LittleJoe

Revisiting Economic Strategy

First off, my apologies for my absence here as of late. The post-election flurry of things I neglected beforehand finally caught up to me, coupled with a great deal of automotive maintenance, and a profound desire to make Ubuntu(!) work the way I wanted. On with the post...

The Federal Reserve is on the brink of yet another drastic interest rate cut, possibly down to .25%, which brings to mind my previous post (see "Credit Crisis Did Not Begin With Housing Decline"). This obviously begs the question, what are they really thinking? Or better yet, are they really thinking?

This graph illustrates the history of the Fed's interest rate fluctuations over the past 5 years.

What seems most alarming about this trend is that the interest rate was dropped in early 2003 and saw its previously lowest point during 2004, followed by steep increases in 2005 and early 2006. It's odd that these increases seem to eerily coincide with a housing down-turn. To spare another lengthy explanation, see my previously linked post.

I realize that the Fed has limited tools at its disposal to repair an ailing market, but as history SHOULD have taught us, dropping the interest rate does nothing but cause exponential inflation after the fact, and when things start becoming more and more expensive at alarming rates, the economy is sure to suffer. Aside from a virtually frozen credit market, things seem relatively cheap now (petro-gas for starters), and things seemed relatively cheap earlier this decade, but when commodity prices started going up, people stopped paying their mortgages (a huge problem is mortgage-backed debt and securities), they stopped paying their credit bills, and things generally went downhill in very short order.

Consistency always seems a better tool to solve economic problems, along with a slow but steady approach, because these jack-rabbit starts and stops cause unnecessary panic in the markets, markets that already overreact to absolutely anything that goes on in the private and public finance sectors. Slow methodical changes would surely be much preferable to this dramatic flux, which does very little to calm our economic fears, and seems to do nothing to stabilize an eroding market.

Wreath construction and lights at night

The first pic below (click a thumbnail image to see larger) shows Shirley as she was building the Peace Wreath. The second pic is our house at night ...probably should have used a tripod, but you can get the idea. More and more homes in the neighborhood are getting lights up, so the third pic is of a couple of houses across the street. The neighborhood's starting to look quite festive.

 

Outdoor lights, wreath installed - dip in pool to cool off

Yesterday I donned t-shirt and shorts, slathered on the sunscreen, and went outside for my annual killer workout of putting up the Christmas lights. You see, we've got a tall peak above the garage. This means that I position the ladder, climb up, put ONE clip for the lights at one location, climb down, adjust the height of the ladder and move it and repeat the process. A lot. And climb up on the roof a couple of times, and try to censor my language as I inevitably break little clips or drop things or whatever ...don't want parents to worry too much about their kids hearing naughty words :)

Oh, and I've been doing this insane pushup workout for months, so my shoulders are always feeling abused, so moving that rather unwieldy ladder is a treat. But the result is worth it. And this year the last thing to do was to grab the hammer drill and mount the 4-foot diameter peace wreath that Shirley made. Very, very cool (click the thumbnail image for a better view). She use flexible water tubing and PVC for the framework, wired on the faux flowers and lights for the wreath itself, and painted a map of the world on some blue nylon and fastened that as a background. She's amazing.

This being Florida, I was in need of cooling off after a couple of hours of working in the sun, so I had to take a dip in the pool. Even though it was around 80F (27C), and the sun was quite warm, and this is Florida, there's still a part of my brain that has a hard time grasping the thought of jumping in a swimming pool in December. When we lived in the Pacific Northwest, this would have been when I'd have hoped to be skiing in the mountains :)

I'll see if I can snap a pic of the lights after nightfall this evening.

Replaced POS garbage disposer with a real appliance

We've been in our house for close to 4 years. It was build by Mercedes Homes. We had checked a lot of model homes from many builders over a couple of years before deciding to go with Mercedes. Overall, we think they do a decent job. But they did skimp on the appliances. Our dishwasher is, in the words of a plumber who repaired a leak for us early on, "below builder grade". That means it is about as cheap as you can find. Similar with our POS garbage disposer. The device that came with the house was a 1/3 hp InSinkErator. I could be wrong, but I believe that is the lowest horsepower disposer that is made. I can understand a builder wanting to keep costs down, so I'm not surprised. Well, this thing had started to leak, so it was time to replace this with a real disposer.

After checking reviews on ConsumerReports .org (and elsewhere), I popped on Amazon and ordered a Waste King 3300. This model is 3/4 hp (so just over twice the horsepower of what came with the house), gets very good reviews, and includes a 10-year parts and labor in home warranty. As long as we keep our receipt for the purchase, if anything goes wrong with this device, Waste King will send someone to our home and fix it. Free.

I did have to make a run to the store for some plumber's putty, but aside from that it was a pretty easy install. And the Waste King is nice and quiet!