This week’s Barron’s magazine highlights the abysmal state of the Manhattan real estate market. Manhattan was one of the last bubble markets to burst. Now, things are unraveling quickly, particularly at the high end. Some experts see another 30% down before the carnage is over. The trigger for the bubble’s bursting came in the form of Lehman Brothers, making the NY real estate market another reminder of how badly the Lehman situation was handled by Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner.

The monthly Nationwide Building Society survey is out for house prices in the U.K. The data show an annual fall that is the steepest on record at 16.6%. This means that house prices are now falling more rapidly than ever in the U.K. and that spells bad news as its economy has just entered recession.

Bill Gross, the founder of PIMCO and manager of the world’s largest bond fund, has just released his most recent Economic Outlook. In it, he takes a tack regarding the fix to the present turmoil in the markets with which I disagree. However, I would like to draw your attention to his analysis as his voice carries weight in the market place.

In November, the U.S. federal agencies which oversee the banking system proposed new guidelines for real estate appraisals. One would imagine that these guidelines would be in keeping with the new more stringent regulatory frame of mind the financial services sector. This is not the case.

In fact, the new proposal appears to entirely eliminate mandated written appraisals in connection with cramdowns and refis.

I have yet to read what the media has reported on the new Case-Shiller Housing Index numbers for November 2008. However, I have crunched the numbers and they do not look very good.

For the Composite-20 list of cities, the index is down 18.2% in the past year, putting it down 25.1% from its peak. The Composite-10 list shows a fall of 19.1% and 26.6% for the same time frames. This puts prices back to levels last seen in February 2004.

The data are in for house prices in the United Kingdom and they are not good. Prices have now fallen 18% from their peak in October 2007 according to the latest Nationwide Building Society survey. They were down a massive 2.5% in December 2008 alone. If you recall, I said November’s survey showed that prices had dropped 13.9% in the year to November, with the losses in December, this number has accelerated to 15.9%- one reason I predicted the United Kingdom will suffer a wave of defaults in the coming year.

If you are wondering why the U.S. housing market is a mess, watch this video about a $103,000 mortgage that was used to finance a shack –literally, a shack. Of course, the mortgage was packaged with a bunch of others into a mortgage backed security, which was rated AAA.

This scenario sums up the mess that was the U.S. housing market pretty nicely.

The S&P/Case-Shiller Index for U.S. housing came out today. It was a pretty nasty little report. It showed a clear acceleration in home price declines for the month of October, the latest month for which data is available. In the Composite-10, prices are a full 18.6% lower than they were last October. While I have believed the pace of house price declines was slowing, this report pours cold water on that thesis. The report also suggests that house prices will be a major concern for the incoming Obama Administration.

It’s interesting to hear a chief executive of a major Wall Street firm speak openly and on the record about the economy. So, it’s refreshing to watch this video and see Jamie Dimon’s take on a number of economic issues ncluding house prices and infrastructure spending.

A few days ago, I showed you a video from a long session he did with Erin Burnett of CNBC. This is another segment of that session. On the whole, he sounds very reasonable. Take a look.

Jamie Dimon on the Economy

Today the Nationwide released their monthly UK-wide figures on house prices and the numbers were better. House prices fell 0.4% in the last month, bringing the annual fall to 13.9%, down from 14.6% in October.

Nevertheless, this is the 13th month in a row that house prices have fallen in the UK. Obviously, the UK is poised to have a sharp property fall that is worse than in the early 1990s.