We've spent a fair amount of time discussing Canada's housing market over the past several months as Chinese money laundering operations have sprouted up bubbles all over the place. Here's a modest sampling of our recent work:
An advisor to China's central bank, Sheng Songcheng, said that virtual currencies like bitcoin are assets but do not have the fundamental attributes needed to be a currency that could meet modern economic development needs. Speaking in an interview with financial magazine Yicai, the PBOC advisors said that the adoption of Bitcoin as a national currency by a country "could lead to its economic collapse."
We've written frequently about the pending collapse in used car prices that will inevitably be brought on by a surge in leases over the past 5 years. With wages stagnant and car prices rising, the only way Americans could 'afford' those brand new BMWs and Mercedes was to lease them.
When you think about municipal bankruptcies, your mind likely conjures images of a decrepit Detroit littered with abandoned auto plants and burned down houses or the rapidly deteriorating city of Chicago with it's gang wars and neighborhoods that look and feel more like an Iraqi battlefield than a U.S. suburb.
What you likely don't think about is an ultra-posh suburb of San Francisco where the median home will run you over $1 million. But according to Bloomberg, the wealthy Northern California city of Moraga could be the next Cali domino to fall.
Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,
There are two important areas of the market that have historically been good leading indicators of the strength, or weakness, of the markets and the economy. Oil and retail.