The prospect of a US Fed 0% rate becoming a reality has been on my mind since August when the subprime made news hit. In my view, the entire mortgage bond structure would suffer massive losses in a successive of waves, beginning with subprimes, extending to primes, and concluding with commercials. How could housing distress […]

By ROBERT J. SHILLER

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut — The future of the housing boom, and the possible financial repercussions of a substantial price decline in coming years, are a matter of mounting concern among governments around the world.
I learned this firsthand while attending this year’s Jackson Hole Symposium in the wilderness of Wyoming, where, ironically, there […]

Two historically irresistible patterns suggest speculative-bubble housing values will eventually retrace back to their 1995-1997 levels:

the symmetry of speculative rises and retraces
the unbreakable links between income and housing values.
Read Article [offsite]

By: John_Mauldin
This week in Outside the Box we turn our eyes on Japan and as promised offer a report by macro-maven and good friend Greg Weldon. Japan is the world’s second largest economy and a major source of liquidity. While China has captured the headlines in Asia, Japan is still the big economic dog and […]

This week in Outside the Box we turn our eyes on Japan and as promised offer a report by macro-maven and good friend Greg Weldon. Japan is the world’s second largest economy and a major source of liquidity. While China has captured the headlines in Asia, Japan is still the big economic dog and supplier […]

INVESTORS seeking the cheapest property stocks are buying in Japan, Germany and China after a two-year tumble in shares of United States home builders.
Japanese land prices are rising for the first time in 16 years, yet shares of developers trade at less than a third the global average, according to UBS AG.
The start of real-estate […]

Kishore Jethanandani submits: A good thumb rule for bargain hunting is to look for assets recovering from a meltdown after a bubble. The traumatic experience tests the management and brings into relief the flaws in the company tactics and strategy. For the leaders, such situations are opportunities to rise to the occasion, shake-up the company […]

TOKYO — Land prices in Japan rose last year for the first time since the so-called “Bubble Economy” burst in 1990, government data showed Thursday, indicating that the long era of real estate deflation may be coming to an end. Residential land prices gained 0.1 per cent on average in 2006, while commercial land prices […]

The Japanese property 16 year bear market increasingly looks like it has come to an end. Presenting an excellent opportunity for investors to get in on a new housing bull market just when other property markets around the world are showing signs of peaking or like the US market are actually falling.

Already investors have been […]

By: Adrian_Ash
SPOT GOLD PRICES rose sharply late-morning in London on Wednesday, recovering an overnight drop in Asia to break above last week’s 27-year closing high above $785 per ounce.
Silver was little changed from Tuesday’s new 8-month high. Platinum recovered $2 per ounce of its $16 drop to $1,438 per ounce last night in New York […]