press – Sun, Mar 11, 2012 12:18 PM EDT
The headlines say the financial crisis is behind us. The Dow is back to pre-financial crisis levels. Layoffs are the slowest since the financial crisis, and car sales the highest since the financial crisis.
So why are Americans still too scared to get back in the stock market?
Because all they hear is “financial crisis.”
Every comparison to 2008, even a comparison that’s supposedly good, stirs memories of 2008. For some people, it rekindles the fear of losing a job or a house. For others, years of retirement savings swallowed by a plunging stock market.
So say the experts in the budding field of behavioral finance. Professional investors and money managers may be baffled that Americans are shaking off the good news. But people with a background in psychology are hardly surprised.
A broad measure of the stock market, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, is up more than 20 percent from last October. The index has more than doubled since March 9, 2009, the low point for stocks during the Great Recession.
But everyday investors refuse to jump in. They pulled $19 billion from funds that invest in U.S. stocks in December, according to the Investment Company Institute, and $2 billion more in January.
“In the old days, if there was a market rally, people would call and ask to put more money in. They felt they were missing the party,” says Deborah DeMatteo, an independent wealth manager at 10-15 Associates in Goshen, N.Y.
This time, investors seem more than happy to miss the party.
“Now, people call and ask, ‘When is it going back down?'” DeMatteo says. “There’s a sense of doom.”
What are they thinking? It’s a question fit for a shrink.
Market psychology is still psychology, which is why Wall Street banks and investment firms pay people like Richard Peterson, a psychiatrist with a medical degree from the University of Texas, to help make sense of it.
A variety of emotions and thought processes are keeping Americans out of the stock market, Peterson and other experts say. The memory of 2008, when the Dow Jones industrial average swung wildly by hundreds of points a day, is probably No. 1.
The tumult of that year stamped itself in many people’s brains. Like survivors of a devastating earthquake, they carry those events with them.
“A traumatic memory gets seared in the brain,” Peterson says.
In this case, the wound is easily irritated. News that reminds people of the financial crisis — debt problems in Europe, a sudden swing in the market — sets off the same emotions of fear or anger. Getting your fear button pushed that often is exhausting, Peterson says.
People eventually tune out to save their sanity.
“Fear is still with us,” says Meir Statman, a professor of finance at Santa Clara University in California and a leading expert in behavioral finance. “We live as if it’s still 2008.”
Statman sees a few other impulses at work. One is a habit of thinking that selects an event and uses it as the basis for understanding everything else. “We look at something and ask, ‘What is this similar to?’ Statman explains.
In good times, this leads to the folly of “return chasing” — expecting an investment, sports team or pickup line to be successful simply because it proved successful in the past.
People usually do this kind of extrapolation from recent events. But Statman suspects many are using the more distant memory of 2008 because it feels closer. “I think that what’s vivid in people’s minds is not last year but 2008,” he says.
As a result, they respond to events as if it were September 2008 and Lehman Brothers were about to collapse all over again. In this case, Statman says it’s not fear that’s driving people but an error of reasoning.
Last summer, for instance, a fight over raising the federal government’s debt limit led Standard & Poor’s to strip the United States of its top-flight AAA rating. The markets went wild. For the month of August, the Dow swung an average of nearly 2 percent every day.
Harvey Rowen, chief investment officer at Starmont Asset Management in San Francisco, says clients called and wanted to cash everything out. “I’d tell them, ‘You’re going to take a loss,'” he says. “And they’d say, ‘I don’t care. I want out.'”
One client called with a demand to sell all his investments. He wanted Starmont to use the cash to buy gold bars, silver bars and Swiss francs and then cart them to his house. “We managed to talk him out of it,” Rowen says.
Another habit that Statman sees at play is the confirmation bias. It’s often used as a way to help explain the widening political divide in the U.S. between Democrats and Republicans.
Say you believe that the federal government’s debts will cause the U.S. to go the way of Greece. Instead of looking for information that challenges this view, you stick to news reports that confirm your opinions.
“If you have evidence that goes against your beliefs, you dismiss it,” he says.
Statman says it seems some people are looking to confirm a “doom and gloom” view of the U.S. economy. Point out that the economy grew at a 3 percent rate in the last quarter of 2011 and they’ll change the subject.
Their view, he says, is: “This country is going down the tubes.”
#98 gary: So you don’t want it???
Being that Gator and I both work full-time, I often pick our little guy up at a friends house around 5:30pm on my way home from work. There’s this one particularly generous mother who goes out of her way to collect Gator Jr’s backpack, shoes and coat when I come to the door. I literally told her to stop doing this. She respected my wishes and I think she learned from it. Until this past Monday, when my son accidentally took home both his her son’s coat as well as his own.
:)
meep meep
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WWWTW1P8rQ&feature=player_embedded
3B [101],
I’ll pass.
So much for refinancing!
CBOE Interest Rate 10-Year T-No (^TNX)
-Chicago Options
2.27 Up 0.17(7.83%) 1:12PM EDT
“I was not hired was they said ‘I was overqualified’. ”
Translation, we don’t want you ANYWHERE near this place. Move along now.
“I was not hired was they said ‘I was overqualified’. ”
See also: “It’s not you. It’s me.”
#04 gary: Fine!!!! Be like that!!!
#05 Lib: You will probably get another chance again, what with sterilized quantitative easing coming down the pike!!!
So what do you all think about houses with asbestos on the pipes in the basement, as well as cracked asbestos tiles in the kitchen? Yay or Nay?
Yay!!! Breathing is overated. My inlaws have that crap all over their house. When they drop dead I will have to tip Pedro and Juan big to remove it
tbw says:
March 14, 2012 at 12:39 pm
So what do you all think about houses with asbestos on the pipes in the basement, as well as cracked asbestos tiles in the kitchen? Yay or Nay?
It looks like one of our dedicated allies/partners/comrades in Afghanistan tried to take out the SecDef’s plane with a truck bomb on the runway INSIDE a British airbase:
http://news.yahoo.com/vehicle-explodes-afghan-runway-panetta-safe-164159892.html
Correction, it was not a bomb, it just exploded.
#10 tbw: You probably now but the just released results of RE’s property reassessment is crating an up roar!!! And the school funding battle with Oradell rages on!!! All not well in the land of the Unicorn.
tbw: Asbestos
Depends on the market. In a buyers market, get the sellers to remove both. In a sellers market, you’re best to bury those pipes behind soffits when you finish the basement and cover the floor tiles (if possible). As long as you don’t disturb either of them, you won’t need to call Weitz & Luxenberg.
Our multi has asbestos covered pipes which we soffited during my cheapo basement reno ($2,000 out of pocket). The pipes are still revealed in the laundry area and the boiler room. Our second set of renters have asked about the pipes and I told them as long as they don’t touch them or let their kids play in the boiler room, they’ll be fine.
All you need to do is wrap absestos pipes in old wet sheets, soak them and then take a razor and cut then in a straight line along bottom and remove them carefully while wearing a mask and old clothes. It is not a big thing. If it is a tenant house between tennants is perfect. Heck hire Merry Maids out of penny saver to do a cleaning afterwards. That stuff will circulate a bit maybe, but this time of year just leave windows open or run a hepa filter for a few days. The soffit stuff is just kickin the can down the road. The plumber who did it for my mom back in the 1980s is still alive and healthy, back then he said he did it a few hundred times already.
” An employees primary objective is to increase shareholder value. You should try to maximize profits from customers, work employees hard and reward employees who mazimize employee profits. ”
Lie, cheat and steal. Just make the deal…..disprezzabile!
#114, yes – mother got the card that her house has lowered in the assessed value.
It is no win buddy. Undercharging clients and overpaying employees is stealing from shareholders, you and I own GS like it or not if we have any stock funds.
All Hype says:
March 14, 2012 at 1:09 pm
” An employees primary objective is to increase shareholder value. You should try to maximize profits from customers, work employees hard and reward employees who mazimize employee profits. ”
Lie, cheat and steal. Just make the deal…..disprezzabile!
jj (81)-
News flash: the retail investor is dead. They call us the working poor now. Even if I had money to invest, it wouldn’t be in the rigged casino masquerading as the equities market.
“That money on the sidelines will soon flood in and it is a presidential election year. My bigger fear is retail investors may flood in at peak and soon another crash which may turn them off from investing for several years. We cant afford that.”
jj, what is you advice to individuals investing against quants and supercomputers that run instantaneous quote-stuffing programs all day long?
Speaking of Kids…
US Unemployment in the 16 – 19 age group now 50.1%
http://danielamerman.com/articles/2012/WorkC.html
box (122)-
More time for them to join gangs and learn how to handle weapons.
I think asbestos sounds scarier than it actually is. My house was covered in it (Asbestos siding). Contractor ripped it off and resided my house without giving it a second thought. Asbestos is dangerous in the friable (airborne) state when breathed in over extended periods of time. Any house built before 1980 probably has it in there somewhere. They used it as an aggregate and mixed it into cement, grout and tile mortar etc. Removing the floor tiles or asbestos on pipes once probably isn’t going to kill you. Just keep it wet. Maybe use a spraybottle with water or like JJ said wet sheets. As long as you keep dry particles from going into the air and you don’t breathe it repeatedly over the course of 20 years, you’ll be fine. Repeated exposure like in a factory or as a contractor day in and day out is what gives you cancer.
It scares the crap out of people when buying and selling homes though. That’s why I had them rip it off my house.
http://www.state.nj.us/health/iep/asbestos_faq.shtml#Asbestos_Siding_and_Vinyl_Asbestos_Floor_Tiles
All the ceiling tiles in my elementary school were made with asbestos and I haven’t been diagnosed with lung cancer after 30 years have passed. The problem isn’t that asbestos is there the problem is if you crush it up and start inhaling the little fibers. This usually is only a problem for someone who worked with the material and just blatanly disrespected themselves. I have seen guys walking around in dusty rooms full of debris in the air and they refuse to wear masks because it is “uncomfortable”
A secondary problem is that when it is torn out of a house those waste products can sometimes go to an incinerator where they turn trash into electrical energy by burning it. Asbestos doesn’t burn but the ash that is produced can cause lung cancer. If a municipality doesn’t know that it is burning asbestos tainted trash they raise the lung cancer rate of the entire surrounding area.
The reason why they have laws about abestos abatement and why it is so costly is to keep someone from stupidly burning the waste material. They require that you remove it safely, trash bag inside trash bag style, and the waste is clearly marked as hazardous and “do not burn”. That way it can be buried and decay natrually.
Do not simply remove and put in the trash. If you want to do asbestos abatement yourself then you often can take a short course that will train you on how to remove the material and dispose of it safely. In Maryland only licensed people are able to remove the abestos debris but obtaining the license doesn’t take very long. (20 hours of course work?)
Take a night course and do your own abatement if you want to save money and do it the safe way.
Pascack Valley is now Jerusalam Valley
Bergen County has become the Jewish County
Reason being, there is a house adjacent to mine which will be going on the market with those condition issues. I do not think it will be very expensive because of several condition issues and a small lot size which has no access to the rear of the house from the outside (easement). I would like to purchase said house…if the price is right.
omg #126, I think the previous owners buried asbestos in the backyard. I was leveling the yard a few years ago and came across this white stuff the consistency of cardboard buried in the dirt along with broken plates and lots of glass. Come to think of it, it was probably asbestos.
First contractor told me all the fancy stuff I had to do, he was going to call the state, he wouldn’t remove it only side over it etc. Second contractor said no problem. It will take me a day. We hava a place in PA we can dump it. I said you’re hired. He probably buried it in tbw’s yard.
Do not simply remove and put in the trash. If you want to do asbestos abatement yourself then you often can take a short course that will train you on how to remove the material and dispose of it safely. In Maryland only licensed people are able to remove the abestos debris but obtaining the license doesn’t take very long. (20 hours of course work?)
tbw,
All good advice given here. Our asbestos was really dried on to the pipes, especially at the joints. Cutting it off would not have removed enough of it. Hence, why I opted to cover it, which is also an acceptable method of abatement. Now my hidden oil tank? That’s gonna be a pita to have removed in the year 2030.
I had to replace the furnace in my multi last winter. First estimate was sky-high and the plumber said I would first have to get the asbestos removed. The second estimate was half the price and the topic of asbestos never entered the conversation. Let me know if there are any old iron pipes in your backyard among the white stuff?
Finally,
I need to have 4 old (mostly dead) trees removed from my backyard. Two are actually in my neighbors yards, so in the style of Captain Cheapo, might as will get a price to do all four lowering the price for my two. :P
Anyone know any cheap (but insured) servicers who handle Glen Ridge (Essex County)?
The first six I called back in November (post Irene and the Halloween storm) never showed up to perform estimates. A complete 0 for 6.
Funny the “laborers” that removed the asbestos siding were not careful at all. They set up rickety scaffolding, ran up it and were throwing the old siding into a dump truck like frisbees. Done in a day. All I know is that it is gone. Yay.
Seems Timmay and company are headed to GS.
http://dailybail.com/home/report-top-geithner-aide-headed-to-goldman-sachs.html
“Seems Timmay and company are headed to GS.”
What were the odds ?
I’m shocked. Shocked!
D’Antoni out (resigns) as Knicks coach. Wow!
Easy, buy into the BATS IPO next week, if you cant beat them join them.
There Went Meat says:
March 14, 2012 at 1:27 pm
jj, what is you advice to individuals investing against quants and supercomputers that run instantaneous quote-stuffing programs all day long?
Libtard #134: I use Almstead Tree and Shrub Care Co. Expensive, but insured, safe, and reliable.
My roof guy was once telling me a story about a guy who hired a cheap roofer from pennysaver who took cash and the illegal mexican roofer day laborer fell off roof landed in backyard dead as a doornail and roofer just left. Homeowner had lots of splainnig to do about how the dead mexican ended up in her yard. Luckily they just mulched around him and composted him.
Jill says:
March 14, 2012 at 3:04 pm
Libtard #134: I use Almstead Tree and Shrub Care Co. Expensive, but insured, safe, and reliable.
Chifi, (62)
There’s no open advert, so it’s up to the kid to write something explaining why he would be a great intern, fit, etc, to get HR’s attention. Don’t say I suggested it – it won’t help anyway. See below after removing the asterisks.
http://www.har*ding****loev*ner.com/contact/career_opportunities.html
#134..try Orange Valley
Staying Out of the Murder Holes
Mar 2, 2012 9:00 AM, By Joshua Brown
Until you’ve been blown up by a few of these investment products, they can be hard to recognize. Here’s a list.
There are some stock market land mines that will invariably destroy anyone foolish enough to stand on them for an extended period of time.
My friend The Fly, an anonymous blogger who writes the popular if misanthropic trading website iBankCoin, has a term he likes to use for these. He calls them murder holes, and a more apt description for these investments couldn’t be conjured if Shakespeare himself came out of a creative writing workshop and checked his portfolio. I think the term was (relatively) recently popularized when it was used in Saving Private Ryan, but it perfectly describes the types of investments we’re about to discuss.
Until you’ve been blown up by a few of these murder holes yourself, it’s hard to recognize them. Below is a list of the dark alleys you never want to wander down for your own future financial well-being.
These alleys are strewn with various land mines, any of which could become your very own murder hole at any time. You probably won’t listen anyway, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
SPACs
NASA engineers working at full tilt for 18 months couldn’t draw up a worse product than what a handful of investment banks began selling to retail customers in the mid-2000s. SPAC stands for special-purpose acquisition corporation, but it may as well mean selling promises and craziness. The basic premise of the SPAC is this:
We put together a board of directors that has a great business pedigree (the former CEO of this, the ex-chairman of that, etc.).
We go public and raise a big pile of cash that we have a year or so to put to use.
The bankers bring us acquisition candidates until we pick one.
We buy the company and change our name from the SPAC to the company’s name, and our directors and execs assume those roles at the newly merged entity.
Now you are a shareholder in an operating business that we have bought. Congrats!
Sounds interesting, right? The reality is that it sucks for everyone except the investment bankers. Here’s the deal
For starters, promising companies with no flies on them are able to just go public the regular way through a traditional IPO. They don’t need to be backdoored into the market via a merger with a SPAC. Only the dregs of the private company barrel need to do a deal like this to hit the public markets. American Apparel (APP) is one example; it is one of the most disastrous stocks of the past decade. The founder and CEO was not only accused of cooking the books; he also had a history of sexually tormenting the barely legal models who worked for him.
Another thing to keep in mind is that many well-known and respected corporate chieftains have merely been lucky; they are not automatically going to succeed at ventures. Look at Microsoft’s Paul Allen. Here’s a guy who, once he left the software company that made him one of the world’s wealthiest men, couldn’t wait to set fire to his cash. Everything he touched turned to compost. It was almost as though he was in some kind of Brewster’s Millions-type of situation where he had to blow $5 billion in order to inherit $50 billion. There are lottery winners from log cabins in the backwoods who’ve been smarter with their investments.
So anyway, a SPAC trots out someone like Steve Wozniak (from Apple), and it makes a deal to buy some also-ran company like Jazz Semiconductor. Yay! Wrong; you will lose. The same thing went on with the hapless losers who ran Jamba Juice into the ground and countless other SPAC stories over the years. No one who invests in these things makes any money before the merger or after it.
Also, hedge funds typically are hooked up with shares from the SPAC’s IPO. They will bail the moment there is any kind of premium in the stock price over that initial cash-per-share amount the company raised. You will be holding the bag not them.
According to Reuters, the last big wave of 57 SPACs that debuted at the height of the credit bubble in 2007 had raised a combined $11.3 billion. That’s a whole lot of dumb money. The best thing that could’ve transpired for those 57 companies would have been the return of cash that occurs when the clock runs out and a deal hasn’t been consummated. In fact, there were a few hedge funds involved with some of those SPACs that were forcing that dissolution to occur using the voting power of their stock positions.
If it weren’t so true, it would almost be laughable how horribly and slowly these things die. And by the way, many of these SPACs have been China-related in recent years. For investors, the China-SPAC combination is like being beaten up after school and then coming home to find that your parents have moved away without telling you.
And just so you know, the investment banks that make these stepchild IPOs are almost always connected to an aggressive brokerage sales force. How else could $100 million be raised for such a hare-brained scheme?
Chinese Reverse Mergers
Nobody does accounting fraud like China. It should come as no surprise that small corporations from a country that invents its own GDP statistics are themselves cooking the books. What’s adorable is that much of the fraud in U.S.-listed Chinese small caps is aspirational in nature; three company-owned shipping facilities become six in the quarterly filing, $50 million in revenues becomes $60 million who’s going to know the difference? Corporate China’s worst element meets the underworld of the U.S. banking complex, and together they release hundreds of scams onto the American Stock Exchange, the NASDAQ, and even the once-prestigious NYSE.
Bloomberg keeps an index of these Chinese RTO stocks (RTO meaning reverse takeover). This index was essentially cut in half during the first half of 2011, as fraudulent companies large and small were dismantled by intrepid short sellers and fleeing investors. Even John Paulson, one of the most successful investors in history, had gotten himself caught in a Chinese fraud called Sino-Forest. Media reports had estimated that Paulson’s losses on the way out of the pump-and-dump timber stock may have been in the $700-million range. Even in the context of a $37 billion hedge fund, losses of that magnitude will leave a mark.
The short sellers who have attacked and unmasked the Chinese RTO fraud machine have done investors a favor in the long run. I’ve advised people to avoid the entire China stock sector until the companies grow up a bit and start acting like professionals. After all, if the legendary John Paulson can be taken in by these charlatans, what chance do you have?
One-Drug Biotechs
The vast majority of drug trials fail to satisfy the FDA, and approvals are the exception, not the rule.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, the FDA approved just 26 new drugs in 2009, of which only seven were biotechnology compounds. The year before, there were 25 new drug approvals with only four of them from the biotech arena.
If you must own biotechnology, try to go with a larger company that has several drugs on the market or in development. It may not produce a 10-fold return, but it also won’t vaporize your portfolio on an FDA setback.
Private Placements
Almost every private placement you have ever been pitched or will ever be pitched is a scam. Yes, you heard me correctly. I’ve witnessed over 200 private placements that were brought into brokerage firms, sold to accredited investors, and then basically disappeared into a black hole of unreturned phone calls and shareholder communications that simply stopped coming.
Just two private placements (Medical Capital and Provident) have been responsible for the shuttering of 21 well-known broker/dealers since 2010. GunnAllen, QA3, Empire Securities, Jesup & Lamont, and Securities America were just some of the casualties when these two diseased privates blew up and took the brokerages’ clients with them.
So I’ll tell you what happens and what will always happen when retail brokers bring their clients private banking deals. By the time a company is desperate enough to go to broker/dealers for funds, it means that it is already at the end of its rope.
The retail brokers are offered a 10 percent commission to show the deal to their clients. They are also promised warrants and stock options should the company end up going public. (It won’t.) This exorbitant compensation for the brokers is a huge red flag. Brown’s law of brokerage product compensation states the following:
The higher the commission or selling concession a broker is paid to sell a product, the worse that product will be for his or her clients.
Brokers take note: selling a client a private placement that pays you a tenth of that money back is the same thing as telling your client to go f*ck himself.
And by the way, the more interesting the company, the more dangerous the private placement offering.
And there are other investor traps out there, too numerous to expound on each of them here. They include:
Oil and gas limited partnerships. (If you’re being cut in on them, the wells are dry.)
Principal protection funds. (They always come out after the market’s been killed and cap your upside on the recovery.)
Insurance brokers selling asset management. (Does your hairdresser also repair the roof on your house?)
Stockbrokers selling guaranteed-return equity-linked annuities. (Yeah, that’ll end well.)
Reverse convertibles and other structured products. (They will pit you against both the market and the banker good luck!)
Brokers with one day left in their pay period. (They will call you with the news that we need to rotate and move some things around.)
Brokers with thick New York accents and Boca Raton area codes.
Anyone who claims to have a system. (Why? Because there is no such thing, and if there were, you would be the last person to hear of it.)
Anyone who calls himself a financier. (He’s guaranteed to be full of sh*t and probably wears dress shoes with no socks.)
Financial advisors who self-clear or self-custody client funds. (Always be sure there is another pair of eyes on your money, preferably a large corporation’s.)
Currency brokers and forex sites. (Nobody knows anything; this is all highly leveraged speculation, and the brokers are actually trading against you when you take a position.)
Managed futures funds. (The fees are so over the top that your actual return will look nothing like the advertised return.)
Movie investments. (The latest telemarketing scam; no studio worth investing in is going to unleash an army of cold callers to raise funds.)
Closed-end fund IPOs. (These funds should only be bought at a discount in the secondary market. Within 90 days of the IPO, the penalty bid phase ends and brokers can freely dump shares while keeping their commissions you will be down 15 percent in a blink.)
So much product is being churned out that a financial advisor like myself can feel more like a bouncer than anything else. Lucky for me, I look good in a black T-shirt with my arms folded across my chest. Many of my clients know to run these ideas past me before acting on an aggressive pitch. My answer is almost always no.
I’d love to be wrong, but that hasn’t happened yet when dissuading the people I care about from these types of murder holes. Consider yourselves warned.
Westy…..you work there HL? You are a g-d…..allow me to genuflect…..really respect your shop….
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