Today I am going to write about The New York Times again.
I know. I know. I shouldn’t. I promised to stop taking the Times seriously a while back. But I just can’t stay away. Including the Thursday re-run I wrote about it twice last week. I just can’t help it. Moths and flames.
On Wednesday last the Times published Looking Ahead to the Spend-Down Years. I am honestly not sure how to characterize the topic of the article, other than to say it had to do with retirement and money and cited the work of several clueless academics with evidently too much time on their hands.
The piece was illustrated with creepy but eye-catching computer generated images of a man’s head as he aged. This was explained in the first few paragraphs.
Read more »
This is actually two questions in one. There is the personal finance version: Is owning a house a shrewd move for a consumer? And there is the broader policy one: Is home ownership something that the government should be 
encouraging as much as it does?
Both are good questions. The first is of great practical importance to many people. But the second is probably more interesting. And it is nearly impossible to discuss one without the other.
Brett Arends at the Wall Street Journal gives it a good try in his latest column, taking as inspiration a recent Time cover story that is entirely on the policy question, to write on the personal finance version.
He starts out by making the point that a Time cover reading “Rethinking Homeownership” is as good a sign as any that the real estate market is bottoming out. He shows us a 2005 Time cover reading “Home $weet Home” that was, in hindsight, a clear indication that the market was then about to peak. I do not disagree, but I would have been much more impressed with Arends if I hadn’t read this blog post at The Big Picture two days earlier that made the same point with pictures of the same two Time covers.
Read more »
On Saturday The New York Times discovered yet another example of evil business fleecing wholesome Americans. Resale Fees That Only Developers Could Love opens with the usual tropes.
Rebecca and Trent Dupaix of Eagle Mountain, Utah, spent a year searching for their dream home. The couple, who have five children, considered 15 to 20 houses before finding “the one.”
But four months after buying the “rock-and-stucco home” the dream turns to a nightmare when
the Dupaixs discovered that their sales contract included a “resale fee” that allows the developer to collect 1 percent of the sales price from the seller every time the property changes hands — for the next 99 years.
Incredibly, the resale fee arrangement was apparently not disclosed to the Dupaixs, something that is either outright fraud or spectacular incompetence on the part of the title company and whoever ran the closing. It can be inferred from the article that the Dupaixs did not have a lawyer.
Read more »
Late August had more angst and gloom about the housing market than usual. Had I been blogging last week, I would have written about it on the last
Wednesday of the month, my usual housing market slot. (The Case-Shiller Index numbers come out on the last Tuesday.)
The proximate cause of the wave of pessimism were two reports on the low levels of house sales in July. The National Association of Realtors revealed that existing home sales were down 27% in July from June. And sales of newly constructed houses fell 12.4% to a new all-time low.
The New York Times reported this with the headline Housing Market Plunged in July, Fueling Anxiety. Anxiety may indeed be being fueled, but the housing market, at least the one most of us care about, did not, as far as we know, plunge in July.
Read more »
Labor Day Weekend is prime time for big-picture discussions in the financial press. With the cultural end of summer, and the heightened feeling of 
seriousness of the back-to-school and back-to-work season, Labor Day is a good time to review where we are and where we are going. Also, articles on broad topics can be written far in advance so that journalists can take the weekend, or entire week, off.
Thus, The Wall Street Journal recently treated us to a spate of pieces on basically the same topic, the wisdom of investing in the stock market.
Brett Arends kicked off this festival of tea leaf reading mid-week with Why Stocks Still Aren’t Cheap. Then over the weekend we got Is It Time to Scrap the Fusty Old P/E Ratio?, covering some of the same ground as Arends but with a less bearish spin, and Thinking Outside the Stocks, discussing off-beat non-stock investments.
Read more »
Investing, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
September 20, 2010 12:29 pm | 
Comments (8) 
Subscribe