Seattle Bubble Forum Archive

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Here it is - the very next bubble! Be sure to jump on the escalator early to maximize profits!



As home prices continue to slide nationwide, the value of farmland is setting records.

Demand for grain for food, fuel and export, along with low interest rates and a weakened dollar have raised farmland prices by double digits the past two years. Average values have doubled since 2000.

Farm real estate prices rose 20% to 23% in Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming in 2007, according to Farm Credit Services of America, an agricultural lender. ......

.......The growth has attracted "a tidal wave of investors," says Murray Wise of Illinois' Westchester Group, which manages $500 million in client assets. "It's everybody from the person concerned about the stock market to large government and corporate pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds.".....
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Isn't this part of the new alternative energy bubble. Corn prices are high because of ethanol production.

Alan - that's the way I see it. I am sure bio-fuel speculation is a major cause for recent farmland appreciation.

Ethanol crops take obscene amounts of water too. Hop on the bottled water bubble while there is still a time. Haven't you seen the charts where water prices increase by 10% from now forever?

I read somewhere that ethanol production consumes more energy in the form of nitrogen fertilizer (made from natural gas) than it produces. Gotta be more efficient ways to convert NG to a liquid, I would think. But of course, those aren't supported by midwest senators on the dole from ADM and their ilk

I think the next bubble is WINE and I'm very concerned. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/02/ ... vest03.php

Why be concerned. Wine is an excellent bubble. The benefits are truly questionable (arguments can be made both for and against). Nobody has a true need for it (any more than coffee at least). And most people can find acceptable substitutes if it becomes too expensive.

Really, a wine bubble would be no more damaging than a Beanie Baby bubble.

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A really good article IMHO



A financial bubble is a market aberration manufactured by government, finance, and industry, a shared speculative hallucination and then a crash, followed by depression. Bubbles were once very rare—one every hundred years or so was enough to motivate politicians, bearing the post-bubble ire of their newly destitute citizenry, to enact legislation that would prevent subsequent occurrences.......

......Nowadays we barely pause between such bouts of insanity. The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of our long-standing American faith that the wide expansion of home ownership can produce social harmony and national economic well-being. Spurred by the actions of the Federal Reserve, financed by exotic credit derivatives and debt securitiztion, an already massive real estate sales-and-marketing program expanded to include the desperate issuance of mortgages to the poor and feckless, compounding their troubles and ours.

That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.....

......Our economy is in serious trouble. Both the production-consumption sector and the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector know that a debt-deflation Armageddon is nigh, and both are praying for a timely miracle, a new bubble to keep the economy from slipping into a depression.....

.....There are a number of plausible candidates for the next bubble, but only a few meet all the criteria.......

.....There is one industry that fits the bill: alternative energy, the development of more energy-efficient products, along with viable alternatives to oil, including wind, solar, and geothermal power, along with the use of nuclear energy to produce sustainable oil substitutes, such as liquefied hydrogen from water. Indeed, the next bubble is already being branded......
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