Tag Archives: Real estate

Submitted by Valentin Schmid via The Epoch Times, Warren Buffett claims that gold is worthless because it doesn’t produce anything. Fair point, but what if the other sectors of the economy also stop producing? “If you think of gold, the only way gold loses is if normal business and private sector cycles come back. If that is the case, gold goes back 100 dollars per ounce. The other outcomes, deflation, stagflation, hyperinflation are good for gold,” said Viktor Shvets,...

Medical vs. Financial Engineering I broke my elbow a month ago, pretty badly as I was told.  The surgeon screwed the pieces back together, using a steel alloy bracket and six screws.  Two hours later, I left the hospital with no cast, a bandage (just to cover a very ugly scar), a prescription for painkillers and therapy started a week later. What would have happened if I had suffered the same accident in 1975?  The...

The last time we wrote about the long-running saga of the scandalous collapse and constant corruption at the Malaysian state wealth fund, 1MDB, which also happened to be an unconfirmed slush fund for president Najib, was a month ago when we learned that the NY bank regulator was looking into fundraising by the fund’s favorite bank, Goldman Sachs. Then overnight, the story which already seemed like it has every possible...

Following James Traub’s mind-numbingly-elitist rebuttal of the democratic rights of “we, the people” in favor of allowing “they, the elite” to ensure the average joe doesn’t run with scissors, “It’s time for the elites to rise up against the ignorant masses.” The Brexit has laid bare the political schism of our time. It’s not about the left vs. the right; it’s about the sane vs. the mindlessly angry… The Guardian’s...

Restless Peasants First, a few quick words on Brexit.  Being the always positive and optimistic person that I am (big grin), I see one very positive outcome of Brexit – it is a revolution without bloodshed. For once, I’m not digressing.  Brexit has a lot of parallels with housing affordability in the US.  Brexit is a clear illustration of how politicians, policy makers and the establishment have lost touch with the...

A warped manifestation of the fear and greed trade-off that used to characterize investor behavior has developed, according to Bloomberg’s Richard Breslow. Asset managers are exhibiting the manic depressive drive to simultaneously throw caution to the wind, ignoring all risk metrics while plaintively bemoaning the lack of safe havens. S&P 500, 2016 EPS Expectations Fear and greed was a continuum, allowing for an...

Is it Time to Buy Income-Producing Real Estate?  No, No, No. Much to the dismay of my real estate buddies, who are complaining about how high prices while watching the cash flow of their portfolios bursting at the seams from a few good years of rent increases, the answer is no. Capitalization Rates REIT cap rates (as of mid 2015, they have declined further since then) Capitalization Rates Valuation is one big red...

Is it Time to Buy Income-Producing Real Estate?  No, No, No. Much to the dismay of my real estate buddies, who are complaining about how high prices while watching the cash flow of their portfolios bursting at the seams from a few good years of rent increases, the answer is no. Capitalization Rates REIT cap rates (as of mid 2015, they have declined further since then) Capitalization Rates Valuation is one big red...

Following the demise of the thousand year-long tradition of Swiss banking secrecy, crushed virtually overnight by Barack Obama's demands to make the central European nation's banking industry transparent, one of the major consequences was the shift in money laundering from Geneva and Zurich to the latest and greatest "anonymous" banking and tax evasion hub located halfway around the world, namely Singapore. And overnight, we got the first shot across the bow of the city state's "Swiss banking...

During the months of March and April of 2016 we released a series of proprietary research reports indicating signficant weakneses that we found in the European banking system and released it for sale through the blockchain (reference The First Bank Likely to Fall in the Great European Banking Crisis). This was performed by the same macro forensic and fundamental analysis team that first warned about the pan-European sovereign debt crisis in 2009 and 2010 (reference Pan-European...