[a.k.a The NON-Home Owners Coalition]
This group is for all those who want the government to stop artificially propping up real estate prices* and let them reach a free market equilibrium. It is dedicated to bringing you up-to-the-minute, salient information on the overinflated state of Manhattan -- and to a lesser degree, national -- real estate prices. Please join and visit occasionally to read the new links and discussions I've posted; I promise they will be engaging, well-rounded, and generally worth your while.
[* By artificially reducing mortgage rates, implementing moratoriums on foreclosures, renegotiating mortgages, inflating the dollar, giving buyer incentives from tax payer money, falsely "stimulating" the economy with tax payer money -- the list goes on and on.]
[[Please get your friends to join too!!! If this group ever takes off I will use it as a de facto petition and present it to some of my friends who were highly involved with the Obama campaign. Perhaps we can actually get something done!!!!!]]
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Overview
This group contains information in three major sections.
I. Introduction (top). This section only contains some very high level polemics for the real estate argument.
II. Links (bottom). This section contains articles from various respectable newspapers and online sites. Filled with detail, these are the main point of news dissemination. If you don't have time to read the whole thing, please take a look at my capsule summaries where I generally highlight the most important point(s) from the articles.
III. Discussions (middle). I use this section to post interesting items that are not simply links. So far I have used this area to posted comments from respected economists and e-mail exchanges with real estate brokers. Please note that this section is NOT actually intended for people to discuss. It is just the best space for which a facebook group allows "free form" posts.
IV. Photos (near bottom). I use this section to show some pictorial representations -- usually graphs -- of the expected market decline. Some are from articles, but others are unique to this section.
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A Brief Rant
Real estate roughly tripled over the last decade. Anyone with any understanding of finance knows this was completely unrealistic and unsustainable. It was a result of various artificial government influences such as reprehensibly loose credit rates and banking policies (fractional reserves, etc), and tax deductions on mortgage interest under the fundamentally unsound advice that everyone should be a homeowner. Would anyone other than the US government tell you to leverage your net worth five times on any other asset class (e.g. equities)? Wake up people!!! The whole thing is a scam!
Everyone is super-bullish on Obama, but I am still cautious*. I, together with everyone I know with any grasp of economics, am still waiting for any remotely decent economic policies from his team. In particular, the administration seems dead set on re-igniting a bubble in the very asset class that has brought the world economy to its knees: real estate. Can anyone say, "huh???!!"
I won't go into the details of how economically disastrous it would be to continue along a line of trying to prop up real estate prices via artificially lowered mortgage rates, bailed out banks, forced lending, and the like. For now, just join if you are smart enough to see that housing prices need to fall to equilibrium before the economy can recover. Tax payer dollars alone cannot prop up any market in the long run, so anything else is just delaying the pain and hurting the future of the economy.
[* This was written 1/2009. At this point (3/2009) it is well understood and discussed amongst the economic intelligentsia that Obama and Geithner's policies have been atrocious for the tax payer, and anyone who remotely supports free market capitalism.]
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