Atlast some comment - I was beginning to get lonely lol.
Perhaps I need to state my position here again:
I 100% agree with comments about Spain being a great place to live, lifestyle etc etc - I am afterall here and loving it too, the weather has been superb since I have been here last Autumn, and my family of little girls are loveing it too.
Let me be clear what I'm saying.
Firstly I'm trying to open people's eyes to what is happening in the wider world with banks and the money system, because its interesting and the real situation is not often written about, the gov. has a very real reason for hideing the truth from us all. However as well as being interesting to some people, not everyone I know, it actually does affect everyone, wether they like it or not. What happens in the US will affect all of us here, mostly in terms of inflation and our standard of living.
Secondly what is going on at the moment is not a standard thing in history. Yes recessions have come and gone, but this one coming is going to turn to a depression and the collapse of the dollar. Many currencies have collapsed in history, but never one that is the reserve currency of the world. There is going to be a lot of suffering as the world adjust to cleansing from decades of debt fueled consumption. The worst hit are going to be those people who are up to their eyeballs in debt, includeing those people who have leveraged themselves on property.
Eventually interest rates are going to be set by the free market, rather than by meddeling governments, as it should always have been. When this happens, rates are going to return to historic norms, but before they do they will have to go much much higher to cleanse the system. Don't expect them to return to 4% tho, historicasl norms are around 7-8%.
This adjustment is going to wipe out millions of people, and folks with property at home and a home abroad are going to be particularly vulnerable, btl is going to be toast.
The developed world has to get back to productive work, rather than just consumption. The US and UK economies are around 2/3rds consumption based and this is not sustainable as evidenced by their growing deficits - Spain having the worst in the world relative to GDP. Imagine if someone asked you what you did for a living and you said I mainly consume things, like tvs and household goods etc. Its ludicrous and history will have this period down as a time of madness.
The fact that it has been going on for years is because up til now the US for example as been able to borrow from the rest of the world, mainly Asia. However the rest of the world is now coming to realise that they are not going to get their money back, cos the Yanks have been depreciating their currency to try and inflate out of their mess.
China has a store of dollars = to around 1 trillion, thats a thousand billion dollars in return for all their productive exports which we all enjoy. Thanks to the Yanks devalueing their dollars, the Chinese have lost around 1/3 trillion dollars just in the last year.
Imagine if you lent somone money and they did that to you? How long are the world going to finance the US and UK at that rate? The answer is not long.
Anyway I digress, I have been trying to warn people about over inflated prices in Spain and the risks associated with borrowing money against such property.
The truth is that there are thousands of people trying to do the opposite. Fooling innocent punters ( who should know better, but don't) into purchaseing property here at prices that will ruin them. Just look across this very board at all the people that have been ripped off, with crappy deals, late construction etc etc the sad story continues. This very board contains a database of hundreds of 2 bed apartments, overpriced by about 50%, owned by desperate decent people just trying to get their money back. And yet at the same time there are people trying to sell more over priced rubbish to innocent people. As if enough damage has not already been done.
The simple fact is that property here is in a bubble of enormous proportions. Its in a bubble because naieve and greedy people came here in their droves, and bid property up to speculative highs based on interest rates unsustainably low and much too easy credit. Most people now accept this and that credit was too easy to obtain, but if you accept this then you must also accept the fact that this produced false prices which must return to more sensible levels, based on normal credit conditions and more realistic interest rates.
The real demand was not based on people coming here to live and enjoy Spain, as you and I do, but by speculation to make a quick buck. If you don't believe this tthen why are all these people now trying to sell, rather then live in their homes. Also why do property developers and shows always plug relentlessly the investment angle, promising X% returns a year, all financed by year round rentals lol. And if it was not investment, why have all the punters suddenly dissapeared as the market started to look weak?
I plan to buy a house some day, but why would I want to buy now. I can rent the same house for half as much, which just goes to show how overpriced stuff is. People keep saying but ist the quality of life etc thats important. But I say sure, what kind of quality of life are you going to have if you buy something that then falls in price by 50% and you need to sell say for illness or 100 other reasons you don't currently know. What quality of life will you have if you pay too much for a house and then have to work all hours just to pay for it, cos the payments are so high. People hunt around shops to save a few euros on the price of a kilo of tomatoes, but suddenly when it comes to the price of property they don't care that they overpaid 100k euros lol. get real if you over pay for veg your life is not going to suffer, if you overpay for a house it really will.
I can enjoy all the aspects of life here, sun, sangria etc without getting mugged buying an apartment of which there are millions without buyers. A very few billionaire property developers have got rich beyound beleif, at the expense of thousands of honest naive folks. Fortunately many of these developers are now going bust themselves, since their greed knew no end and they didn;t know when to quit.
To summarise I am actually trying to protect people and to get them to think very hard before buying here, not something many people did a lot of. To think that many people bought "their dream apartment" on the back of a weekend inspection trip makes me shudder.
To all those people who live here happily, please continue enjoying your lives and read this thread for interest only, and perhaps think about your own debt levels, because decades of consumer debt is about to bite alot of people. To be fair to me look back to the start of this thread and the date. It was long before the stockmarket crash, Northern Rock, crisis talks by government etc Trust me its going to get a lot worse.