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Land in Short Supply in Perth

The Urban Development Institute says there are currently fewer than 1400 blocks of land for …

Tuesday March 2nd,
6.30 – 8pm
Phil Anderson

With land prices increasing $766 a DAY in the December quarter, Phil Anderson will analyse economic prescriptions and asset bubbles. Are bubbles essential for banking liquidity? Who is meant to borrow this credit …

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Today’s Crikey had this corker:
The housing market:

Ben Loiterton writes: I am hoping you are alert to a gigantic sleeper issue …

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Michael Hudson

July 14, 2008

I am writing this article about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while sitting in the Queens Botanical Garden. This was not my plan today. The central air conditioning in my apartment broke down six weeks ago, and still has not been fixed. (It’s a nice condominium building, but accidents happen.) It is over 90 degrees outside, and nearly 100 as a result of the greenhouse effect in my apartment. Yesterday I took refuge in the Forest Hills Public Library, but it is closed on Sunday. One of the few libraries near public transport that normally is open on Sunday is in Flushing. So I went there to write the final draft describing the past week’s financial turmoil.

Unfortunately, when I got to the Flushing Public Library, a lady explained that because of the city’s budget cuts, the library no longer would be open on Sundays. Already before noon, when it was supposed to open, a large number of Chinese were waiting to get in, expecting to use the books and computer terminals. There was no sign explaining the situation in Chinese, and they continued to wait as I went down Main Street to the Botanical Garden.

At first glance this might not seem to have much to do with the turmoil of the last few days over the fate of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or the real estate markets they have helped inflate over the past decade. But actually, my experience today has everything to do with this topic. These two semi-public mortgage-packaging companies dominate the nation’s mortgage market and have supported real estate prices by steering over $5 trillion to enable homebuyers to bid higher and higher prices for homes, earning billions of dollars of bonuses, profits and interest for the bankers, mortgage brokers and Wall Street debt packagers who are the financial beneficiaries of the real estate bubble.

Carol Nader reports in the Age that
HUNDREDS of children are spending 60 hours or more a week in child care, a Federal Government report has revealed.
The article then critiques the Federal Government’s policy of encouraging as many mothers as possible into the workforce. What are the underlying economic forces encouraging such workforce participation? We know that home owners are paying the highest amount ever recorded for land and housing, at 6.6 times the average wage, versus the long term average of half this.

Children are left in such long day care because families are struggling to pay for land. This flows through into prices for milk ($4 for $2 litres at the milk bar!!!), petrol and other key ingredients. As revealed at the recent ABC People’s Summit at the Victorian Parliament, the competition for limited child care places is also hindered by child care operators refusing to open more centres when the cost of land is so high.

Another reason is that workers are commuting longer and longer distances as ’speculative sprawl’ forces them to chase affordable housing in areas bereft of public infrastructure such as child care centres and train stations.