REMINDER: All investment, economics, and finance related material now appears at the new IaconoResearch.com. For the time being at least, this has become a personal blog covering a variety of mostly unrelated topics.

A “Make or Break Moment” for Greece

Another austerity vote and another bailout for Greece (its sixth) are on tap today ahead of a big meeting of European leaders over the weekend that, if past is precedent, will only defer making the tough decisions about the sovereign debt crisis that began in late-2009. (Doesn’t it seem like more than just two years ago that the incoming Greek government told that world that the outgoing government had “cooked the books” for the last decade.)

Virtually the entire country of Greece is shut down again for the second day as more than 100,000 people gathered in or near Syntagma Square in front of the government’s assembly building where the draft legislation passed initial voting last night and more voting on the details of the austerity plan will occur today.

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Underwater Homes Across the U.S.

The National Association of Realtors reports on existing home sales tomorrow and the data in the graphic below from this NY Times story is not likely to show much improvement, if any. In fact, with the slow, winter selling season quickly approaching, America’s underwater home problem is about to get a little worse before next spring.

Yes, that’s right. The entire cities of Las Vegas and Orlando are underwater while Phoenix along with a number of cities in California and Florida are not far behind.

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The Commerce Department reported(.pdf) that housing starts jumped 15.0 percent in September, from an annual rate of 572,000 units in August to 658,000 last month, but permits for new construction, a leading indicator for the home building industry, fell 5.0 percent, from 625,000 in August to 594,000 in September, as residential construction continues at a pace that can only be described as “depressionary” (if that’s a word).

Current levels of housing starts and permits remain down more than 70 percent from their 2005-2006 housing bubble highs and are still less than half of what would be considered “normal”, a context that is critical in understanding the significance of housing starts reaching a 17-month high – conditions are still very, very bad for home builders.

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I”ve yet to have a look at the GOP debate this evening that, according to the news headlines, focused a lot of attention on Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan and had Mitt Romney and Rick Perry squaring off against. It likely didn’t draw much attention to Ron Paul, something which, according to the chart below from Journalism.org he’s probably used to.

Earlier, Paul unveiled his economic plan that would reduce the budget deficit by $1 trillion – no, not over ten years, over one year! Paul’s “Restore America” plan includes tax cuts and a 10 percent reduction in the government workforce that would eliminate the Departments of Education, Commerce, Energy, Interior and Housing and Urban Development.

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Those Amazing Canadian Home Prices

It looks like China’s housing bubble is teetering, sales this fall down by half from the level of a year ago, and the Australian housing market has looked shaky all year, but that Canadian housing bubble seems nearly indestructible, charts like the one below from this Globe & Mail report now a real head scratcher for those of us south of the border.

Having just visited Calgary two months ago, I can attest to the residential areas looking a lot like Southern California in about 2005, but Toronto and Vancouver are apparently experiencing even bigger booms, as noted in the Globe & Mail report above, about the only question for residents being which big city will beat the other in price gains this year.

Last month, Toronto home prices rose 6.5 percent from a year ago, down from a 9.3 percent pace the month before, and with annual price gains in Vancouver recently falling from 20+ percent to 10.6 percent, a real battle is brewing. They note that “overall the market continues to appear healthy” and an economist offers only a mild cautionary note, words that sound eerily familiar to us in the U.S.

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More on OWS and Politics

Lawyer, academic, author, and former banking regulator (that is, from back in a different era before the financial industry had bought Congress) William Black was on the Dylan Ratigan show yesterday with an exhausted David DeGraw of AmpedStatus.com to talk about the relationship between the Occupy Wall Street protest and political parties.

Black would certainly be a good choice as their spokesman – he’s been talking about these issues since way back before the housing bubble had started to burst.

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