Monday, September 25, 2006

Housing Bubble Continues To Go Mainstream

9 comments:

  1. Yeah, Drudge better be careful. Rush may call him a liberal for such heresy. The right wing cannot remain that stupid without looking like the morons that they really are. It is now time for them to hide their true personalities and fess up to reality. They now just need to do the same regarding Iraq.

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  2. To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time when the world was powered by the black fuel, people watched property ladder for inspiration, and the deserts sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all.

    Without fuel they were nothing. They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men.

    On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed.

    Except for one man armed with an AK-47, and a Honda full of silver. In the roar of an engine, he lost everything and became a shell of a man, a burnt out, desolate man, a man haunted by the demons of his past. A man who wandered out into the wasteland. And it was here in this blighted place that he learned to live again.

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  3. Can I post without a blogger identity?

    It is good that the news is getting out there. I think at the very least that new flipping activity is probably slowing down. But I am not seeing anything like remotely serious price reductions in the DC area yet. It's more like people bought some trash for 800K, offer it at 1.1 million, and then reduce to 1.05 million.

    Gonna be a while. But I suppose the bottom could fall out very suddenly.

    A Redskins fan

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  4. Canary in the coal mine indicator?

    http://www.maine.craigslist.org/rfs/211584092.html

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  5. I saw that. Though think about it--it's like buying a lottery or raffle ticket. The sellers probably aren't going to refund the money from the losing essays, and they are requiring a minimum number of "essays"--say 1000--to even hold the contest, so then they could end up with 100,000 for their house.

    Kind of clever, but kind of desperate at the same time.

    Anne Onimus

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  6. The Washington Monthly web blog site managed by Kevin Drum has a good housing bubble post.

    He thinks David Lereah is full of crap too.

    http://www.washingtonmonthly.com

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  7. “To bring buyers back into the market, sellers simply have to lower their prices, said David Lereah, the NAR’s chief economist. Lereah has repeatedly cut his forecast for the housing market this year and says he’s now unsure how deep the correction will turn out.”

    “There’s now a 7.5-month supply of homes for sale, up 60% from last year. ‘If we have prices drop for the rest of the year and sales also continue to drop, then we will have a bad situation in housing of balloons popping rather than air coming out,’ Lereah said. Either way, he says, ‘It’s a buyer’s market.’”

    Lereah may get it right for once.

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  8. Anon 5:08-
    How dark, yet poetic...

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  9. And now it's gone....

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