Location: 48 degrees, 02.12 minutes North, 043 degrees, 42.08 minutes East, or 1,421 nautical miles ENE of New York.

The Queen Mary 2 is currently plowing its way through a massive fog bank a thousand miles thick, sounding the foghorn every two minutes. Visibility is less than 100 yards, and the waves are a rough 12 feet high. The captain has closed the outside decks for fear of losing a passenger overboard. The weather has disrupted our satellite link, and our Internet is down. So here I write.

One hour out of New York, and a passenger suffered a heart attack. So the captain turned the ship around and headed back to the harbor, where the New Jersey search and rescue sent out a launch to pick up the unfortunate man and his spouse. That meant we could pass under the Verrazano Bridge three times, on each occasion deftly clearing the span by a mere ten feet. Talk about inauspicious beginnings.

The ship is truly gigantic. You must allow 20 minutes to get anywhere, 5 minutes to walk there and 15 minutes to get lost. When launched a decade ago, it was the largest cruise ship every built at 148,900 tons, nearly double the size of the now decommissioned Queen Elizabeth II. It whisks up to 3,000 passengers and 1,325 crew across the seas in the utmost luxury at a steady 21.5 knots. You could water ski behind this leviathan of a vessel, if only the crew permitted it.

As a 40 year guest of Cunard and the highest paying customer on the ship, I managed to bag the Sandringham Suite, possible the most luxurious publicly available oceangoing accommodation ever created. The 2,200 square foot, two floor, two bedroom, three bathroom, Q1 class apartment on decks nine and ten includes a formal dining room, kitchen, his and her closets, a small gym, and 1,000 square feet of rear facing teak deck.

All of this was a bargain for $56,000, or about the same as renting the presidential suite at the San Francisco Ritz for a week at $10,000 a night, except at the end you wake up in England five pounds heavier. Not that I noticed, though. By the afternoon, the two complimentary bottles of Dom Perignon Champagne were already headed for the recycling bin.

The suite came staffed with two full time butlers, Peter and Henry, who were an endless font of fascinating information about the ship. During one unfortunate cruise, eight senior citizens passed away. The morgue held only six, so the extra two were stashed in the meat locker for the duration of the voyage.

I asked if the Cunard they ever performed burials at sea in these circumstances. They said they used to. But a few years back an elderly billionaire ?Mr. Smith? checked into a deluxe Q1 cabin with a hot young ?Mrs. Smith?, and then promptly expired. The grieving widow requested he be buried mid-Atlantic with the traditional yard of sail and a cannonball. When the ship docked at Southampton, the much older real ?Mrs. Smith? appeared to claim the body, and sued the company when informed of his current disposition. So, no more burials at sea.

Yes, the ship did hit a whale once, which stuck to the bulbous bow. When it landed in Portugal, Cunard was fined for commercial fishing without a license. The unlucky cetacean?s skeleton is now in a Lisbon maritime museum. Apparently this company gets sued a lot.

Of course, the memory of the sinking of the Titanic is ever present. There is a history display down on deck 2 and you can even have your photo taken in front of a backdrop of the grand staircase of the ill fated ship. When we passed 10,000 feet over the wreck at 48 degrees, 38.50 minutes North, 50 degrees, 00.11 minutes West one day out of New York, the Queen Mary 2 let out three long blasts of its horn in memory of the lost. Cunard took over the Titanic?s White Star Line during the Great Depression and is therefore the inheritor of this legacy.

Peter is now at the door with my dinner, so I will continue on another post.

 

 

 

A number of analysts, and even some of those in the real estate industry, are finally coming around to the depressing conclusion that there will never be a recovery in residential real estate. Long time readers of this letter know too well that I have been hugely negative on the sector since late 2005, when I unloaded all of my holdings (click here for ?The Hard Truth About Residential Real Estate?). However, I believe that ?forever? may be on the extreme side. Personally, I believe there will be great opportunities in real estate starting in 2030.

Let?s back up for a second and review where the great bull market of 1950-2007 came from. That?s when a mere 50 million members of the ?greatest generation?, those born from 1920 to 1945, were chased by 80 million baby boomers born from 1946-1962. There was a chronic shortage of housing, with the extra 30 million never hesitating to borrow more to pay higher prices. When my parents got married in 1948, they were only able to land a dingy apartment in a crummy Los Angeles neighborhood because he was an ex-Marine. This is where our suburbs came from.

Since 2005, the tables have turned. There are now 80 million baby boomers attempting to unload dwellings on 65 million generation Xer?s who earn less than their parents, marking down prices as fast as they can. As a result, the Federal Reserve thinks that 50% of American homeowners either have negative equity, or less than 10% equity, which amounts to nearly zero after you take out sales commissions and closing costs. That comes to 70 million homes. Don?t count on selling your house to your kids, especially if they are still living rent free in the basement.

The good news is that the next bull market in housing starts in 20 years. That?s when 85 million millennials, those born from 1988 to yesterday, start competing to buy homes from only 65 million gen Xer?s. By then, house prices will be a lot cheaper than they are today in real terms. The ongoing melt down in residential real estate will probably knock another 25% off real estate prices. Think 1982 again. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be long gone, meaning that the 30 year conventional mortgage will cease to exist. All future home purchases will be financed with adjustable rate mortgages, forcing homebuyers to assume interest rate risk, as they already do in most of the developed world. With the US budget deficit problems persisting beyond the horizon, the home mortgage interest deduction is an endangered species, and its demise will chop another 10% off home values.

For you millennials just graduating from college now, this is a best case scenario. It gives you 15 years to save up the substantial down payment banks will require by then. You can then swoop in to cherry pick the best neighborhoods at the bottom of a 25 year bear market. People will no doubt tell you that you are crazy, that renting is the only safe thing to do, and that home ownership is for suckers. That?s what people told me when I bought my first New York coop in 1982 at one tenth its current market price. Just remember to sell by 2060, because that?s when the next intergenerational residential real estate collapse is expected to ensue. That will leave the next, yet to be named generation, holding the bag, as your grandparents are now.

Another great American Icon is falling victim to the collapse of the country?s manufacturing industry. Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries has completed construction of the last of four steel modules for the new Oakland Bay Bridge. The pieces of this giant erector set, which weigh 5,300 tons together, will shortly begin the arduous 22 day journey across the Pacific, baring weather delays.

These are the last of 43,000 tons of Chinese heavy engineering handiwork that will be used to rebuild the aging structure, which was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Caltrans authorities have been holding their breath ever since, with potholes occasionally opening up to the bay 100 feet below, cables snapping to behead unfortunate rush hour commuters, and trucks breaking through a treacherous ?S? curve to crash land below.

Zhenhua won the contract with a rock bottom $250 million bid, which is not much more than the cost of the steel itself. The company had to agree to train 1,000 welders to US union standards to get the job. An all American bid would have come in at several times this figure. When the 525 foot tall tower is completed, it will become the world?s largest single span suspension bridge.

The only catch is that if repairs are required on site, the operating manual is written in Mandarin. Will the last person to leave US based manufacturing please turn out the lights? At least many of the tourists photographing the new bridge will be visiting from the Middle Kingdom and paying for it with their vacation dollars.

Small consolation if you are an American worker waiting for his next food stamp hand out.