Tuesday, April 30, 2013

COTW: The Bubble Returns

As the stock market soars even higher, fueled by the ultimate happy drug--fiat currency, the joy is spreading to the housing market too. The Fed is buying $45 billion worth of mortgage securities each month driving mortgage rates to record lows (average for a thirty-year loan is now 3.4%):
The widely-followed Schiller Price Index for twenty cities rose over 9% from last year, red line) back to the level of fall 2003, before the real estate bubble began rising.  Our economy has become one of serial bubbles that inflate, burst, and repeat. Nearly 90 million Americans are out of the labor market or nine times the number of unemployed in the First Great Depression. Here's a statistic that will turn your head:  that icon of Americana, Coca-Cola, now makes 70% of its revenue outside the United States. Thank you Ben Bernanke, "Pope of Fraud".