Cheap condos in Florida
I had a few condos in a large association (1169 of them) in Naples which I sold 6 years ago.Originally Posted by chip anderson
In spring when we left they had 85 for sale, and so far a total 7 have been sold since January.
In the golf community where I have a house now, there are 700 of them, a total of 40 for sale and 3 were sold this year.
My Optiboard brother (Jerry Huang) is visiting me and we have been checking out made in China equipment. We were shocked to find that much of the equipment is more expensive then the same equipment from USA. It really makes no sense because certain costs are just less expensive here. The good news is that US equipment and products are becoming more competitive (better prices and better features). I just wish more US companies would come here and sell their products in China. I see very little US representation at trade shows and I think it is a good opportunity for US companies to expand their sales market.
Doc
Eye Opener.........................
You are the first one to openly report to today's market situation I have seen coming for about 2 years.
I am sure that your situation is not the only one. Its actually all over the USA and starting in Canada just that no one wants to admit specially the media.
Wish you all the best for the future you seem to be a fighter and will succeed, and thanks for having the guts to let the optical world know about it.
Stocks to tumble...................
Stocks set to fall on fresh credit woes
Mon Nov 19, 2007 6:49am EST
By Blaise Robinson
PARIS (Reuters) - Stocks were set to retreat on Monday, as investors remain cautious after fresh negative news on the credit front, but shares of oil firms could find support from buoyant crude prices.
Reinsurer Swiss Re (RUKN.VX: Quote, Profile, Research) became the latest financial institution to unveil a huge hit from the crisis in the subprime mortgage market, reporting a 1.2 billion Swiss franc ($1.07 billion) writedown on Monday.
Its shares tumbled nearly 7 percent.
By 5:20 a.m. ET, S&P futures were down 0.3 percent, Dow futures eased 0.2 percent and Nasdaq futures slipped 0.2 percent
See whole story at: http://www.reuters.com/article/hotSt...57195020071119
A huge contributor to the problem is NAFTA. Boy the US took a hozzing with that one. If you are an American, buy everything you still can from US suppliers! Support you fellow US Americans!
Mr Sunshine sayeth: "I had a few condos in a large association (1169 of them) in Naples which I sold 6 years ago.
In spring when we left they had 85 for sale, and so far a total 7 have been sold since January.
In the golf community where I have a house now, there are 700 of them, a total of 40 for sale and 3 were sold this year. "
The market for condos in Florida, Vegas and other "recreational/second home" locations was oversaturated with units. Everyone was going to get rich in the building boom. Those who got in early and got out early did get rich. The latecomers got schmucked. It's called the law of supply and demand.
By the way, the folks who made a killing with the condos by getting out early are now buying up all of this defaulted property. Guess what, they are going to get even richer. And the chumps are going to get poorer and poorer.
These folks arent too much worried about the present "slump". :D
Chris,
I don't think anyone is denying that today's optical market situation is not healthy, but I think people are takikng issue with the broad brush strokes.
Michigan is in terrible shape. Everybody's hurting, but they would be hurting whether the dollar was up or down. Audiyoda lost his job in April, and many more lost their jobs way before he did. Things have been bad there for a long time.
What your gloom and dooms don't take into consideration is that the whole face of optical is changing with every new buyout/merger/failing.
Of course labs will be laying off people at labs when the largest retailers have their own labs.
This is not an earth shaking news. Things are tough, but they are tough for a number of reasons, and they are not tough for everyone. Some of us, even in poverty stricken areas, are flourishing. If we're not, we don't turn to the demise of the dollar, the federal debt, nor any number of other outside factors as the reason.
Ophthalmic Optician, Society to Advance Opticianry
Will we adapt ...............??????????
You have just hit the nail on the head........................
They are florishing because they have adapted to their conditions and neighbourhoods with their economic problems. It is not so complicated in the optical retail to re-adjust by purchasing smarter in frames as well in lenses, to reduce your lab cost and to re-adjust your selling methods and all that with still making a good living.
However it is a lot tougher to do when caught with your pants down and you sit on a high priced inventory that will not move any more, unless you drop your prices until there is no more profit margin left. Or if you continue the usual way then you wont get the customers anymore and you have to lay off employees.
From your own post's I am convinced that you are doing well and have taken the right measures for one reason or another.
When the US dollars looses value it simply takes more dollars to purchase the same item once inventories have to be replenished. If the dollar would be where it was 18 month ago the barrel of oil would still cost $ 60.00 instead of $ 95.00-100.00.
People will always need glasses, but the ones that get into a financial squeeze and the number is increasing, will go to the retailers that can comply with their financial position. Are the independent opticians numbered so few these days, that they can live only off the patients that are financially comfortable ?
Or after all consumers can always patronize the WalMart Opticals which are already geared for this type of economic conditions.
Housing, dollar and oil on stocks' radat...................
Housing, dollar and oil on stocks' radar
Fri Nov 23, 2007 6:08pm EST
By Cal Mankowski
NEW YORK (Reuters) - New data on a depressed housing sector figures large in a fairly heavy schedule of economic reports due next week while the dollar and oil approach threshold levels that could prove unsettling.
"Investors are anxious to see any kind of bullish news because we sure haven't seen much lately," said Fred Dickson, market strategist and director of retail research at D.A. Davidson & Co. in Lake Oswego, Oregon.
Key concerns include whether the dollar falls through $1.50 against the euro and sets a new low, and whether oil hits $100 per barrel or higher, Dickson said. On Friday, U.S. crude oil for January delivery (CLF8: Quote, Profile, Research) settled at a record $98.18 a barrel, up almost 1 percent on the New York Mercantile Exchange
See whole story ay: http://www.reuters.com/article/hotSt...31621620071123
Arabs become CITI Banks largest shareholder.................
Citi sells stake to Abu Dhabi fund
Agencies
Published: November 27, 2007, 10:30
New York: Citigroup said late on Monday that the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority will invest $7.5 billion in the nation's largest bank, offering needed capital to offset big losses from mortgages and other investments.
The cash from the sovereign investment fund of the Gulf Arab state, which has been a beneficiary of this year's surge in oil prices, will be convertible into no more than 4.9 per cent of Citigroup Inc.'s equity. Citigroup characterised the investment as passive and said the fund will not be able to name any board members to the bank.
The Investment Authority would become one of Citi's largest shareholders.
See the whole story: http://www.gulfnews.com/business/Ban.../10170679.html
Very true, but the US is.............
one problem.....................the US is functioning on borrowed money and time.
Why to keep bumping your own thread?
The US IS BROKE..................
Im not bumping anybody, just report the facts that the optical people dont want the hear, and adjust their business accordingly.
I am being laughed at................but it is the US that is broke.
How is the Cannadian trade/credit ballence?:
last time I checked, we have a trade balance, and have been paying off our federal debt.
Canadian Trade Balance...............
According to Canada Stats, the trade balance was for 2006:
Exports $ 455,696.5
Imports $ 404,394.6
Balance $ 51,301.9
all details can be seen at : http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/gblec02a.htm
Florida second after California.......................
Thursday, November 29, 2007
RealtyTrac: Foreclosures up 165 percent in Florida
South Florida Business Journal
More than 30,000 properties in Florida were in some form of foreclosure in October, figures compiled by RealtyTrac showed.
The October numbers were 165 percent higher than October 2006, but down 9.5 percent from September.
Florida's total of 30,190 was the second highest in the country, behind California. Per household, Florida was third behind Nevada and California, with one property in foreclosure for every 273 households.
Nationwide, there were more than 224,000 properties in foreclosure, or one for every 555 households. Filings were up 94 percent from October of last year and up 2 percent from September.
See the whole story at:http://southflorida.bizjournals.com/...6/daily35.html
And why shouldn't they be?
These are the two of the most bloated real estate markets in the country.
These are simply market corrections.
How many Florida factories shut down this year? How many California automakers layed off workers?
Look at Las Vegas as well. There are a lot of corrections going on out there.
The music's stopped (for now) hope you've got a good seat!
Ophthalmic Optician, Society to Advance Opticianry
After all of the bickering, lies, truths, reports, etc....isn't really just about PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY?
Thats a nasty phrase though, isn't it?
exactly
National debt grows $1 million a minute
By TOM RAUM, Associated Press Writer Mon Dec 3, 6:55 AM ET
Like a ticking time bomb, the national debt is an explosion waiting to happen. It's expanding by about $1.4 billion a day —— or nearly $1 million a minute.
What's that mean to you?
It means almost $30,000 in debt for each man, woman, child and infant in the United States.
Even if you've escaped the recent housing and credit crunches and are coping with rising fuel prices, you may still be headed for economic misery, along with the rest of the country. That's because the government is fast straining resources needed to meet interest payments on the national debt, which stands at a mind-numbing $9.13 trillion.
And like homeowners who took out adjustable-rate mortgages, the government faces the prospect of seeing this debt —— now at relatively low interest rates —— rolling over to higher rates, multiplying the financial pain.
So long as somebody is willing to keep loaning the U.S. government money, the debt is largely out of sight, out of mind.
But the interest payments keep compounding, and could in time squeeze out most other government spending —— leading to sharply higher taxes or a cut in basic services like Social Security and other government benefit programs. Or all of the above.
A major economic slowdown, as some economists suggest may be looming, could hasten the day of reckoning.
The national debt —— the total accumulation of annual budget deficits —— is up from $5.7 trillion when President Bush took office in January 2001 and it will top $10 trillion sometime right before or right after he leaves in January 2009.
That's $10,000,000,000,000.00, or one digit more than an odometer-style "national debt clock" near New York's Times Square can handle. When the privately owned automated clock was activated in 1989, the national debt was $2.7 trillion.
It only gets worse.
Over the next 25 years, the number of Americans aged 65 and up is expected to almost double. The work population will shrink and more and more baby boomers will be drawing Social Security and Medicare benefits, putting new demands on the government's resources.
These guaranteed retirement and health benefit programs now make up the largest component of federal spending. Defense is next. And moving up fast in third place is interest on the national debt, which totaled $430 billion last year.
Aggravating the debt picture: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates could cost $2.4 trillion over the next decade.
Despite vows in both parties to restrain federal spending, the national debt as a percentage of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product has grown from about 35 percent in 1975 to around 65 percent today. By historical standards, it's not proportionately as high as during World War II —— when it briefly rose to 120 percent of GDP, but it's a big chunk of liability.
"The problem is going forward," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard and Poors, a major credit-rating agency.
"Our estimate is that the national debt will hit 350 percent of the GDP by 2050 under unchanged policy. Something has to change, because if you look at what's going to happen to expenditures for entitlement programs after us baby boomers start to retire, at the current tax rates, it doesn't work," Wyss said.
With national elections approaching, candidates of both parties are talking about fiscal discipline and reducing the deficit and accusing the other of irresponsible spending. But the national debt itself —— a legacy of overspending dating back to the American Revolution —— receives only occasional mention.
Who is loaning Washington all this money?
Ordinary investors who buy Treasury bills, notes and U.S. savings bonds, for one. Also it is banks, pension funds, mutual fund companies and state, local and increasingly foreign governments. This accounts for about $5.1 trillion of the total and is called the "publicly held" debt. The remaining $4 trillion is owed to Social Security and other government accounts, according to the Treasury Department, which keeps figures on the national debt down to the penny on its Web site.
Some economists liken the government's plight to consumers who spent like there was no tomorrow —— only to find themselves maxed out on credit cards and having a hard time keeping up with rising interest payments.
"The government is in the same predicament as the average homeowner who took out an adjustable mortgage," said Stanley Collender, a former congressional budget analyst and now managing director at Qorvis Communications, a business consulting firm.
Much of the recent borrowing has been accomplished through the selling of shorter-term Treasury bills. If these loans roll over to higher rates, interest payments on the national debt could soar. Furthermore, the decline of the dollar against other major currencies is making Treasury securities less attractive to foreigners —— even if they remain one of the world's safest investments.
For now, large U.S. trade deficits with much of the rest of the world work in favor of continued foreign investment in Treasuries and dollar-denominated securities. After all, the vast sums Americans pay —— in dollars —— for imported goods has to go somewhere. But that dynamic could change.
"The first day the Chinese or the Japanese or the Saudis say, `we've bought enough of your paper,' then the debt —— whatever level it is at that point —— becomes unmanageable," said Collender.
A recent comment by a Chinese lawmaker suggesting the country should buy more euros instead of dollars helped send the Dow Jones plunging more than 300 points.
The dollar is down about 35 percent since the end of 2001 against a basket of major currencies.
Foreign governments and investors now hold some $2.23 trillion —— or about 44 percent —— of all publicly held U.S. debt. That's up 9.5 percent from a year earlier.
Japan is first with $586 billion, followed by China ($400 billion) and Britain ($244 billion). Saudi Arabia and other oil-exporting countries account for $123 billion, according to the Treasury.
"Borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from China and OPEC puts not only our future economy, but also our national security, at risk. It is critical that we ensure that countries that control our debt do not control our future," said Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio, a Republican budget hawk.
Of all federal budget categories, interest on the national debt is the one the president and Congress have the least control over. Cutting payments would amount to default, something Washington has never done.
Congress must from time to time raise the debt limit —— sort of like a credit card maximum —— or the government would be unable to borrow any further to keep it operating and to pay additional debt obligations.
The Democratic-led Congress recently did just that, raising the ceiling to $9.82 trillion as the former $8.97 trillion maximum was about to be exceeded. It was the fifth debt-ceiling increase since Bush became president in 2001.
Democrats are blaming the runup in deficit spending on Bush and his Republican allies who controlled Congress for the first six years of his presidency. They criticize him for resisting improvements in health care, education and other vital areas while seeking nearly $200 billion in new Iraq and Afghanistan war spending.
"We pay in interest four times more than we spend on education and four times what it will cost to cover 10 million children with health insurance for five years," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. "That's fiscal irresponsibility."
Republicans insist congressional Democrats are the irresponsible ones. Bush has reinforced his call for deficit reduction with vetoes and veto threats and cites a looming "train wreck" if entitlement programs are not reined in.
Yet his efforts two years ago to overhaul Social Security had little support, even among fellow Republicans.
The deficit only reflects the gap between government spending and tax revenues for one year. Not exactly how a family or a business keeps its books.
Even during the four most recent years when there was a budget surplus, 1998-2001, the national debt ranged between $5.5 trillion and $5.8 trillion.
As in trying to pay off a large credit-card balance by only making minimum payments, the overall debt might be next to impossible to chisel down appreciably, regardless of who is in the White House or which party controls Congress, without major spending cuts, tax increases or both.
"The basic facts are a matter of arithmetic, not ideology," said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group that advocates eliminating federal deficits.
There's little dispute that current fiscal policies are unsustainable, he said. "Yet too few of our elected leaders in Washington are willing to acknowledge the seriousness of the long-term fiscal problem and even fewer are willing to put it on the political agenda."
Polls show people don't like the idea of saddling future generations with debt, but proposing to pay down the national debt itself doesn't move the needle much.
"People have a tendency to put some of these longer term problems out of their minds because they're so pressed with more imminent worries, such as wages and jobs and income inequality," said pollster Andrew Kohut of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
Texas billionaire Ross Perot made paying down the national debt a central element of his quixotic third-party presidential bid in 1992. The national debt then stood at $4 trillion and Perot displayed charts showing it would soar to $8 trillion by 2007 if left unchecked. He was about a trillion low.
Not long ago, it actually looked like the national debt could be paid off —— in full. In the late 1990s, the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office projected a surplus of a $5.6 trillion over ten years —— and calculated the debt would be paid off as early as 2006.
Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan recently wrote that he was "stunned" and even troubled by such a prospect. Among other things, he worried about where the government would park its surplus if Treasury bonds went out of existence because they were no longer needed.
Not to worry. That surplus quickly evaporated.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, said he's more concerned that interest on the national debt will become unsustainable than he is that foreign countries will dump their dollar holdings —— something that would undermine the value of their own vast holdings. "We're going to have to shell out a lot of resources to make those interest payments. There's a very strong argument as to why it's vital that we address our budget issues before they get measurably worse," Zandi said.
"Of course, that's not going to happen until after the next president is in the White House," he added.
___
On the Net:
Treasury site listing share of national debt held by foreigners: http://www.treasury.gov/tic/mfh.txt.
The national debt to the penny: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?applicationnp
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071203/...XxWF.H29t2wPIE
Last edited by GOS_Queen; 12-07-2007 at 10:57 AM. Reason: trying to work out the spacing for easier reading
Mon Dec 10, 2007 3:40am EST
UBS makes $10 bln writedown, raises new capital
By Andrew Hurst, European Banking Correspondent
ZURICH (Reuters) - Swiss bank UBS unveiled $10 billion in shock subprime writedowns on Monday and said it had obtained an emergency capital injection from a Singapore government entity and an unnamed Middle East investor.
UBS, which has been severely battered by the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown, issued a profit warning and cancelled plans for a cash dividend in moves expected to batter the stock and the banking sector as a whole.
See whole story at: http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv...49891520071210
2 items of interest:
1) I was at my bank in Hong Kong today and noticed many people/companies converting their USD to HK Dollar or Chinese RMB.
2) Chinese companies have started issuing invoices to buyers in RMB or Euro rather than USD.
Doc
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