Warren Buffet on CNBC Squawk Box on CNBC Squawk Box on March 3, 2008
:
"And if a house has doubled in price, and somebody lends 95 percent of the price that's doubled in a couple of years, there's a good chance they're going to lose money�.. for a while people thought houses could do nothing but go up, so they paid no attention to any other factor..... the person who sold the house [during the bubble] got a bubble-type price�.. every time anybody tells about somebody losing a lot of money by selling a house [after the bubble burst], there's somebody else that's buying it at a more attractive price than they would've paid a year or two ago."
Wilbur Ross on CNBC Squawk Box on March 7, 2008
:
�I think the credit crunch is not only getting worse in the US but it is spreading overseas. I was in England about two weeks ago, and my take of the housing market there is that it is in at least as bad a shambles as what we have in the United States. They had an activity there called �build to let� where little people, not real realestate professionals, but average citizens were building houses, highly leveraged, on speck, with the idea of renting them out. And I don�t think that realestate is a very good game to play �Amateur Hour�. And it�s now coming back to haunt them. So I see the credit crunch spreading to England. Housing prices have been very badly hit in Ireland. Very badly hit in Spain. Even as far away as Australia. So I think �credit crunch� may be one of our big export products near term.� |
