(Warren) Buffett: Unemployment linked to housing

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.omaha.com/article/20120225/MONEY/702259872#buffett-unemployment-linked-to-housing

By Steve Jordon

The nation's housing market remains in a "depression," Warren Buffett said Saturday, keeping the nation's unemployment rate too high.

Buffett, the chairman and CEO of Omaha investment company Berkshire Hathaway Inc, said he was "dead wrong" last year when he predicted the housing market would turn around by the end of 2011.

Even though Berkshire's housing-related businesses made a profit in 2011, he said, it was less than one-third of the money they made in 2006, before the 2008-2009 recession.

"Housing will come back — you can be sure of that," he wrote in his annual letter to Berkshire shareholders, made public Saturday morning, but the housing industry remains in a depression even though it is gradually improving.

FULL story at link.

[davidthegnome]

1. Breaking news...

(Warren) Buffet: Water is wet.

[BOHICA12]

2. Ahhh: The Gods of the Copy Book Headings

they are hard to avoid.

[Newest Reality]

3. The Great Oracle

didn't reveal just how housing will "come back".

Perhaps the magic of his words and voice are considered to be spells that bring this about?

Considering that we have some huge economic issues being muted by wedge-issue and irrelevant blathering, the whole charade seems to be "management" rather than repair or renewal.

So, the poor and homeless are increasing and simultaneously being criticized and marginalized while the Great Guru points out that they are a factor in housing. Cardboard and underpasses are not housing, he should realize up there, on his transcendent plane.

Go figure.

[Yavin4]

4. Housing Is Simply Falling Back in Line with Wages

That's all that's really happening. For too long, housing price appreciation ran far ahead of wage growth. That's what the bubble of the early 2000s was all about. Folks were able to get mortgages even though their incomes did not qualify them.

Now, that has changed. The prices for housing are falling back in line with incomes. If incomes for the middle class are either stagnant or declining, so too are the prices for housing.

[jwirr]

5. There is more to it than that. I called Housing in our community wanting to get on the waiting list

for a housing voucher. I was told that they are not taking any more names because there is not even on housing unit in our town that has any openings. Most have enough on their waiting list for half of their apartments. The demand is there - the loans and rentals are not.

I can see what Buffett is talking about though - when we are not building new housing that leaves a lot of builders without the kind of work they had before. This is definitely one area where spending the "war" money at home would really make a difference.

[stockholmer]

7. there is no shortage of homes nationwide, there is a huge glut (see my post below)

cheers

[jwirr]

12. I may have not made myself clear. The shortage is not the houses so much as it is the loans or the

rental vouchers. Howere when every apartment building in our community have waiting lists for several years then there is a shortage here.

[Bradical79]

10. Yeah, it's frustrating

Fixing and improving our infrastructure shouldn't be a liberal vs. conservative issue. When I drive over a bridge, I don't want it to collapse. It's win-win. Some people get jobs, and I don't die in a horrible accident. Apparently, that makes me an evil bleeding heart liberal

[stockholmer]

6. There are over 18.5 million vacant homes in the United States right now with another 8 to 10

million projected over the next several years. That is over 5 vacant homes for each homeless person in the USA. Yet people keep hanging their hats on 'new housing starts'. Madness.



http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/more_vacant_homes_than_homeless_in_us_20111231/

http://blog.amnestyusa.org/us/housing-its-a-wonderful-right/

[DCBob]

8. Housing will recover when prices come down to where normal people can afford to buy them.

and the banks loosen up their lending requirements.

[DallasNE]

9. The Reason Buffett Was "Dead Wrong"

On housing a year ago was because he didn't have enough data at hand to make the right call. And it is all part of the loss of transparency due to deregulation. It's the same reason government forecasters missed the depth of the Great Recession. People were flying in the dark, so to speak. And it is why Obama has belatedly proposed a plan to help out distressed home owners.

[unkachuck]

11. yes sir, mr. buffer....

....housing is definitively in a crony-capitalist wall-street generated depression....but it's worse than that....for it's been planned this way....

....for thirty years the average Americans' income has remained flat or has dropped....the economy has been de-manufactured/de-Unioned....gone are the good jobs that pay a living wage....gone are the skills of a manufacturing/production based economy and workforce....

....can you buy, furnish or remodel a home working for minimum wage at dairy queen?....that's a problem....the corporate solution will be: corporate housing!

....the average person can no longer afford to buy a family farm or become a farmer and you will soon no longer be able to buy a house or become a homeowner....you will only be able to rent your housing from a corporation after the bankster/wall-street consortiums buy up all the nations' housing stock at bargain-basement prices....prices they fabricated with jobs they destroyed....

....welcome to 21st century America; fascism gone wild....