Financial markets will tell you whether private investors believe greater “fiscal integration” is the long-term answer to Europe’s debt problem. We can save you the trouble and tell you the answer now: Europe is still doomed.
December 12th, 2011 | Dan Denning | 5 comments | ContinuedAll Posts Tagged With: "mortgage rates"
Real Estate and its Trend-line
That leaves real estate. That’s why people want to put money in real estate. It’s priced at fair value – statistically. So, you can buy it without worrying too much about it going down. And it’s not like gold. You can get income from it. Everybody is looking for rental properties with a decent stream of income.
September 7th, 2011 | Bill Bonner | 1 comment | Continued
The Platypus Exception
What we both agree on is that no one knows what will happen. Your editor believes that the Austrian theory of the business cycle has both explanatory and predictive power when it comes to figuring out what has to happen at the end of a leveraged asset boom. But it is true – from meat pies to the platypus (both reptile AND mammal!) and in many other ways-Australia is exceptional.
July 7th, 2010 | Dan Denning | 87 comments | Continued
RBA Governor Glenn Stevens Reveals Intention to Raise Interest Rates to Normal Levels
When the man who sets interest rates tells you that you’re rising, it would be wise to at least hear him out. Whether you take him at his word is up to you. But if you’re making financial plans – say, like you’re going to buy a house and are trying to figure out if you can stand a few extra points rise in the interest rate – the man has told you what is going to happen.
March 30th, 2010 | Dan Denning | 48 comments | Continued
A Loss is Not a Loss if You Turn Debt into Equity
The yoke of debt may have felt light until now. But the lash of higher rates on the back will definitely be noticeable. Let’s just hope it doesn’t break the financial back of a whole generation of home buyers, although this is what we fear “bringing forward demand” will do.
March 24th, 2010 | Dan Denning | 15 comments | Continued
U.S. Bonds Better than Greek or Other Sovereign Bonds
But as we’ve said before, the rally in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. sovereign debt is driven more by a preference for short-term liquidity than anything else. You can tell this is true because for longer-dated bonds, demand is weak. No one wants to lend to the Nation State for 30 years anymore.
February 24th, 2010 | Dan Denning | 2 comments | Continued
Underwater Homeowners Continue Making Mortgage Payments
But homeowners? They plod along. Maybe they think their house will come back in price. Maybe they think they’ll suffer some awful penalty if they default.
February 4th, 2010 | Bill Bonner | 7 comments | Continued
Credit Default Swap: Buying Insurance Against Default in Your Bonds
While Australians march down the path of a national house price obsession/mania, the world’s bond traders are firing warning shots. Bloomberg reports that, “Credit default swap (CDS) protection buying against sovereign debt default has spiked to five times the level of similar protection bought for corporate bonds, as the potential for a wave of sovereign debt defaults intensifies.”
January 28th, 2010 | Dan Denning | 6 comments | Continued
You Can Lead Investors to Liquidity but You Can’t Make Them Buy Stocks
Our version of this Christmas story is that a long-term bear market began in 2000. This was the fall-out from the dot.com boom and the end of an 18-year bull market in stocks that had begun in 1982. Left to its own devices, the market would have declined to more reasonable valuations and companies would have sorted out real ways to grow earnings.
December 14th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 2 comments | Continued
Why I Would Have Raised the Interest Rates
Am I privy to the discussions of the RBA Board? No again. But I do know this. I do know why I would have raised rates, and would keep on raising them until the Government gets the message.
October 9th, 2009 | Dr. Steven Kates | 16 comments | Continued
Underlying Demand During a Housing Shortage
That is clever to suggest that when rates rise people will have to find another way to say that houses are affordable. But we reckon when rates rise, as they eventually must, a lot of new home buyers will find out that access to cheap credit does not make a house affordable. It just makes the amount of debt you owe to the bank a lot larger.
September 30th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 41 comments | Continued
Trends Make Investors Less Afraid of Risk
But on March 9, 2009, came a lull. Reluctantly, investors came out of their storm shelters. The skies lightened…the sun shined. Oil has gone up 53% since then. Stocks worldwide are up about 30%.
And now…people say “the worst is behind us.”
June 4th, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 4 comments | Continued
How U.S. Mortgage Rates Affect Aussie Stocks
Today’s Daily Reckoning has a simple task: to figure out what all this business in America means for Australia. Okay, it’s simple in theory, but maybe not so simple in fact. Let’s have a crack anyway. The last few days we spent a great deal of time trying to discover the goal of the Fed’s $1 trillion foray into Treasury bonds and the U.S. mortgage-backed securities market. Why?…
March 20th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 10 comments | Continued
