Economy

Housing market is tipping in favor of buyers, real-estate agents say (Adam)

Those insights – and more detailed observations – come from investment bank Credit Suisse, which polls real estate agents around the country every month. Its February edition, released a few days ago, paints a more uniform picture of housing conditions around the country, though some distinctly local matters, like the impact of the government shutdown on Washington, D.C., or the “red tide” in Gulf Coast Florida, stand out.

3-21 Hanson…Massive House Price Growth Deceleration; A BRICK WALL (Adam)

Very few regions escaped a significant deceleration with some prominent regions like San Jose and San Francisco even getting crushed on a year-over-year absolute basis.

The only thing that even comes close to this sharp of deceleration was circa-2007.

Politics Has Failed, Now Central Banks Are Failing (thc0655)

Are we in a pre-revolutionary era? Here's clue #1: politics has failed. When the political process can no longer fix what's broken, politics has failed. When entire classes of citizenry no longer feel represented, politics has failed. When the system delivers a steadily declining standard of living to the bottom 80% of households, politics has failed.

Doug Casey on the Year the World Falls Apart (thc0655)

I know this sounds outrageous because right now everything is running fairly smoothly. The standard of living of the average middle-class American has degraded slowly over decades but hasn’t yet totally collapsed. But that’s the way it is a day before a volcano explodes, or a day before an earthquake, or minutes before an avalanche starts coming down.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal changed the world – but it didn't change Facebook (John J.)

Facebook’s PR machine spent much of the first 24 hours after the story broke engaged in a pedantic and self-defeating argument over whether or not what had occurred constituted a “data breach”. By information security standards, Facebook was correct that what occurred was not a “data breach” – as representatives wrote, “no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked”.

Self-Destruction: Cheerleading the Process (GE Christenson)

The road to economic hell for individuals is paved with easy monthly payments. Governments only pay the interest on their rapidly increasing debt. But they must borrow even more to pay the interest. Retiring the debt is seldom considered.

The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change (John J.)

The study from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform On Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), expected to run to over 8,000 pages, is being compiled by more than 500 experts in 50 countries. It is the greatest attempt yet to assess the state of life on Earth and will show how tens of thousands of species are at high risk of extinction, how countries are using nature at a rate that far exceeds its ability to renew itself, and how nature’s ability to contribute food and fresh water to a growing human population is being compromised in every region on earth.

Industry says China has stopped buying Canadian canola seed (Uncletommy)

Thursday’s announcement comes just weeks after Chinese officials announced they were pulling the canola export license from one of Canada’s largest canola exporters, Richardson International Ltd, alleging “hazardous organisms” had been found in one of the company’s shipments. Two days later, Chinese officials announced all Canadian canola imports into China would face heightened import inspections because of pest concerns.

Over Half of Samples of Kale Tainted With Possible Cancer-Causing Chemical (John J.)

Overall, the USDA found 225 different pesticides and pesticide breakdown products on popular fruits and vegetables Americans eat every day. Before testing, all produce was washed and peeled, just as people would prepare food for themselves, which shows that simple washing does not remove all pesticides.

UK will miss almost all its 2020 nature targets, says official report (tmn)

Critics of the government said the report showed wildlife and natural habitats were in deep crisis. The UK is “among the most nature-depleted countries in the world”, according to a separate 2016 report, with continuing declines in species such as skylarks, hedgehogs, many insects including butterflies and corn marigolds.

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