RyanMcMaken.com

Here's a time-lapse map I put together on foreclosures in Colorado. Primarily, I put it together to show the spread of foreclosures from Colorado's Front Range to mountain areas and Western Slope areas.

In this video, I look at the latest trends in foreclosure events in Colorado.

In this video, I look at statewide employment and compare some trends in Grand Junction and Fort Collins. I also look at employment in construction and the service sector.

Cross posted at Mises Economics Blog . Microsoft is slowly dying as a consumer brand. As recently as five or six years ago, though, left liberals and other anti-business ideologues were still making comments about how Microsoft was a monopoly that was crushing competition in the market place. The less sophisticated of these critiques centered on nothing more than the fact that Microsoft enjoyed huge market share ten years ago. The more sophisticated critiques noted that Microsoft had been successful at expanding market share through agreements with PC providers like Dell who pre-packaged their PCs with Microsoft software. Anti-IP libertarians have made convincing arguments about patents, but the IP-loving competitors of Microsoft (and the Feds who make IP possible) hardly have a problem with IP. None of this behavior around bundling products is remotely "monopolist" of course, since there were no real barriers to entry into the market beyond the fact that people really like...

The Market Oracle has a nice and detailed piece explaining the history of mortgage loan securitization and debt collection, and shows how the current crisis has the potential to inflict massive amounts of damage on the mortgage and banking industries. Here's my favorite part: Foreclosures can only be done by the note-holder, who has the legal standing to show up in court and ask the judge to foreclose and evict. In about half the states, they have to bring the ORIGINAL (not a photocopy or electronic version) document with "wet signature", so the judge can see the actual ink on paper. They have to prove the chain of title and that they own the note they intend to foreclose on. BECAUSE IF THE CHAIN OF TITLE OF THE NOTE IS BROKEN, THEY WON'T BE ABLE TO FORECLOSE. Once the people going into foreclosure figure this out, they will stop paying and hire lawyers. Some will keep their homes for free. Once the people who have been paying their mortgages figure out they might ...

Cross posted at Christian Science Monitor and the Mises Blog: The people over at the Calculated Risk blog had a helpful post today that links to the BLS's primer on the differences between the "Establishment" employment data and the "Household" employment data. Economist John Williams has often been referenced on these issues, and his site, Shadowstats.com is indeed helpful. However, if you want something straight from the BLS's mouth, the primer is very useful. This will help you understand a bit more about the establishment survey's somewhat infamous "birth/death" model that assumes new businesses (and jobs) are created every time an existing business goes out of business. This sort of modeling, of course, makes employment look better than it is in the current environment. Calculated Risk also credits a recent blog post by Nancy Folbre that looks at the futility of examining the unemployment rate as a measure of real-world job market hea...

I've put together this short analysis of personal income totals in Colorado. Income's been increasing, but at a slower pace in Colorado than in most states, and it's not likely that it's driven by jobs and wages.

My book review for The Cult of the Presidency , published in The Independent Review last year, is now online .

Here's my look at vacancies and rents in single-family rentals and similar properties in Denver

J.H. Huebert, a brilliant writer, libertarian, attorney and friend, wrote this column showing that Glenn Beck is not now and never has been a libertarian (even though some people refer to him as such for some unfathomable reason). A fellow named Leon Haller wrote in calling Huebert a "leftist plant" and a "fool," which is fun in itself, but this part piqued my interest for obvious reasons: "You are a free market egalitarian, Huebert, and I'm going to show up at any Mises Institute event in which I know you're going to be a speaker (at least someday, when I can arrange matters properly), and I'm going to expose for the world just what leftists you and [Mises Institute founder Llewellyn] Rockwell et al really are. I knew Murray Rothbard, and he would be disheartened and DISGUSTED at the "Modals" like you which turncoat Rockwell has allowed into the formerly paleolibertarian fold. Shame on you, Lew, for selling out, and building the careers ...

This time, I discuss unemployment. I'm trying to make these a little livelier, but so far the comments I've received have been good.

Today I stumbled across the Marketing Japan blog by Mike Rogers in Tokyo. I've corresponded with Mike a couple of times since we write for the same web site every now and then. Being an expatriate who has fled these American shores, he's naturally one of the sanest people I know. If you're interested in learning about business from the Japanese, check out his blog.

I've begun putting together short videos on the economy that are two to three minutes long, and will be produced about once a week. Here's the first one. I should have another one posted by Monday:

It's a red letter day. One of my economic predictions actually came true . Note this snippet from the Denver Business Journal: Foreclosure filings in Colorado's 12 largest counties fell 29.5 percent in July from a year earlier, although they were up slightly from June 2010, the Colorado Division of Housing reported Thursday. Completed foreclosures in the state's urban areas, meanwhile, fell 15.4 percent in July from 2009 and were down 10.9 percent from June 2010. The new figures appear to back up state experts' predictions earlier this year that Colorado foreclosure sales -- the last stage in the foreclosure process if a homeowner can't work out a deal with a lender -- would start to come down after months of year-over-year decline in foreclosure-filing rates . Huzzah. My batting average is now about .100

Cross posted at Mises Economics Blog The latest data for the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index were released today . The home price index for April is still down considerably from the July 2006 peak: As of April 2010, average home prices across the United States are at similar levels to where they were in late summer/early autumn of 2003. From their peak in June/July of 2006 through the trough in April 2009, the 10-City Composite is down 33.5% and the 20-City Composite is down 32.6%. The peak-to-date figures through April 2010 are -30.5% and -30.0%, respectively. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld from a different context, it is close to impossible now to deny that the housing markets are in for a long, hard slog. Well, the places that have hit bottom are in for a slog. Some places, such as Las Vegas, are still on their way down. Comparing year over year, Las Vegas home prices actually fell 8.5 percent. April of 2009 was a disastrous month for home prices, but Vegas is now below even ...

by Ryan McMaken Cross posted at LRC blog. The economics profession is experiencing a crisis of legitimacy. Well, not the whole profession, just the mainstream neo-Keynesian part that comprises the majority of the professional economist corps. Austrian economics, on the other hand, is in a state of renaissance since the old Keynesian sloganeering obviously isn't working anymore. So, in response, an economist who works for the Federal Reserve, Kartik Athreya whines that the economics bloggers are mean and are undermining the real economists with PhD's who sit around with their computer models and debate whether the government should tax everything at a rate of 40 percent or 50 percent. In reality, this isn't a matter of PhD's, since many brilliant economists from Ludwig von Mises to Joseph Salerno have had PhD's or an equivalent degree. So what Athreya really means is that non-PhD'ed economists -who point out the Olympus-like heights to which the non-Austrians ...

by Ryan McMaken Cross posted at Mises Economics Blog Existing home sales did not do as well as expected in May, while new home sales fared even worse. Last week's new home sales data released by HUD and the Census Bureau revealed yet again the underlying weakness in the housing markets in the United States. New home sales, not to be confused with existing home sales, fell 32.7 percent from April to May. The negative month-over-month change was expected by many in the real estate industry, although most major media outlets called the drop "surprising." The drop surprised no one who was watching to see the response to the expiration of the home buyer tax credit in April. So, while the April to May drop was expected, the year-over-year drop signaled a significant lack of demand for new housing. From May 2009 to May 2010, new home sales dropped 18.3 percent. This is especially noteworthy since May 2009 was near the bottom of the market following the financial panic of late...

by Ryan McMaken Cross posted at Mises Economics Blog. Personal income information released this week by the Bureau of Economic Analysis shows total personal income increasing 0.4 percent, or $54 billion, from April to May 2010. Year over year, personal income is up 1.6 percent, or $191 billion. In spite of recent growth, total personal income is still down $24.4 billion, or 0.2 percent, from the peak reached during May of 2008. In short, personal income has gone nowhere over the last two years as it plummeted $479 billion, or 3.9 percent, from May 2008's peak to March 2009's nadir. It has generally increased each month since. Now that personal income has nearly recovered to where it was during the peak time, it is important to look at where the income has come from. Job creation has been extremely weak since 2008. More than 7 million jobs have been lost, and as new high school and college grads have entered the work force, there simply haven't been enough jobs to provide f...

My grandfather's sister, Wilma Zeimmer, recently died back in Indiana. Requiescat in pace. Here is the funeral home's obituary: Born: January 14, 1912 Died: May 23, 2010 J. WILMA ZEIMMER, 98, of Fort Wayne, passed away on Sunday, May 23, 2010, at Coventry Meadow Nursing Home. Born Jan. 14, 1912, in Fort Wayne, she was a daughter of the late Henry W. McMaken and Jessie (Freck). She was a homemaker and member of Arcola United Methodist Church. Surviving are three daughters, Mary Grepke and Norma (Terry) Closson, both of Fort Wayne, and Janice (Bob) Bell of Geneva; stepdaughter, Roxanna Baker of Tucson, Ariz.; stepson, Ronald Zeimmer of Ashville, N.C.; brother-in-law, Kenneth Becktol of Roanoke; 15 grandchildren; 30 great-grandchildren; and eight great-great-grandchildren. She was also preceded in death by her first husband, Joseph Carroll; second husband, George H. Zeimmer; daughter Lorraine Schorey; sons-in-law, Stan Fink, Harry Beatty and Tom Grepke; brother, Herbert McMaken; s...

Bill Anderson has an excellent piece on this case today: This week, Sholom Rubashkin, who was the vice-president of what was once the largest kosher meat processing supplier in the world, was sentenced to 27 years federal prison for "financial fraud." Prosecutors had asked for 25 years, and this is essentially a life sentence for Rubashkin, who is 51. However, a lot of other people, including a number of former U.S. attorneys general, called for leniency and are outraged by this sentence that was motivated more by politics and not by the law. I will go against all of them. Sholom Rubashkin, in my view, does not need "leniency." He needs to be freed, period, for the man is not a criminal, which is more than I can say for the people who hounded and prosecuted him and destroyed his business, Glatt kosher Agriprocessors of Postville, Iowa. Let me begin. Rubashkin is a Hasidic Jew, his family having fled the U.S.S.R. after the Nazi invasion. They came to the United State...

Cross-posted at the Mises Economics Blog: http://blog.mises.org/13055/the-market-for-news/ Historically, newspapers have made money in two ways. They make money from readers, and they make money from advertisers. Originally, most of the money that newspapers made came from readers. In the late 19th century and early 20th century the old newsboy sales model was based on incentives to move as many newspapers as possible at the highest possible price. Advertising was a source of revenue, to be sure, but not the primary source. Over time, the emphasis would shift away from revenue provided by readers and toward advertiser revenue. Eventually, advertiser revenue would make up at least 70-80 percent of all revenue. Essentially, newspapers gave up on getting the readers to cover the full cost of the news a long time ago. The daily cost of a newspaper subscription is, more often than not, well below the cost of producing a paper copy of a newspaper. Until the last few years, the real money was...

There's a web site called VDARE which many corporate web-surfing programs block for "racist content." They're a site that spins a variety of bizarre theories about the inferiority of non-Anglo Saxons and so on. Articles criticizing me for my moderately pro-immigration views have appeared more than once. On this site, a writer seems to (or at least did at one time) attribute to me the famous "Go back to Boston" tirade by Augustin Cebada of the Brown Berets. Comments that are a bit fiery for my tastes, and somewhat violent and in poor taste. And, I never wrote them. [Here is the original piece, although I don't want to link directly to such a site: http://www.vdare.com/misc/080514_pendleton.htm] This is simply an occupational hazard of writing a lot, I suppose, since sooner or later, someone would attribute something to me that I never wrote. In my original posting in which I quote (without endorsement) Cebada's views, I did point out the hypocrisy of...

With the next several years looking quite grim, it seems that just neutral economic news will be good news. From the Aurora Sentinel today: Higher earners far from immune on foreclosure AURORA | Not a single economic class or neighborhood in Aurora is immune to foreclosures. Although foreclosures are more saturated in low-income neighborhoods, they are also dispersed throughout middle- and high-income neighborhoods, according to 2009 data from Arapahoe County. Until recently, foreclosures were most prevalent in lower-income neighborhoods, among homeowners who were living paycheck to paycheck, afflicted with job losses and unable to pay their mortgages. But as high unemployment persists and the aftermath of the recession continues to ripple across the state, wealthier neighborhoods with higher-income homeowners are becoming vulnerable to foreclosures as well. Although the Arapahoe County Assessor’s office doesn’t track the incomes of people who have been affected by foreclosures, they ...

I especially enjoyed this one: Translation: I don't have any actual knowledge about any actual industries. I just like to communicate about communications. From The Oatmeal

From my post at Libertarianstandard.com: In the chart below, provided by chartoftheday.com, one can see how grim the job situation has become. The long term-trend experienced since 1961 has been abandoned for what can only be described as stagnation in job creation. As jobs remain flat, of course, the size of the job force will continue to grow as more young people graduate from college and secondary school. This is partly why unemployment among teens and twentysomethings is now about 25 percent. According to chartoftheday.com: Today, the Labor Department reported that nonfarm payrolls increased by 431,000 in May. It is worth noting that a large majority of last month's gain in payrolls was due to the hiring of temporary workers for the 2010 census. Today's chart provides some perspective on the US job market. Note how the number of jobs steadily increased from 1961 to 2001 (top chart). During the last economic recovery, however, job growth was unable to get back up to its lo...

Here are a couple of haikus by economists I know. I didn't credit them because I'm too lazy to ask them, and it's easier to just cut and paste. Note: If you want me to credit you, just shoot me an email. Helicopters fueled Bernanke begins his flight Paper-rain cuts me also Too much bank credit Plans cannot be completed Recession follows I'll post any good new ones...

All those big growth numbers above 5 percent come from manufacturing to replace burned off inventory. There's little actual growth. Oh, and there's zero employment growth. This piece is helpful except for this statement: "As this remains a jobless recovery, it must therefore become a consumer spending recovery." That doesn't follow at all. This attitude only results in consumers going more deeply into debt. Just because the American economy is currently driven by consumer spending doesn't mean that has to be true. The economy could just as easily be based on saving and investment rather than on purchasing shiny trinkets. But, as long as the Fed continues to ram down interest rates, consumers will prefer spending to saving.

I was recently on an economics panel at the Aspen Board of Realtors' Economic Summit. The Aspen Daily news did a write-up. Foreclosure filings up dramatically by Catherine Lutz, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer Monday, March 15, 2010 Expert: Locals in resort areas getting hit hard Foreclosure filings in Pitkin County are more than triple what they were in early March last year, mirroring a disturbing trend in which experts are seeing rural resort regions getting hit harder later in the economic downturn. There have been 22 foreclosure filings so far in Pitkin County in 2010, compared to six at the same time last year, according to treasurer’s office records. Delinquent amounts range from under $100,000 to $1.5 million, and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the types of foreclosures being filed, said Tiffany Wancura, chief deputy public trustee for Pitkin County. “They’re all over the place,” said Wancura. “They just keep coming in.” A scan of the foreclosures list shows...

The Foreclosure Hotline communications guru ( Sarah Noel ) and I helped put together a nice little partnership between the Colorado Association of Realtors and the Foreclosure Hotline that has led to a series of spots on CBS4 featuring foreclosure issues and homeownership. They can be viewed here .

Housing Snapshot is a very brief summary of the housing economy in Colorado. It's 4 pages of short articles and graphs covering mostly job growth and housing demand, and the housing markets in general. Here's February's issue.

In case you're looking for it, here's the link to the latest Case-Shiller home price index data.

Because it was a waste of time. I'm generally against press conferences and other made-up events that are supposed to create news out of nothing. Press conferences are rickety, wizened old antiques from the 20th century. It is all well explained by Daniel Boostin in his classic book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Press conferences are non-events dressed up as events. That may have worked ten or twenty years ago when reporters were looking for things to do, but in the modern era when no reporter has the time to travel to a press conference, listen to a bunch of self-congratulatory chit chat, and then drive back to the office, something else must be done. Conference calls tailored to specific reporters work well. But only if there is actual news worth reporting. That latter part is the tough part. But even if it's only sort of news, if you get a 100-word brief out of it, you've done well since you didn't waste a bunch of time planning an enormously inef...

Apartment vacancies fell in fourth quarter February 01, 2010 11:50 AM THE GAZETTE Local apartments filled up late last year at a pace not seen in eight years. The vacancy rate for Colorado Springs-area apartments was 8.7 percent during the final three months of 2009, down from 10.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 and the lowest for any fourth quarter since the rate was 8.9 percent in 2001, according to a report released today by the Colorado Division of Housing. More troops at Fort Carson and a lack of new apartments being built in the area contributed to the falling vacancy rate, said Gordon Von Stroh, a University of Denver business professor and who authored the report. Even though the demand for apartments is on the upswing, rents averaged $711.66 in the fourth quarter, which was about $1.60 less than the same period a year earlier. Rents likely remained stable because of poor economic conditions, particularly shrinking payrolls and rising unemployment, said Housing Division ...

Unemployment rises in Colorado to 7.3 percent January 22, 2:57 PM Denver Economy Examiner Ryan McMaken Colorado's unemployment rate (not seasonally adjusted) increased six-tenths of one percentage point from 6.7 to 7.3 percent in December, according to new data released today by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. Nationally, the unemployment rate remained at 10 percent for the second month, according to the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). December's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in Colorado was 7.5 percent. Year over year, the December rate increased in Colorado from 6.0 to 7.3, and the national rate increased from 7.4 percent to 10.0 percent.

Here's my latest piece as the Economy Examiner for Examiner.com: Consumer prices fell 0.2 percent in Western states, including Colorado, from November to December. Prices in the region have risen 2.2 percent since December 2008 according to the report released Friday by the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nationwide, consumer prices in December increased 2.7 percent over December 2008 and fell 0.2 percent since November 2009. Numbers are not seasonally adjusted. ... Generalizing regional data to Colorado can be problematic. The West, as defined by the BLS, includes a large number of states with economic conditions that differ from Colorado's. Nevada and California, for example, are both included in the region yet differ significantly from Colorado in employment figures and in real estate prices. States with high unemployment and depressed real estate and more likely to see falling overall prices than states with more moderate unemployment and with more s...