I do appreciate all the insight here! Last night after writing this post I started doing a bit more research and went to bed thinking today may be a very telling day in the markets. In fact so telling that I wanted to put money in some short financial ETF’s like Proshares SKF (of course it was up 20% today). Unfortunately I woke up a bit too late but my instinct was correct. The market has gone on an upswing way too long. The banks can’t hide all this negative information too much longer and at some level we shouldn’t see any stability in either the stock markets or RE markets for sometime.
I agree that the government is looking at the RE markets from a much broader aspect than those strictly focused on Real Estate, so it is hard for many of us to understand the motives here. We can definitely speculate, but their plans are far from obvious. In order for the government to stabilize the markets they are going to have to control the supply, which they have done. There are obvious problems when trying to control supply and demand and we will probably see the ramifications of this within the next 12 months. The banks are going to continue to lose as the government can only do so much. We still have a lot of negative news that will have a much greater impact in my opinion. I think the commercial RE collapse will also cause a wide range of problems for banks. This storm is still brewing, but should take shape within the next 6-12 months as well.
All that said we can only hope hyper-inflation won’t take a dramatic hold of the US Dollar as the Fed doesn’t have the ability to stop it. We are going to need a miracle for these markets to remain sustainable and at this point, I just don’t see that happening.