"It's all government, the entire US real estate market..."
BobbyG
government gets its funding from you."
That's about as brief a summary of what's wrong with what's
underpinning what's supposed to be our economic recovery, and again,
it's from some of us's favorite source,
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2010/03/march-26-2010-some-people-are-too-far.html
The lack of any "Plan B" for the economy hinted at in that blog post
reminds me, oddly enough, of the lack of any "Plan B" for the peaking
out of oil production, or of any "Plan B" for what to do with the
constantly rising CO2 levels in our atmosphere, or the lack of any
"Plan B" for the constant and accelerating loss of biodiversity all
across the planet.
Spend some time at local government meetings, and you begin to
understand why there's no "Plan B" for any of the crises we find
ourselves in. It's because government doesn't work that way. There's
sort of an unwritten rule that the focus must only be on the instant
case, the matter being voted on at tonight's meeting, the money that
must be spent now, or lost, that shovel-ready money that's ready to go
and doesn't allow for any "Plan B" to be thought out and written
down. We're hard at it building stuff that's going to need to be
demolished inside of one generation.
And government isn't the only realm of our lives that doesn't work
that way. Corporations, no matter how big, have got no time for
developing a "Plan B" because the biggest shareholders are demanding
some earnings growth, right now, because the share price must be
propped up at all costs.
So you see where the lack of any "Plan B" in either the public realm
or the private realm comes from.
Meanwhile, we'll go back to maintaining this system where people are
compelled to spend far more of their income on housing, than the
actual housing stock is really worth. When you look at these new
houses, it's really just a lot of shoddy low-grade "sub-prime"
building materials cobbled together very quickly to be presented on
the real estate market, to earn hopefully a profit for the builders.
No point in going looking for land to grow food in this environment.
The crash in real estate values really is only just getting started,
if the above-quoted blog is to be believed. No reason to be in any
hurry to buy any assets right now,be it real estate, or stocks 'n
bonds, or automobiles, anything really. I'm pretty sure it will all
be cheaper not that many months down the road here.
Bobby G.