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The rate of decline in house prices in the UK is accelerating. Today the Nationwide released their monthly UK-wide figures on house prices and the numbers were fairly grim. House prices fell 1.4% in the last month alone, bringing the annual fall to 14.6% or nearly 20% in inflation-adjusted terms.
This is the 12th month [...]

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Beware the unwinding of the yen carry trade – FT
Worse than Japan again becoming the source of almost free money, is the chance of an even more risky dollar carry trade, writes David Pilling

Cracks appearing in Vancouver’s condo boom – Financial Post
Holly Wood’s first hint that something was “smelling fishy” in Vancouver’s champagne-infused construction market [...]

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Just as Japan is starting to unwind its carry trade, a new one might be forming in the form of 1% base rates in the United States. The carry trade was very popular amongst Japanese retail investors, especially using leverage (see article – hat tip Yves Smith). But, this trade unwound in a [...]

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I have run several stories in the past about Canada’s housing bubble because I have visited a number of Canadian cities over the past few years and all of them seemed to be building like mad. Vancouver and Toronto were the worst of the lot as far as condos go. But, as the [...]

For the second day in a row we are basking in the glow of an up market (update: or at least we were until the last 12 minutes). Everyone’s happy. But, some people are happier than others. And the happiest amongst the bunch are those people who are long commodities.

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I have not posted all day because I have been spending most of the day doing site maintenance — importing the data from the credit crisis timeline into a database, which will make it a lot easier to update, backfill and make changes to the timeline. We now have about 700 discrete events catalogued [...]

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PJB: Obama’s First 100 Days – Patrick BuchananUndeniably, a powerful tide is running for the Democratic Party, with one week left to Election Day. Bush’s approval rating is 27 percent, just above Richard Nixon’s Watergate nadir and almost down to Carter-Truman lows.
Today’s Polls, 10/28 -FiveThirtyEightStop me if you’ve heard this one before. Although the national [...]

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Patrick Buchanan has given up on any chances of McCain winning this election judging by his last blog post. The title alone says it all. In a missive titled “Obama’s First 100 Days” Buchanan asks what an Obama Administration will look like.
While you may disagree with the sometimes controversial Pat Buchanan, he is always interesting.
Undeniably, [...]

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This week, I can practically repeat what I said last week verbatim – so, I will.
Writedowns continued unabated despite the easing global credit markets. While we should see a bear market rally due to this easing, the ill effects of a global recession and new concerns in emerging markets and Asia will cause writedowns to [...]

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This is a quote from the populist American politician William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat famous at the beginning of the last century.
“There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has [...]