As usual in Washington, it’s “Do as I say, not as I do.” While Ben Bernanke is talking up the U.S. economy, Congress and the IRS are scrambling to stop another real estate collapse.

Is the U.S. housing market truly at a turning point, as investors seem to increasingly believe? Or is this actually a false dawn, meaning that there are problems and pain ahead for those who turned bullish too soon?

With vacation season ending in the Northern Hemisphere, we’ll start to see analysis rooted in experience and common sense driving stock prices. Through much of the summer, trading has been dominated by “quant” funds that are prone to “garbage in, garbage out” decision systems. You can see it in the tick-by-tick movements and in Level 2 quotes. These quant funds typically use backward-looking data on the U.S. economy to drive trading decisions, rather than assess how the outlook for the global economy has changed in the wake of last fall’s panic.

A rise in existing home sales last month shows things are getting better in the U.S. housing market, but the still-dire unemployment situation and the looming possibility of a jobless recovery may halt the rally by the end of the year. That makes the extension of an $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers imperative.

Ten years ago, it would be hard to imagine a more stable investment than timber, or those Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) that bought millions of acres of harvestable trees.

Having last month addressed concerns about inflation by outlining a stimulus “exit strategy,” U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke may turn his attention to the growing threat posed by commercial real estate at the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) two-day meeting taking place tomorrow (Tuesday) and Wednesday.

I received a question on my recent article titled “The Golden Age of America” and I wanted to post my response for your benefit.  

According to one of the world’s biggest banks, 48% of U.S. mortgages will be underwater by 2011. Man… and the critics call us “doom and gloom”?

Just about every company that beat expectations recently did it by cutting costs and increasing margins. It may boost share price now, but it could create problems down the road.

Now that the subprime, low-income crowd has taken their lashings, there’s a new Great Recession victim — the faux rich.