I’ve got a ton of stuff to do today so I’ll make this quick. I don’t know what the future holds. I’m looking at the information at hand and trying to extrapolate it into the future. I fully agree with you that based on what has happened in the past and what’s happening now I THINK we’re headed for a huge decline. But I have been wrong before and I can be wrong again.
My problem with saying things WILL happen in the future is that there are variables that nobody can know. What if oil goes through the roof and the downtown condos do better than everywhere else because of their proximity to employment? What happens if the dollar takes such a beating that inflation corrects the wage/price imbalance? What happens if long term interest rates don’t go up like we think they should? What if there’s some new tax break that comes about to promote RE investment positions?
Granted, the idea that any of these scenarios could be of such effect on the local market as to enable the prices to remain strong or rally is far-fetched, but what rational person could have guessed in 2003 that the interest rates and the markets would have done what they did in fact do? I was wrong about that back then and I need to be honest and not forget that as an example that I can be wrong about this, too.
I’ll give you one more example before I split. When I was realtively new to my current occupation I thought I was so good. I had learned enough to develop a rythym and it was working for me. I could look at a problem and instantly develop my opinion. I saw everything in terms of black-white. But as time wore on and I saw more examples of the exception to the rule, more complicated problems, and ran into situations that had more variables, I came to realize there is no black and there is no white; it’s all shades of gray. I especially learned that people do not always act rationally nor are they often well informed. Now I have a hard time ever being judgemental enough to commit to a single course of action until I’m at the very end of my process. Prior to that it’s all subject to additional information and consideration. Some people would call that weakness and maybe it is, but I like to think of it as keeping an open mind.