| Why the US Housing Market 'Is Ready to Turn Around' and How EU Hopes to Save Euro: 'It's a Very Good Outcome' |
| News - Financial News |
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In some metropolitan areas, the market has bottomed, with both sales and prices on the rise and foreclosures on the decline.This contrarian — and largely overlooked — thesis flies in the face of the persistent gloom that has nagged the industry since 2007, when the subprime crisis flared.Industry analysts and players cite a number of reasons — some traditional (employment), others unique to the post-credit bubble era (foreclosures) — for the long-awaited sea change. An analysis of industry and government data also support the forecast.“It has become increasingly apparent to us that the pieces for a housing rebound next year are beginning to fall into place,” declared Barclays Capital analyst Stephen Kim in a recent note to investors. [Read the full article] The popping of the Chinese real estate bubble has just begun, with the nation likely to experience the types of problems the U.S. has encountered over the past five years, hedge fund titan Jim Chanos told CNBC.Chanos, head of Kynikos Associates, has been bearish all year on China, which recently has seen a slowdown in growth and officials taking pains to try to prevent the world's second-largest economy from cooling too much.While he is not predicting any imminent crash, Chanos does think investors should be taking note of what is happening."China's going to survive all this. This is not the end of the next Middle Kingdom," he said in a live interview. "They have a real estate bubble on their hands and they're going to have to get through this."We're not saying China is going to completely melt down as a society or country. [Read the full article] The European Central Bank is capping its weekly bond purchases at 20 billion euros and euro zone officials want banks to use its big new liquidity offer to buy more sovereign debt, ECB sources said on Friday.The ECB has bought no more than 22 billion euros worth of bonds in any week since it reactivated its bond-buy program in August to defend Italy and Spain.ECB sources said it would keep purchases to a maximum of 20 billion euros now and was not considering bigger action in response to an EU summit decision to create a fiscal union.Europe secured an historic agreement to draft a new treaty for deeper economic integration in the euro zone but Britain, the region's third largest economy, refused to join the other 26 countries in a fiscal union and was left isolated."We more or less anticipated what would come out," one ECB source said. [Read the full article] 
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