sell! sell! sell!

[tiznow]

Tales from HK

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[h=1]Hong Kong's Housing Market Has Become "A Sea Of Madness" Central Bank Warns[/h]What a difference 16 months makes.
It was in February of 2016 when, looking at the latest trends in the Hong Kong housing market, we wrote that in January [2016] Hong Kong home prices tumbled the most since July 2013, and after a 12 year upcycle, prices were now down 10% from the recent peak just four months prior...

... while the local Centaline Property Agency estimated that total Hong Kong property transactions at the start of 2016 were on track to register the worst month on record.
Fast forward to today when that particular blip is long forgotten, swept away by the record credit injection unleashed by China in the interim, which has spilled over into the Hong Kong's housing market where instead of concerns about a bubble bursting, the locals are preoccupied with chasing the latest, and biggest yet, housing bubble to form in Hong Kong, as crowds of people line up in hope of being the winning bidder for one of several properties for sales, some of which are oversubscribed as much as 15x.

According to the latest data from Hong Kong's Centaline Property Centa-City Leading Index of existing homes, prices have risen an unprecedented 23% in the past year, setting new price records week after week. Over the past decade, home prices in the financial capital of Asia have tripled.

As Bloomberg observes, snaking queues of thousands of prospective apartment buyers in Hong Kong signaled authorities have made no progress in cooling a red-hot property market, where prices are at records.

At the Victoria Skye, a luxury project at the former airport site of Kai Tak and at the Ocean Pride development by Cheung Kong Property Holdings people were lining up on Friday and over the weekend for their chance to buy a home at all time high prices.

K&K Property has offered an additional 200 units at Victoria Skye after it sold 306 flats on Saturday, Ming Pao newspaper reported. Cheung Kong will put another 346 up for grabs after selling 496 in a single day, May 26, it said. In both cases, the developers will raise the prices of the additional units by about 2 percent, the newspaper reported.
Yes, HK real estate prices are rising by 2% not over a year, or a month, but in one day!
That, however, does not stop the relentless demand from local buyers. Hong Kong developers sold 8,616 homes in the first five months of the year, more than were sold in any first half since new purchasing rules were introduced in 2013, the Hong Kong Economic Times reported.
What makes this particular bubble different is that this time, it is obvious to everyone, certainly the local press. An editorial in The Standard newspaper on Monday was surprisingly accurate: “successive moves by the government in recent memory to cool the property market only resulted in it becoming crazier. The result is a sea of madness.”
It is also obvious to the local central bank, which, however, like Vancouver and Toronto, appears powerless to halt the tsunami of hot mainland money. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has been tightening rules for lenders, Bloomberg writes, including restricting levels of lending to developers, as it tries to limit financial risks and take some of the heat out of the market.
And yet, so far the result is absolutely nothing as nobody bothers to listen to the growing warnings.
Speaking at a Legislative Council meeting last Monday, Hong Kong's central bank chief, HKMA Chief Executive Norman Chan, said levels of demand were reminiscent of 20 years ago, just before Hong Kong suffered a property bust, and he expressed concern that people with limited financial resources were buying just because they thought prices would only keep going up, just like in a bubble.
Chan said that while the global economy has improved, uncertainties remain and warned that when the property cycle reverses, "the impact will be serious."
With real estate prices rising fast - in some cases as much as 2% per day - his warning has fallen on deaf ears. Of course, it will be different when the bubble against bursts, and everyone is "shocked" that the authorities let it come to this again, and then first the HKMA, then the PBOC, will have to again step in and bail out all the bubble chasing speculators once more, or risk yet another economic collapse, rinse and repeat.

 

[eek.]

Homes will never let you down Tiz

Tthe human race is expanding at a phenomenal rate and everyone with any ambition at all wants a nice hoose to spend their life in.

Things may go up and down but the trend will always be up

Once we start colonising other beautiful planets that may change, but we'll need to invent warp travel first

 

[eek.]

Shares in online retail giant Amazon have risen above $1,000

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40095518

 

[tiznow]

I ran from my short position when they took out 2400 s&p (I'll be back at some point) and added more to my gold position.. gold most undervalued asset right now my a large margin IMO but what do I know..

Gold shooting up this morning on lower than expected jobs data.. futures slightly green.. everything bubble getting insane ... bubbles drive the sane insane at the tail end..

 

[tiznow]

Another unbelievable launch from spacex just happened.. first time they reused a falcon spacecraft.. and the landings of the reusable rockets becoming routine now.. amazingly clean landing today.. great stuff musk and everybody else involved..

 

[tiznow]

The worst foreign policy mistake the US/UK ever made.. with the invasion of Iraq and all the ripple effects that are following rolls on.. 2 attacks in London recently..

we need more bombing and more refugee creation! War is bullish military industrial complex is awesome! Merica!

 

[lely1103]

"According to the latest data from Hong Kong's Centaline Property Centa-City Leading Index of existing homes, prices have risen an unprecedented 23% in the past year, setting new price records week after week. Over the past decade, home prices in the financial capital of Asia have tripled"
oh wow look so interestinggggg
thank you guys so much for sharing such good information

 

[eek.]

Things are getting Antsy in the middle east

Egypt is closing its airspace to Qatari planes in a growing diplomatic row, with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain expected to do the same on Tuesday.
Several countries have cut ties with Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorism in the Gulf region.
Qatari nationals in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been given two weeks to leave.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-40168856

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Billion dollar ransom paid to tewwowists

A group of Qatari hunters - including members of the ruling family - have been freed 16 months after being kidnapped in Iraq, officials say.
The Iraqi interior ministry said "all 26" were in Baghdad and would be handed over to a Qatari envoy.
The hunters were abducted by gunmen in a desert area of Iraq near the Saudi border in December 2015.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-39669501

 

[tiznow]

Yeah saw that eekster even the typically "safe" Muslim nations starting to get riled up with the Qatar thing..

It all goes back to the neocons and them deciding they needed to throw a huge grenade into the Middle East by invading Iraq.. throwing the entire region into chaos... more to come...

heres more of the freedom we chose for iraq..

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Mosul: As the battle against ISIS rages on, so does terror, suffering for civilians

By Arwa Damon, Ghazi Balkiz, and Brice Laine, CNN

Updated 6:49 AM EDT, Tue June 06, 2017

Story highlights

• Mosul is a hell of "endless, throat-grabbing, suffocating sorrow"
• From the front lines: "civilians cowering under staircases ... children screaming, parents helpless to protect them"

(CNN)A Humvee screams into the field clinic a few kilometers from western Mosul's current front line. A teenage girl is carried out, listless. An elderly man is in complete shock, unable to utter a word, and is helped towards a bed. A woman struggling to breathe is quickly given oxygen.
Ten-year-old year old Mariam Salim and her older sister, Ina'am, are being tended to in the back.
"My parents are under the rubble, (another) sister is dead. I saw her," Ina'am mutters, her lips quivering.

​

Just as the family was trying to flee, the two girls say, a mortar hit their house causing it to collapse. The rest of the family is buried under the rubble.
"They are gone, they are gone." Mariam tells us. "My mother, father, sister, brother."
Mariam leans over to wipe the Betadine antiseptic off her sister's face -- the reality of what she has said perhaps not quite sinking in, or maybe she just needs something to focus on, a distraction from a loss she cannot yet comprehend.
Her sorrow seems to come in waves. Her body shakes as her eyes fill with tears, but just as quickly she is angrily asking questions, yelling to an older brother who made it out, "We were trying to get to you!" and then turning around and calmly cleaning Ina'am's face.
Their neighborhood is still under ISIS control, although the Iraqi forces are within eyesight and earshot. Those forces were not able to reach the siblings' home or their family members trapped under the destroyed house. They cling to a hope that at least maybe their parents and younger brother may still somehow be alive.
We drive closer to the frontline. Plumes of smoke rise, the explosions rumbling in the distance. The targets are ISIS fighters, but with each blast comes the reality that in the homes and streets hit -- whether by airstrikes, artillery, or ISIS bombs -- are civilians cowering under staircases, in basements. Children screaming, parents helpless to protect them.
Earlier, an Iraqi commander, visibly upset, had told us of corpses they pulled from under the rubble in one neighborhood. A mother was still cradling her baby.
'Where have you been for the last three years?'

Stumbling through the debris-strewn streets, past the blown-out buildings and burned-out vehicle husks, those who survived make their way towards the Iraqi forces. Escape rarely comes before the fighting picks up as Iraqi troops move in on ISIS forces. ISIS executes anyone who tries to flee when ISIS fighters are not otherwise occupied.
They arrive breathless, voices shaking, single sentences that hardly encompass what they have been through.
"Where have you been for the last three years?" a woman shouts at Iraqi troops.
"Twenty days ago we tried to escape, they (ISIS fighters) caught him, shot him four times in the head," a man sobs. "My brother."

​

There is deep sorrow. There is anger. There is relief.
As ISIS is being squeezed into even smaller territory -- a handful of neighborhoods and Mosul's old city -- the civilians held hostage are running out of food.
Umm Abed has a family of 11
"We were eating flour and water." She says. It was only enough to feed the children, to ease their hunger pains. She and her husband stayed without food for four days.
Also on the front line is a forward field clinic manned by ex-US Army Special Forces soldier Dave Eubank and his team with the Free Burma Rangers, a non-governmental service organization.
Just days earlier they responded to a call from one of the Iraqi units.
"They said civilians coming, a lot (of them) shot. We got there and a guy came crying, crying, he said, 'My daughter was shot in front of me, her head was blown off.'" Eubank recalled.
The field was littered with dozens of bodies massacred by ISIS fighters as they were trying to flee. Men, women, young, old. Children shot in the face.
Thirteen bodies ... and then, movement

"We saw these 13 bodies and then we saw movement. Here they are, look against the wall, these are all dead people." He shows us a photo on this phone. Bodies crumpled against each other.
After the photo was taken, life appears and the effort to save life is fast.
One man is alive, he moves his arm. From underneath a black hijab a little girl peers out. Her mother had been dead for two days. The little girl hid against her mother's corpse.
American forces supporting Iraqis with air assets drop a curtain of smoke. Using an Iraqi tank for cover Eubank and others move as close as they can.
"We got there and then the smoke lifted," Eubank said later. "And then ISIS just hammers them. And the people there are like, 'Come! come!' And the little girl gets out from under her dead mother's hijab and she sees us -- the tank is shooting, you know. "
"I called the Americans, I said, 'Please give me smoke again right now.' The Iraqis are already in on this. So the Americans dropped this perfect curtain of smoke I ran grabbed her.
"She was screaming, unwilling to let her mother go. No one knows her name, she still hasn't said a word."
The next morning, Eubank said, another man somehow managed to escape and told them of others who were still alive.
"With a brave Iraqi soldier, we ran across the road -- ISIS is on three sides of us, we can hear them talking. Crawled through, found a girl up the street, threw a rope to her. She tied herself. (She was) three days no sleep no water, wounded."
They managed to safely drag her over the rubble and rocks.
The depth of the suffering here impossible to articulate.
"It is hell," an elderly woman in a wheelchair said softly.
A hell that we cannot even begin to imagine.
The incomprehensible brutality of life under ISIS, the public executions, beheadings, school curriculums that taught of slaughter, mandatory black niqabs and long beards; smoking, cell phone, satellite TV bans. To endure that for three years followed by the incessant bombardment, fear and starvation.
People here have lost just about everything.
There is no past blueprint for this war, no one has fought an enemy like ISIS holding civilians hostage in this type of a dense urban battlefield. There are no words to comfort those who survive.
Just the endless, throat-grabbing, suffocating sorrow.
CNN's Moayad al-Ameen contributed to this report.
View on CNN

 

[eek.]

As an Iraqi once said

America got rid of one Saddam Hussein and left us with a thousand Saddam Husseins

 

[tiznow]

Think things are gonna get very interesting once the next global recession hits eekster.. US at full employment stock market all time highs and have nots are still restless and not happy.. gonna be a huge shitstorm of unhappy have nots worldwide when this next everything bubble burst..

South Africa officially enters recession more to come..

-------

South Africa is back in recession for the first time since 2009.
Africa's second biggest economy contracted by 0.7% in the first quarter, a poor performance that was fueled by weakness in trade and manufacturing.
The slump surprised analysts who were expecting the economy to rebound after it shrank by 0.3% in the final three months of 2016.

 

[tiznow]

Hoards of baby boomers retiring and no skilled labor (typically physical jobs that involve some knowledge skill that spoiled younger generations don't wanna do) to replace them .. worker productivity in this country tanking.. become a nation of entitled unskilled people + baby boomers with no savings that wanna live till they 90 sucking huge on entitlements .. pArty times ahead!

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There are more job openings than EVER right now

• Job openings in April swelled to a record high, with the government's count showing 6 million positions waiting to be filled, according to the JOLTS report.
• Those numbers came during a month that saw nonfarm payrolls grow by 174,000.

Jeff Cox | @JeffCoxCNBCcom
2 Hours AgoCNBC.com

PLAY VIDEO

If the labor market has gotten a little sluggish as of late, it's certainly not because there aren't enough jobs out there.
In fact, job openings in April swelled to a record high, with the government's count showing 6 million positions waiting to be filled. That represented an addition of 259,000, or a 4.5 percent gain, from March, according to the monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Those numbers came during a month that saw nonfarm payrolls grow by 174,000, part of a recent trend that has seen gains slow down after a quick start to the year.




The openings come as employers are finding a harder time finding qualified workers; hirings for the month fell by 253,000 to 6.1 million.
But the slowdown also could be because high-paying jobs are getting harder to find. The majority of the new openings came in the accommodation and food services industry, which grew by 118,000. Open government positions also increased by 39,000, but durable goods manufacturing fell by 30,000.
"If one is looking for a job, it's out there. It just may not be exactly what is wanted," Peter Boockvar, chief market analyst at the Lindsey Group, said in a note. "Bottom line, the story remains the same in that the supply of labor is not meeting the demands."
The closely watched quits rate also declined for the month, falling 111,000 to about 3 million. The number is considered an indicator of worker confidence that better jobs are available elsewhere.
Layoffs and discharges were little changed at 1.6 million.
Over the past 12 months, according to the JOLTS survey, there were 62.9 million hires while separations totaled 60.7 million, resulting in a net job gain of 2.2 million for the period ending April 30. During that time, the unemployment rate fell from 5 percent to 4.4 percent (it was 4.3 percent through May).
Much of the fall in the jobless rate has come due to a relatively low labor force participation level.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said the participation rate has been declining for men, though that also represents an underutilized part of the labor force that could be poised for growth. The rate for men aged 25 to 54 was at 88.4 percent in May, down from as high as 96 percent back in 1970.
"That is a huge number. There is something wrong," Dimon said Tuesday during a news conference for the Business Roundtable, which he chairs. "I do believe we'll get a lot of those people back in the workforce."

 

[tiznow]

Nice day for btg pats fan.. once the wheels fully come off the everything bubble gold should soar..

 

[eek.]

Job openings in April swelled to a record high, with the government's count showing 6 million positions waiting to be filled

Wow. 6 million jobs with healthcare/dental and enough money to pay a mortgage/bills etc and a nice pension at the end of it all.
Amazing.( lol )

once the wheels fully come off the everything bubble gold should soar.

They're all piling into Bitcoins Tiz, $2800 now. Gold is for old people and the unconnected world.
We are the new young hitech society people, no more barbaric relics holding us back

 

[tiznow]

Putin likes ether so I like ether

 

[tiznow]

As long as vitalik stays involved eth should surpass Bitcoin in total market cap.. there's a place for gold in a crypto filled world .. the ultimate loser will be fiat and the usd.. interning times ahead that's for aure

 

[tiznow]

Gold can't be hacked

it will always have value and be a safe store of value as it has been throughout the history of mankind

but crypto/cashless society is the future too little doubt.. will be an interesting journey already is ha..

 

[tiznow]

Retail sales and CPI negative..

recession soon.. gold spiking..markets still yawning aka fed won't tighten as much woo hoo..

 

[eek.]

Trio accused of Grand Theft Fruit

 

[tiznow]

US and UK providing the arms used by Saudi in Yemen... military industrial complex rules! Profits for chaos and pain in ME!

iraq invasion legacy rolls on..

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Yemen cholera cases pass 100,000 amid 'unprecedented' epidemic

The UN says it is struggling to deliver medicine to treat those with cholera because of the ongoing conflict.
The number of suspected cases of cholera resulting from a severe outbreak in Yemen has passed 100,000, the World Health Organization says.
A total of 798 deaths associated with the disease have been recorded in 19 out of 22 provinces since 27 April.
The charity Oxfam said the epidemic was killing one person almost every hour.
Yemen's health, water and sanitation systems are collapsing after two years of war between government forces and the rebel Houthi movement.
Cholera is an acute diarrhoeal infection caused by ingestion of food or water contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio cholera.
Most of those infected will have no or mild symptoms but, in severe cases, the disease can kill within hours if left untreated.

• Yemen’s professionals drawn into war
• How bad is the humanitarian crisis?
• Yemen crisis: Who is fighting whom?

On Wednesday, the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the epidemic in Yemen was "of an unprecedented scale".
In the past four weeks, it added, the number of deaths had been three times higher than that reported between October 2016 - when Yemen's government first announced an outbreak - and March 2017.

A state of emergency has been declared by the authorities in rebel-controlled Sanaa
The authorities in the rebel-controlled capital Sanaa, which has recorded the highest number of cases, declared a state of emergency on 14 May.
More than half of the country's health facilities are no longer functioning, with almost 300 having been damaged or destroyed in the fighting.
Health and sanitation workers have not been paid for eight months; only 30% of required medical supplies are being imported into the country; rubbish collection in the cities is irregular; and more than 8 million people lack access to safe drinking water and proper sanitation.
The OCHA said the risk of the epidemic spreading further was compounded by the rainy season, widespread food insecurity and malnutrition.

Malnourished children and women, and people with other chronic conditions, are at greatest risk
The war has left 18.8 million of Yemen's 28 million people needing humanitarian assistance and almost 7 million on the brink of famine.
Oxfam's Yemen country director, Sajjad Mohammed Sajid, meanwhile warnedthat the outbreak was set to be one of the worst this century if there was not a massive and immediate effort to bring it under control.
"Cholera is simple to treat and prevent but while the fighting continues the task is made doubly difficult. A massive aid effort is needed now," he said.
"Those backers of this war in Western and Middle Eastern capitals need to put pressure on parties to the fighting to agree a ceasefire to allow public health and aid workers to get on with the task."
A Saudi-led multinational coalition - backed by the US and UK - launched a military campaign in support of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi in March 2015. Since then, at least 8,050 people have been killed and 45,100 others injured.

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