Jim Cramer Shorting Stocks, Manipulating Markets, Saying The SEC Doesn"t Understand

In light of the current economic crisis, and with the hullabaloo ignited recently by Jon Stewart over the accuracy of CNBC"s reporting, we thought it might be useful to revisit this shocking 2006 interview Jim Cramer gave to TheStreet.com"s Aaron Task.
In it, the host of Mad Money says he regularly manipulated the market when he ran his hedge fund. He calls it "a fun game, and it"s a lucrative game." He suggests all hedge fund managers do the same. "No one else in the world would ever admit that, but I could care. I am not going to say it on TV," he quips in the video.
He also calls Wall Street Journal reporters "bozos" and says behaving illegally is okay because the SEC doesn"t understand it anyway.
Here are some gems:

Stock Market Manipulation - Jim Cramer

WATCH: Jon Stewart Rips Jim Cramer, Whole NBC Family

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Basic Cable Personality Clash Skirmish "09

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Economic Crisis

Gasoline Prices are Starting to Bite

USA Today is reporting that Resale values tumble on Large SUVs. The reason should be obvious: higher gas prices at the pump. Let"s take a look:

SUV and pickup owners - already stung by rising gasoline prices - are paying another penalty when it comes time to trade in or sell: falling resale values for the gas-thirsty vehicles.

The resale values of large SUVs and pickups are slumping in response to a supply glut, higher gasoline prices and lower sales of new SUVs and pickups.

"If the rebate on a Chevy Suburban goes up $1,000 this month, usually the Suburbans sitting out there in our auction lane all of sudden lost maybe $500 worth of value," said Tom Kontos, chief economist at Adesa, a firm that tracks wholesale used vehicle prices.

AutoTrader.com, an online vehicle seller, has 100,000 more SUVs listed in online classified ads today than a year ago, spokeswoman Louise Barr said.

This can not bode well for the lack of innovative new designs at GM and Ford. Yes, GM is reporting record month over month sales increases but from depressed levels and at what cost? If they start cranking out more SUVs who will want them? Are they capable of cranking out anything else that people might want? Even if they can, can GM make a profit on it? How much of these sales bite into future demand as customers are now expecting "employee discounts" everywhere you look?

If that news is not bad enough, on July 25th this announcement came from Paul Krugman at the New York Times: Toyota, Moving Northward.

There has been fierce competition among states hoping to attract a new Toyota assembly plant. Several Southern states reportedly offered financial incentives worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But last month Toyota decided to put the new plant, which will produce RAV4 mini-S.U.V."s, in Ontario. Explaining why it passed up financial incentives to choose a U.S. location, the company cited the quality of Ontario"s work force.

Is the quality of the US work force that much worse than Canada"s or is this all a smokescreen for something else? Since I do not have that much faith in inate Canadian ability vs. the US, I think something else is happening.

This kind of reminds me of the opening lines of
For What It"s Worth (a 60"s protest song, taking the liberty of changing one word).
There"s something happening here
What it is is exactly clear...
At any rate, Krugman nails it with his continuation as follows:

Canada"s other big selling point is its national health insurance system, which saves auto manufacturers large sums in benefit payments compared with their costs in the United States.

So what"s the impact on taxpayers? In Canada, there"s no impact at all: since all Canadians get government-provided health insurance in any case, the additional auto jobs won"t increase government spending.

But U.S. taxpayers will suffer, because the general public ends up picking up much of the cost of health care for workers who don"t get insurance through their jobs. Some uninsured workers and their families end up on Medicaid. Others end up depending on emergency rooms, which are heavily subsidized by taxpayers.

Funny, isn"t it? Pundits tell us that the welfare state is doomed by globalization, that programs like national health insurance have become unsustainable. But Canada"s universal health insurance system is handling international competition just fine. It"s our own system, which penalizes companies that treat their workers well, that"s in trouble.

By the way, it"s not just gasoline prices, its gasoline prices, health care prices, education prices, outsourcing, property taxes and numerous other factors. Unless wages improve we are headed for a brutal consumer led deflationary recession. Hint: wages are not going to improve.

Mike Shedlock / Mish
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/

SEEKING ALPHA: Dear Mr. Buffett: A Book Review with a Little "Extra"

Janet Tavakoli is one of the top experts in the fields of structured finance. She is one of the most vocal critics of a system gone horribly wrong and saw disaster looming early on. She even tried to sound the alarm many times with an SEC that in retrospect looks to be on the wrong side of the subpeona issuance business.

The current multi-trillion dollar financial crisis didn�t come about due to any single act of brazen greed or stupidity, rather it was a case of many people all looking for a little extra. Pushing the boundaries at each level has a multiplier effect. Common sense and ethics went out the window as it was all mostly legal and appeared at each level to be just a little �extra� nudge.

Here is my diagram of how each level of the sense of �entitlement� to a little �extra� will cost a generation. The era of rules meant be bent and self-entitlement will haunt the world for years to come.

Actor	Extra	Self deluded Justification
Home Owners	Bedrooms, bathrooms etc.	The neighbors have it, the finance is available and everyone else is doing it. To paraphrase Kindelberger, �nothing will cause a person to lose their sense of economic rationality than to see the idiot neighbor/ relative get rich.�
Realtor/ Mortgage broker	Extra income from activity	We are putting people in beautiful dream homes and making a little on the side. Who cares about the loan forms, it�s the loan that counts.
Mortgage �packager� securitizer	Extra yield maybe 0.75% on a few loans via securitization	If the ratings agencies say it is AAA and there is a market for it, then it must be OK.
S&P, Moody�s etc.:ratings Agencies, who have a Government granted monopoly on truth.	Make a little extra income for rating new securitized instruments. An investment grade ratings could increase income by a factor 20x	The models indicate that the loans or OK. We are the original kids who never learned �just say no!� We can model anything and in the face of �free money� or having to say we are ignorant, we will take the money.

One of the problems with securitization as elaborated by Ms. Tavakoli so adroitly is the chain of responsibility and accountability that was broken between lender and borrower. Long term responsibility was packaged up and sold in a heart beat to the next yield hungry bidder looking for a little "extra". This is a classic agency problem.

Like any drama involving a major loss for an entire generation, this one has many systemic failings. No single actor failed totally, many failed just enough. This multiplied into what is still unfolding as the largest economic crisis in many generations. The reality still hasn�t hit main street America. Wait 6-9 months.

In any group human endeavor some greed, stupidity and laziness will be present. Most cultural institutions and systems are designed to handle these individual components. The crunch was a case of multiple actors giving way just enough to cause a cascading failure.Ms. Tavakoli uses her letters and relationship with Warren Buffett as an homage to Buffett"s ability to distill the basic essence of complex matters into simple facts of money and value. Buffett has the gift of simple language and metaphor to illustrate complex financial truths. He is the Richard Feynman of finance.

Ms. Tavakoli is an expert in the area of the most sophisticated areas of credit derivatives having authored such tomes as Structured Finance and Collateralized Debt Obligations: New Developments in Cash and Synthetic Securitization. For Dear Mr. Buffett, she has opted for a simple approach to tell the tale of actors gone bad and trust abused at many levels. This book is an accessible popularization of the issues, and as such no heavy securitization math etc. to deal with. I agree with this approach as the story needs to get out to as many as possible.

It is a tale of oversight and minor characters who loomed large in their time, but will be seen as petty by future generations. Financial debacles and their actors rarely make sweeping historical reads.

The embodiment of the Wall Street tyrant appears to be Dick Fuld, a small man in many ways ,who is the essence of the bully standing atop in an empty castle with nothing to offer but an angry wimper. Mr. Fuld, Sandy Weill, Stan O�Neill, Angelo Mozillo etc. are the sorry human reflections of a failed culture.

Buffett comes across in classic form as modest and thoughtful in dodging the mess and politely not making too much money from it. His low ball bid for MBIA�s (MBI) good assets gets scant attention in the book. If the bid had been put forth by anyone else, it would have been seen as good business, but poor taste. Buffett can pull this stuff off and still look saintly.

One small critique I have of the book is Ms. Tavakoli�s light treatment of Buffett in regards to Moody�s rating agency. Buffett talks in his book with regards to his holdings in Moody�s, but there needs to be a house cleaning among the entire NRSRO system. My suggestion would be to eliminate it and all SEC mandates referring to ratings. Better no risk system than chasing a flawed one.

Ratings agencies are the pimps of Wall Street, dressing up securities to happily service Bankers and Fund managers too lazy to do their own due diligence. The average fund manger is happy to look for a little yield with minimal effort at due diligence or god forbid independent thought. The coming storm in the Muni-bond market will be eye opening for those managers who buy alphabet soup from the rating agencies and sell "extra" basis points to their investors as performance without knowing what is under the hood of their funds.

The game the ratings agencies play with Municipal bond ratings would make any mafia member�s eyes swell with envy as a protection racket. The ratings agencies are an in-built American systemic failure in a system that causes catastrophic �normal accidents�. The U.S.S.R. had Pravda and we have the NRSRO to separate state truth from fiction for us.

A word of warning about reading this book, it will make you angry. If it doesn�t, read it again until you understand it. The more one understands the nature of what caused this hyper-accident, the more blame there is to go around.

As a hedgie, I studied the bond insurers, attended last year�s asset securitization conference(blow out Super Bowl party sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer) in Vegas and watched the Senate testimony from the front row given by the likes of MBIA, AMBAC and Moody�s.

A fitting touch at the senate testimony was the happy coincidence that Mr. Spitzer put on his special show as Client #9 only hours before his testimony. We can only be thankful that Mr. Spitzer�s attempts at cornering the market on self-righteousness have been doused as his powers of heightened self importance seemed to be getting out of hand.

Mr. Dinallo, the New York insurance superintendant appears to be genuinely trying to making the best of a bad situation. My own opinion is that the bond insurers still have a role to play in the credit debacle as Municipal bonds start defaulting and the insurance they so happily offer is seen to be as valuable as Joe Brown�s piercing insights into MBIA�s own solvency or lack thereof.

Stay tuned, this will play out in the next 6-9 months as municipalities across the country start defaulting and the bond insurers get handed from the State level up to the Feds. TARP which should be Latin for financial herpes, really is the taxpayer gift that keeps giving.

The story Ms. Tavakoli shares is not a simple one, the actors are all intelligent and each plays their role in inflating the credit bubble. None are innocent and yet all profess to be victims in retrospect. The saying is that success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan. The credit bubble that is engulfing the world was a web of greed that reaches down from Government to Wall Street across main street and right to the front door of your neighbors.

Everyone was entitled to bigger homes, free money etc. a few players highlighted in Ms. Tavakoli�s book delivered that little �extra� that now engulfs the world.

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Dear Mr. Buffett: What An Investor Learns 1,269 Miles From Wall Street by Janet M. Tavakoli
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Consumer Demand For Nearly Everything Plunges

Retail stores and exporters alike are in deep trouble as consumer demand for nearly everything is plunging. Let"s take a look at some proof starting with Japan Exports Plunge Record 27% as Recession Deepens

Japan�s exports plunged the most on record in November as global demand for cars and electronics collapsed, signaling more factory shutdowns and job cuts are likely as the recession deepens.

Exports fell 26.7 percent from a year earlier, the Finance Ministry said today in Tokyo. That was more than the 22.3 percent decline estimated by economists and the sharpest since comparable data were made available in 1980.

Shipments to the U.S. slid an unprecedented 34 percent and sales to China slumped the most in 13 years, underscoring why the Bank of Japan lowered its key interest rate to 0.1 percent last week. The yen�s surge to a 13-year high is amplifying the woes of exporters including Toyota Motor Corp., which may announce a lower earnings forecast at a press briefing today.

�Japan�s export crash is finally upon us, and this is the worst thing that could happen,� said Yoshiki Shinke, a senior economist at Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo. �The recession will be very severe as companies adjust investment, production and labor.�

Idle Cranes From Long Beach To Singapore

Idle shipping cranes at Frozen Ports From Long Beach to Singapore portend a bleak 2009-2010.

Chris Lytle, chief operating officer of the port of Long Beach, California, took in a panorama of the slumping world economy from his rooftop observation deck one day this month. Shipping cranes stood still, truck traffic trickled and a cargo vessel sat idle, moored to a pier.

�You never see that,� Lytle said. �It�s quiet. Too quiet.�

Port traffic has slowed from North America to Europe and Asia as a recession erodes consumer demand and the credit crisis chokes off loans to export-dependent companies. International trade is set to fall by more than 2 percent next year, the most since the World Bank began measuring it in 1971. Idle ports around the globe are showing how quickly a collapse in trade can spread, undermining growth in each country it reaches.

�Everybody expects 2009 to be a bleak year,� said Jim McKenna, chief executive officer of the Pacific Maritime Association, a San Francisco-based group representing dock employers at U.S. West Coast ports. �Now, it looks like 2010 is going to be just as bleak.�

Coal is piling up at the Mozambique port of Maputo. Brazil�s exports of cars, household appliances, machinery and furniture fell in November from a year earlier. The port in Singapore, the world�s busiest for containers, posted its first month-over-month decline in seven years in November, at 1.5 percent.

�You take it for granted until it blows up,� said Bernard Hoekman, trade economist at the World Bank, in an interview. �Now it�s blowing up.�

Unsold Autos Pile Up on Lots

In the midst of the world"s biggest auto slump in decades, Toyota May Cut U.S. Payroll as Unsold Autos Pile Up on Lots.

The worst U.S. auto market since the early 1990s may force Toyota Motor Corp. to do something that was once unthinkable: cut its North American payroll.

Asia�s largest automaker, which hasn�t shed workers in 24 years of building cars in the U.S., is exhausting options to trim costs after halting work on a Prius plant in Mississippi, idling a Texas truck factory for 15 weeks and planning to pare U.S. and Canadian output next month.

�If we don�t see a rebound by the second half of next year, they�d probably have to consider layoffs,� said Haig Stoddard, an analyst at forecaster IHS Global Insight Inc. in Troy, Michigan. �Toyota was expanding to catch up with demand. Now it�s got itself stuck with overcapacity for the first time.�

Retailers Face Darwinian Fight as Losses Mount

A huge battle for shrinking consumer discretionary spending is underway. Yet, round after round of profit eating discounts have still not gotten consumers interested in spending. Retailers Now Face A Darwinian Fight For Survival as losses mount.

U.S. retailers will face a Darwinian fight for survival next year as they run out of cash as early as January and competition forces thousands of store closings, according to private-equity buyers and restructuring experts.

Probably 50,000 stores could close without any effect on consumer choice, Gregory Segall, a managing partner at buyout firm Versa Capital Management Inc., said yesterday during a panel discussion held at Bloomberg LP�s New York offices.

�The United States is massively over-stored in all categories,� Segall said. He said his firm is in �a wait mode� and he expects banks to squeeze retailers after Jan. 1.

Plunging home prices, rising unemployment and tightening credit have led consumers to rein in spending, resulting in what may be the worst holiday season in at least four decades. Macy�s Inc., Kohl�s Corp. and other retailers have marked down items 50 percent to lure customers, eroding margins at a time when store owners hope to make a third or more of their annual profit.

Only retailers with healthy balance sheets will survive the recession, said Matthew Katz, a managing director at consulting firm AlixPartners LLP.

�This is a very Darwinian time,� Katz said.

Weakening in Demand For Temporary Help

The temporary help market is grim. Staffing giant Manpower Sees Rapid Weakening in Demand

Manpower Inc. lowered its financial forecast for the fourth quarter, in the latest sign that the job market is weakening rapidly, and that the troubles are spreading to Europe.

The Milwaukee-based concern largely blamed a further decrease in demand for its services in most markets. "Many of our light industrial clients are taking prolonged plant shutdowns around the holidays compared to last year," Jeffrey A. Joerres, Manpower"s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. Some clients have indicated their shutdowns may extend an extra week until Jan. 12, Mr. Joerres told analysts on a conference call.

Demand For Oil Drops

In a three-way battle between worldwide demand, peak oil, and OPEC, worldwide demand is calling the shots. This headline tells the story: Oil Falls on Signs OPEC Cuts Won"t Boost Prices as Demand Drops

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is "determined" to stabilize oil markets, Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi told reporters in Doha, Qatar, Dec. 21. Japanese crude- oil imports tumbled 17 percent to 3.71 million barrels a day last month, according to a report from the country"s finance ministry.

"The Japanese demand numbers help explain why OPEC is having such a hard time supporting prices," said Adam Sieminski, Deutsche Bank"s chief energy economist, in Washington. "Weak demand and increasing OPEC spare capacity are contributing to weaker prices."

One of Japan"s Asian neighbors, South Korea, also saw demand decline. Consumption dropped 12.4 percent in November from a year earlier. The country used 60.3 million barrels of refined products, data from state-run Korea National Oil Corp. showed yesterday.

"OPEC may be determined to stabilize oil prices, but with such poor demand it"s hard to see how any supply-driven initiatives can have a positive impact on prices," said Addison Armstrong, director of market research for Tradition Energy in Stamford, Connecticut.

Chips Are Down At Fujitsu

Falling demand for mobile phones, TVs, servers, etc have forced Fujitsu to Cut 400 Jobs at Japanese Chip Plants

Fujitsu Ltd., a Japanese maker of chips for servers, mobile phones and flat-panel TVs, will fire 400 workers at its domestic factories as demand for semiconductors declines amid a global recession.

Tokyo-based Fujitsu will reduce staff at its seven factories by terminating their labor contracts before their expiry next March, spokesman Toshiyuki Fukuoka said today. The company will almost quadruple job cuts from 100 planned earlier because of a slump in sales, he added.

Fujitsu will extend a halt in its output for holidays for longer than last year, Fukuoka said. The company�s rivals Toshiba Corp. and NEC Electronics Corp. earlier announced similar plans to halt output.

US vs. Japan

What was it that someone told me a year ago? Oh I remember now. "The US consumer will never throw in the towel. The US is not Japan".

Another person hit me with this tirade.

"Too even compare the citizens of Japan to the US is stupid, stupid, stupid Forest Gump! Culturally the Americans are spendthrifts compared to the Japanese. The comparison to Japan is hollow, North Americans have become drunk on excess and will keep spending until the repo vans appear in the driveway.

See Q&A on the Psychology of Deflation written January 11, 2007 for the the above quote and additional thoughts on the US vs. Japan as it pertains to deflation.

I concluded the above Q&A with....

I am amazed at the near universal belief that everyone seems to have in the Fed and the Government. The arguments proposed and the comments made seem to imply that the Fed can pull off some sort of miracle bailing out consumers by causing wages to rise, property values to rise, the stock market to rise, and to create enough jobs so that everyone can live happily ever after.

Financial and asset speculations of this magnitude throughout history have never ended well. There were deflationary crashes in Japan, the Great Depression, the South Seas bubble, the John Law Mississippi Bubble, Tulip Mania, etc. In each case the bubble collapsed after sentiment changed towards speculation. Once sentiment changed it was never again revived.

Pudding Is Served

When Japan faced deflation it had an internet boom and US consumer demand (exports) to cushion the blow. Japan also had savings to fall back on. The US has no such cushion, no savings, no source of jobs, and an extremely high level of consumer debt. I have been saying for years those factors make the deflationary pressures in the US far worse than anything Japan faced.

Pudding is served. That pudding is called deflation. And unlike Japan, the US threatens to take much of the world down in a deflationary spiral right along with it.

Eventually this had to happen given that nearly every country in the world, in some fashion or other, became hugely dependent on the US shopping center economic model that is now history.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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Oil priced In Yen: Does It Really matter?

The number of people linking to articles such as this one: Cash-strapped Iran asks Japan to pay for oil in yen over the past several days has been enormous. I was expecting to see a lot of "We are about to invade Iran" calls but those invasion calls never came. (If it happens it will be Bush arrogance not an oil pricing unit that causes an invasion).

It"s time we finally put to bed two ideas.

• We invaded Iraq because Iraq was about to price oil in Euros
• The pricing unit itself actually matters

People seem to be having an extremely hard time distinguishing between a pricing unit and a holding unit. The difference is significant.

In Iran asks Japan to pay yen for oil I see the following text: "Most Japanese refiners pay dollars for the oil they purchase from Iran, according to Kyodo."

Clearly Iran has already been taking Yen for oil. Obviously there is not an absolute requirement to trade oil in dollars even though oil is priced in dollars.

I am still staggered by the fact that people just cannot see the difference even though anyone in London can walk into a gold dealer and buy gold in the British Pound or Euros even though gold is priced in dollars. For some strange reason people think that oil trades only in dollars even though currencies are totally fungible. Furthermore it would not matter one iota even IF oil only traded in the pricing currency given that currency trades can execute in less than a second.

Asking Japan to pay for oil in Yen is a political sideshow. In and of itself it is meaningless. Iran can convert dollars to Yen in one second flat. Nonetheless, add Iran to the list of countries attempting to divest themselves of dollars.

If no one is willing to hold dollars, then we have a problem with dollars, do we not? Thus it is lack of faith in the US$ that is the real problem, not the pricing unit. The pricing unit is nothing but a sideshow even as the significance of the event is missed.

The significance is that that someone (in this case Iran) appears to want to hold the Yen vs. the US dollar when the two weakest currencies have been the Yen and the Dollar. This puts downward pressure on the dollar and upward pressure on the Yen even though the announcement itself is pure politics. In the end it is Iran"s actions (refusal to hold dollars) as opposed to Iran"s words (in regards to the pricing unit) that matters.

Mike Shedlock / Mish
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/

Rachel Maddow Confronts Notorious Corporate Lobbyist Rick Berman

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Global Property Bubbles to Implode in 2008

The Telegraph is reporting UK Landlords face office rent crisis.

One of the UK"s leading commercial property agents has warned that office rents may tumble next year, dealing a second devastating blow to landlords who have already seen the value of their portfolios plummet in recent months.

DTZ is predicting a 15pc-20pc fall in office demand in 2008 as banks and other financial institutions reduce their overheads, which will almost inevitably lead to a softening of rents and the increase in incentives such as rent-free periods.

DTZ"s report added that the current financial crisis is symptomatic of a much wider problem than the US sub-prime market.

A spokesman said: "Sub-prime is a red herring. It was simply the most stretched segment of an over-stretched debt market. As such, it has to be seen as a catalyst rather than the cause of the recent turmoil."

My Comment: DTZ has this correct. Yet we still hear (at least in the US) how all of this is related to subprime. Alt-A and Pay Option ARMs are going to be at least as big if not a bigger problem than subprime.

The concern over rental growth in the commercial property market comes against a backdrop of a falling number of deals in the sale and purchase of commercial property.

Research from property agent Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) reveals that the volume of transactions across the UK commercial property market dropped 25pc in 2007 to �48bn as investors fled the sector. Falling prices and reduced availability of debt restricted the flow of deals, especially larger ones, across the second half of the year.

My Comment: Commercial Real Estate Transactions Plunge in the US as well. A plunge in transaction preceded the bursting of the housing bubble in the US. Expect the same scenario to play out in the Commercial Real Estate bubble.

JLL director of capital markets Andrew Hynard said: " I think the first quarter of 2008 will be pretty slow, and we will see the pick-up in quarter two. However, the fall in capital values is likely to keep the overall value of transactions lower in 2008 than 2007."

My Comment: JLL is an amazing optimist. The US, UK, and EU all likely headed for what Shiller calls a Japanese Style Recession.

A Real Estate Bubble in Spain



Click Here To Play Video

Spanish property dreams seem to be reaching for the sky. The new skyline of the Spanish capital Madrid features 250 meter high office buildings - a symbol of the country"s economic boom.

But as the city grows higher it is also becoming too expensive for many residents. Rocio Ramos and her partner bought themselves an apartment outside the city and now they are struggling to keep up with rising interest rates. At the same time, prices are stagnating after the years of building boom. On the coast many of the newly built appartments are empty. Ute Brucker took a look at developments in Madrid and Valencia.

The above property cost 200,000 Euros ($292,000+-) for 65 square meters (about 700 square feet) in a building constructed in the 1970"s. That is a bubble folks.

Property Bubbles Are Everywhere You Look

Florida has been ground zero of bubble popping but California, Arizona, and Nevada are catching up. Internationally, there are enormous bubble in Spain, the UK, Canada (especially Vancouver and Toronto), and China.

Credit expansion in the UK and EU was just as rampant as the US. Global property bubbles were the result. Here is an interesting chart from HousePriceCrash.Co.UK



The dotted line is an alternate trendline that I drew. The ramifications should be obvious.

Global property bubbles are poised to implode in 2008.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List