Collapse heard 'round the world: US housing market

[NVMojo]

damn good read here ...

snip...

Think it all doesn't matter to you? Think again. For nearly a decade now, the United States has been the economic driver for much of the world — Canada included. The United States has been sucking up excess savings and consuming everything in sight, from cars to homes and everything that goes in them.

“It's hard to imagine that a U.S.-centric global economy wouldn't be at risk in the aftermath of a bursting of the U.S. housing bubble,” warned Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach, one of Wall Street's most outspoken worrywarts.

“The non-U.S. world remains heavily reliant on selling exports to wealth-dependent American consumers. As the United States comes to grips with the aftershocks of another post-bubble shakeout, so too must the rest of the world.”

As he put it: “If the American consumer sneezes, countries in both the developed and the developing world could easily catch a cold.”

How Potomac real estate became a leading indicator for the global economy is the story of a silent transformation of the U.S. economy.

more...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060904.RHOUSING04/TPStory/Business

or

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060903.whousing0903/BNStory/Business/home

[physioex]

1. Use the second link.....No Registration...EOM

[brokensymmetry]

2. Good article. Kick!

:kick:

[Warpy]

3. Spot on assessment

A house in my area was renovated by flippers, sold in a week in June. They wisely priced it well under actual market value. A real estate speculator snapped it up, and it's been priced at the actual going rate and sitting there unsold for two months now. The renovation isn't anything spectacular, but it's a good, solid property in an area on the way up.

It's also priced at actual local prices, not the laughable Zillow.com price.

I'd thought this area immune from the collapse, thanks to our lack of a real estate bubble due to the overbuilding that's gone on for the last 10 years. Still, houses are sitting on the market forever. Nothing is selling now.

Look out below, here we come!

[Matariki]

4. Are prices on zillow.com

laughably high or laughably low?

[Warpy]

5. For this area, laughably high

Their assessment of other areas has been quite accurate.

The unsold house is on the market for exactly half the Zillow estimate.