With regards to the comments of anyone being entitled to 2003 prices, it’s not about entitlement, it’s just logic and math.
The primer on this site and any analysis of the historical value of R/E will tell you that 2003 was a pivotal year in our financial history. That was when it should have been a peak year and should have gone flat for four years from there, technically down because it wouldn’t have kept up with inflation. Then 4 years of tracking inflation and then four years of exceeding inflation, lather, rinse, repeat. Ying/Yang, whatever the market takes as extra during boom years it gives back in bust years, it owes the gods that exact amount. The trouble arose when the “creative” financing in 2003 tried to cheat the invisible hand and extend the rally beyond the fundamentals, something that had never happened on that scale in our history. There is always a consequnce for removing the balance of the universe and the markets. Let’s look at 2020 (12 years from 2003, peak to peak on a 12 year cycle), if you take your 2003 value and calculated 12 years of inflation you would arrive in 2020 with that value, or roughly 30-35% higher than your 2003. If you take the 1997/1998 bottom of the last cycle and take it to 2010, do the same. That is where we should have been and ultimately will end up, except the years will be off by 4 or so.
Things will be different this time but they will be the same, the 12 year cycle will be a 16 yr because of the false extension and the swings will be more wild, more extreme, but the end of the world is not here nor will it come, this is just the universe’s way of teaching us a lesson. We have lost the WWII generation to old age and, we needed this to make us stronger and smarter, open your arms and accept the gift of wisdom so on the other side of this mess we will be better off at identifying potential problems not just better at pointing fingers.
I honestly think paramount is not in a bad place as far as the grand scheme of things goes, he is not in the FB category, he did not buy at the artificial peak, he did not get a zero down toxic loan and he did not borrow what he could not afford to pay back and he did not heloc himself into the artificial peak, effectively joining the fb’s buy re-buying his own property during the artificial peak. He is in a recoverable position, with the means to ride it out and that is why I gave the opinion I did.
