Free Republic

It doesn't take much when you're near the tipping point. Last week Countrywide Financial said it had increased defaults on some of its home equity loans and several banks took unexpected charges against potential credit defaults. Suddenly investors reacted as if the whole world had changed. Their fears sent the popular stock averages to their biggest loss in almost five years and the bears proclaimed that the days of easy credit that has fed the bull market over the past 4 ½ years were finally over. Valuations are Sound But the purveyors of doom and gloom are wrong. It's true...

The Future for Investors by Jeremy Siegel, Ph.D. Is Real Estate a House of Cards? Monday, December 19, 2005 Real estate has been the hottest asset class over the past five years. Some locales have seen prices double in two or three years and news of investors flipping condos reminds me of the frenzied days of Internet IPOs in the late 1990s. But with the latest rise in mortgage rates there's been an unmistakable shift in sentiment. Recent data from the research firm ISI shows that the dollar value of unsold homes in the U.S. has now surpassed $500 billion,...