The AM Forum

My son and were driving around the hood at the beach today. The first thing we noticed was there were no houses for sale. For the past two years a number of houses sat on the market for ever, maybe 20 of them. All sold, even the big buck places on the beach. I bought my land in  '97 when prices were down and plenty of deals out there. Within a year and a half everything dried up and prices took off. Could this be a good sign??

The CEO's of those bailed-out companies have already bought them all with their bonus checks.

They got there big fat bonus checks courtesy of the hard working tax payer.
Who they sacked and/or asked to take pay cut.

Note well - that despite the noise being made, they have now got away with it and will continue to do the same in the future.

From the start, it was all engineered to happen.

They lined their pockets with big bonuses and now they will line them with the stimulus packages.

Jokes on us and they are laughing.

It WOULD be a good sign if this was a "normal" recession. But it's not.  This deflation is correcting the excesses of 65 years, not  4 to 12 years, like other recessions.  Probability says the general economy will not bottom for some time yet.  The stock mkt, which historically has signaled the bottoms 6 months in advance is still groping for a bottom.  This means the real world has hard times ahead for at least 6 more months, and likely longer.

BTW,  in Cape Coral Florida, you can buy a small house on the water for $100K today that cost $400K only last year.  Most areas of the country (CT included) have not seen anything like that yet. It may not happen, but it may pay to keep your powder dry a little longer to wait and see.

We are now sliding down a slope of hope in this bear mkt. Bull mkts climb a wall of worry... :-)  When people finally start saying, "real estate is dead"... "stocks are dead"...  "I don't care anymore cuz my 401K is so beaten up I can't sell here now anyway" , etc, then we have the chance for a recovery.  As long as general investors and the talking heads on TV are picking bottoms and finding reasons to buy, most likely it has lower to go.

If this was a normal decline, we most certainly would have bottomed by now just based on the negative psychology. But this degree of correction requires even larger negative psychology to end and turn up again.

It takes time to run its course - much longer than most think or desire it to be.

T

I hope you are wrong but fear you are right.
guess what I wanna say