Salient to Investors: Robert Shiller said a housing bubble is emerging in Brazil as home prices have risen as much as twice the increase in rent prices, and housing bubbles are brewing in emerging markets including China, Taiwan, India, Russia, Colombia, Canada and Hong Kong. Shiller said Brazil prices doubling
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: For most Americans, the real estate crash is over and personal wealth is back where it was in the boom. For blacks, 18 years of economic progress has vanished, with a rebound in housing slipping further out of reach and the unemployment rate almost twice that of whites. Black homeownership fell
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Hometrack said average house prices in England and Wales were up 1.8 percent from a year earlier, the most since July 2010, adding to evidence of a mini-boom in the housing market, as mortgage approvals reached their highest since 2008. The average time taken to sell a property
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Private-equity firms, hedge funds and REITs have bought more than 100,000 US homes, becoming dominant single-family landlords in markets hardest-hit by the housing crash such as Atlanta. Christopher Thornberg at Beacon Economics said investors that are building home-rental companies may not want to take on the red tape, stigma of
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Caroline Baum writes: The residential real-estate market has just got going and only in the last 2 years has residential investment contributed in any significant way to economic growth. July single-family housing starts of an annual rate of 591,000 is a long way from the peak of 1.8 million
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Brian Jones at Societe Generale said the rate of growth of home prices is certainly slowing, but is still posting respectable year-over-year increases and housing is in good shape. S&P/Case-Shiller say the year-over-year gauge provides better indications of trends in home prices. All 20 cities in the index
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Fareed Zakaria said: The distinctive feature of the American system is how undemocratic it is. Three co-equal branches of government and the one with the final say on many issues is composed of 9 unelected men and women. The Senate, the most unrepresentative upper house in the
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Adrian Miller at GMP Securities said 2 weeks of Fed-speak have laid the foundation for a September tapering. Bill Gross at Pimco said no more QE mean no more bull markets. The 30-year bond yield was 3.91 percent on August 19, the most since August 2011. Vincent Chaigneau at Societe Generale said 10-year
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Jeremy Grantham said: The biggest issue we face is deterioration of the environment, particularly climate damage. In the US, the biggest problem is coal and tar sands. If we burn half or more of the coal and tar sands in two areas in North America, there is
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Miller Samuel said: Listings for NY non-luxury apartments – homes under $3 million and 90 percent of the market – have fallen by over 36 percent year-over-year in each of the last 3 quarters, the biggest declines in 12 years of record keeping. Inventory in the top 10 percent
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