Prosper Australia

photo credit: atomicshark “The devil is in the details.” German Proverb A fascinating paper on Manhattan real estate in the 1920-39 era shows why property went down, stayed down and didn’t recover in real terms until 1960. ‘Real Estate Prices During the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression’ by Nicholas and Scherbina makes a chilling [...]

A debate is a chance to crunch opposing views. Strong ideas advance and poor ones are discarded. Good. But when participants and audience have already made up their minds, fresh argument goes nowhere. The Money Institute’s big debate in Sydney on Tuesday asked – Will the Australian Property Market Crash? The audience were dragged over [...]

photo credit: Travis S. The US housing market is a living hell.  Homeowners are being boiled alive. The price of land was bid up to staggering multiples of incomes, until it no longer made sense to buy a house. And then the trend turned, hard and fast. One in five US mortgages is ‘underwater’: the [...]

  photo credit: robertivanc The great property speculation game is over in America and Europe.  The music has stopped. Forty years of steadily increasing pressure has been released.  Houses are worth a fraction of what people paid in better times, while the giant mortgages they took on remain. Meanwhile, Australia parties on.  We play the [...]

  The Australian Tax Office has released figures on the extent of negative gearing in Australia ahead of the Henry Tax Review. This is no accident. They are preparing the ground for Ken Henry’s changes. The picture drawn is not pretty: it shows the nation’s ‘aspirational’ landlords, heavily weighted with borrowings, perched on a twig, [...]

photo credit: dave_7 Polly Cleveland Economists conventionally attribute the Great Depression to blunders by the then-new Federal Reserve Bank. According to this story, promoted by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, after the stock market crash of 1929, the Fed kept interest rates too high, strangling the economy. This story made most economists confident that [...]

photo credit: woodleywonderworks The Oligarchs’ Escape Plan – at the Treasury’s Expense By Prof. Michael Hudson see the original article and the growing list of comments on Information Clearinghouse The financial “wealth creation” game is over. Economies emerged from World War II relatively free of debt, but the 60-year global run-up has run its course. [...]

Hat tips to Magnifico, with further analysis It heats up at 2.10 into the clip.

The economic depression: an occasional commentary # 4 10th January 2009 Bryan Kavanagh, LVRG [If you wish to keep things simple and ignore unnecessary explanation, please proceed to the final, italicised paragraph.] The form of reductionism that has provided DNA sequencing of the human genome is leading to enormous gains in medical science; but reductionism in [...]

photo credit: funadium Over the next few posts we will bring you a series of reminders about how we and our colleagues have been warning about the impending financial peril for many years. The Depression An occasional commentary (for Australia’s federal politicians)      #1 4 December 2008 ASTONISHING EVENTS? At last night’s Lowy Institute lecture in [...]