What are you investors doing about the national dropping of property values?

[allagash]

I think there are some excellent candidates on the Republican side.

-Mike

[jbaldwin]

Let me preface this by saying I'm not an expert on the economy or the fed, I know which indicators are important to my business and that's it.  What that being said here is my two cents on the issue of the feds, wall street, and economy in general.  There are billions of dollars, hundreds of companies, and thousands of jobs that have been and will continue to be lost because of sub-prime.  The only way to fix the problem is to let this 'correction' take its course and weed out the losers who didn't belong in the first place.  Wall street tycoons and fat cats are screaming foul when they're the ones who were buying the mortgages in the first place.  The feds job is NOT to bail out wall street investors.  Let those firms lose money and not at the expense of jeopardizing the entire US economy.  We all know that business moves in cycles, it's up, it's down, and right now it's down.  I'm still buying, but that's another point.  I suggest we let the ugliness take its toll and we will all be fine once things normalize.

[fdjake]

That was the EXACT theory put into practice in 1929.  They did nothing and let the market handle it.  The first cracks appeared in March of 1929.  JP Morgan (HIMSELF) pumped money into the banking system.  It worked..... until October.  Then banks stopped loaning each other money (that's happening RIGHT NOW!)  By October it was all over, too late for the Goverment to intervene.   A HUGE mistake.

The goverment BLEW IT,  They let market forces run, and it plunged this country into THE worst financial disaster it had ever seen and HAS ever seen.  If they let THIS go, it will be uglier than ANYTHING our generation, as a group, have ever lived through.

Remember......things like the SEC, the FDIC, the Resolution Trust Corp. even the FED itself were all created because market forces DO NOT screw around.  If we let market forces handle ALL the miscalculations by humans,  ALL OF US............ALL OF US, are going to have to endure tremendous amounts of pain.  The only thing these agencies can do is soften the blow.  Corrections will still occur, Recessions will still occur, even Depressions.  The difference is they should be less DEVASTATING.

I'm a free market guy, don't get me wrong.  You buy a house you can't afford, shame on you.  But when the foundation of the mortgage industry itself is on life support....... HELL YEA, someone grab the defibrillator.   If you let it die, it will take DECADES for it to come back.

Also understand that NO ONE or NO AGENCY is bigger than "The Market."  if it's correcting, it's correcting......That's it.   These agencies can attempt to STEER it.  By steering they may avoid the cliff and decide to hit something that causes less damage.

Be careful what you hope for.   

My 2 cents.

[rookieNYC]

The feds job is NOT to bail out wall street investors

Yes it is...Well since Greenspan that has been the sole purpose of the Fed..It seems that way from my standpoint..

What amuses me though is all the RE investors everywhere never felt annoyed when property prices were rising artificially due to the loose lending practices and the crooked appraisers (thanks to the fed flooding the markets with tons of cheap money)..Now when things are falling apart and these same over leveraged people can't *re-bail* themselves out ,now it's a problem...The language I'd like to use isn't allowed on this forum....They deserve what's coming to them and I will be waiting to offer pennies on the dollar for their properties...

[allagash]

That was the EXACT theory put into practice in 1929.  They did nothing and let the market handle it.  The first cracks appeared in March of 1929.  JP Morgan (HIMSELF) pumped money into the banking system.  It worked..... until October.  Then banks stopped loaning each other money (that's happening RIGHT NOW!)  By October it was all over, too late for the Goverment to intervene.   A HUGE mistake.

The goverment BLEW IT,  They let market forces run, and it plunged this country into THE worst financial disaster it had ever seen and HAS ever seen.  If they let THIS go, it will be uglier than ANYTHING our generation, as a group, have ever lived through.

Remember......things like the SEC, the FDIC, the Resolution Trust Corp. even the FED itself were all created because market forces DO NOT screw around.  If we let market forces handle ALL the miscalculations by humans,  ALL OF US............ALL OF US, are going to have to endure tremendous amounts of pain.  The only thing these agencies can do is soften the blow.  Corrections will still occur, Recessions will still occur, even Depressions.  The difference is they should be less DEVASTATING.

I'm a free market guy, don't get me wrong.  You buy a house you can't afford, shame on you.  But when the foundation of the mortgage industry itself is on life support....... HELL YEA, someone grab the defibrillator.   If you let it die, it will take DECADES for it to come back.

Also understand that NO ONE or NO AGENCY is bigger than "The Market."  if it's correcting, it's correcting......That's it.   These agencies can attempt to STEER it.  By steering they may avoid the cliff and decide to hit something that causes less damage.

Be careful what you hope for.   

My 2 cents.

fdjake....

I've got to hand it to you.  This is quite simply a remarkable grasp of the situation.

A little while back I did a "wikipedia" of Henry M. Paulson:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Paulson

I simply wanted to get a better understanding of what he brought to the table as United State Treasury Secretary.

After reading his bio I can see that this ain't some puppet.  He's got a full grasp of the far reaching implications.

A few days ago he gave a speach about the train wreck coming in the next 2 years.

If we don't have individuals like this, fighting for corrective action, we're in for some deep shi*.

Blood really starts to flow in April.

-Mike

[SoftwareEngineer]

As some of you mentioned that prices on real-estate bubbled artificially especially California, Florida and NYC – we can see the trend on real-estate appreciation is going on in NYC in 2007. Here is an article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/realestate/03real.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Any interesting ideas to explain this fact?