Virginia Is For Families

I was having trouble discovering a topic to write about today. I was even considering writing about Sparky and Malarky my two German Shepherds who guard the house while we are gone. They are downstairs at the moment imagining how great the trash man would taste and discussing who will get the more tender parts.

But that’s not going to happen. He’s a good guy. Still I don’t want to tell the dogs it won’t happen . In the first place they would be upset with me. And in the second place they might try to eat me. And I am not safely on the other side of the door like our neighborhood trash guy.

I left him a trash can full of woodworking trash today. Lots of little 2 X 4’s that add up to about half a ton. He’s probably not too happy about that right about now. He has to pay a whole lot more money for gas just to get here and then I am weighing down his truck with all this wood.

I’m a bad customer.

But on the other hand I could share some good news with him. This will make him happy enough to forget about a bunch of 2 X 4’s.

Oil slipped off a record high above $143 a barrel today as US crude rose 11 cents to 140.59 a barrel. I know that seems like not so good news. You have to dig deeper to find the pony as President Reagan used to like to say. Because the US Energy Information Administration revised down US April oil demand by 863,000 barrels per day. That’s nearly 4 percent below demand last year in April.

“This revision of the US oil demand for April has certainly put pressure on crude futures. This is demand destruction before our very eyes” said Phil Flynn of Alaron Trading. “This is a huge revision and it happened when fuel prices were still lower, so you can expect that there could be more future downgrades in demand data.

On the other hand we have the weak dollar and escalating tensions between Iran and Israel over Teheran’s nuclear program.

Those two are gonna have a showdown at some point. But what I interpret this guy saying is that there is probably a huge glut of oil out here and the traders have gone too far. Prices are going to start down in the very near future.

And we can all take our cars out on the road again! Who has cut back on their driving?

Just about everybody. We all make those little decisions that cut our fuel costs by five, ten or twenty percent. And it adds up! So I need to run down the street and catch my trash man before he turns the corner. And tell him the good news.

Maybe Sparky and Malarky would like to come? Would you guys? Great! Come on then. Let’s get some exercise and run down there to see the trash man!

I have been talking to Beth about buying some vacation property down in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. I love the Outer Banks. I especially like those huge dunes that mark the location of the first flight made by the Wright brothers. The beaches are wonderful too.

But vacation property is not cheap. So I have come up with a plan and am presenting it to the board, pardon me, I mean bored expression that is on the face of my lovely wife Beth. She’s not buying what I’m selling. And it’s a shame because we could probably have two or three vacation homes in just a couple of years if she would jump on the band wagon.

Timing is the thing. All we need to do is sell all of our property now and rent a small apartment downtown. Or maybe get a trailer out in the woods. I can see us now living under the trees with a campfire burning and crickets chirping so loud we can’t even hear the twelve inch B and W television in the kitchen.

Then we sit back and wait for these smart businessmen to put all their empty houses on the market at half price. Six months from now when they are all still on the market the floodgates will open. Housing prices will really tumble and we will be able to purchase beach front property for pennies on the dollar. I wasn’t aware of how bad things really have gotten until reading this article about Hovnanian. But if you are a home owner don’t worry about it too much. Things will eventually come back to normal. The government is not going to let the housing market suffer too long. They want it to hurt but they don’t want it to die. So we are looking at a dip in prices that will afford opportunities to folks like me who don’t mind camping out in the woods or moving downtown near a college campus or two. Hey, maybe we can live near my son. He thought he escaped when he moved out last summer. This could be a helpful reminder to him that things don’t always turn out as planned.

When I was Zach’s age I was reading books about economic upheaval. I read about Germany prior to World War II and I read about other examples of hyperinflation followed by depression. Back in the 1970’s I thought it was going to happen here. I even bought a bunch of dried food so we would have something to eat.

Silly me. The shelf date passed and the food was never eaten. Maybe there was a depression in the seventies and early eighties. But the government paved the way out of it and most were not aware it had even happened. We had stagflation for awhile which was a stagnating economy that was not responding well to inflationary policies like Keynes said it would. And then we had Paul Volker and Ronald Reagan. They decided to forget that and try something else. The recession got worse and then it got better. They stopped giving the patient antibiotics and his fever spiked. Maybe he would die! Oh, well! But he got better instead. You just have to be willing to place a big bet and wait. President Reagan was always acting like he enjoyed doing that. It was pretty funny to watch him casually talk about WW3. I nearly died laughing a few times.

Anyway, all of this was so long ago. I was proved so wrong for so many years that I no longer believe any of it is possible. Now it’s just an opportunity to buy beachfront property and to catch up on my camping skills.

Hey, I bet I could get some really good pictures. Do they have broadband out in the woods?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aMY4kexu4198&refer=home