Prosper Australia

photo credit: Dean Terry 5 August 2011 MELBOURNE:- “Australia’s housing undersupply myth has just been exposed. We have overbuilt more than the USA,” Prosper Australia Campaign Manager David Collyer said today. “Prosper calculates Australia now has over 125,000 excess dwellings. “Fresh analysis of ABS data by Philip Soos for Prosper Australia and comparison with peer [...]

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 [...]

On Tuesday, SQM Research released their forecast for house price movements this year. Louis Christopher is as dour as a maiden aunt.

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 [...]

photo credit: midlander1231   For too long, the media eagerly reported the property spruikers’ claim ‘prices only go higher’. This ‘truth’ turned homeowners into speculators and led a whole generation of first home buyers to commit to enormous mortgages they will only pay off after thirty years of unrelenting sacrifice. This week the public story [...]

  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: country_boy_shane At least Timothy Geithner is showing a little spunk with his new shared equity plan. The government puts in effectively 93%, and the lucky bankers chosen put in just 7%. How does it work? Both the government and the bankers put in 7% equity, then the government lends the other 86%. When [...]

photo credit: Genista Dr Michael Hudson tells it as it is on KPFA’s Guns and Butter! Make yourself a cup of tea and kick back to the real story!

photo credit: bortescristian The Bank of England now admits that the UK government failed to provide it with the tools needed to deal with boom/bust, according to an interview tonight on BBC’s Panorama programme. The missing tool was tax policy. “That’s why we can say that the global recession did not originate in the US [...]