Super-rich boys get to have their toys.
Sadly, I’m not super-rich but if I was I’d like something from the world of personal jets, a.k.a. microjets, something like this Maverick SmartJet, which only costs about $900K would be on my list.
The Eclipse 500 also looks hot and the company has more orders than it can fill. Bill Gates is an investor in the company.
Any loyal readers have heard me say repeatedly that we’re in for major inflation in our future as the government manufactures more money to pay off debt and prop up financial markets that would collapse without intervention.
Today’s action in the markets is confirming this with the dollar plunging to new lows and gold reaching a 28-year high, well on it’s way I believe to an all-time high in the not too distant future.
The Federal Reserve cut its key federal funds rate by one half a percentage point today.
Stocks soared on the news, but the dollar declined and gold increased. Some might view the unexpectedly large interest rate cut as a measure of just how serious the Fed thinks the housing crisis and the related credit crunch is getting.
In related news, oil hit a new high, more companies get hit by the subprime fallout, and foreclosures doubled since the same time last year.
Hovnanian, a large builder of homes, is slashing prices in an attempt to move stagnant inventory.
NEWARK, N.J. - Hovnanian Enterprises Inc., struggling like other home builders, is offering six-figure discounts on some of its properties this weekend as it tries to draw interest in a slumping market.
The sales blitz involves dropping prices more than 20 percent on some of its prime real estate.
The largest discounts are on the most expensive homes, including a three-bedroom condominium by the Hudson River in West New York, which has been reduced $240,000, or 22 percent, to $862,000 this weekend. A 25 percent discount is being offered on a two-bedroom home in Jackson Township, N.J., which lowers its price tag to $300,501.
This is not the kind of thing that people who just paid full price for a home want to see.
It’s great for buyers who have been waiting on the sidelines, but terrible for those who recently purchased. If you just paid $400,000 for a new house and the builder then cuts the price for similar homes to $300,000, you’ve just lost $100,000 in value.
The bad thing about such deflation is that it makes buyers wary of buying. They fear the same thing could happen to them if the builder is forced to cut prices again.
It was reported on NBC Nightly news that Hovnanian wants to sell 2,000 homes this weekend. It will be interesting to see if they succeeded.