About me

Gender	Male
Occupation	Entrepreneur
Location	Cape Town, South Africa
Introduction	When I reached the stage in my life where I wanted to buy a house, I realised the SA real price chart showed we were at the peak of a bubble that was as high as any that had gone before. I was nervous to buy and that was when CJ (which became CJ Says after certain spam attacks) was born and I alerted people that red lights were flashing. What no one knew was that we were in a once in a life time super-bubble, bigger than anything ever seen before, and the housing greed kept the market surging upwards in an unprecedented frenzy. Those of us in the know realised that the higher we went, the more painful the fall would be. Which is indeed what happened - in fact, the whole global financial system was almost brought down with it, and indeed, things still look extremely rocky. The collapse of this bubble could be the moment in history that is remembered as the beginning of the decline of the US empire. And the sad thing is, a whole generation of first time home buyers are now being penalised because of the greed of the last decade.
Interests	I like patterns, graphs, charts - I believe everything works in cycles and to a large extent, history repeats itself time and time again. As a sideline I use this to find tradable patterns in the stock market.
Favorite movies	cont... There was so much hype from the people with vested property interests, trying to endlessly ramp the market ever higher, that I felt obliged to counteract their lies with some hard facts and graphs. The website capetownbubble.blogspot was a kindred spirit I came across early on. I also posted on realestateweb.co.za until they closed down recently (2011). Many of the graphs I referred to over the years now appear at this great new blog - http://housepricesouthafrica.com/graphs/ and I often comment there, although I have nothing to do with it's creation. I am as keen as the next person to buy a house, but when I see that the real price (excluding inflation) is still double what it should be, I am obviously not going to buy now. Land also looks like it is as much as 8 times higher than it historically used to be in real terms. A 10 year bubble takes many years to crash. The US is showing the way as it has crashed nicely, but SA, which had the biggest housing bubble in the world, is dragging it's heals.
Favorite music	cont... Interest rates are at 30 year lows which is slowing the collapse. The same governments that allowed the bubble to happen are now keeping bond rates artificially low to stop the whole deck of cards from collapsing. And the people who were responsible with their money, who didn't get sucked into the property ponzi scheme, who saved their money, they are the ones who are being penalised. A sorry state of affairs when reckless gamblers are protected instead of being penalised. So when the people who caused this mess crawl out of their holes and start doing their property hype talk again, you can be sure CJ Says will have something to say to put them right. The UK real price chart is in a similar stage to the SA chart and this site is very active and informative - www.housepricecrash.co.uk
Favorite books	cont... I believe at this time (August 2011) that SA real house prices need to fall at least 50% in real terms. Maybe 22% nominally as we have quite high inflation compared to the rest of the world. New build houses will fall even further. It will be 4 years or more before we see a bottom I believe. I give my reasoning over at http://housepricesouthafrica.com/graphs/ There is some interesting baby boomer research that indicates property will be a non performer for the next few decades. Also, Martin Armstrong, an interesting character who the US government have locked up because he created a computer program that found extremely accurate global cycles, often so accurate that it predicted turning points to within a day, predicts that US property may bottom then go up for a few years and then drop to even further lows. People need to realise that the last decade was a freak. Those property wonder years are never going to return in our life time. They were so excessive that it will be a long time before the damage is repaired. We now need to let the cycle do what it needs to do. ie Return to the long term trend (in real terms) - overshoot below that - bounce back to the trend and then it will roughly follow inflation for many years to follow.