A Correct Bet Leveraged

By Ramesh Akkineni
from Whitney Tilson’s 2006 Wesco Annual Meeting Notes
It was quite logical for people to gamble that with interest rates going down, housing prices would go up. And if you really took advantage of the low interest rates and really laid it on and took on a lot of leverage, I think that was very clever and you could even argue it was totally sound. People did it big time and made enormous amounts of money – unbelievable amounts of money. The rest of us were really dumb. It was a very logical thing to do if you stop to think about it: as interest rates were sure to go down, the value of property was sure to go up. The rest of us were stupid. It looked risky, but really wasn’t. It was a pretty smart thing for these people to do.
Whether it’s smart to continue it now from our present level is a very interesting question. I would think no. There are many instances of collapse after liberal mortgage lending. England had a tremendous collapse maybe 10 or 15 years ago.
A combination of very extreme extra leverage in mortgage lending, combined with the leverage in consumer lending…

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