Results tagged “decline”

You would think, from reading bulletins about the stock market's drop today--about how the Dow Jones decline rate mimics the Great Depression--that Western civilization was on the brink of extinction. To someone who hasn't bought stock or mutual funds (securities of any kind, for that matter) for at least a decade, this doesn't make sense. The closely followed Dow is an average of the prices of thirty stodgy, old-line industrial companies (out of tens of thousands of publicly traded enterprises). An artificial indicator like that is bound to fluctuate, and consider this: No one is forcing anyone at gunpoint to buy or sell anything; for every seller, there's a willing buyer. The Market goes up, the Market goes down. Don't let it get in your head.

Found in our Theo Chocolates promotional newsletter this morning: "Sales of existing houses dropped more in Washington than anywhere else in the nation last quarter, compared with a year earlier, according to a new report. King County's median sale price also dropped roughly 10 percent from a year earlier." Who was saying that Seattle wasn't immune to, but typically lagged the national trends? With the drop, 57 percent of the state's first-time buyers have enough income to afford the median home price.

Only Microsoft could send people fleeing from a free product. But users are abandoning Redmond's free Hotmail service, and they were leaving before the new interface that's got everyone else pissed off: says the P-I, "among the major Web-based mail providers in the United States, Windows Live Hotmail was the only one to experience a fall in traffic in September." (Gmail gained 26K unique visitors, in contrast.) Undeterred, Microsoft is playing stern dad, and forcefully upgrading laggard "classic" users to the new Hotmail interface, like it or not. Ironically, Todd Bishop over at TechFlash has been catching flack from Microsofties for his temporary Gmail address. That's Hotmail's problem! Todd Bishop!

The latest Case-Schiller numbers are out, and they're...not great. Seattle area housing values are down "8.8 percent from August 2007," says the P-I, and they quote an economist who says that "as bad as the latest Case-Shiller numbers appear to be, they are bound to get much worse." We were having lunch with a friend of ours who was reminiscing how, in the mid-80s, he and his wife bought a teensy bungalow for a price also in the mid-80s. He was making about $30,000 a year. Not quite ten years later, they sold for over $300,000, and the property kept appreciating. However, to this day, his old job pays around $30,000 a year. "I don't understand," he said, shaking his head. "We couldn't get started here, today."

It doesn't seem that long ago that no matter which daily newspaper you picked up, the real estate news was good and getting better the by the second. This morning the Seattle Times has a story about even highly motivated home-sellers not finding buyers. Key sentence: "The Seattle-area housing market, once touted as bulletproof against the forces that were pulling down other markets across the country, is now stressing out sellers, who are seeing inventories rise, sales fall and prices drop." We love that "once touted." Wonder who was doing all that touting? Damn those touts!

It wasn't just the Dow Jones setting records today; the NASDAQ index had its 3rd largest one-day decline ever by percentage, losing 9% of its value. Among the tech stocks taking a drubbing were locals Microsoft (-8.7%) and Amazon (-10.4%)--though Redmond might enjoy the schadenfreude of knowing that Apple closed down nearly 18%.

The P-I is running an AP story with the headline: "Seattle home sales plummet 41% from a year ago," (lede: "Seattle and Portland were among the top 10 metro areas in the nation with the most pronounced drop in sales") while the Seattle Times counters with "Record U.S. home-price decline in August attracts buyers." So there's an upside? "...sales are sluggish in formerly stable markets like the Pacific Northwest and Charlotte." Oh. At least we've got strong fundament--oh. Hey, sunny San Diego County real estate is ten percent cheaper than King County. Wait, is that good or bad?