In case you missed it Washington Mutual, a savings and loan with over $300billion in assets, was taken over by the FDIC. This is certainly a stark contrast to what we were hearing from some of the Realtors in the Deep Creek area back in May when the crisis was over and there were nothing but clear skies on the horizon. I believe "well and improving daily" was the phrase used to describe the local market by another agent. If you happened to see the August 2008 average sales price decline in the Garrett County market compared to August 2007 and believe that this is somehow related to the value of your own home you might disagree with that as well. Even a real estate agent can't find a way to put enough lipstick on that pig to cover up the fact that things are not well and improving daily.
In May, at the time of the linked posting above, I questioned, on this blogger's own site, whether this was good advice to be giving and subsequently questioned whether this posting was a violation of copyright laws since as you notice has been copied directly from the Wall Street Journal. Those posts were blocked and/or removed from the other site, but through this feed I was able to retrieve at least one of those comments which was approved by the moderator (see quoted text below). As many long-time readers already know the censoring of these comments also led to the creation of this blog.
"Jim Cramer was a hedge fund guy from Goldman Sachs, a firm which by most accounts has a significantly better reputation than Morgan Stanley, and he goes on TV every evening showing just how un-credible his resume makes him to predict the future. If you've ever tuned into his show Mad Money and followed even a handful of his suggestions you know exactly what I mean.
And let me ask you this, if these Wall Street firms and hedge fund guys know so much about the housing market why are they all writing down billions of dollars in losses related to subprime mortgages right now?
There's another guy out there who likes to give his opinion on things every year at his annual meeting which is often referred to as Woodstock for Capitalists. He's made a rather large fortune by buying at the bottom and being right about things like this. He also happens to be the richest man in the world so his record of being "right" about things kind of speaks for itself. Do you have any idea what he said about the credit crisis just in the last week? Or what he has said about the housing market? Or the warnings he was freely giving to folks like you and I in 2005 and 2006 when he said there was "a lot of dumb money out there in housing"?
You can make a lot of people seem credible but few earn it with results in my opinion."
If you didn't notice in my reply to this blogger I was talking about Warren Buffett who is once again in the news this week for his savy investment in Goldman Sachs and just sort of has a knack for being right. As I implied above you don't get to be the richest man in the world (or second right now) without some understanding of how the world works. Or as the UBS analyst quoted in the Goldman Sachs link said, "Warren Buffett is the ultimate stamp of approval." Of course the blogger's reply was that sometimes free advice is the worst advice, basically trying to tell me that he knows more than Warren Buffett because he is a real estate professional. I laughed. I really did.
"You should hire a professional and take their advice. The worst advice is often free advice." - Deep Creek Real Estate Blogger, May 2008
After seeing so much misleading information out there urging consumers to risk their own future so that someone else could profit I felt compelled to create this website and offer an alternative to what I felt was a constant stream of bad or misleading information. Today, much less misinformation is finding its way online in Garrett County, so in that respect this blog has been a far greater success than I initally imagined. Thank you all for continuing to keep tabs on what is posted here and for sharing your own thoughts as well.
Don't forget to check back to Dan's Deep Creek Blog for future updates.
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