A list of the latest green shoots sprouting up all over America! First the Airlines…
Jets taxi at Los Angeles International Airport, 2009. The International Air…
International airlines suffered their biggest decline in traffic since 1945 last year as passenger demand fell 3.5 percent, the International Air Transport Association said Wednesday.
Freight also fell, by 10.1 percent, as "full-year 2009 demand statistics for international scheduled air traffic that showed the industry ending 2009 with the largest ever post-war decline," IATA said in a statement.
"In terms of demand, 2009 goes into the history books as the worst year the industry has ever seen," said Giovanni Bisignani, director general of the world’s biggest airlines’ association.
"We have permanently lost 2.5 years of growth in passenger markets and 3.5 years of growth in the freight business," he added Airlines suffered record drop in traffic in 2009: IATA
How is rail traffic doing?
Total Industry Charts (US, Canada and Mexico)
Year over Year Percent Change 13 Week Rolling Averages
Norfolk Southern Posts Profit Decline
Norfolk Southern posted a decline in quarterly profit as the No. 4 U.S. railroad coped with weak freight volumes, resulting from the sluggish economy.
Hey what about homebuilding?
U.S. Economy: New-Home Sales Fall, Capping Worst Year (Update1)
By Bob Willis
Jan. 27 (Bloomberg) — Sales of new homes in the U.S. unexpectedly dropped in December, capping the worst year on record and signaling the government’s tax-credit extension has yet to shore up demand.
Purchases declined 7.6 percent to an annual pace of 342,000, marking the fourth decrease in the past five months, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. For all of 2009, sales declined 23 percent to 374,000, the lowest level since records began in 1963.
Spectacular! We are selling the same number of houses we did back in 63…cool baby! Well that should help move all that hidden inventory the banks are holding that are upside down. Good thing that we are letting the banks decide how much all that shit they have on their books is worth. Heaven knows what would happen if they were forced to value their assets like all the rest of us are forced to. Maybe I can just go to the bank and tell them I think my rusted out old bicycle is worth enough to use as collateral on a $1,000,000 dollar home?
Unlocking the Foreclosure Box – The Most Comprehensive Shadow Inventory Housing Analysis for Los Angeles County. Examining 269 Zip Codes and Finding 100,000 Shadow Properties while Public Views 19,000.
One resolution I had coming into 2010 was getting a better number for the shadow inventory in Southern California. It is rather clear that shadow inventory is a real factor in the current market but how big is this inventory? Can we really get an accurate figure for a large area like Los Angeles County? Well this is something I set out to do. The trouble with the current numbers is they are derived from a variety of sources. First, you need to pull MLS data for each of the 269 zip codes in Los Angeles County. This is the largest county in California with approximately 9,700,000 people living here. It provides an excellent cross section of all the ills California housing is currently experiencing. If we can get a handle on the actual shadow inventory for this area we can put together a better picture of the housing market for 2010.
Wow hey maybe those undeclared shadow homes might be a problem in a bit eh? Nah we can just borrow some more money to paper over all these trillions of dollars of loss….yea trillions because as sure as day follows night some bunch of Wall Street Crooks have hedged their losses in the CDS markets. Gosh this is fun! Hey Bernie don’t stop printing just yet we need a few more trillion dollar notes…nothing to see here folks. After all soverign debt is bullshit as far as we are concerned because WE ARE TOO BIG TO FAIL. SUCK IT UP PRODUCTIVE COUNTRIES WE NEED YOUR MONEY!
Dubai Crisis May End in ‘Major’ Default, BofA Says (Update3)
By Tal Barak Harif
Nov. 27 (Bloomberg) — Dubai’s debt woes may worsen to become a “major sovereign default” that roils developing nations and cuts off capital flows to emerging markets, Bank of America Corp. said.
“One cannot rule out — as a tail risk — a case where this would escalate into a major sovereign default problem, which would then resonate across global emerging markets in the same way that Argentina did in the early 2000s or Russia in the late 1990s,” Bank of America strategists Benoit Anne and Daniel Tenengauzer wrote in a report.
A default would lead to a “sudden stop of capital flows into emerging markets” and be a “major step back” in the recovery from the global financial crisis, they wrote.
Emerging-market stocks around the world have slumped for two days on concern a debt restructuring by Dubai World, with $59 billion of liabilities, will add to the $1.72 trillion of losses and writedowns from the global credit freeze. The MSCI Emerging Markets Index fell 1.9 percent to 940.30 as of 1:55 p.m. in New York, extending this week’s decline to 2.6 percent.
Well the question is exactly when do the adults take over in Washington DC and force the country to take some very painful medicine so we can get back to growing again? We need to cut spending, cut entitlements, cut corporate taxes, end this fantasy that the banks are engaged in regarding their dreams that housing prices are set to recover any time soon. No one is too big to fail. Every large nation in history has been brought down sooner or later. How about we delay our downfall by acting like adults and paying our bills.
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