Lombardi is not sure he believes them. Or, to rephrase: he’s not sure they understand. Lombardi is the analyst who correctly predicted the housing crash and told his readers to get out of real estate a couple of years before the crash.
We all remember when banks pulled way back on home foreclosures in 2010, as they were accused of not having their paperwork in order when they foreclosed. This put a temporary halt to U.S. home foreclosures. Now that they’ve cleaned up their act, big U.S. banks are actually starting to accelerate their foreclosures.
In the third quarter of 2011, U.S. banks started foreclosures on more homes than at any other time in the past 12 months. According to Profit Confidential, “Banks have a backlog of foreclosures in the U.S. housing market to start work on as a result of the banks cooling foreclosures during the period they were being accused of faulty foreclosure practices.”
According to the National Association of Realtors, U.S. home prices fell in three-quarters of all metropolitan areas in the third quarter of 2011. The median price of homes in the U.S. was down 4.7% in the third quarter of 2011, compared to the same period of 2010. Foreclosure sales still make up 30% of all U.S. housing market activity at the resale level.
Hence, we have a situation where more foreclosed homes are coming onto the U.S. housing market and U.S. home prices are still dropping. But this is not the real problem.
If the Federal Reserve could keep long-term interest rates down for the next 10 to 20 years, the U.S. housing market would have a chance to recover. Unfortunately, the Fed can’t keep rates that low for that long. Interest rates will have to rise sooner rather than later as inflation becomes a problem in America.
Lombardi states “Rising interest rates will only depress the U.S. housing market further. This is what realtors don’t understand… the best bargains may lie further ahead.”
Profit Confidential, which has been published for over a decade now, has been widely recognized as predicting five major economic events over the past 10 years. In 2002, Profit Confidential started advising its readers to buy gold-related investments when gold traded under $300 an ounce. In 2006, it “begged” its readers to get out of the housing market...before it plunged.
Profit Confidential was among the first (back in late 2006) to predict that the U.S. economy would be in a recession by late 2007. The daily e-letter correctly predicted the crash in the stock market of 2008 and early 2009. And Profit Confidential turned bullish on stocks in March of 2009 and rode the bear market rally from a Dow Jones Industrial Average of 6,440 on March 9, 2009, to 12,876 on May 2, 2011, a gain of 99%.
With a track record like this is a good group of people to listen to. Since they were talking about this back in November of 2011 we should pay attention to what they are saying. It could be just around the corner.
Deanna -D&D Taking Out The Trash, LLC