By: fcoa on Giovedì 28 Giugno 2007 17:05
The first knot: Scandal at one of the country’s largest real estate developers -- Astroc -- lowers the company’s share price by two-thirds. Stock at Spain’s biggest real estate company, Metrovacesa SA is down by one-third in 2007.
The second knot: Construction starts in 2006 ran at 800,000 new homes, more than the total number of homes constructed in Italy, France, and Germany combined, FOUR times the UK number, and nearly one-half of U.S. starts, an economy that is seven times bigger than Spain. (Gulf News )
The third knot: This April, Spain’s best-performing fund manager Francisco Parames received a hand-written note from the third richest man in the world himself, Warren Buffet, seeking advice on how to safely invest in the region’s economic boom.
Parames' reply: You Can’t.
“The Spanish economy,” wrote Parames, “is going to go through some very rough times as the real estate crash [spreads] and credit bubble bursts.”
Around the same time, the Bank of Spain issued a public warning pronouncing “unsustainable growth in real estate prices AND a housing market that is 30% overvalued.”
Despite the barrage of bad news, however, the mainstream majority is still tangled up in BULL-ue regarding the long-term prospects of Spain’s housing sector and overall economy.
“The country’s economy is still going strong and talks of a sudden downward correction are overstated,” begins a recent Forbes. Case in point: “Black Tuesday” included, Madrid’s IBEX 35 has soared 35% in the last 12 months to an all-time record high, a performance that has outstripped almost all other major European bourses.
If something were intrinsically wrong, explains one expertician, “the trouble would show up in the stock market to reveal increasing pessimism about the Spanish housing market.”
Unless of course, one sector tarried behind the other…
Bottom line is: there is an integral stage of every mania in which warnings from the professionals go unheeded by the public. That time may be at hand in Spain.