My Budget 360

Many of you had the chance to catch a glimpse of the 60 Minutes episode this past weekend called, House of Cards. In a nutshell, what has occurred with the housing market is a glorified Ponzi Scheme. The housing market was fueled and pumped by perpetual housing speculation motion. That is, the idea that the home you buy today will be worth a lot more when you sell it in the future. The majority of those complicit in the charade never stopped and asked the inevitable question of how they would react should prices go down.We’ve all had those moments where we let our mind wander and think, where does money come from? Yet the answer is so obvious and disturbing that we erase the thought. The housing market was built on the margin of real asset wealth and speculative hedging. No one is going to dispute that housing has an inherent value to it. Unlike over-the-counter (OTC) stocks that can quickly vanish into thin air overnight, home values will not decline to zero. There is a fundamental and intrinsic value to real estate. And in most places this is determined by local area economics and the ability of people to afford a monthly payment.

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With the emergency rate cut by the Federal Reserve, it is not a question about going into a recession but how deep of a recession it will be. The markets have not bounced aside from a few sectors including those bottom fishing in the financial sectors thinking a bail out is in the works or that the Fed will simply not let them fail. The technology sector is having a hard time digesting information from Apple and Intel showing weaker than expected quarters. Other tech giants have also announced that they will be cutting their workforce back. The Federal Reserve does not have much power besides a direct influence on monetary policy and at this point, that weapon is being ineffective. Now that they have exhausted that measure, they will attempt to use fiscal stimulus to jump start the economy. There is talk about rebate checks that will go straight into the hands of consumers but this would still take one or two months at the earliest. Also, we are entering a year where the IRS is working to revamp the tax systems to accommodate the large increase of those filing with the AMT tax. Read More

It shouldn’t come as a shock to you that California has a higher rate of inflation than the rest of the country. If we are to look at historical measures, what should the price of a California home be in 2007 accounting for inflation pressures? Using the CPI for California, which includes all urban consumers we can get an idea how fast housing prices have outpaced even California inflation which has a higher rate than the rest of the nation. Let us take a point in time where home prices were reasonable in California. We will use the base point of 1999. Let us take a look at a region that has seen some of the wildest inflation, Southern California: Read More