再轉一個令人興奮的：RBA: House prices can't fall a 'dangerous idea'（ZT）

特別是null-pointer和其他左派分子。咱窮人也有盼頭了。

Chris Zappone

Reporter, Business Day

http://smh.domain.com.au/real-estate-news/rba-house-prices-cant-fall-a-dangerous-idea-20120724-22meg.html

The Reserve Bank says housing prices may fall further and believes it is risky to assume they won't.

"It is a very dangerous idea to think that dwelling prices cannot fall," RBA governor Glenn Stevens said in a speech today. "They can, and they have."

"We should never say a crash couldn't happen here, and the Reserve Bank continues to monitor property markets and the performance of mortgages quite closely," said Mr Stevens.

Home prices in Australia have fallen 5 to 10 per cent from their peak, compared with 15-20 per cent in the UK and 30 per cent in the US, according to the RBA.

Measured against incomes, home prices are now close to where they were in 2002, Mr Stevens said in a speech to The Anika Foundation Luncheon in Sydney.

But even as Mr Stevens conceded further falls are possible, he said there is little evidence that a plunge in Australian house prices, like that seen in the US, UK or Spain, is inevitable.

"It has to be said that the housing market bubble, if that's what it is, seems to be taking quite a long time to pop - if that's what it is going to do."

Capital city home prices have sunk 5.3 per cent in the year to May, according to RP Data, even as interest rates have been slashed by the RBA. Would-be buyers continue to remain on the sidelines with auction clearance rates - a forward indicator of demand - struggling to rise above the 60-per-cent mark in Sydney and Melbourne in recent weeks.

Decade low

One reason why the housing market hasn't fallen further is that repaying a mortgage is becoming less of a burden for many households.

Along with falling prices, loans are smaller, interest rates are lower and incomes continue to rise. As a result, the repayment on a new loan on a median-priced house as a share of average income is at its lowest point in a decade, the RBA governor said.

Mr Stevens also disputed the notion that home prices are unaffordable. International groups such as Demographia use numbers that show capital city home prices in Australia have a world-leading home price-to-income ratio near eight times, compared with three times, the level it considers "affordable."

While admitting that home prices relative to income are higher than 20 years ago, Mr Stevens said "the problem is that there is no particular basis to think that the price-to-income ratio 20 years ago was 'correct'."

"Are dwelling prices overvalued?" said Mr Stevens. "It's very hard to be definitive on that question."

Overseas critics

Mr Stevens comments followed years of speculation by critics that the level of home prices in Australia constituted a bubble, in the same vein as credit bubbles seen in the US and Europe in the years before the financial crisis.

In 2010, the US-based Centre for Economic and Policy Research co-director Dean Baker, one of the economists who forecast the financial crisis before 2007, said the Australian housing market looked like a bubble because rents didn't "remotely correspond" to house prices.

The Economist magazine reached a similar conclusion, as did US investment fund GMO manager Jeremy Grantham in 2010.

While discouraging explanations of future home price movements that relied on domestic factors solely, Mr Stevens today linked the increase in home prices to the global debt boom which was seen through the US, UK, and Europe since in the mid-1990s.

"As everyone knows, dwelling prices rose a great deal over the decade or more from 1995, and not just in Australia," he said. "This occurred globally."

The "widespread phenomenon...suggests that the global dwelling price dynamic had a lot to do with financial factors - and there is little doubt that finance for housing became more readily available."

The Anika Foundation Luncheon was supported by Australian Business Economists and Macquarie Bank. The speech, entitled "The Lucky Country" focused on whether Australia's relatively good economic performance in recent years is a function of "luck" or wise policy.