To buy or not to buy.....................?

 Offering advice on the home buying process is even harder than offering investment advice without more context. Investing is personal but your living situation has even more idiosyncratic risks involved.

-Ben Carlson, from this post

For a wealth management kind of guy he has a pretty good feel for real estate.   Will admit to some surprise at seeing his chart of the gross profit margins for the largest production builders.  If we knew they were making that much money we would have charged them more for the building lots we sold them.

What happens when.......................

 .............................money is free?  A list of eleven things here.

We experienced a decade of quantitative easing and declining interest rates that culminated with an unprecedented multi-trillion-dollar infusion of capital in 2020. But three years later, the party had to end.

The Fed is raising rates, money isn't free anymore, and companies have to once again rediscover the lost art of "turning a profit." Outrageous stuff, isn't it?

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Smart guy............................

      Thales of Miletus, a Greek philosopher, made important discoveries in geometry and careful observations of the frequency of natural events.  His prediction of the solar eclipse in 585 BC was described by Isaac Asimov as 'the birth of science'.  Thales also used his scientific knowledge to anticipate an especially plentiful olive harvest.  He bought options on all the olive presses in Miletus, and when demand soared he rented them out at a substantial profit.  According to Aristotle, Thales' motive was not primarily pecuniary;  he aimed to provide an answer to the question so often thrown at philosophers and economists:  'If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

-John Kay and Mervyn King:  Radical Uncertainty:  Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers

dead media walking................

     The technological change that broke the news business was our ability to measure audience reaction to every headline and every variation of every story.  Once you can reliably measure the income potential of different approaches to the news, people who manage the news have to do what works best for profitability or else they are abandoning their responsibilities to shareholders.  On top of that, executive compensation is determined by profit performance.  From the moment technology allowed us to know which kinds of content influenced viewership the most, the old business model of the news industry was dead media walking.  From that point through today, the business model of the press changed from presenting information to manipulating brains.

-Scott Adams, Loserthink:  How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

Government might make more sense..........

....................if the people running it had, at some time in their life, the responsibility for meeting a payroll, because then they would know...

"...the difference between making that profit and closing up shop can be surprisingly thin."

-Megan McArdle

Jeff re-joins the electrified..............

........and he comments on a recent post about the impact of "price gouging" laws on supple and demand.  Jeff, having lived with the impact of Sandy, favors the brighter side of human nature.

"I'll put forth the proposition that human ingenuity is not driven by the desire for windfall profits - but by the solution to a need."

I'd like to believe he is right.

Truth............................

"The farmer and manufacturer can no more live without profit than the labourer without wages."
-David Ricardo

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