At least in housing prices:
The ailing US housing market passed a grim milestone in the first quarter of this year, posting a further deterioration that means the fall in house prices is now greater than that suffered during the Great Depression.
The brief recovery in prices in 2009, spurred by government aid to first-time buyers, has now been entirely snuffed out, and the average American home now costs 33 per cent less than it did at the peak of the housing bubble in 2007. The peak-to-trough fall in house prices in the 1930s Depression was 31 per cent – and prices took 19 years to recover after that downturn…
And it also took a baby boom and a resultant massive demand for new housing to do it. On the whole, we should work on the assumption that the 2007 housing prices will never be repeated – at least, not in a time frame which will matter to anyone 35 and older. While buying a house is a good investment, I would advise – expect in a few markets – against buying a house within the next two to three years. My feeling is that until I see a sustained year-over-year increase in housing prices, we simply have not seen the bottom. And no sweat if you don’t quite buy at the bottom…the way things are going, if you miss the bottom you’re only going to pay, at most, 1 or 2% more than you might have.
The silver lining in this cloud is that once we do hit bottom if we have, in the meantime, reformed our economy towards making, mining and growing things while at the same time instituted genuine financial reform (as regards housing, the most important thing is to forbid the sale of home mortgages between banks and other financial institutions), then the younger people out there will not only be able to buy a decent home at a reasonable price, but won’t be subjected to the temptation to view the home as a piggy bank for endless equity lines of credit.
Because in the end our problem is – yes, you guessed it – moral. We went and got quite immoral about things. We wanted our stuff now. We didn’t want to work and save and then buy…just give us the darn credit card or line of credit and let’s have the latest computer gadget today even though it will be obsolete tomorrow. A poorer but wiser America will, I believe, emerge out of this morass of fiat money, usury and bankster/bureaucrat idiocy…but we won’t be able to get started until we get rid of Obama. So, on to Task Number One.
(Yes, liberals, I know that Obama isn’t the only person responsible for this…it took a century to build up to this collapse. But we on the right learned from the left 2001-09 that each and every thing which goes wrong is entirely the fault of the President…so, turn about is fair play.)
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