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Silver Southwest Chief splits the semaphores
https://railpictures.net/photo/723060/
Back In The Day, But most folks bought their homes with cash; they had no mortgage interest to deduct. re The History of the Mortgage Interest Deduction
Another excellent article appeared yesterday in the New York Times regarding the home mortgage interest deduction, this time detailing its history and why most economists argue that it is bad tax policy. Roger Lowenstein explains the historical context of the deduction:
The first modern federal income tax was created in 1894. Interest — all forms of interest — was deductible; the Supreme Court, however, quickly ruled that the tax was unconstitutional. In 1913, the Constitution was amended and a new income tax was enacted. Once again, interest was deductible.
There is no evidence, however, that Congress thought much about this provision. It certainly wasn’t thinking of the interest deduction as a stepping-stone to middle-class homeownership, because the tax excluded the first $3,000 (or for married couples, $4,000) of income; less than 1 percent of the population earned more than that. The people paying taxes — Andrew Carnegie and such — did not need the deduction to afford their homes or their yachts.
There is another reason Congress could not have had homeownership in mind. The great majority of people who owned a home did not have a mortgage. The exceptions were farmers. But most folks bought their homes with cash; they had no mortgage interest to deduct.
When Congress made interest deductible, it was probably thinking of business interest. Just as today, the aim was to tax a business’s profits after expenses had been netted out, and interest was an expense like any other. In a nation of small proprietors, basically all interest looked like business interest. Whether it was interest on a farm mortgage, or interest on a loan to purchase a tractor, or interest charged to a general store that purchased its inventory on credit, it all would have looked like a business expense. Credit cards did not exist. So Congress just said, “Deduct it.”
It was not until the 1920’s and the spread of the automobile that home mortgages outnumbered farm mortgages. In the 1930’s, the mortgage industry got a huge assist from the feds — not from the tax deduction, but from agencies like the Federal Housing Administration, which insured 30-year loans, and, over time, the newly created Federal National Mortgage Association, or Fannie Mae. Before then, the corner bank would issue a mortgage and wait for the homeowner to pay them back; now savings and loans could replenish their capital by selling their mortgages to Fannie Mae — meaning they could turn around and issue a new mortgage to someone else. (Full Story)
The article is right – the mortgage interest deduction essentially treats individuals’ housing expenses like a business expense, allowing them to deduct it from taxable income. But the big difference between a business deducting interest and an individual deducting housing-related interest is that the business must pay taxes on the net income for which that expense was incurred, whereas no one pays tax on the imputed income they earn from owning a home.
For more on the home mortgage interest deduction, check out this recent Tax Foundation piece on the topic, as well as the blog archive.
PM price bashing
If prices go any lower I’m going to have to buy me one of those Nova Scotia motorcycles! They need lots of heavy metal ballast I hear. I wanna see him pop a wheelie!
This 1930’s image is from http://motoblogn.blogspot.com/
Deer79, Capt.
Agree with both of you.
They are going to cut again at the March meeting next week, probably announce some sort of QE, etc.
Let’s face it, the news isn’t going to get any better. I have to think despite the bullshit in the pm sector of the last couple of weeks, we’re on the right track.
Perhaps
The cretins are taking G&S down before a massive stimulus package is announced?
Buygold @ 15:57
Ugly no?
Should be good for getting rid of the critical mass of idiot Comex speculators with any luck however.
Cheers
Of the far too many insults the scum has handed out
getting PM shares to rally with the SM as Gold falls …has to rank well up there.
Well gee whiz
at least the shares kind of chased the SM back up, which I guess is good since gold sucks.
I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see the SM open down 500 tomorrow.
WPM the big winner amongst the pm shares I watch, otherwise pretty depressing action the last couple of days.
2009 redux
Couple at Lewis-McChord military base in Washington test positive for coronavirus
https://www.theolympian.com/news/local/article241058361.html?ac_cid=DM149282&ac_bid=80128824
If it gets in these big bases could have quite an impact.
Circa 1913, Loans Intended To Bring The Future Prosperity Sooner Rather Than Naturally Later
I read years ago that to borrow money to buy a house at the turn of the century, 1900s it was frowned upon. The Banker would look over his bi-spectacles at the borrower and scrutinize him.
Bottom line, it was 50% down and a 5 year loan. Naturally over time the PTB kept dropping, or lowering the down payment to 20% down and then to 0% down, and eventually they gave 105% loans with 30 years, to pay prices got too high and the entire “prosperity game” ended with the crash of 2008.
There is no way left anymore to bring future prosperity up front and center, ahead of its natural time. UNLESS! Two scenarios to keep this fake man made artificial economy going.
#1 EVERYONE THAT IS PAID LESS THAN $150,000 gets tax exempt, Or gets a pay raise of 50% to make a taxable $225,000.
#2 A MASSIVE DEFLATION IN THE COST OF LIVING, and typical wages remain stable where they are now. So its a raise either way for tax PAYERS. Tax absorber occupations should be tax exempt. Just pay them the typical take home pay.
No sense paying them more, so they can afford the income tax, and then they kick back some of the tax money they got. They are “tax neutral” paying taxes to themselves. They should not be credited as tax PAYERS.
The Donald is a genius at politics…
Stocks Tumble After Trump Claims Pelosi “Won’t Be Ready This Week” To Meet On Fiscal Plans
Richard 10:10
Probably market will be choppy for awhile per norm while people wondering when it’s safe to jump back in. Some will try now probably get discouraged don’t know others will wait a bit.
Trump helped the market a bit buy stating he’s going to help out businesses and workers living from paycheck to paycheck who can’t afford to miss a paycheck which is probably the majority of people. They should also give unemployment insurance with no waiting period to start immediately to those temporary laid off or in mandatory isolation.
Looks like the shares are going to follow the metals today
which of course makes total sense since they seem to follow whatever is going down.
Looks like crude’s not ready for prime time-note that Exxon gapped open and was immediately swatted
CDEV is an incredible bargain at 61 cents
revenue per share $3.53—book value per share $11.81–float 198 million–
and, yeah, they got debt…so did century aluminum in 2008-9–I bought it for $2–it went to $24–every company has debt
here are the stats:
https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=XOM&qsearchterm=
Fidelity, Blackrock and Vanguard own a big chunk of it
Description
Centennial Resource Development, Inc., an independent oil and natural gas company, focuses on the development of unconventional oil and associated liquids-rich natural gas reserves in the United States. The company’s assets primarily focus on the Delaware Basin, a sub-basin of the Permian Basin. Its properties consist of acreage blocks primarily in Reeves County in West Texas and Lea County in New Mexico. As of December 31, 2019, it leased or acquired approximately 78,195 net acres; and owned 1,569 net mineral acres in the Delaware Basin. The company was formerly known as Silver Run Acquisition Corporation and changed its name to Centennial Resource Development, Inc. in October 2016. Centennial Resource Development, Inc. was incorporated in 2015 and is headquartered in Denver, Colorado.
JNUG up a buck gold futs are down $20–that triggers another, by now, useless, discredited R640 buy signal
https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=JNUG
The HUI’s up a coupla bucks…yawn…
Coronavirus: Italy to suspend mortgage payments amid outbreak
Mortgage payments will be suspended across Italy as part of measures to soften the economic blow of coronavirus on households, a minister has said.
Laura Castelli, Italy’s deputy economy minister, told Radio Anch’io: “Yes, that will be the case, for individuals and households.”
Italy’s banking lobby group ABI said lenders would offer debt holidays to small firms and families.
Suspending debt payments is not unheard of in Italy.
Some small businesses and families were given time off during the financial crisis before having to repay.
Italy has extended its emergency coronavirus measures, which include travel restrictions and a ban on public gatherings, to the entire country.
On Monday, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte ordered people to stay home and seek permission for essential travel.
Italy’s coronavirus death toll jumped from 366 to 463 on Monday. It is the worst-hit country after China.
The great Rick Ackerman-that peerless mkt timer.
Deflation and the Pandemic
Rick Ackerman March 8, 2020 5:30 pm
It is the precipitous drop in the price of crude oil that most threatens the financial Ponzi scheme. Energy resources were the main source of collateral for the game when the world emerged from the mortgage-securities collapse of 2007-08. “What tangible asset can we hock up to our eyeballs this time?” asked the financiers. Their answer was crude oil, and now the enormous bet they made on the energy patch has started to implode. Even before the pandemic hit, fracking had glutted the world with quantities of natural gas and oil that OPEC and the Russians could not counteract even with drastic cuts in output. With the pandemic bearing down on global growth, there is no way to avert the liquidity-trap created by the implosion of hyper-leveraged energy resources. [Editor’s note: In a timely coincidence, crude oil plunged $13 overnight to a low at 28.57. The June contract has since bounced to 34.65, but I expect a relapse to exactly 25.88 before it’s over. RA]
I appeared to occupy a unique place on the lunatic fringe when, many years ago, I started writing about the prospect of a short squeeze on the dollar. When I bounced this idea off a half-dozen finance professors, each had the same response: “Huh?” Their incredulity notwithstanding, it has always seemed a given to me that it would take a catastrophic deflation to wipe out debts, both public and private, that long ago exceeded our ability to repay them. The main feature of a debt deflation is an increase in the real burden of debt. Ultimately, and unfortunately for all who are fully invested in the politically popular idea of a free lunch, every penny of every debt must be paid — if not by the borrower, then by the lender. We kid ourselves to think we will escape it via hyperinflation. Realize that the biggest piece of what Americans owe, putting aside incalculable future liabilities from Social Security and Medicare, is mortgage debt. It is not simply going to go away, and that is why deflation, rather than hyperinflation, is far more likely to determine the financial endgame.
This premise starts with the assumption that mortgage lenders will never accept a few hundred-thousand-dollar bills peeled from our hyperinflated wallets to settle up. Instead, most mortgages will eventually have to be rewritten as lease agreements so that people can stay in their homes during the hard times that are coming. This process is already well under way via a rental boom that has drastically altered the dynamic of the housing market. Private equity firms have not only been buying up whole neighborhoods at inflated prices in order to rent homes to those who cannot afford them, they have been building news homes to lease to the same tapped out crowd.
‘Minsky Moment’ Delayed
But the mortgage market is just nickel-and-dime stuff compared to the global derivatives market. This quadrillion dollar shell game is denominated almost entirely in dollars. Those on the borrowing side of the equation have avoided a Minsky moment because the central banks have been infinitely accommodating. This crackpot scheme cannot possibly last, however, and the reason is become increasingly obvious: Monetary stimulus is not generating enough growth to pay off loans even at zero percent or less. The world is caught in a deflationary vise, and it is about to tighten because of the economic effects of the coronavirus.
It is the precipitous drop in the price of crude oil that most threatens the financial Ponzi scheme. Energy Money Velocity Is Key
Another big problem for the central banks, and for anyone counting on easing to pump up the stock market, concerns money velocity. Realize that stimulus implies borrowing. Interest rates can fall to zero or even lower, but the money made available in theory has to be borrowed into existence before it can stimulate anything. The scheme works when everyone is confident that asset values will keep rising, as they very predictably have been doing for more than a decade. But the pandemic has knocked investors’ certitude about this for a loop, killing money velocity and with it the multiplier effect that causes economies to appear to boom.
The recent, unprecedented explosion in bond prices and the inverse collapse of yields remind us that another term for money velocity is liquidity preference. When stocks were rising relentlessly, there was little concern about liquidity because stocks themselves were quite liquid. Baby Boomers and other savers had come to regard the Apple shares sitting in their nest-egg accounts as the same as cash. Not any longer. In fact, the opposite will be true as AAPL and other portfolio mainstays continue to fall. “Liquidity is a coward,” I wrote here recently (quoting Ray Devoe), and it evaporates at the first sign of fear.
Post-Bubble Reality
Which brings us back to the dollar and the prospect of a short squeeze in which borrowers will be hard-pressed to come up with cash when short-term rollovers start to seize up. Here’s my colleague Bob Hoye on what to expect: “We will stay with our old observation that the senior currency becomes chronically strong in a post-bubble contraction. And after building a base for a few weeks at this level there could be another rally. To better understand this it should be understood that with most prices deflating in a post-bubble contraction the senior central bank will not able to depreciate its currency. The senior currency is still the U.S. dollar. Another way of looking at it is that service debt due in U.S. dollars represents a massive short position in U.S. dollars. And a central bank that can’t depreciate its own currency is like a pub with no beer.” Just so. Anyone banking on the Federal Reserve to come through for the economy and stock-market bulls is in for a rude surprise. _______
UPDATE (Mar 9, 9:02 p.m.) So now Wall Street is banking on the Fed to ease two more times in quick succession to bring administered rates down to near-zero. ZIRP has worked so well for Europe that it’s a wonder the feather merchants haven’t already granted Wall Street its wish, like, yesterday. Don’t put it past investors to pretend for a while that it will work, or for the hacks who invent the news each day to start talking up the coming housing boom.
Yeah Captain
I’ve never really seen a bear market end inside two weeks or close down one day followed by a rebound the next. Seems like those bottom’s are made with intraday reversals.
I’m not even sure this rally will stick today, probably will, but doubtful the SM is done.
Done at quite a higher price than they are today
Skeena Announces C$20M Private Placement
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 10, 2020 / Skeena Resources Limited (TSXV:SKE)(OTCQX:SKREF) (“Skeena” or the “Company”) is pleased to announce a fully subscribed non-brokered private placement offering (the “Offering”) of approximately 17,316,000 flow-through shares at a price of C$1.155 per share for aggregate gross proceeds of C$20 million.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/skeena-announces-c-20m-private-120000814.html
Buygold @ 8:54
I’m with you. This is not the final bottom.
Could bounce for days / week(s) though.
Cheers
R640 – Bottomed?
Ya think? or Wollie thinks?
Seems a little early for a bottom, even though we could get a nice Fed induced bounce today. Probably a coordinated world’s central bank thing in all markets.
It’s obvious they need to hit gold today because it was up sooooo much yesterday.
Guess we have to wait for the next 1/2% cut.