After 15 years in Oz we missed the green stuff, mountains (real ones) , white stuff and recreational opportunities far more varied than Oz has to offer.

You have more. Ours are better looking.

Not in the US and maybe for a long time. The next GFC event will almost certainly hasten a change in the reserve currency from the US$ to a basket of currencies (incl the US$). That creates a huge problems for the US currency.

The US currency is seen as a commodity to facility global trade. The US can run deficits into the global system to supply the US$'s countries need to trade effectively. If the US$ is not needed then the trillions of US$ in the system become surplus and essentially worthless. You might get 10 cents on the dollar until the system rebalances … I'm not sure how it's going to work out but it certainly won't be good. Anybody holding US$ or assets in US$ will have a bad day.

If the US$comes under threat in this way then interest rates are likely to rise substantially (think mid 80's @ 22%) to mop up excess US$ liquidity.

Currently inflation is being misreported by the US government because if the true rate were published (in excess of 10%) then interest rates would have to rise substantially to contain inflation. There's no way they raise rates without going belly up.

It is very difficult to envisage any way in which a transition from US$ reserve status to a basket of currencies will play out. I can't see any way in which it will be good for investors. The upside is that the US economy would become more competitive by a significant margin. You might even see the US and China sort of change positions. China becomes a consumer and the US a manufacturer. God knows US manufacturing quality is streets ahead of the Chinese.

Interesting times ahead.

So you are suggesting we repeat the mistakes of the past for no gain.

Investor demand is only one component in the matrix. What is often missing is the influence of hot money looking for opportunity from international investors. There is wide scale abuse of the FIRB requirements by international investors and the the FIRB appears to have no interest in correcting the problem. Internationals tend to overpay for property and consequently can have a disproportionate affect on property pricing.

You have already acknowledged that in your first sentence that subsidies distort the market for little or no gain so why persist with a flawed strategy? So how about prospective first buyers learn some discipline and skills that will enable them to enter the market on a sound footing. The argument that first home buyers can't save for a deposit because prices rise too fast is frankly BS. What they can't do is save fast enough to buy a new 4 bedroom double garage with 60" plasma type property. If you can't get in at the level you want you lower your standards and buy what and where you can to get runs on the board. The more motivated buyers tend to buy reno jobs and work on developing their equity through this method then move on or use increased equity to leverage into another reno property and so on. This forum offers many strategies to get into and expand ones property portfolio.

And many aren't which goes to show that it's doable and that subsidies aren't as necessary as some like to make out. There are investors here who bought their first properties when they were 18 or younger and have since built million dollar portfolio's. FHOG weren't first and foremost in their investing strategy.

What you're looking for is the easy option – get in the door on someone else’s back.

Hey Ziv look at this. Now I know you're a fair way away from that nuclear wasteland they call Fukushima (as if you can eva be far enough away)

I thought you might be interested in some protection tips…

How to Help Protect Yourself from Fukushima Radiation

I thought the lead sumo jock strap could be a winner over there.. trendy huh?

<edited: moderator>

Blackstone impress me as fairly switched on cookies. They are pretty good at buying over leveraged businesses, leveraging them up some more (plus a bit of asset stripping on the side I suspect) then repackaging the whole deal a bit down the track and offloading to some dumb as chips super fund or other for exorbitant fees and profits. Unless they get their timing wrong (and I don't think they have at this stage) they'll unload or monitise everything they can before things go pear shaped.

I'm pretty sure these guys have seen the writing on the wall as have you and are positioning themselves to get out of the way of what's surly coming.

What always surprises me is the mutton heads who buy the overpriced junk they're selling. Then again fund managers get paid either way.

The writing on the wall..

The problem with property markets is that you have HF's mopping up capacity and consequently pushing up asset prices crushing yield. On top of that you have banks leveraging MREIT's to the moon on free FED money(Repo's) to buy MBS's. There have been several upsets that have seen banks dump MBS's to deleverage on MREITS when Repo rates tic'd up.

Things'll get very dodgy if (when) the market destabilises. A GFC like credit freeze will almost ceratinly see rates rise faster than banks can liquidate. That'll signal a potential collapse in property prices if the big guys decide to dump everything and run or the system simply stalls like the last event.

My guess is that the property market will get crushed between rising rates and HF's monetising rentals.

• MREITs are a growing part of the US shadow banking system. When they have to liquidate their holdings of MBS, of which the banks also held $1.3 trillion (as of end of March), they might take some banks down with them. How fast have they grown? Over the last three years, their holdings of MBS have nearly tripled to $460 billion. Fitch had warned about the issue at the end of June: "A repo funding disruption in which leveraged MBS investors need to liquidate some of their holdings could create negative knock-on effects for the $6.7 trillion agency MBS market more broadly." And banks would get hit.

The next event will look much like the GFC in 07/08. However, it will be broader deeper and more pronounced than the last. Any recovery could take decades if ever (in our lifetimes). The problem this time around is that exponential population growth is stripping resources faster than we can replenish them or find substitutes for them. Over the next 30 years energy supply will not meet demand by a significant amount based on current discovery rates verses depletion rates coupled with extraction/supply rates. Most western countries have been bumping up against energy supply limits for a decade or more.

The other obstacle is food production. We haven't progressed food production in line with population growth. The reality is that for all the tech breakthroughs we aren't keeping up and in fact may be boxing ourselves in with mono culture ag practices. It is estimated that the world needs to double food production within 25 years. We've never been able to do that and with an energy and fertiliser shortages on the horizon the outcomes does not look good.

One of the largest sources of protein for many populations is marine. In my lifetime I've personally seen anecdotal evidence of desertification of marine coastlines in NZ. Pollution, over fishing, climate etc are on track to cause a global collapse in marine ecosystems by 2050.

Many people choose to ignore these challenges and problems because they are either ignorant of the facts or simply choose to not see because the consequences are too dire to cope with emotionally. The ostrich syndrome. If I don't know about it, can't see it or simply ignore it it will somehow go away.

The reality is that these problems are coming and the cause is population nothing else.

These challenges are bad enough but while some wonder about asteroid impacts causing problems we have our own lethal problem brewing under our noses, nuclear waste. People should educate themselves about Fukushima to get their head around that problem. What most people don't realise is that Fukushima has the potential, if it goes wrong, to destroy virtually all life on this planet. Currently we a have waste storage pool (reactor  4) containing several hundred tonnes of spent fuel rods sitting in damaged cradles suspended under water in a building that has been partially destroyed by earthquake, tsunami and hydrogen gas explosions. This pool of waste fuel rods is suspended 3 floors up and is held in place by a series of jack studs to prevent the pool from collapsing and spreading spent fuel rods all over the place. Just this pool alone has the potential to release radioactive contamination equivalent to 14,000 Hiroshima's. That pool of fuel rods will start cooking off the second they are exposed to air. It will take down its neighboring reactor which has roughly the same amount of fuel rods. They will in turn start cooking off and then we have the remainder of the site that has literally another 1500+ tonnes of spent fuel rods stored on site.

One expert described the problem in fixing this as almost impossible. The fuel rods are stacked in cradles underwater and where positioned by computer controlled cranes that work to tolerances of a mm. Those cranes (30t) are currently sitting in the pools in a tangled mess with half the building collapse in on them. The expert described extracting these fuel rods for safe storage like pulling wet cigarettes out of a crushed packet without breaking them – good luck with that. So while everyone tries to figure out how to make Fukushima safe without destroying the world the rest pray that another earthquake won't finish the job off in the meantime.

If Fukushima goes off it's basically game over. It isn't stoppable. It would be so bad they're even talking about basically evacuating the northern hemisphere. Impossible I know but people will flee none the less. The estimates are that the southern hemisphere will last around 10 years before it too succumbs.

Fukushima aside we have the problem of another 400+ reactors around the world plus another 400 on the drawing boards that produce huge quantities of fuel waste that has to be contained in water pools to prevent them going off. We only have to do this for 100, 000 years. No problem I'm sure they're all stored in safe locations away from earthquakes, floods and highly skilled tech's watch over them day and night with upto date monitoring systems.

AU is likely to take the least damage and should recover faster than others due to much smaller debt load and economy that is at least partially supported by stuff others want.

As long as you keep your leverage below 60% and can take a 50% asset depreciation hit while still retaining positive cash flow you should be alright in even the worst of situations.

If your even close to negative gearing you're a goner.

It's pretty obvious where this is going… not too long now I'm thinking

Jeez Ziv he's been singing that song for a year or more… where ya been son?

The scary thing is your BOJ heros are starting to echo his opinion…