Good point The Germans have put up with a fair amount of pain recently in the name of the euro. If growth had been as slow in the US poeple would have been screaming for lower IR. Monetary stability does seem to be more prised in Germany.But they are not the whole Eurozone....Spain Italy Portugal Greece Ireland may all be calling for lower IR if Duplex is correct. We'll see what happens.
tyoung, sorry, my post of yesterday wasn't very clear.
What I was saying was that Interest rates are linked to many differing factors.
Money Supply...the more money, the lesss valuable it is, the more prices increas in nominal terms.
Money Velocity...the quicker money changes hands the more money can be manufactured into the system with the fractional reserve banking.
Inflation, directly related to interest rates....more money supply, then things cost more in nominal terms.
Now, interest rates are inversely related to the yields, ie the profits or returns made on an asset, be it a house, a loan, a bond etc.
So if inflation rises, then rates rise, if rates rise then yields drop, if yeilds drop then prices drop to come back into line with returns and so the cycle continues.
The more liquid the asset, the quicker this circle spins...so if rates rise then bond prices drop overnight. But with houses things take longer to turn full circle. With vested interest and taxations on liquidity (such as stamp duty, solictors costs (whihc in themselves are also responsible for losses in the way of taxation inefficiences) this circle turns even slower again....
Add in Sentiment and historical behaviour, esp with house prices, then this circle turns even slower, but it does turn.
TO further complicate matters, consider the chaos theory of markets. mr yank sells but miss yank buys at lower rates, now mr yanks drops his sentiment on his returns and miss yanks drops her sentiment on her prospective yeilds, they talk to each group of friends....they lower the expecations...akin to the adaptive expectation hypothesis, and expect lower....this in turn fuels furhter sentiment and so on....
now all these elements pull together to direct the market for any good...as housing has some many more factors in play than most makrets it's more compicated than most...but at the ned of the day it will all boil back to yeilds, be it daily value extraceted from rent or compounding retunrs in the form of capital apprecaition...
so, long term view is that rates will rise, yeilds will drop and then rise again as prices realign themselve with money supply and inflation will come back on track....
long winded but hopefully a bit clearer...
excuse spellings.