Any body notice the market over the past few days?

Seems like the days of people buying $500,000 homes with no money down and negative equity came with a price.

The housing market fueled a big part of our economy of the past few years. Such a big part, in fact, that over-enthusiastic bankers, builders, and developers have in short overbuilt in a good many markets, including Georgia, Florida, and Arizona.

Many of the major home builders, Toll Brothers, Pulte Homes, and Beazer homes are suffering and losing a good deal of their value in their stock. Once you hit a saturation point, you hit a cannibalization point, where you may have built several properties that are all competing for the same buyer. I overhead Talmadge talk about condos in PC that are standing unfinished.

Home prices have leveled off and are falling in some areas. On the east coast, below DC and above Orlando home prices are reasonably normalized. Above DC, the prices had risen so high, now they are starting to fall. When EduNeering wanted me to relocate to Princeton, NJ it was going to cost about $650,000 to have a house equivalent to what we have in Valdosta.

Now, wall street is worried. As an investment, mortgages are far more flexible than you think. A routine practice is for an institution to take a bunch of mortgages of borrowers with lower credit, split apart the principle and interest payments, and takes these pieces and combine them with other investments to form derivatives. Derivatives do not get a lot of press these days, but they are still around and still going strong.

So what does this mean for us? We may see St. Joe drop in price, for no other reason than they are real estate holdings company. Good ole Budweiser may rise in price because its viewed as a "defensive" stock, meaning that when people arent sure where the economy is headed, they buy stocks of companies that produce products people buy regardless of economic conditions.

So what do we do now?

Love to hear your thoughts.