Financial Prophets Proving Wrong

Financial forecasters like US based Harry Dent have a lot to answer for.

Not only do they come out to our country, which has an entirely different economy and property market history and profile, and pronounce doom and tragedy, but they don’t even get it right in their own country.

US Home Prices data just released saw a significant acceleration for March, rising 0.7% in that month. This came on top of an upwardly revised February number of 0.5%. US House Prices are climbing impressively as has always been forecast here. This is a very stable and steadily advancing property market.

We have moved way beyond the Global Financial Crisis, yet people still act as if the same thing will happen again. Of course it will not. The world has changed. It’s moved on.

Asset prices are rising everywhere. From US houses to the Chinese project to build the second highest apartment tower in the southern hemisphere on the Gold Coast. I keep telling everyone the Gold coast is going to be Australia’s third largest city! Meanwhile the Chinese property market, the one the media and these not too smart American economists kept telling you was about to crash, is going from strength to strength with numbers like +8% and +15% for Beijing and Shanghai.

Stock markets are going up as expected, and so are house prices everywhere - including Australia.

Which is why the Harry Dents of the world are such bad news and so very damaging. They frighten people out of rising markets, keeping people poor and placing them well behind the smart money.

Imagine if people had listened to Dent and sold their home last year, and especially several years ago as he and his doomsayer colleagues were forecasting. Imagine if you had sold all your stocks at the bottom of the market at the start of the year. The wealth lost would be immense and personally very damaging to whole families.

All through these past seven years, which is how long ago the GFC finished, the smart money has been aggressively buying property and stocks consistently. That is how real wealth is built - Determined acquisition when everyone else is negative.

As sentiment turns more positive on the back of unmistakably stronger data which is now appearing everywhere, the bargains that have been available recently may begin to disappear.

My view hasn't changed. This is a great time to be buying!

Clifford Bennett International Economist