All Posts Tagged With: "housing market"

There’s more news on the housing front to report and argue about. Remember, all we’re saying is that rising Australian housing prices had a lot more to do with the credit boom than any critical shortage of housing stock. This alleged shortage is often alluded to but never proven, so far as we can see. If someone does have proof, we’re happy to publish it. But if there were really a shortage of housing units, wouldn’t there be a lot more people living in the streets or in their cars?

The collapse of the U.S. housing and mortgage bubble has proved much more worrying and has already destroyed the independence of Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, A.I.G., Lehman Bros, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and, in London, Northern Rock and HBOS, with various levels of loss for the shareholders. When we were writing “Blood in the Streets”, we did foresee the significance of the housing market.

In the United States, the fall in stocks has cost investors almost a trillion this year. Losses from housing are said to be about a third of that. But that is just the beginning.

Thomas G. Donlan’s new essay in Barron’s is titled “Lands of Waste and Debt” with the subhead “The states send signals that it will not be a happy Spring”, which makes me ask the obvious question “It won’t be happy for who?”, as I am all in gold, silver and oil, and I am dead-bang sure that I will be VERY happy for a long, long time because I know what happens to those particular items when a moronic, corrupt government teams up with a central bank…

The Wall Street Journal calls the last ten years a “lost decade” for stockholders. The S&P is now about where it was in 1999. Stock market investors are ten years older and wiser; but not a penny richer. And now they’re beginning to wonder about the whole scheme of things…