REIT insiders have been dumping stock like crazy over the past six months. They must know something, do you think?
We'll just increase our national wealth by giving the daytraders another tool to gamble with.
We don't need to make or invent anything anymore, since we'll all get rich trading paper assets back and forth!
Wouldn't touch their shares with a sterilised barge pole.
The mortgage industry pretty much has to find a new game to play; sub-prime home equity lending has to be nearly tapped out. This is the standard cycle in banking -- everyone piles into what is perceived as an excellent profit opportunity, then the field gets too crowded, then lending standards just relax to the point of idiocy, then somebody or somebodies overextend and ultimately collapse.
Then, they run to the taxpayer for a bailout. Wriston and the boys got clipped, hugely, on sovereign loans in the 1970s, guess who bailed their asses out? I had a bit of fun at his /their expense in chapter 2 of my recent book.
Must disagree with your assessment of this new r.e. futures mkt regarding homeowners, sorry. If a homeowner uses this mkt properly, it will indeed be an excellent hedge, and will have no effect on his/her debt levels if the r.e. mkt heads south. Effectively, what will happen to a hedged position in a falling r.e. mkt is that some amount of home equity will be transformed into 60% long-term cap gain, 40% short-term, per section 1256 of the IRC.
So, the hedge isn't perfect by a long chalk, unless the homeowner here has some amount of tax-loss carryforward.
But, the hedge is a damned sight better than nothing at all.