Visiting here is bringing you the knowledge of how your Association operates to support and protect your best interests and connect you to the top resources and expertise in the key areas of concern that could affect your rights and reasonable enjoyment of property. Like a family we are here to stand by you and fight adversities that will in turn make us all stronger and closer.
WE SHALL NEVER SURRENDER.
Wind and solar generation for a category called “Wind, Solar, etc.” by the IEA. Amounts are for 2020 for Germany, the UK, Australia, Norway, the United States, and Japan. For other groups shown in this chart, the amounts are calculated using 2019 data.
The share of total energy provided by the Wind and Solar category is very low, only 2.2% for the world as a whole. Germany comes out highest of the groups analyzed, but even it is replacing only 6.0% of its total energy consumed. It is difficult to imagine how the land and water around Germany could tolerate wind turbines and solar panels being ramped up sufficiently to cover such a shortfall. Other parts of the world are even farther from replacing current energy supplies with wind and solar.
Clearly, we cannot expect wind and solar to ever be ramped up to meet our energy needs, even in combination with hydro.
HERE ARE EIGHT CRITICAL TAKE- AWAYS
[1] Batteries are suitable for fine-tuning the precise time during a 24-hour period solar electricity is used. They cannot be scaled up to store solar energy from summer to winter.
[2] Ramping up hydro is not a solution to our problem of inadequate energy for heat in winter.
[3] Wind energy is not greatly better than hydro and solar, in terms of variability and poor timing of supply.
[4] As more wind and solar are added to the grid, the challenges and costs become increasingly great.
CHINA'S GREEN ENERGY FAILS REVEALING DEEP CONCERNS
[5] The word “sustainable” has created unrealistic expectations with respect to intermittent wind and solar electricity.
[6] Energy modeling has led to unrealistic expectations for wind and solar.
[7] Competitive pricing plans that enable the growth of wind and solar electricity are part of what is pushing a number of areas in the world toward a “freezing-in-the-dark” problem.
[8] The world is a very long way from producing enough wind and solar to solve its energy problems, especially its need for heat in winter.
Over the past decade owning a house has meant easy money. Prices rose reliably for years and then went bizarrely ballistic in the pandemic. Yet today if your wealth is tied up in bricks and mortar it is time to get nervous. House prices are now falling in nine rich economies. The drops in America are small so far, but in the wildest markets they are already dramatic. In condo-crazed Canada homes cost 9% less than they did in February. As inflation and recession stalk the world a deepening correction is likely—even estate agents are gloomy. Although this will not detonate global banks as in 2007-09, it will intensify the downturn, leave a cohort of people with wrecked finances and start a political storm.
The cause of the crunch is soaring interest rates: in America prospective buyers have been watching, horrified, as the 30-year mortgage rate has hit 6.92%, over twice the level of a year ago and the highest since April 2002. The pandemic mini-bubble was fuelled by rate cuts, stimulus cash and a hunt for more suburban space. Now most of that is going into reverse. Take, for example, someone who a year ago could afford to put $1,800 a month towards a 30-year mortgage. Back then they could have borrowed $420,000. Today the payment is enough for a loan of $280,000: 33% less. From Stockholm to Sydney the buying power of borrowers is collapsing. That makes it harder for new buyers to afford homes, depressing demand, and can squeeze the finances of existing owners who, if they are unlucky, may be forced to sell.
MONTHLY HOUSE PAYMENTS EXPLODE
The good news is that falling house prices will not cause an epic financial bust in America as they did 15 years ago. The country has fewer risky loans and better-capitalised banks which have not binged on dodgy subprime securities. Uncle Sam now underwrites or securitises two-thirds of new mortgages. The big losers will be taxpayers. Through state insurance schemes they bear the risk of defaults. As rates rise they are exposed to losses via the Federal Reserve, which owns one-quarter of mortgage-backed securities.
NOT SO BAD???
Some other places, such as South Korea and the Nordic countries, have seen scarier accelerations in borrowing, with household debt of around 100% of gdp. They could face destabilising losses at their banks or shadow financial firms: Sweden’s central-bank boss has likened this to “sitting on top of a volcano”. But the world’s worst housing-related financial crisis will still be confined to China, whose problems—vast speculative excess, mortgage strikes, people who have pre-paid for flats which have not been built—are, mercifully, contained within its borders.
WILL THE CRASH SPREAD BEYOND UK?
Even without a synchronised global banking crash, though, the housing downturn will be grim. First, because gummed-up property markets are a drag on the jobs market. As rates rise and prices gradually adjust, the uncertainty makes people hesitant about moving. Sales of existing homes in America dropped by 20% in August year on year, and Zillow, a housing firm, reports 13% fewer new listings than the seasonal norm. In Canada sales volumes could drop by 40% this year. When people cannot move, it saps labour markets of dynamism, a big worry when companies are trying to adapt to worker shortages and the energy crisis. And when prices do plunge, homeowners can find their homes are worth less than their mortgages, making it even harder to up sticks—a problem that afflicted many economies after the global financial crisis.
What is perfectly clear from this analysis is that none of the Central Banks can fix the real economy with currencies or economic policies because the planet is now overwhelmed by too many people and rapidly exhausting resources - meaning applying their final tool kit of financial shenanigans is going to be completely fruitless.
When thathappens then the global economy will collapse; just as it is currently doing in specific developing and developed countries, it will no longer be possible to operate our complex global society.
DYNAMICS OF TRAGIC FAILURE
Block Chain, FinTech, EVs, nor AI hold any promise to solve our real physical predicament outside of providing conceptual absurdities by either Hollywood or Commercial lunacy to sell.
Projections therefore about what happens next should only be viewed as pure speculation or utter poppycock because there are both infinite permutations and outcomes possible. Nonetheless, it is highly likely that society is approaching the end of days similar to historical complex civilizations mentioned in the above linked video presentation by Joseph Tainter .
Let's face it, you cannot eat any form of physical (gold) or abstract currency (bitcoin, dollars etc.) - for as science has long professed
The major issue is that money, by itself, cannot operate the economy, because we cannot eat money. Any model of the economy must include energy and other resources. In a finite world, these resources tend to deplete. Also, human population tends to grow. At some point, not enough goods and services are produced for the growing population.
Time and time again, financial approaches have worked to fix economic problems. Raising interest rates has acted to slow the economy and lowering them has acted to speed up the economy. Governments overspending their incomes also acts to push the economy ahead; doing the reverse seems to slow economies down.
What could possibly go wrong? The issue is a physics problem. The economy doesn’t run simply on money and debt. It operates on resources of many kinds, including energy-related resources. As the population grows, the need for energy-related resources grows. The bottleneck that occurs is something that is hard to see in advance; it is an affordability bottleneck.
For a very long time, financial manipulations have been able to adjust affordability in a way that is optimal for most players. At some point, resources, especially energy resources, get stretched too thin, relative to the rising population and all the commitments that have been made, such as pension commitments. As a result, there is no way for the quantity of goods and services produced to grow sufficiently to match the promises that the financial system has made. This is the real bottleneck that the world economy reaches.
CENTRAL BANKS ARE CLEARLY ON VERGE OF COLLAPSE
I believe that we are closely approaching this bottleneck today. I recently gave a talk to a group of European officials at the 2nd Luxembourg Strategy Conference, discussing the issue from the European point of view. Europeans seem to be especially vulnerable because Europe, with its early entry into the Industrial Revolution, substantially depleted its fossil fuel resources many years ago. The topic I was asked to discuss was, “Energy: The interconnection of energy limits and the economy and what this means for the future.”
In this post, I write about this presentation.
Slide 3
TOO MANY PEOPLE, TOO LITTLE FOOD
NOT GOOD
The major issue is that money, by itself, cannot operate the economy, becausewe cannot eat money. Any model of the economy must include energy and other resources. In a finite world, these resources tend to deplete. Also, human population tends to grow. At some point, not enough goods and services are produced for the growing population.
EUROPE & OTHERS IN ECONOMIC HELL
WE'RE NEXT
I believe that the major reason we have not been told about how the economy really works is because it would simply be too disturbing to understand the real situation. If today’s economy is dependent on finite fossil fuel supplies, it becomes clear that, at some point, these will run short. Then the world economy is likely to face a very difficult time.
A secondary reason for the confusion about how the economy operates is too much specialization by researchers studying the issue. Physicists (who are concerned about energy) don’t study economics; politicians and economists don’t study physics. As a result, neither group has a very broad understanding of the situation.
I am an actuary. I come from a different perspective: Will physical resources be adequate to meet financial promises being made? I have had the privilege of learning a little from both economic and physics sides of the discussion. I have also learned about the issue from a historical perspective.
Housing Market Crash 2022: What To Expect As Interest Rates Rise
Key takeaways
Existing home sales dropped 0.4% from July, with an overall drop of 19.9% from one year ago. This is attributed to higher mortgage rates that made monthly payments more expensive than ever.
Google Trends shows that search queries for “real estate market crash” have skyrocketed in the last month.
Mortgage rates have hit a 20-year high as the Fed tries to fight inflation and cool down the economy.
Many hopeful homeowners have been waiting for a housing market crash so that they can finally enter the market. While it appears that home prices are softening, houses are not becoming more affordable since mortgage rates skyrocketed, reaching a 20-year high.
THIS IS A VERY SERIOUS COLLAPSE
Consumers are uncertain about the economy's future as inflation continues to soar. While the Fed continues to raise rates to restore the balance of supply and demand, many potential home buyers aren’t sure what to do. They want to enter the market, but many of us are dissuaded by a fear of a recession.
Due to rate hikes, the real estate market is cooling down regarding sales and prices. However, there’s more to the story as the battle against inflation wages on. We will look at the possibility of a housing market crash as interest rates rise.
Why are interest rates still rising?
The Fed has been raising interest rates since March 2022, when they finally had to concede that inflation was no longer transitory. When the cost of borrowing money goes up, mortgage rates are impacted. The Fed has even hinted at interest rates reaching 4.6% in 2023.
FED CHAIR SPEAKS ON RATE INCREASES
As the Fed combats inflation by increasing rates to slow down the economy, there are going to be many sectors that feel the pain. The housing market is one area where the consequences will be felt since mortgage rates will make consumers hesitant to enter the market.
What do rate hikes mean for the housing market?
Interest rate hikes are intended to slow down the housing market, which has catapulted itself to new heights over the past few years.
The country was already dealing with a housing shortage before the pandemic started. Then, when the pandemic hit, many people were working from home and had the flexibility to relocate.
With so many Americans opting to relocate due to newfound freedom from remote work, this increased demand in smaller markets and led to bidding wars.
The biggest issue with rate hikes is that everything becomes more expensive for the average consumer. This is frustrating since inflation is already responsible for rising prices, and people have to deal with additional increases regarding internet rates.
Soaring interest rates are making mortgage payments more expensive. In September 2022, the average rate of 6.29% on a 30-year fixed mortgage meant an additional $600 was added to the monthly cost of being a homeowner on top of the increased costs of everything else.
Moving forward, potential homebuyers will be hesitant about getting into the real estate market because it costs more to borrow money. This doesn’t even factor in any additional assistance needed for home upgrades.
MORE INFLATION,' FOOD & ENERGY SHORTAGES MEANS COLLAPSE
What’s happening with the real estate market right now?
For the 44 million households who rent a home or apartment in the U.S., inflation keeps pushing costs higher and higher. Anger is rising too. It could be a breaking point.
Here’s a list of places you might imagine seeing an argument over housing policy. A city council meeting. A late-night zoning hearing. Maybe a ribbon-cutting to christen a new affordable housing complex.
Instead, there was Quinton Lucas, the mayor of Kansas City, Mo., on a stage dressed as the pope with a half-dozen hecklers in yellow T-shirts berating his new housing plan from the audience in front of him. Mr. Lucas had arrived at the outdoor Starlight Theater on a warm August evening for a cameo appearance in a local production of “Sister Act.” Just before he walked onto the stage, the demonstrators, who belonged to a group called KC Tenants, unfurled a banner that read “Mayor Lucas: Developing Displacement.”
A pack of uniformed security guards promptly smothered the scene. During the slow procession to the exit gates that followed, members of KC Tenants chanted, “The rent is too damn high!” while the audience tried to focus on the mayor/pope and the dancing nuns.
Such is the state of housing in America, where rising costs are flaring into pockets of resistance and rage. Take two-plus years of pandemic-fueled eviction anxiety and spiking home prices, add a growing inflation problem that is being increasingly driven by rising rents, and throw in a long-run affordable housing shortage that cities seem powerless to solve. Add it up and the 44 million U.S. households who rent a home or apartment have many reasons to be unhappy.
REMEMBER IT CAN HAPPEN AGAIN
''HEY MOM - WHERE'S THE PITCHFORK?''
That unhappiness extends across the economic spectrum. At one end are renters who aspire to buy a home but have had their dreams dashed by high home prices and, now, rising mortgage rates. At the other are low-income tenants who make up the bulk of the 11 million households who spend more than half of their income on rent. In between is a hollowed-out middle class that is steadily losing ground, although not enough to qualify for much sympathy or help.
WE THE PEOPLE
The confluence of all these forces has fueled a swell of tenants’ rights activism that has brought organizing muscle and policies like rent control to cities far beyond the high-cost coasts. Kansas City, Mo., is a leading example. With a population of 500,000, where the avenues are lined with brick buildings and side streets have modest homes with raised porches, the city offers little to suggest a renters’ revolution. Zillow’s home value index puts the typical Kansas City home at $230,000, or more than $100,000 below the national level.
But with a steadily expanding economy driven by the logistics and medical industries, Kansas City has seen its rents increase 8.5 percent from a year ago, outpacing the rest of the nation, according to rental search site Apartment List. Over the past decade, Kansas City, like many places, has added a collection of high-end towers and apartments even as its stock of low-income housing has withered. The strain from rising rents, which landlords say they need to cover their costs, is creeping from people working in low-income service professions to middle-income teachers and city workers, part of a festering affordable housing crunch that spreads more widely across the nation each month.
KC Tenants is one result. Pairing aggressive protests with traditional lobbying, the group exploded onto the political scene during the pandemic and has since become instrumental in passing tenant-friendly laws like an ordinance that gives renters a lawyer during eviction proceedings. It has also left a trail of embittered opponents who find the group’s tactics, such as protesting outside judges’ homes, ill-suited to what many residents describe as a cordial Midwestern town.
“It’s a transition in politics for us,” said Mayor Lucas, a Democrat, who says he meets with the leaders of KC Tenants regularly, despite being a frequent subject of the group’s protests. “There is a new, almost tougher political edge, in the sense that there are people who are organizing and intrigued by politics and are very angry and are not coming out of the same institutions that built a lot of us.”
END OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING
America’s housing problem was simmering long before the pandemic, and tenant organizing is a well-established trade. What’s changed is the depth of the housing shortage and the suddenness with which Covid-19 and inflation have tipped smaller cities into an affordability crisis. This has opened the aperture for policies once deemed politically impossible, in a wider range of markets.
Unlike homeowners, whose budget problems are blunted by a litany of tax breaks and fixed-rate mortgages, renters are mostly unprotected from rapidly rising prices. Once cities around the country passed widespread eviction moratoriums and emergency rent caps that were followed by tens of billions of dollars in pandemic rental assistance, it was only natural for housing activists to push for some of those temporary policies to be made permanent.
Politically speaking, inflation has only helped. Nationally, rents are now 20 percent higher than they were in early 2020, creating an opportunity for renter-friendly laws to get baked into long-term policy.
INFLATION OUT OF CONTROL
“People take for granted that rent is always going to go up,” said Tara Raghuveer, a co-founder of KC Tenants. “There’s so little political imagination about what could be different, and now I think that’s changing.”
A hyper-focused worker who blends the rhetoric of a revolutionary with the efficiency of a chief executive, Ms. Raghuveer also directs the Homes Guarantee campaign, which works to create tenant unions around the country. She described KC Tenants as both a local movement and national experiment through which organizing ideas can be test-driven.
“I think every national organizer should be accountable to a local base,” she said.
During a three-day visit in which I hung around the office and shadowed meetings and protests, Ms. Raghuveer returned repeatedly to an idea that has become a refrain among tenant groups: the hope that growing resentment over housing costs is fostering a broad tenant identity that will inspire a wide range of renters to organize and vote with a shared interest. In the activist nomenclature, this is known as “tenants as a class.
”That’s an audacious goal in a country where homeownership is all but defined as success. An irony of the nation’s housing problem is that it’s become so pervasive that it has created as many opportunities for cleavage as it has for coalition. Need has grown faster than resources, making housing policy a prism through which a stealth conflict between the middle class and the truly poor is filtered.
Even so, what’s clear is that in Kansas City and elsewhere tenants are becoming a real constituency. That’s not something you could say as recently as a few years ago. But a few years ago the rent wasn’t quite so high.
Getting the Data
Tara Raghuveer, KC Tenants’ founding director, working outside the East Patrol Division Station where the group camped out waiting for Board President Tiana Caldwell to be released on bond.Credit...Barrett Emke for The New York Times
