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nbarter

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  1. I sure hope so, i made a £50 bet with my gf a few years ago that UK interest rates wouldn't rise for 5 years, so i may yet get rich beyond my wildest dreams
  2. Noticed the following in an email i received yesterday, sadly i am the wrong side of 30 and so cant attend.
  3. An article today... http://www.cnbc.com/id/38100051
  4. Saturday, June 12, 2010 - by Dr. Antal Fekete Q.: Professor Fekete, you are known as a staunch advocate of a return to the gold standard. But mainstream economists are saying a gold standard is not practicable and they are fighting the idea with everything they have. How do you answer their criticism? A.: To say that the gold standard is not practicable is the same to say that honesty is not practicable, and Constitutions are made to be blithely ignored when convenient. The American Constitution, for example, mandates a metallic monetary standard for the United States in the clearest possible language. Opponents of the gold standard have never been able to muster up the moral fortitude to amend the Constitution so as to formalize the abolishing of the gold standard. Yet in 1933 president Roosevelt confiscated the gold of the citizens, gave them irredeemable paper in exchange, and proceeded to write up the value of gold in terms of the paper by 75 per cent. Might makes right: if you cannot do it fairly and legally, then you can use the strong arm of the government to do it through chicanery, backed by the constabulary and the jail cell. More recently, in our own century, Switzerland changed her Constitution in which the gold standard was also enshrined, through a referendum. Citizens were given a week-end to debate and decide the merits or demerits of the proposed constitutional changes. The indecent haste with which they were railroaded through the constitutional process betrayed the bad conscience of the authors. One of the key principles supporting a gold standard is that jurisprudence cannot tolerate a double standard of justice. The government, its departments and agencies ought to be subject to the same contract law as are citizens. There are no valid grounds to allow the Treasury and the Central Bank to issue obligations which they have neither the means nor the intention to honor ­ while everybody else doing it will be dealt with according to the Criminal Code. To say that the gold standard is not practicable is the same as saying that the government should be exempted from the provisions of the Criminal Code in its dealings with its subjects. Q.: What would be the basic steps involved in reintroducing a gold standard? How to proceed? A.: Three indispensable steps are involved. First, the government should open the Mint to gold. This means that everybody who wants to convert his gold of the right quantity and quality into gold coins of the realm should be able to do so at the Mint, free of seigniorage charges, and with no limit imposed on the amount. In other words, they would get gold back, ounce for ounce, in coined form, and the cost of minting would be absorbed by the government, the same way as it absorbs the cost of maintaining highways in good repair. Conversely, owners of the gold coins of the realm must have the right to hoard, melt down, or export them as they see fit. This is designed to vest the right to regulate the money supply in the people, rather than in unelected bureaucrats. Second, "legal tender protection" of paper money must for once and all be declared unconstitutional. This is designed to remove coercion whereby labor can be forced to accept irredeemable currency for services rendered. Such coercion was first legalized in France and Germany in the year 1909, just five years before the outbreak of World War I. These countries wanted to make sure that civil servants and military personnel could be paid in chits, thus putting the entire labor force at the disposal of the government ­ regardless of the state of budget and collection of taxes ­ in case of war. The motivation behind the second provision is that governments should not be able to wage undeclared and unpopular wars, as could kings of old, but must raise taxes. World War I would have come to an early end but for the legal tender laws. As soon as treasuries had run out of gold, the belligerents would have been forced to make peace, unless the electorate agreed to pay for the continuing bloodshed and destruction of property. And the world would have been the better for it. Third, the principle known as the "Real Bills Doctrine" of Adam Smith should be observed. Bills of exchange drawn on fast-moving merchandise in most urgent demand by the consumers, which mature into gold coins within 91 days (the length of the seasons of the year), must be allowed to enter into spontaneous monetary circulation. This would guarantee the flexibility of the monetary system not through government coercion, but through the voluntary cooperation of producers and consumers in satisfying human wants. It can be seen that the market for real bills is the clearing house of the gold standard. In 1918, at the end of World War I, the victorious allies decided not to allow the world to go back to multilateral international trade. To be sure, they wanted to go back on the gold standard, witness Great Britain's decision to make the pound sterling once more convertible into gold at the pre-war exchange rate in 1925, but with only bilateral trade allowed. This meant nothing less than the castration of the gold standard: once its clearing house was amputated, it could not perform. The allied powers did this out of spite and vengeance: they wanted to cripple Germany over and above the provisions of the Versailles peace treaty. Forcing bilateral trade upon Germany was equivalent to peacetime blockade whereby the allied powers could monitor and control Germany's imports and exports. The measure backfired. The Great Depression and the 1931-1936 collapse of the international gold standard was due to the forcible elimination of the multilateral financing of world trade with real bills. The gold standard did not collapse because of its "contractionist nature" - as alleged by Keynes. It collapsed because of its clearing system, the bill market was blocked. Falling prices in 1930 were not the cause of the Great Depression: they were the effect. The cause was falling interest rates. Incidentally, falling interest rates were in turn caused by the illegal introduction of "open market operations" by the Federal Reserve of the United States in 1921, whereby the central bank pays bribe money, in the form of risk-free profits, to bond speculators for bidding bond prices sky-high. Q.: To what extent should money be "covered" by gold? A.: The Real Bills Doctrine provides the answer to that question. There are on average 75 business days in a quarter. Therefore on each business day, on average, one-seventy-fifth, that is, 11/3 percent of the outstanding real bills mature into gold. Sufficient gold must be available at all times to pay the bills at maturity; more if the discount rate is rising, less if it is falling. In normal times the commercial banks should have that much gold flowing to them in the ordinary course of business, with which they can pay the maturing bills. If times are abnormal, banks go to the bill market and sell at a discount a sufficient amount of bills from their portfolios to raise the gold. This should be no problem: a maturing real bill is the best earning asset a commercial bank can have. At any given time there are commercial banks somewhere in the world overflowing with gold. They scramble to acquire earning assets. The value of real bills increases every single day through matur ity. They represent "self-liquidating credit". Sale of the underlying merchandise to the ultimate consumer provides the wherewithal for their liquidation. Q.: What happens if a country has no gold in its coffers? A.: Such a country will experience a rise in the discount rate. The appearance of a positive spread between the discount rates prevailing in two countries improves the terms of trade in favor of the one with the higher rate. It can offer lower cash prices on its exports, while paying lower prices (91 days net) for its imports. This means that the country gets the gold for its exports 91 days before its bills payable in gold for its imports fall due. In addition, the higher discount rate will induce an inflow of short term capital that will help finance both exports and imports. We have to remember that imports are financed by exports, not by gold. Gold is there to tie the country over through temporary imbalances. Should this help not be sufficient to meet the shortage of gold, then consumers, if they want to eat, to keep themselves clad, shod and, in winter, warm, will have to dig into their pockets and come up with the gold coin to pay the bills for their imports upon maturity. The point is that a shortage of gold need not cause privation: thanks to the discount-rate mechanism it is a self-correcting condition. Q.: You have announced that in August you will start a school, and call it the New Austrian School of Economics, in Budapest, Hungary. Why new? Why Austrian? Why in Hungary? A.: The Austrian School of Economics was started by Carl Menger (1840-1921) of Austria-Hungary who deserves the epitaph, along with Isaac Newton, humanis generis decus (pride of the human race). The first members of the school, like Merger himself, were all great monetary scientists who abhorred the idea of irredeemable currency. Keynes introduced the notion that the gold standard is a "barbarous relic" and should be discarded. Through bribe and blackmail academia was enlisted to rally to the new doctrine, while the Austrian School withered. When the intellectual bankruptcy of Keynesianism ­ which turned things upside down in castigating the virtue of thrift and lionizing the vice of prodigality ­ has become obvious, the Austrian School has gone through a renaissance, especially in the United States, calling for sanity and return to the gold standard. However, the "American Austrians" are vehemently against the Real Bills Doctrine of Adam Smith for doctrinaire reasons, as it contradicts their holy of holies, the Quantity Theory of Money. They do not understand that real bill circulation is spontaneous and its suppression is nothing less than unwarranted interfering in the operation of the free market. They do not see the difference between the discount rate (yield on real bills) and the rate of interest (yield in the gold bond). This prompted me to start my school in Hungary where I live. It would be a disaster if the American Austrians succeeded in making their "100 percent gold standard" a reality. It would not survive the first Christmas shopping season. Markets would seize up, and the gold standard would be given a bad name for the second time. Austria and Hungary used to be a dual monarchy during the days of Carl Menger, sharing not only the monarch, but also their scientific and cultural heritage. Q.: Why a gold standard? Why not pick a basket of precious metals, or of some other marketable commodities to serve as the standard unit of value? A.: American money doctors are in the habit of ridiculing gold in comparing it to frozen pork bellies that, horribile dictu, have been trading in the same pit since gold was expelled from the Monetary Paradise. This reflects a mindset suggesting that gold, at best, is just one of several marketable commodities, and a basket of wider selection could provide a better monetary reserve than gold. This position is false. Gold is not frozen pork bellies ­ wishful thinking of the American money doctors notwithstanding. The reason is that the marginal utility of the former declines more slowly than that of the latter. In fact, the marginal utility of gold declines more slowly than that of any commodity (or a basket of any commodities) known to man. That's what makes gold what it is: the monetary metal par excellence. That's what makes gold the only monetary asset that has no counterpart as a liability in the balance sheet of someone else. Incidentally, there are only two monetary metals: gold and silver. Other precious metals such as platinum and palladium are not monetary metals. What sets monetary metals apart from other precious metals is their stocks-to-flows ratio. They are a high multiple for the monetary metals, but a small fraction for other precious metals. Q.: Critics say that historically, under the gold standard, the world economy languished, trade was sluggish, technological and therapeutic innovation was unexciting, in a word: the gold standard has never worked well. How do you answer that? A.: This allegation is just the opposite of the truth. The heyday of the gold standard was during the 100 years' period between 1815 (the end of the Napoleonic wars) and 1914 (the start of World War I). This was the age of transcontinental railways, intercontinental shipping, when all the key inventions were made that ushered in the age of electricity, of the internal combustion engine, of aviation, of wireless telecommunication, of the X-ray, etc. Financing these discoveries and their applications in transportation, telecommunication, and therapeutics would have not been possible without the gold standard and the accumulation of capital that it facilitated. Q.: Introducing a gold standard hardly seems possible today, in view of the gigantic injections of new currency into the economy world-wide. How could the gold standard handle that? A.: It wouldn't. The new gold standard would let the regime of irredeemable currency run itself aground and boil in its own juices of excess fiat money. When it can no longer handle the task of delivering food and other necessities to the people, when it can no longer provide employment to the majority of the population, the gold standard will spring back to life spontaneously. People have to eat, and they also have other necessities. They must have work to be able to earn a living. It will dawn on the world, maybe unexpectedly for the majority, that gold has a place underneath the Sun. Gold is that hard core of capital that can be destroyed neither by inflation nor by deflation, that will survive any consolidation of balance sheets. Gold is at the heart of the healing process of the world economy that makes survival possible. Q.: Is a gold standard the ultima ratio to cure the human weakness, the belief that you can multiply wealth by printing money without limits? Is it not true that no central bank could ever stand up to do-gooder politicians? A.: Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel-laureate Austrian economist thought so. He said that there would be no need for a gold standard but for the propensity of governments to spend beyond their means. I don't believe that. I see gold everywhere, independently of the government's spending propensities. Even without a gold standard, gold has a role to play in forming prices, wages, rents, the rate of interest. It helps to find the balance between short- and long-term satisfaction; it determines the marginal productivity of capital and labor. It is like air, we don't see it yet it's there and, without it, there is no life. You need a yardstick to measure value. Gold is the raw material of which that yardstick is made. Q.: In the past states also went bankrupt, some repeatedly, e.g., ancient Athens, Rome, or France in the 17th and 18th centuries. This shows not only that such occurrences are possible under a gold standard, but also that the powers-that-be could always circumvent limitations put on coining money and restrictions on banking whenever the idea of scarcity of gold takes hold. What makes you think that a future gold standard may be more successful, and could endure for a long period of time? A.: There is no hard-and-fast limit on the amount of self-liquidating credit that can be safely built on the unit weight of gold. Improvements in clearing techniques, such as those in telecommunication, freight-forwarding and warehousing will increase the amount of credit outstanding while there is no corresponding increase in gold bearing that credit. It is this property that makes gold the ultimate extinguisher of debt. It is simply not true that restrictions put on the economy by the gold standard are "contractionist", and that the "powers-that-be" are justified in breaking those fetters. Gold is not scarce: in terms of its stocks-to-flows ratio gold is the most abundant substance on earth. But for the gold standard to endure man has to have confidence in the promises of government to pay gold. If this confidence is impaired, gold tends to go into hiding and then the system may break down. The answer to the problem is that the government must keep faith with its subjects without fail. Q.: What is your opinion of the governments' handling the great financial crisis, the Greek crisis, the crisis of the Euro, and the other currency crises brewing? How long can they contain the "debt-firestorms"? Will they be able to extinguish it with a shower of new debts? A.: The governments of the industrialized countries bear full responsibility for bringing the world to the brink of this crisis ­ the greatest financial and economic crisis ever. They should have resigned in admission of their guilt, and let new governments armed with a better economic theory take over and work out the remedy. Instead, they doggedly cling to power. Their analyses of the causes of the malady are faulty; the remedial measures they have recommended are the old nostrums, incredibly inept, nay, counter-productive. Take the example of the runaway growth of the debt tower. The great financial crisis, the Greek crisis, and all the currency crises still at the brewing stage, are part of the same problem, namely, the debt problem. It goes back to the year 1971. On August 15 of that fateful year the U.S. government defaulted on its international gold obligations. By now the debt tower threatens with toppling, and burying the world economy under the debris. The reason for the exponential growth of debt in the world is that the international monetary system has been lacking an ultimate extinguisher since 1971. Total debt in the world can only grow, never contract. We should do well to remember that, since time immemorial, gold has successfully acted as the ultimate extinguisher of debt ­ until it was forcibly removed from the international monetary system in 1971. Paying debt in gold extinguished the debt, period. Since 1971 governments have pretended that paying debt in U.S. dollars extinguished it, too. But in fact it did not. Debt was merely transferred from the debtor to the U.S. government and kept accumulating. Transferring debt is not the same as extinguishing it. Debt accumulation has a natural limit. This limit has now been reached. Your description of the debt-tower as a firestorm is apt. Governments of the leading industrialized countries will not be able to contain the firestorm they have started. They are just pouring oil on the fire. Q.: How will the current situation unfold? Do you think resolution will come in the form of hyper-inflation or deflation? A.: One has to be careful with these terms. Both inflation and deflation mean destruction of wealth through destroying the value of obligations; the former through depreciation, the latter through default. It is also possible to have a mixture of both simultaneously. But if you insist on my answering your question, chalk me up in the deflation column. Signs of deflation are all around us. Rivers of new money are unable to turn receding prices and interest rates around. Confidence in promises to pay is evaporating. Banks do not trust one another with overnight money. Paper gold is being pushed down the throat of those wanting physical gold. Worse still, vanishing confidence has reached the stage of contagion. Paper wealth is disintegrating before our very eyes. The domino-effect is spreading: the collapse of one firm brings down two other. Most frightening is the shrinking of employment. It is leading to a break-down in law-and-order. Governments are completely unprepared and think that it is just a matter of printing more money, for which they are superbly equipped, to prevent further contraction. Q.: Your answer to my next question would certainly interest our readers very much. Are you invested in gold, silver, and other precious metals? Would you still buy them at these elevated prices? A.: I take exception to your use of the word "investing". To my way of thinking holding monetary metals is not investing but more like taking out an insurance policy. I don't think the other precious metals (or stones, for that matter) make good investments. As far as the monetary metals, gold and silver, are concerned, you would be well-advised to buy some more every month routinely, regardless of the price. You should look at your holdings as you look at your fire insurance policy. If you never need to collect, well, so much the better. At the optimum, you would track the value of your assets not at their dollar price but at their gold equivalent. In other words, you would carry your balance sheet, both on the asset and the liability side, not in dollar or euro units, but in gold units (ounces or grams). It takes self-discipline to do that, but this is the only way to avoid the pitfall of always looking at your own face in a curved mirror. The torsion of the image may easily translate into torsion of the mind. Q.: I come to my final question, if I may. What do you think the gold price will be in terms of U.S. dollars or euros in 3 to 5 years' time? A.: I am sorry, but I am not a practitioner of clairvoyance. I think I would compromise my reputation as a scientist if I ventured to answer this question. Besides, I don't think I am very much interested in knowing. Guesses at the future price of gold are dime a dozen. A more appropriate ­ and interesting ­ question may be whether the dollar and the euro will still be around in 3 to 5 years. I am not sure about the euro, but I think the dollar will definitely be around 3 years from now. 5 years ­ maybe not, but I wouldn't be surprised if the staying power of the dollar extended beyond 5 years. It is dangerous to underestimate the strength of the poison you have to live and work with. Interviewer: Thank you for your time to talk to us. Professor Fekete: Thank you for the opportunity to express my views.
  5. Just like to say a big thank you to Dr B. My internet time is limited these days, but managed to catch up on a whole load of stuff by perusing this site for a couple of hours, it's invaluable. Good to see Neely and Prechter's latest thinking etc. Really interesting to see that Neely has come around to the longer bear market view - wondered when that would happen. Thanks too, to the various posters who posted links etc. Appreciated.
  6. Hopefully, have moved stops down to below yesterday's high so its just wait and see time now. Given the content of Neely's email, it looks like he is looking for a turn down anytime soon as well. However, from reading between the lines i guess he probably thinks this turn down will take us to new lows, whereas conventional elliott wave analysis suggests we are probably only due a 'B' wave down before another leg up to new recovery highs before the market then embarks on its next big leg down to new lows.
  7. Be skeptical if you like, but check out my Dow highs thread and look at the levels of the markets against the dates of my posts. I have succesfully called most of the twists and turns of this bear market using EW. In fact i have taken enough out of the market since last summer to pay for nearly a whole year off travelling, which is what i shall be doing come May (and i am only a small time gambler). I accept that applying EW to gold is much more difficult though and far less certain. The patterns are less clear than they are with major stock markets. I have commented on this a few times on GEI, but nevertheless, i still agree with other EW practitioners (Prechter, Neely etc) that gold will likely fall back. I am not as bearish as Neely's $500 call, but see Prechter's $600 region call as quite possible. There was a cluster of price action there (and potentially what EWavers call a 4th wave) which is often attractive to prices that are correcting. But, that isnt to say that i would sell any small holdings of physical gold or silver if i had any. It is good to have insurance and so i would keep onto it.
  8. Gold coin shortage as demand soars By Javier Blas in New York Published: February 25 2009 19:37 | Last updated: February 25 2009 19:37 The rush by retail investors into bullion coins is creating shortages as mints across the world struggle to meet the surge in demand, dealers and mint officials say. The scarcity is lifting coin premiums to as much as 5 per cent above the spot gold price, a level reached briefly after the collapse of Lehman Brothers last September, when coin shortages also surfaced. Spot gold in London on Wednesday traded at $972 an ounce, below last week’s peak of $1,004.5. “There is demand for double or triple what the US mint is able to produce,” said Michael Kramer, president of MTB in New York, one of the four US gold dealers authorised to purchase bullion coins directly from the government’s mint. The US Mint has sold 193,500 ounces of its popular American Eagle gold coin in the first seven weeks of this year, the same amount it shipped during the whole of 2007 and about the same as in the first six months of last year. “The demand is extraordinary. All the coins we got on Monday are gone today [Tuesday] and we will not be able to take any order until the following week,” Mr Kramer said. “It is the same with other mints.” Bullion coins used to be bought mainly by collectors and gold bugs, but the financial crisis is leading regular retail investors to embrace them, dealers say. Although the surge in coin demand is a bullish signal for gold prices, the fact that mints cannot match demand means that the potential extra consumption does not push spot prices higher, but just drives premiums above normal levels. The Rand Refinery in Johannesburg, which mints the world’s most popular gold coin, South Africa’s Krugerrand, said demand was above its maximum capacity, even after doubling last month to 20,000 ounces from 10,000 ounces a week. Johan Botha, head of precious metals sales at the Rand Refinery, said there was demand for more from international investors, pointing to strong sales to Switzerland, the UK and Germany. “If we were able to produce 30,000 ounces,the market would absorb it,” he said. Mr Kramer said MTB had Krugerrand orders equal to three months of refinery supplies to the company. The New Zealand Mint said it was doing as much business in a day as in a month a year ago, mostly servicing global investors. Michael O’Kane, head of gold sales at the New Zealand Mint, said: “Most mints and bullion manufacturers are struggling to meet current demand levels.”
  9. Anyone know anything about the London Mint Office and their introductory offers where you can buy a (full) sovereign for £119? Are these genuine royal mint coins? Thanks
  10. True, but i never really worry about that stuff anyway. I see things from a technical analyst point of view and not a fundamentalist point of view - at least in the short to medium term.
  11. Note: Neely is looking for a massive bounce starting now.
  12. I remain bearish gold, from a chart perspective. As for Neely. I got motivated earlier this year to find out more about his analysis so i took out his trial subscription for a month i think it is. Jury is out as far as i am concerned. It is not elliott wave as i recognise it (or how Elliott himself would recongise it for that matter) so find it difficult to follow his reasoning. But, he has made some good calls. I disagree that the S&P bottom will be around the 2002 lows and think it will be substantially below this. As for gold, i am less bearish than him. I am looking for a bottom around the $600 area, he, if i recall rightly, is looking for a long bear market going further than that.
  13. People are too quick too jump to conspiracy theories when it comes to governments. Usually it is just incompetence.
  14. They could impoverish the next generation by bailing out the stupid and greedy from this generation for starters.
  15. I dont know about gold, but the S&P for example normally hates leaving gaps unfilled - unless there is a serious bull or bear market on. There were a few gaps on the way down from the May highs that were not filled. I wouldnt be surprised if the same happened in gold if this market has a lot further to go south.
  16. Interesting article from Roger Bootle that backs up Dr Bubbs theory. -------------- Housing market on the brink By Roger Bootle Last Updated: 12:37am GMT 03/12/2007 The last time I wrote about house prices, in mid October, I was just finishing my diet of humble pie which had been self-imposed after my earlier forecast of falling house prices had proved so wrong. Since then the evidence has piled up that the housing market has turned a corner. In October, mortgage approvals for new house purchases fell to 88,000, the lowest level since February 2005. In recent weeks, Nationwide, Halifax, Hometrack, the RICS and Rightmove have all reported house price falls. Moreover, this chimes in with evidence from the Home Builders' Federation. Their site visit balance has already fallen below its 2004 low. Interestingly, in the past six months house builders' share prices have fallen by 50pc. Falls on that scale have only been seen three times in the past: in 1974, 1976 and 1992. Each of the three major house price corrections of the past 30 years has been preceded by a collapse in house builders' share prices. The credit crunch is not the root cause of what is going wrong in the housing market. The decline in new buyer inquiries began at least six months before the onset of the problems in wholesale markets - as did the downward move in completed sales. There are two fundamental causes of the housing market slump, one proximate and the other underlying. The proximate cause is interest rates. Official interest rates began to rise last August and they are up in total by 125 basis points. The second, fundamental reason is that property has become too expensive. What goes up too far must come down - and often too far as well. There are several indicators of housing market excess. My own favourite is the house price to earnings ratio, which currently stands in unheard-of territory at over six. This indicator is often decried because it takes no account of the effect of low interest rates. But even when you take account of this factor by measuring housing affordability, the picture still looks grim. A new mortgage currently absorbs about 50pc of national average take-home earnings, a third above the 30-year average. Meanwhile, gross rental yields on property are running at around 5.3pc - below mortgage rates of roughly 6pc. This means that once you take account of all the incidental costs, landlords are making a running loss. It is only the hope of future capital gains that can justify hanging on. On top of these pre-existing fundamental causes comes the credit crunch. The number of new mortgages approved by specialist lenders - those without a retail deposit base and who thus rely on raising funds in wholesale markets - is down 46pc over the past three months. Mortgage approvals by building societies by contrast are up 5pc over the same period. And there may be even more of an effect in the months to come as pressure on lenders intensifies. So how bad could things get? Could it be a repeat of the early 1990s? In broad terms the answer is that the degree of pain will surely not be as serious since the economy is in radically different shape. That will limit the rise in mortgage arrears and forced sales. Moreover, then interest rates reached levels that are unthinkable today. These conditions, plus the surge in mortgage lending close to the peak in house prices, coupled with the widespread use of 100pc mortgages, caused a huge surge in negative equity. This affected over 1m households, exacerbating the economic and financial impact of house price weakness. But the market is arguably more over-valued now than it was then. And there are some adverse structural factors operating now. We estimate that over the next year an average of 110,000 households a month will come to the end of a fixed-rate deal. Two-year fixed mortgage rates are currently around 1.5 percentage points higher than in October 2005, a rise of a third. Furthermore, the buy-to-let market is vulnerable. There is some, but not yet conclusive, anecdotal evidence of landlords selling up. Also many of the major buy-to-let lenders are heavily reliant on wholesale markets. A lack of new mortgage credit in what has been the fastest growing sector in the housing market could leave prices vulnerable. Whenever I write about the housing market I get a host of smart-alec messages asking whether I realised that the housing market is an average and there are a whole host of different experiences within this average. Funnily enough I had realised this. It is just that when talking about macro factors it is most useful to concentrate on the average rather than on a myriad of special cases. Indeed, a blow-by-blow account of every facet of the housing market would take up the whole newspaper. At present, there is acute downward pressure on the prices of purpose-built flats in city centres built for the buy-to-let market. In some cases the prices of such property are already 30pc down or more. By contrast, so far, the prices of good family houses in leafy suburbs are holding up well. It is widely believed that London is the most over-valued region, but relative to earnings and compared with historical averages, this is not true. Valuation and affordability measures look most stretched in Northern Ireland, the South West, North East and North West, the East Midlands and Wales. Wales, Northern Ireland and the North East are also heavily dependent on the public sector for job creation - and could thus suffer from the public spending squeeze. London has demand from overseas buyers and clear limitations on supply. Having said that, it will be the most vulnerable to upsets in financial markets and weakness in the global economy. It is astonishing how much things can change. Once prospective buyers and sellers realise that prices are no longer rising they will concentrate their attention on fundamental values and the forces making for price falls will grow. But because house prices cannot fall very fast, in conditions of low inflation it can take many years to return the market to equilibrium. In the last major downturn, prices started to fall in 1989 and continued to fall, depending upon which measure you look at, for between three and a half and six and a half years. In real terms house prices did not regain their 1990 level until 2002. Accordingly, during the recent housing boom, only the last five years have been breaking new ground; the previous 12 were simply recovering the ground lost since 1990. Still, this time it's different - isn't it? Don't worry, I have learned enough not to throw away the humble pie just yet. It may well come in handy in relation to other awful forecasts. But at least as regards house prices, somehow I suspect that over the coming year I will not be forced to eat it. Roger Bootle is managing director of Capital Economics and economic adviser to Deloitte.
  17. Interesting article from Roger Bootle that backs up Dr Bubbs theory. -------------- Housing market on the brink By Roger Bootle Last Updated: 12:37am GMT 03/12/2007 The last time I wrote about house prices, in mid October, I was just finishing my diet of humble pie which had been self-imposed after my earlier forecast of falling house prices had proved so wrong. Since then the evidence has piled up that the housing market has turned a corner. In October, mortgage approvals for new house purchases fell to 88,000, the lowest level since February 2005. In recent weeks, Nationwide, Halifax, Hometrack, the RICS and Rightmove have all reported house price falls. Moreover, this chimes in with evidence from the Home Builders' Federation. Their site visit balance has already fallen below its 2004 low. Interestingly, in the past six months house builders' share prices have fallen by 50pc. Falls on that scale have only been seen three times in the past: in 1974, 1976 and 1992. Each of the three major house price corrections of the past 30 years has been preceded by a collapse in house builders' share prices. The credit crunch is not the root cause of what is going wrong in the housing market. The decline in new buyer inquiries began at least six months before the onset of the problems in wholesale markets - as did the downward move in completed sales. There are two fundamental causes of the housing market slump, one proximate and the other underlying. The proximate cause is interest rates. Official interest rates began to rise last August and they are up in total by 125 basis points. The second, fundamental reason is that property has become too expensive. What goes up too far must come down - and often too far as well. There are several indicators of housing market excess. My own favourite is the house price to earnings ratio, which currently stands in unheard-of territory at over six. This indicator is often decried because it takes no account of the effect of low interest rates. But even when you take account of this factor by measuring housing affordability, the picture still looks grim. A new mortgage currently absorbs about 50pc of national average take-home earnings, a third above the 30-year average. Meanwhile, gross rental yields on property are running at around 5.3pc - below mortgage rates of roughly 6pc. This means that once you take account of all the incidental costs, landlords are making a running loss. It is only the hope of future capital gains that can justify hanging on. On top of these pre-existing fundamental causes comes the credit crunch. The number of new mortgages approved by specialist lenders - those without a retail deposit base and who thus rely on raising funds in wholesale markets - is down 46pc over the past three months. Mortgage approvals by building societies by contrast are up 5pc over the same period. And there may be even more of an effect in the months to come as pressure on lenders intensifies. So how bad could things get? Could it be a repeat of the early 1990s? In broad terms the answer is that the degree of pain will surely not be as serious since the economy is in radically different shape. That will limit the rise in mortgage arrears and forced sales. Moreover, then interest rates reached levels that are unthinkable today. These conditions, plus the surge in mortgage lending close to the peak in house prices, coupled with the widespread use of 100pc mortgages, caused a huge surge in negative equity. This affected over 1m households, exacerbating the economic and financial impact of house price weakness. But the market is arguably more over-valued now than it was then. And there are some adverse structural factors operating now. We estimate that over the next year an average of 110,000 households a month will come to the end of a fixed-rate deal. Two-year fixed mortgage rates are currently around 1.5 percentage points higher than in October 2005, a rise of a third. Furthermore, the buy-to-let market is vulnerable. There is some, but not yet conclusive, anecdotal evidence of landlords selling up. Also many of the major buy-to-let lenders are heavily reliant on wholesale markets. A lack of new mortgage credit in what has been the fastest growing sector in the housing market could leave prices vulnerable. Whenever I write about the housing market I get a host of smart-alec messages asking whether I realised that the housing market is an average and there are a whole host of different experiences within this average. Funnily enough I had realised this. It is just that when talking about macro factors it is most useful to concentrate on the average rather than on a myriad of special cases. Indeed, a blow-by-blow account of every facet of the housing market would take up the whole newspaper. At present, there is acute downward pressure on the prices of purpose-built flats in city centres built for the buy-to-let market. In some cases the prices of such property are already 30pc down or more. By contrast, so far, the prices of good family houses in leafy suburbs are holding up well. It is widely believed that London is the most over-valued region, but relative to earnings and compared with historical averages, this is not true. Valuation and affordability measures look most stretched in Northern Ireland, the South West, North East and North West, the East Midlands and Wales. Wales, Northern Ireland and the North East are also heavily dependent on the public sector for job creation - and could thus suffer from the public spending squeeze. London has demand from overseas buyers and clear limitations on supply. Having said that, it will be the most vulnerable to upsets in financial markets and weakness in the global economy. It is astonishing how much things can change. Once prospective buyers and sellers realise that prices are no longer rising they will concentrate their attention on fundamental values and the forces making for price falls will grow. But because house prices cannot fall very fast, in conditions of low inflation it can take many years to return the market to equilibrium. In the last major downturn, prices started to fall in 1989 and continued to fall, depending upon which measure you look at, for between three and a half and six and a half years. In real terms house prices did not regain their 1990 level until 2002. Accordingly, during the recent housing boom, only the last five years have been breaking new ground; the previous 12 were simply recovering the ground lost since 1990. Still, this time it's different - isn't it? Don't worry, I have learned enough not to throw away the humble pie just yet. It may well come in handy in relation to other awful forecasts. But at least as regards house prices, somehow I suspect that over the coming year I will not be forced to eat it. Roger Bootle is managing director of Capital Economics and economic adviser to Deloitte.
  18. Northern Rock had another nice down day (-6%). I recall talking with BP about shorting NR some weeks ago, but somehow never got around to it. Shame. This must be an indicator of falls in the UK housing market to come too. It topped in February this year and is now down 39%....impressive stuff in just 6 months.
  19. Interesting article in today's Telegraph suggesting China may have big problems in a few years because of the demographic ticking time bomb. --------------- Japan leads world in demographic decline By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Tokyo Last Updated: 12:12am BST 01/06/2007 Japan is slowly shrinking. Last year it became the first nation in modern history to tip over into outright demographic contraction, pioneering a path that will soon be followed by Italy, Germany, Spain, and most of Eastern Europe, with China close behind. The population peaked at 128m in 2005 and is expected to fall below 100m by the middle of the century, when 36pc will be 65 or older. The dynamics of decline are already contaminating every aspect of the economy. The trend rate of growth has dropped to 1.5pc. The blistering 10pc pace of the early 1970s seems like a distant dream. Wages have fallen for the last five months in a row, vastly complicating efforts to stave off deflation. Officials at the Bank of Japan blame the subtle effects of ageing. A bulge of baby-boomers is retiring at the top of the pay scale, to be replaced by younger workers - many on part-time contracts, at half the rate. Salaries have fallen 8pc over the past decade. It will be much worse for China, where the workforce peaks in just eight years before plunging into the fastest downward spiral ever seen in peacetime. The one-child policy of 1980s and 1990s has already baked a population crunch into the pie, whatever is done now. Dr Kwan Chi Hung, a fellow at the Nomura Institute and a top China expert, said the long-term prospects for China were "horrible". advertisement"When Japan hit this problem it was already an advanced economy. China will still be poor. It only has 10 more years of strong economic growth and that is not enough," he said. Mr Kwan estimates that China's development is 40 years behind Japan on most indicators, and its return on investment (incremental capital output ratio) is a dismal 4.4, far worse than those of Japan (3.2), South Korea (3.2), and Taiwan (2.7) during their growth spurts. "China is extremely inefficient because of the large state-owned sector," he said. When the crunch comes around 2015, China's per capita income will be a sixth of Japanese and western levels. The society will turn grey before it escapes poverty. This is small comfort for Japan, where a sense of foreboding about the demographic crisis colours all political discourse. Prof Mariko Bando, the former chief of Japan's gender equality bureau, said the fertility rate had crashed to 1.26 from a stable level near 2 in the 1980s, far below the minimum reproduction rate. She said the plunge has been more extreme than in Europe (though Latvia and Estonia are comparable) because Japan had been so slow to embrace feminism. "They never listened to the voice of women before, but the shock is now forcing Japan to respond," she said. Women are silently protesting through refusal to have children under the existing social contract. "The ancien regime makes it very hard to have both a career and a family so women are putting off marriage. They are no longer willing to accept a double shift where they come home from work and have to do all the household chores," she said. Over 17pc in their 40s remain single. "It's not so bad in the civil service, but business remains the last stand culturally for the Japanese man," she said. The country faces a sort of fertility paralysis as men cling to the Confucian tradition that wives must serve their husbands, while women rebel. Parts of the ruling LDP (all male) party is having great difficulty coming to terms with this. "Women have their proper place: they should be womanly," said LDP policy chairman Syoichi Nakagawa, right-hand man to premier Shinzo Abe. "They have their own abilities and these should be fully exercised, for example in flower arranging, sewing, or cooking. It's not a matter of good or bad, but we need to accept reality that men and women are genetically different, " he said over breakfast in Tokyo. Other parts of the Japanese government take a starkly different view, believing that the only way to prevent economic atrophy is to unlock female talent. The cabinet office has pushed though affirmative action quotas designed to raise the number of women in public sector management jobs from 10pc to 30pc by 2020. Maternity (or paternity) pay has been lifted from 25pc to 50pc of income, and leave has been extended from one year to 18 months. The waiting list for nurseries is being slashed. The number of immigrants is creeping up too as the authorities quietly waive restrictions. Some 300,000 Brazilians of mixed Japanese ancestry have come, mostly to work in the Toyota factories of Nagoya. Phillipino migrants now tend the rice paddies and orchards, supposedly as student "trainees". But they are not enough. "We need three million," said Fukunari Kimura, a professor at Keio University. The once vast trade surplus has shrunk to 1.9pc of GDP as the economy matures. It will soon turn to deficit. For the next 30 years, Japan will slowly draw down its $1,800bn (£909bn) of net foreign assets, mankind's greatest stash of offshore wealth. Decline may be unavoidable, but at least it will be graceful.
  20. Indeed, and given how strongly silver seems to be linked to stocks i would be amazed if silver didnt continue these falls this autumn and make a new low below the sub $10 June lows.
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