International Investing

From the WSJ:
The stock market is trading right where it was nine years ago. Stocks, long touted as the best investment for the long term, have been one of the worst investments over the nine-year period, trounced even by lowly Treasury bonds.
Ouch!
After the tech boom and bust, and now the housing bust, buy and hold [...]

From the WSJ:
In some major markets, including Las Vegas and San Diego, foreclosure-related sales have accounted for more than 40% of all sales in recent months.
…
The median price dropped 8.2% from a year earlier to $195,900, the biggest drop recorded by the Realtors in the current slump.
…
The Detroit Board of Realtors recently found that home [...]

The ending isn’t pretty:
The Fed is doing everything it can to stave off disaster, but frankly, it is not rich enough. With assets of about $800 billion, having instituted $400 billion of rescue programs in the last two weeks, a $30 billion loan backing J.P. Morgan’s takeover of Bear Stearns and a commitment to offer [...]

From Mauldin:
This shows that part of the bubble in housing was in the number of transactions that occurred during the bubble years. In 2005 alone, there were 48% more housing transactions that occurred than should have been expected based on historical average sales per household. In large part this was caused by “investors,” many of [...]

From the Daily Reckoning:
…Before long, the pit was a frenzy. All of a sudden, I heard traders yelling, “21 bid, 22 bid, 23 bid,” meaning that the traders were trying to buy wheat at $20 per bushel. In order for a transaction to take place, another trader must be willing to sell at whatever price [...]

A staggering amount:
China’s foreign exchange reserves jumped $61.6 billion in January to reach $1.5898 trillion compared with $1.5282 trillion at the end of 2007, two sources familiar with the data told Reuters on Wednesday.

Excellent paper on the mortgage crisis and its likely market impact:
We confirm the conventional view that the current problems in financial markets are concentrated in institutions that have exposure to mortgage securities. We use several methods to estimate the ultimate losses on these securities. Our best (very uncertain) guess is that the losses will total [...]