By: GZ on Giovedì 15 Febbraio 2007 01:01
c'è un bellissimo pezzo di Niederhoffer che riassume l'^effetto dei grandi cicli di speculazione immobiliare#http://www.dailyspeculations.com/wordpress/?p=896^, per questo trimestre a dire la verità ne trae una statistica positiva per le azioni
è bello perchè sintetizza come in termini economici la terra e gli immobili hanno sempre avuto molto più effetto sull'economia della borsa o di qualunque altra cosa, per secoli il "ciclo economico" è sempre stato soprattutto un ciclo di credito/debito e speculazione sulla terra
la sua stessa famiglia perse tutto negli anni '30 speculando sugli immobili e così quella di sua moglie
"..Laurel’s father, a REIT executive, lost wealth and his livelihood in the 1972-1974 collapse. Vic’s parents were similarly brought to their knees during the Depression. After losing their stake in the stock market, the family tried to rebuild by buying depressed properties at foreclosure sales in the ‘30s. When that, too, proved impossible, speculation became a dirty word until the late ‘50s, when Vic gingerly made his first steps into buying mining properties on the American Stock Exchange. Almost four decades later, a financial collapse in Thailand brought about by massive overbuilding forced Vic to close his hedge fund — and mortgage his house.
Real estate drives everything Real estate’s wide-ranging impact on life and investment stems from its immovable nature; it is fixed in quantity. Everything that happens takes place on real estate. It’s a major source of wealth for businesses and consumers. It absorbs a sizable portion of everything that people spend — some 10% to 20% of typical business operating expenses, and at least one-third of a typical family’s income. It's a factor in all production and spending decisions.
Several theories attempt to pinpoint the cause of real estate cycles. David Ricardo and Henry George observed in the 19th century that rents and land prices rise when business is good, absorbing the extra profits generated. The price rise is exacerbated as speculators jump in near the top. Eventually, business staggers under the burden, rents and mortgage payments go unpaid and land prices crash. But hope springs eternal, and real estate eventually becomes cheap enough to let entrepreneurial business plans pencil out.
Going back into history, the demise of great speculative land operations — the South Sea Company in England and the Mississippi Company in France — created wholesale financial panics. The memoirs of the great 18th-century speculator Giacomo Casanova, whom it is always proper to recall on Valentine’s Day, detail how he used such excesses for the mutual benefit of himself and his amours. In modern days, who can forget 1980s Japan, when the few acres around the imperial palace in Tokyo commanded a higher price than all the real estate in California? Or the 1990s tech boom that drove Silicon Valley rents and land prices up hundreds of percent? In both cases, as in so many others, disaster soon followed.
Yoon Dekko of Korea’s Ajou University and colleagues at University of California Berkeley note that many explanations of real estate cycles feature “the greedy developer” and “the bumbling lender.” This is because bankers apparently like to lend so long as business conditions are good, while developers have a complementary tendency to borrow so long as credit flows. The resulting oversupply brings down prices.
Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, asked about the causes of Southeast Asia’s market collapse in a June 2000 interview with The Progressive, went to the heart of the problem: "The biggest problems were the misallocations of lending to speculative real estate, and risky financing, especially borrowing short-term debt on international markets."
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