Shhh! Did You Hear That?

As I was driving somewhere today, I heard a voice come out of the radio about housing sales being up about 2% in September. Now they really didn't say if they were up from August, or up from September last year, but at least they were supposedly up from something!

While I continued to cruise along thinking about how great this was, and imagining SOLD riders springing up on For Sale signs faster than buyers could gas up their cars, I switched radio stations and heard another voice mentioning that home values are at the same level that they were in September of 2004. And someone told me last week that they heard this whole housing thing was supposed to pick up in the 3rd quarter of 2023.

In just five or ten minutes of watching CNBC or FNN, you will get a similar array of stupidity from an endless parade of experts regarding the stock market and the financial mess. The political process is worse yet, with hour long debates from a cast of characters about "Joe the Plumber!"

Jon Stewart, of The Daily Show, may have done the best job on this nonsense with his bit piece this evening on political analysts called: "Who the "BLEEP" is This Guy?"

It seems to me that the rate of consumer indecision correlates directly to the number of analysts spewing out garbage at any given point in time. In fact, I may attempt to prove that in a theorem, since the real estate market is still a bit slow from what I've seen. Although, then I suppose I would have to think up a good name for it, because no one wants to go through the trouble of creating a time consuming theorem without giving it a catchy name!

Look at the Pythagorean Theorem. Now that's one catchy name for a theorem! Athough, it didn't hurt that he already had kind of a fun name as Pythagoras. Parents just seemed to be a lot more creative with names back then.

And wouldn't you know it, there's already an Anderson's Theorem. I suppose that if this real estate market picks up any more I might just have to name it Dan's Theorem to save some time. I don't think there's one of those yet.

Maybe someday analysts will get paid based on merit and how accurate they are with their prognostications, and maybe then we will be able to believe them. But until that time we will have to make political decisions, investment decisions, and real estate decisions based on incessant babble from talking heads...or on our own gut feelings.

Oh...gotta go. ABC News just called and they're having a round-table discussion tomorrow morning that includes all the people with eight letters in their last name, and how that relates to your lifetime earning capacity. Hopefully, I can get a few words in because I have some pretty strong opinions on this subject!