Salient to Investors: Bengt Hansson at the Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning said: The Swedish housing market is dangerously overvalued – house prices were 25 percent above fair market value in October, apartments even more overvalued. Oceans of easy credit have eroded the Lutheran tradition of always
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: John Gilbert at General Re-New England Asset Mgmt, a unit of Berkshire Hathaway, said: Fed policy has lifted stocks but has created systemic risk in the world financial system for which they take little responsibility, because what happens outside the US is not their assignment. A slowdown
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Richard Titherington at JP Morgan Asset Mgmt said: Everyone assumes the US debt default will be averted, but it illustrates that these are uncertain times. Emerging markets are cheap for a reason because in the last 12-24 months they disappointed and there were better returns from the US
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Jeremy Grantham at GMO said: Commodity prices fell for a hundred years by an average of 70 percent, and then from 2002 basically everything tripled and regained the whole decline in 6 years – tobacco was the only commodity that fell. The game changed because of the
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Katja Taipalus at the Bank of Finland said asset prices have been one of the main components as financial crises have built up, while bubbles have common characteristics. Taipalus said a bubble is people believing that prices will go up and that they can exit the market before it
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Edward Glaeser at Harvard says: Exuberant buyers may be more rational than many assume and booms are often consistent with reasonable beliefs about the future — the recent housing boom fits comfortably within America’s speculative past. In 1817, Alabama farmland was $35 per acre (in 2012 dollars) and rose to $134
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