The Incline Village Real Estate market is going strong and is alive and well.  Over 10,000,000 in closed escrows in the last week.  If we were not in at least in a stable market, I would be surprised.  There are some very well located and priced property in Lake Tahoe right now.   Inventory and Incline Village luxury Listings are being sold at a good clip.

Read on. 

Tim Lampe, Realtor, Incline Village Nevada

 

Weekly Commentary

 

The reliable economists—who are predicting neither doom and gloom nor a rapid upturn for the economy—are nonetheless pushing the time they expect the economy to have turned around further into the future. Michael Zoller, of Moody’s Analytics, recently suggested, for example:

 

“Even though housing demand will pick up, gains will be only marginal for several months. It will take until mid-2011, when the national recovery really begins to pick up steam, for sales to accelerate. By then, a strengthening job market should boost demand, and credit should have thawed enough to facilitate buying.”

 

So the economy is continuing to improve—very slowly—and it seems to be improving at an even slower rate than economists were recently suggesting it was. This is a gentle way of saying that it is nearly stuck in the mud, but not sinking.

 

But the markets are likely to get stirred by the Federal Reserve’s announcement of the terms of its program of buying up Treasury securities—the QE2, or quantitative easing plan, part 2. We will have the impression of movement in the markets—the stock market indices are likely to rise (if the Fed’s plan is ambitious enough) or fall  (if investors are disappointed by the Fed’s conservative approach to QE2).

 

What would define such a conservative approach? Committing too little money and buying up Treasury securities too slowly. Of course, this is a very subjective judgment on the part of investors, and it could change within a day. But the bets are currently on the Fed announcing a rather mild program of purchases. Where the first phase of quantitative easing involved a promise of over a trillion dollars to be spent relatively quickly, this phase will likely involve a few hundred billion dollars to be doled out rather slowly. The Fed will likely try to avoid frightening the markets into a mild panic with another massive infusion of cash.

 

With as much confusion as now exists in the markets, though, it is difficult to imagine the Fed pleasing everyone with its new QE2. Instead, it should not surprise us greatly if today’s announcement (assuming there is one) disappoints investors and sends stock market indices lower. But with such a lack of certainty about anything in these markets, it’s likely that the market indices will return fairly swiftly to where they were before the announcement…and the effects of QE2, whatever exactly they may be, will play themselves out slowly.

 

The markets, therefore, may look frenetic in the next week or so, but the underlying economy will remain as stuck and inscrutable as it was before the Fed’s announcement was made. It’s a time, in other words, to stay calm and let the Chicken Littles have their moment in the sun.