Good morning from my office on Broadway. I will be spending some time here off and on over the next few weeks as we renovate the rooms in this hotel floor-by-floor. I will be cataloging all the assets for each room and setting up the Asset Tracking Base I wrote here on this property. It will be a short week this week due to New Years, and for the first time in decades I will be spending those two days at home.
Short news day today. I’ve got a lot of crap to do and this is not one of them.
But first, let me go to my ChatGPT Assistant that I wrote to mimic Stephen Colbert’s opening bit on his “Meanwhile” segments:
“Folks, if you watch the show, you know I spend most of my time right over there in the news workshop, carving the year’s most poignant and topical stories into the elegantly crafted cuckoo clock of my monologue—each tick marking history, each tock chiming with significance. But sometimes, folks, on a day like December 30th, I find myself quietly reflecting by the fire, carving a simple tribute from the newswood itself, as we say goodbye to President Jimmy Carter—a statesman, humanitarian, and humble soul whose legacy will echo long after this year’s clock has struck its final chime. That reflection, folks, is my segment, Meanwhile.”
A Life Well Lived
Jimmy Carter, the 39th US president, has died at 100
ATLANTA (AP) — Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer who won the presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War, endured humbling defeat after one tumultuous term and then redefined life after the White House as a global humanitarian, has died. He was 100 years old.
The longest-lived American president died on Sunday, roughly 22 months after entering hospice care, at his home in the small town of Plains, Georgia, where he and his wife, Rosalynn, who died at 96 in November 2023, spent most of their lives, The Carter Center said.
“Our founder, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, passed away this afternoon in Plains, Georgia,” the center said on the social media platform X. It added in a statement that he died peacefully, surrounded by his family.
As reaction poured in from around the world, President Joe Biden mourned Carter’s death, saying the world lost an “extraordinary leader, statesman and humanitarian” and he lost a dear friend. Biden cited Carter’s work to eradicate disease, forge peace, advance civil and human rights, promote free and fair elections and house the homeless as an example for others.
MY TAKE:
Jimmy Carter, the former president who didn’t let his failed four years in office set his legacy for his one hundred years of life. He left office and went on to devote the rest of his life to helping the poor and underprivileged. When he wasn’t building houses for Habitat for Humanity, he was traveling the world trying to smooth out problems and generally tried to make people’s lives more bearable. He still found time to do the one thing that he got the most pleasure in doing:
He taught Sunday School at least thirty times a year, all the way up to the last year of his life.
Jimmy Carter described himself as a “Red Letter Baptist”. In other words, he followed what Jesus said in the bible and ignored all the rest. To him, it only mattered what Jesus said, and not the political blathering of those around him.
I am agnostic, but I do respect people like Jimmy Carter. He literally walked the walk.
History Repeating — Propellerheads
US credit card defaults jump to highest level since 2010
Consumers are ‘tapped out’ after years of high inflation and as pandemic-era savings have evaporated
Defaults on US credit card loans have hit the highest level since the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, in a sign that lower-income consumers’ financial health is waning after years of high inflation.
Credit card lenders wrote off $46bn in seriously delinquent loan balances in the first nine months of 2024, up 50 per cent from the same period in the year prior and the highest level in 14 years, according to industry data collated by BankRegData. Write-offs, which occur when lenders decide it is unlikely a borrower will make good on their debts, are a closely watched measure of significant loan distress.
“High-income households are fine, but the bottom third of US consumers are tapped out,” said Mark Zandi, the head of Moody’s Analytics. “Their savings rate right now is zero.”
The sharp rise in defaults is a sign of how consumers’ personal finances are becoming increasingly stretched after years of high inflation, and as the Federal Reserve has left borrowing costs at elevated levels.
MY TAKE:
While your credit score weighs your payment history fairly high, it tends to focus more on your credit USAGE more than whether you are making regular payments or not. Credit reporting agencies give more of a score on keeping a low usage over a high one. They like it if you can keep your utilization under 20%.
Most Americans are now hovering around 80% utilization, which is back up to where it was just before the global pandemic of 2020.
If the pandemic hadn’t hit when it did, that great and wonderful economy that Trumpublicans love to tout would have probably dropped into another recession by 2022.
Me, personally, am running at 9% utilization at the moment, which for me is absolutely fantastic. I used to be one of those who ran around 75% all the time, and running around $30k in credit card debt at one time. I’ve spent the past five years paying it down because I don’t want to be stuck in another recession with my ass out.
Look, recessions are the name of the game in capitalism. It’s not a matter of “IF”, but a matter of when. We have a recession just right around the corner, and if you don’t prepare for it now, it’s going to catch you in a way that will be uncomfortable for you.
Credit Card Charge-Offs and Delinquencies Hit 13-Year High, Are They Peaking?
Credit card charge-offs and credit card loan delinquencies hit a 13-year high, according to the Federal Reserve’s third-quarter report.
Third-quarter 2024 data reveals that credit card charge-offs increased to 4.65%, up from 4.36% in the previous quarter, marking the highest level since the third quarter of 2011. Charge-offs are continuing to grow at a fairly steep slope. With a 9–12-month lag time to legal placements, the volume should continue to increase well into 2025.
Credit card loan delinquencies, an early indicator of future charge-offs, have held steady at 3.11%. While this represents a plateau, it reached a 13-year high. The stability of this rate raises questions about whether it signifies a temporary pause or if delinquencies have peaked and may begin to decline. Delinquencies are particularly significant as they often precede charge-offs by six to nine months, providing insight into potential future trends in credit card defaults.
Wilbert van der Klaauw, economic research advisor at the New York Fed, highlighted the broader implications of these trends: “Credit card and auto loan transitions into delinquency are still rising above pre-pandemic levels. This signals increased financial stress, especially among younger and lower-income households.”
The Federal Reserve’s charts for the data referenced follow and are linked.
MY TAKE:
I have a charge off on an auto loan way back in 2004. The bank went out of business and charged off all of its debt. I still had three payments left to go on the car and nobody to take the money. I still have the piece of shit sitting in front of my house. I can’t sell it because I still can’t get a title from the bank.
Insider Bank Fraud is on the rise AGAIN
Bank Insiders Are Leaking Data on Client Accounts as Scams Surge
(Bloomberg) — The new staffer was supposed to help Toronto-Dominion Bank spot money laundering from an outpost in New York.
She instead used her access to bank data to distribute customer details to a criminal network on Telegram, according to prosecutors in Manhattan. Local detectives who searched her phone allegedly found images of 255 checks belonging to customers, along with other personal information on almost 70 others.
It’s part of a little-noticed pattern popping up across US banking — from towers in Manhattan, to hubs in Florida and even suburban Louisiana.
As sophisticated scams targeting the life savings of Americans create headlines across the US, the industry’s lowest-paid employees keep getting caught selling sensitive customer information out the back door — emerging as a critical area of weakness in banks’ risk controls.
That’s an inconvenient trend as firms steadfastly argue to policymakers and the public that customers bear primary responsibility for ensuring they don’t get conned out of their savings. While many scams seemingly target people at random, some victims have said con artists who tricked them knew a lot about their finances at the outset.
“The more employees there are inside a company with access to sensitive customer information, the higher the risk that access is going to be abused,” said R.J. Cross, a privacy advocate at US Public Interest Research Group. “Companies need to have technical measures in place to ensure employees and contractors can’t run off with people’s information or access data that isn’t necessary for their job duties.”
MY TAKE:
Another housing bubble is about to burst
San Francisco house prices plunge amid widespread tech layoffs
The Golden City is losing its shine.
Housing prices in San Francisco have plunged to pre-pandemic levels amid widespread layoffs in the tech sector, SFGATE reports.
Despite still being one of the more expensive metropolitan areas in the US, prices for condominiums and co-ops in the city were down 14.7% from May 2022 and now average $986,000.
Those prices have not been seen since 2015, according to Zillow data analyzed by Wolf Street.
Single-family homes are down 15.4% from their peak in 2022, now at an average of $1.39 million, according to data provided to SFGATE by a Zillow representative.
According to the outlet, condo prices doubled between 2012 and 2022, but have now declined by 30% in the past two years.
The Millennium Tower, notorious for being the leaning tower of San Francisco, saw a 44% decrease in price per unit. In September, SFGATE reports, one condo sold for $615,000. A decade prior, it sold for $1.1 million.
MY TAKE:
The main reason why many West Coast cities have a record number of homeless people is because the tech companies paying wages that far exceeds the standard rate of pay for the average employee.
Because of this, the price of housing has risen to meet the demands of the higher-paying employee, to the detriment of every other kind of employee in the city. The standard, non-tech worker cannot compete with the higher-paid tech worker when it comes to housing so they end up assed out and on the streets.
Heading Further down the Ren Rabbit Hole
Last year we had the honour of playing at the mighty Ed Solo’s wedding. He asked us if we’d learn a FatBoy Slim tune, so we did! We ended up jamming the track on the streets of Brighton a few months later and by some synchronistic freak occurrence the Fatboy himself walked passed, caught the performance, filmed it, and stuck it on his Instagram (go check it out!) We enjoyed creating this arrangement so much we thought we’d stick it up on here for all you guys! Enjoy!!
The Big Push is Ren’s former Busking Band.
Have a wonderful day.
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Carter unfortunately tarnished his legacy by contributing to anti-Semitic language regarding Israel that terrorists use to justify killing innocent Jews. With him dead, maybe we can move one step closer to a final peace.
I suspect that you are referring to his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, in which he referred to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories as being similar to the South African apartheid.
Just because the usual suspects jumped up to claim Carter was a “bigot” and “anti-Semitic” because of his characterizations, doesn’t make it true. In fact, the actions of Israel since the Hamas attacks have pretty much proven Carter to be correct.
Look, people love to throw around labels against anyone who has said or done something that says something cross. How many times has the name “Hitler” and “Nazi” been used as a pejorative against someone or some group we don’t approve of? Do you know how many times I’ve been labeled “anti-Semitic” because I am a vocal opponent of Benjamin Netanyahu? Ironically, I’m Jewish.
But let’s look at what has happened since Carter published that book back in 2006.
If you don’t think that Israel isn’t bent upon wiping the Palestinian presence from any land(s) that Israel considers their own, then you are both deaf and blind. Or you are only seeing half the picture. Israel has been systematically wiping out every bit of infrastructure, housing, food, medical, clothing, and even the lives of anything Palestinian. Just this morning I’m hearing that Israel is now arresting and detaining DOCTORS and MEDICS as they systematically tear down hospitals and medical centers in Gaza.
The other day I posted a story about Republican Representative Brian Mast is questioning the innocence of babies killed in Gaza. He believes that Palestinian babies are not innocent civilians but “terrorists” who should be killed. He wasn’t ‘misunderstood’ when he made those comments, he literally tripled down on them. He does NOT believe that there is such a thing as an ‘innocent’ Palestinian — and that is pretty much the general attitude of almost everyone who normally lurks around this site. If you don’t believe me, go back and read the 20+ years of history of this site. The general consensus around this site has always been pro-Israel, anti-every Arab in the region.
Have you ever been to Israel? Most of you haven’t. I am not only a citizen of Israel, I fought in the Yom Kippur war. I’ve been back and forth several times over the past fifty years. I can tell you with utter confidence that Israel does NOT treat their Arab citizens well, and they treat the Palestinian people even worse.
Arabs are truly second-class citizens in Israel. There may be a few who have made it into the government, but they don’t hold much sway. It’s almost the opposite in Iran, where there are Jews who hold government positions, but hold no real power.
I think Carter was spot on when he likened the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as being a form of apartheid. There is really no other description you can call what has been going on there for the past few decades.
It is anti-Semitic to treat the Jewish state differently than you would any other state. And no other state would be expected to accept a neighboring state constantly trying to murder them like Israel is supposed to. It is an insult to black Africans to call Israel apartheid, because Nelson Mandela did not believe in a policy of trying to wipe out white people in the way that Hamas expressly wants to push Jews into the sea. Israel’s policies are based on self-defense from an enemy who wants them dead. I absolutely believe Israel desires a two-state solution. I do not at all think the Palestinians want a two-state solution. Don’t consume the PR statements they use to gain sympathy from the West after their human shield civilians get killed. Read what they say and write in their native language to see their real violently anti-Semitic attitudes that they unfortunately continue to brainwash every new generation with.
Israel already did exactly what Carter and you say they should do: they ripped down their settlements. They evicted Jews from the homes they made in Gaza there so that Palestinians could have a state of their own. What was their reward for that? A leadership elected in Hamas that expressly believes in the violent elimination of Israel, rockets indiscriminately fired across the border, rewards paid to those who can stab to death Jewish children. To expect Israel to have open borders with these people is insane and again a standard no other nation would be held to. I mean how is it that Israel can limit what goes into Gaza? Aren’t their fellow Arabs right there in Egypt? Oh that’s right, Egypt ALSO closes down its border with Palestine, because they also know it is filled with terrorists.
Israel is not an apartheid regime. They are a country that shares a border with a failed terrorist state. Jimmy Carter was another useful idiot for a corrupt leadership that has failed the Palestinian people for decades.
There. Fixed it for ya.
You should drop the ‘anti-Semitic’ act. It was designed to shut down ANY kind of criticism against the STATE of Israel.
Right-leaning wing nuts love to conflate criticism of the State of Israel with ‘anti-Semitism’ because it does have the effect of shutting down conversations. If I were to speak out against the US government should I be labeled ‘anti-Christian’?
I have a problem with how the GOVERNMENT of Israel is killing innocent men, women, and children and other non-combatants. I have a problem with them targeting hospitals and schools, which is against international LAW.
You talk about it being ‘anti-Semitic to treat the Jewish state differently from any other State? Didn’t we literally invade Iraq and Afghanistan because we didn’t like the way they treated their own citizens?
I am all about treating everyone the same. If they do good, then we treat them as such. When they do bad, we tell them so, without being hobbled by some stupid labeling.
I don’t know how many ways I have to explain that it is possible to hate the government and love the people.
If you dislike the sitting US president, are you anti-American? Are you “anti-American” if you disagree with the decision of the Supreme Court? Are you “anti-American” if you disapprove of Congress? Or the direction this country is always “heading in”?
I don’t like Vladimir Putin, but I like the Russian people. In Russia, I’d probably be in prison for saying that. But it certainly doesn’t make me “anti-Russian”.
I am also Canadian by accidental birth. If I were to speak out against the British Columbia government, I’d get a lot of apologies — which is why Vancouver, BC is the dump it is right now, but I digress. I am not anti-Canadian.
Apparently, you can’t speak out against the government of Israel, because then, you are somehow ‘anti-Semitic’.