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Comment by philk | Hacker News Reader

There's probably a good chance that house prices will continue to increase, simply because whoever is in government can't afford the the economy to tank in the short term.

I imagine these subsidies and handouts will continue until the government lacks the ability to positively influence house prices any further, at which point we'll have a much bigger crash.

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In the UK's last recession in the early nineties house prices crashed two years after the stock markets crashed. When the stock market crashed the government used low interest rate to boost the economy. This had the effect of keeping mortgages avoidable. However when the economy recovered interest rates had to be put up because of inflation. The resultant increase in the cost of mortgage repayments along with high unemployment, a lagging indicator, resulted in high repossession rates and the property crash.

This is Peter Schiff's prediction.

The financial crisis becomes a currency crisis when the politicians keep trying to pump up a false boom by printing money until the rest of the world wakes up to the loss of value in the US dollar leading to massive inflation.

I'd say the differences between the two are quite slender, Peter Schiff is merely less optimistic[1] about what will happen politically.

[1] Being less optimistic about what will happen politically is probably a very smart thing. Politicians are not incented on the long term performance of their countries.

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