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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (15854)	3/23/2007 12:57:12 PM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218186

Hong Kong The Peak the most expensive lot on earth. And check this out: Apt sold by Cheung Kong real estate: US$ 45.511/m2. Penthouse for 123,2 million HK dollar (US$ 15,77 million), broke the record of US$ 38.977/m2 reached with an apt in Bluewater in 1997. It has 357m2 and private swimming pool.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (15854)	3/23/2007 1:43:08 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 218186

But there is still a net gain from buying and renting a house to a tenant, albeit with barely Happy Meal returns. <the house that earns not enough is not worth what the market believes, and will drop in valuation when financial gravite gets done with it. > Also, in NZ, house price gains are tax free, even for property investors, though the tax department is thinking of deeming negative returns on houses at the time of purchase as ipso facto evidence that the main purpose of buying the house was to get capital gains, in which case those gains would be taxable. Rented houses with mortgages usually lose money, but have enjoyed large capital gains when sold. And, what's more, the interest on the mortgage is deductible from other income. So, a local yokel considering buying a house or paying rent is competing with people who get their mortgage tax deductible, but they can't deduct their mortgage against their income if they are living in it themselves. It's tough to buy a house in NZ now. But if they don't buy a house they have to pay high taxes on their income, then pay rent with the remainder. A traditional escape hatch was to build one's own house, and not pay tax on one's own labour [though that is done by almost nobody these days]. But the government has now made it illegal to build your own house. Which is an interesting law. They could make it illegal to grow one's own food too. Remember that financial gravity is operating on mass-less particles called $. Within a black hole said mass-less particles are confined, but outside the event horizon, things are different. Governments can, and do, pixelate vast numbers of new $ which causes the inflationary universe to continue its financial relativity theory expansion in unending acceleration. Governments these days have the very happy duality of Made in China/discounted in India, combined with the vast productivity boom of cyberspace, not to mention the fantastic never-in-history economies of scale of 6 billion people specializing in this, that and the other. One person can invent something and all the rest can copy/paste it and use it without having to dig another mine or build another factory. The unit cost of inventing something is near zero. So, prices can stay steady or fall, while governments enjoy vast profits of control by way of diluting their fake currencies. But that game is coming to an end. The mugs holding the $ will lose their savings. But there is quite a way to go before that happens [I guess]. Meanwhile, as always, my rule of thumb is to NOT hold any fiat currency run by governments. I did break that rule for a few years recently due to tax investigation, which cost me substantial opportunity cost, though fortunately the currency was not destroyed in that time [merely devalued by half against Q, G and other measures]. Mqurice