Monday
The weak of the free market. Monday
Propelled by $350 million in state incentives, Miami-based Lennar Corporation will put solar power on all new homes sold in the San Francisco Bay area. California is also where the largest utility, PG&E, is leading a national effort to cap emissions of carbon dioxide, based on state law and incentives to conserve. In Texas where state law also provides incentives, Florida Power and Light is the largest producer of wind energy in the nation.
But in Florida, where markets are “free” Lennar continues to push conventional tract housing without solar and Florida Power and Light is planning a new coal-fired power plant at the edge of the Everglades.
In Hong Kong, another free market haven, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says that economic cycles should be allowed to follow their natural course—a prescription for monetary policy he never subscribed to during his tenure while he hacked at interest rates and created the biggest bubble in housing markets in US history—and suggests an economic recession could be in our future. (You couldn't invent this stuff up!)
Tuesday
US stock markets their worst drop since the markets re-opened after 9/11. The Dow Jones Industrial Average falls 416 points.
Al Gore speaks to a packed house at the University of Miami basketball arena on global warming, which a report by the British government calls "the greatest market failure in world history".
Wednesday
The government reports that construction activity fell by .8 percent in January, double the decline that analysts had been expecting.
Thursday
Miami-based Lennar Corporation pulls the plug on Florida City Commons, withdrawing its application with the State of Florida for a 6,000 home development and $1 billion of construction at the edge of the Everglades fiercely opposed by environmentalists and promoted by countless lobbyists, engineers and political insiders.
Friday
Miami developer and political insider, Raul Masvidal, is arrested on charges that he defrauded the agency charged with helping disadvantages families find housing in order to buy himself a sculpture of a giant watermelon slice.
Saturday
According to the New York Times, leaders of the Christian Right are pressuring the vice chair of the National Association of Evangelicals to stop speaking out on global warming. They associate global warming with population control, leftists and "limits on free enterprise."
Sunday
The Miami Herald reports a new wrinkle on the housing crash: mortgage fraud. But you'd have to excavate to the back page of the business section, 8E to find it: "I've never seen us this overwhelmed on any one type of crime before," said Miami Dade police sargeant Richard Davis, which in our book is a claim worth note.
And if you think the damage stops at subprime mortgages, and a rash of consumers who just couldn't borrow from willing lenders fast enough, just wait until next week's news about the free market.
3 comments:
According to the New York Times, leaders of the Christian Right are pressuring the vice chair of the National Association of Evangelicals to stop speaking out on global warming. They associate global warming with population control, leftists and "limits on free enterprise.
Arggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Too bad there isn't such a thing as "a well-educated and common-sense Right".
It really chaps my rear when these guys speak on behalf of USA and infer that those of faith believe in the blind, self-serving propaganda that they dish up. Makes the USA look uneducated and stupid.
Maybe the silent majority, if there is one, isn't silent. Perhaps, they are just choking and can't get the words out to protest all the non-sense without losing all rationality.
I can't believe that these people speak for God. God doesn't need their kind of help, and neither do I.
The plug was pulled on Florida City Commons because houses are not selling. It was an entirely selfish move by the developer. Lennar's option was a good a move by them --- bad by Atlantic Civil, with Lennar not fully committed they were able to bow out with not a lot of investment in the project.
Economics pure and simple.
Agree with some qualifications. Lennar's Miami group was at the forefront of the efforts to move the Urban Development Boundary and to coordinate the Barbara Jordan "affordable housing" ordinance back in 2005, when the boom was in full swing.
By the writer's standards, the investment may have been small--but by our standards there was nothing small about the investment in time and energy to coordinate the applications by production home builders to move the Urban Development Boundary, or to assemble land tracts outside the UDB in expectation that the line would be moved in 2006. On the pyramid of interests to move the UDB, Lennar--because of its deep pockets and roots in Miami--is at the top.
How things change: Lennar is now a multi-billion dollar company in a daily fight, along with other big production home builders, to conserve cash as inventories swell.
The 'unstoppable force' of suburban sprawl in Miami has been stopped in its tracks.
The dead market made withdrawal of the Lennar application to the state an easy business, but it signals a sharp retrenchment of production homebuilders who are still profitable, an effort to unload property whose value is highly inflated by others, and impending foreclosures from many directions.
Go to Homestead today and you'll find lots of bulldozers and construction sites. But what you will see is all that's left at the tail end of the housing boom pipeline, including construction financing and mortgage commitments... there's nothing coming in at the front end because when a bubble bursts, there is no way to put the air back in.
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