That's not true.

if you can live in it for most if not ALL of your life,
while all around you are places twice as nice for 1/3 of the price,
could you still be happy ?

if so, then buy.

That's the plan.... home, not investment. It's Eastern Canada, not the UK.

BTW, is your sig "modelled" on an old Kraftwerk tune??

Can i just put my twopence in,

Just as CGNAO has been saying there will be an almighty crash I have been saying for the past few years (under some different usernames) that the only and inevitable response frmo Washington/London to an economic downturn will be another war.

This time with Iran. Anyone who fails to see the depressing reality of this cycle of Wall St boom- Wall Street crash - war - Wall Street boom is really burying their heads deep in the sand,

just look back at the summer of 2002. we had a MAJOR CRISIS in capitalism that summer with the Enron scandal followed by dozens of other accountancy scandals at many major US companies.

I remember one commentator on newsnight saynig it was the end of capitalism as we knew it !

The stock market tanked really badly and on the eve of war with Iraq in march 2003 the DJIA was at 7700 and falling and the FTSE was at 3300 and falling,.

if it carried on the game was really up for western capitalism and a hufe recession loomed.

of course the IRaq war saved the day and the FTSE and DJIA soared as soon as the first cruise missiles hit their targets .

they even called it the BAGHDAD BOUNCE.

well folks its a short 5 years later and the familiar pattern is being repeated yet again (remember the Afghan war was started only a year after the dot.com burst had gutted wall street) and we are being primed for war with IRAN to save the US and UK economies.

i supose they will call it the TEHRAN TONIC.

will we just sit by like zombies and let it happen ?

of course we will.

Nope.

The reason that war normally works for wall street and Washington is that they don't come under any direct risk themselves.

They owe the chinese and other heavily armed people (who incidentally make almost everything the US consumes) a lot of money.

Do the maths. There hasn't been a single armed conflict between any two nations who can kill the people who start the wars. The whole point of war is to kill the leaders. Killing the leaders is two button pushes and a phone call away.

The US really does have to "eat it's liver" this time.

The Asia Times article was good. I liked this bit:

"Quasi-fraudulent": now there's a term that we should be using more. It doesn't actually say that they were fraudulent, but it does kind of suggest that something not entirely above-board may have been going on. It manages to be insulting without being explicitly libelous.

bit of humour

I think the gold bugs underestimate the sheer determination of the average nation state. It is a long time ago, but can I remind posters about some ancient history.

At one point in its war with Carthage, the Roman Empire ran out of money. The Romans had blown all their cash on building two fleets, both of which the Carthaginians had sunk. The Empire therefore had no funds to carry on fighting. The response? Oblige the citizens with cash to build a navy and give it to the state.

Luckily this fleet was successful and the rest is, er, history.

If the economic crisis becomes as acute as cgnao predicts I doubt that governments will hesitate to take control of bullion in private hands. And no doubt the story given for why the cash is needed will be as reasonable as the Romans' one.

I agree with this. I am changing my unallocated gold to allocated. At least that way I can go and pick the bugger up if things start looking really hairy

Steve

once I had read a lot of threads from various posters (you know who you are), it became clear to me that those that were calling for total meltdown of the money markets & associated housing markets had it spot-on.
I put that together with some anecdotal for the UK situation & lots & lots of reading web articles & it became clear that there were major problems imminently ahead.

I suppose cgnao gets the accolaide because he has been the most prolific poster & has given the clearest/earliest indications of 'stuff' before it has happened. Obviously he is very well connected.

Lets also not forget that some of the other very good posters have been saying the same things also.

What surprises me is that we have a lot of qualified & educated economists on here, that couldn't see this coming or happening, I find that unbelievable tbh. I have had a few debaits/discussions with these people, who could lose me with their technical babble, but appear to not understand the situation. They were wrong & are being proved so now.

Well done cgnao!

I have read this thread with interest and what you have all failed to mention is that according to all the "news" pprogrammes I can find, Vera Duckworth will be leaving Coronation Street.

Makes you think

Or maybe not

But close

Although a newbie, this must be the worst start to the FTSE for a long while!!

if we get a 3-5% drop anytime next week then that will be a significant drop IMHO!!!

There is a big big drop coming, i can all feel it or maybe like summer this is a great time to buy in and watch it rise to 6700 odd and then maybe drop off again!!!

But IMHO a US Recession which is next to confirmed then the Ftse aint going nowhere for a little while and House prices!! ha

Well when you aint got no money for Food, clothes etc then HP's all of a sudden are put into perspective.

I feel sorry for my generation who have the firm belief that House prices double every 7 years and many are on Interest Only Mortgages blah blah blah.

I consider myself lucky and thank the wise ones on this website for their thoughts and guidance that iam 23 years old, pretty much Debt Free with a bit of savings in a non Northern Rock Account

You would think so wouldn't you? But weeks like this can shake one's belief to the core. The market can act in very disingenious ways sometimes..

If you are going to to look at stocks in oil companies, avoid the majors/seniors. I mean the BPs, Shells, Texaco, Exxon etc etc. These should do o-k, but the problem they have is that they are mostly sitting on mature deposits, and struggling to increase production at all, and even maintaining production is proving to be a challenge. A better play is the oil service companies, which have taken an absolute thrashing this week, and you get a fine well-run company like Schlumberger at bargain prices right now. Its had it share price savaged today because its profits were up by ONLY 22%..boohoo.. Transocean, Diamond Offshore, Baker Hughes, Noble Energy are also some companies to look into in this oil-service sector. Also, don't disregard natural gas. CHK is a leader here. But be warned. The Stock Market is not for the faint of heart right now. Its like the roller-coaster ride from hell right now. I've got all my posiitons hedged with shorts against various indexes, and it still looks uglier at the end of this week than i was expecting.. My PMs and PM stocks are holding up well, tho

Good! With that attitude you shall inherit the Earth!

(If you are a bloke don't blow all your saving on women either)

Never mind the tears

It could be more like a bloodbath if the Dow ends below 12,000 today.

Unbelievable week ,where will it all end ???

End??!??!?!

This is barely the beginning!

Why do you think Gordon is "Brown nose" is in China?

"Oh Please, PLEASE buy our banks!"

He knows that the US is History and its time to get into bed with China.
Mega

Obviously - not all of us are fortunate enough to rent a bedsit from David Icke...

You don't need to be 'well connected' to have seen what was coming. I've had absolutely no doubt about the extent of the collapse we face since 2000.

Well said Dubai. Get a roof over your head in Canada and you will breathe some real fresh air. Gold ? Pah ! We only live the biblical three score and ten. So enjoy !!

Yip BB & F are s-o-o-o-o-o good !

i knew this was going to happen in 1992- but i kept it to myself just in case i was wrong

Thanks for the support RH. It goes totally against common sense... house prices are way over the top here too, but cheap compared to the UK. So they will drop, a lot. But I'm starting to get a bit twitchy about meltdowns etc. If I spend what I have on a house, I'll have somewhere to live at least. I'm sure it would be wiser to buy gold and get a really BIG house later... but my testies are too small to take the gamble!

Lol.

I knew this was going to happen in 2000/2001...but then just got confused by how low interest rates seemed to stabilise things. Wasn't until 2004/2005 that I started to realise that something was really, really wrong and found this site. Kept the faith and figured that in the long run houses would return to a normal price and started buying gold.

It wasn't until late 2006 that I started to realise that things were even "wronger" than I had thought previously. Learnt a lot from the economic comments made on this site and have made some nice cash shorting the obvious shares over 2007, and shorting the pound this year.

However, as we go further into 2008 I am just plain scared about the outcome of this mess. No idea where money should be invested to remain safe. Doesn't matter if you make a killing spread betting if the company/bank holding your money goes bust.

(So p*ssed off at myself for not shorting Ambac at the beginning of last week. I had my finger hovering over the button...truly I did, but was having a tough time on GBP/JPY so was in a risk averse mood. $%^£*!)

Yeah, he looks like he's lost the keys to his helicoptor:



That's going in my sig that is...

I feel a bit sorry for Bernanke, he inherited this mess from Greenspan. I wouldn't be suprised if 'helicopter Ben' suffered a black hawk down.

OOps! headachesville. lol