It never rains, it pours. Hot on the heels of the Bradford and Bingley saga, we wake up today to the news that mortgage lending has hit a record low.

Don’t believe all the gloom and doom you read… The U.S. housing bust may be just about over. We should be darn close to the bottom… possibly within one year of it.

The Economist recently reported that “house prices are falling even faster than during the Great Depression”. The housing bubble kept inflating for far longer than most expected.

In 1993, a poor family in rural Nicaragua took me in. I didn’t know them. I met their teenage son, Alfonso, on the side of the road when I asked him for directions. His hospitality was incredible. We ended up eating dinner at their house that night… And Alfonso’s family took us in for days.

Have you ever been rock climbing? If you have, you’ll be familiar with that slightly panicked feeling you sometimes get on the way down. Your hands cling on, sweat seeping through the chalk on your fingers, as your foot probes the rock face below for a foothold.

U.S. home prices suffered their worst decline on record, skidding 1.7% in the first quarter, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) announced today (Thursday).

I’m going to show you a very important chart below. It’s one that shows one of the biggest drivers for higher gas prices.

US commercial property prices plunged in February, their steepest drop since records began almost 15 years ago, according to a report in the Financial Times.

The value of commercial buildings fell 1.03 per cent between January and February, the largest monthly decline since at least 1993, when the industry was just emerging from a deep slump.

Here’s a turn-up for the books: we have such a vast oversupply of houses in the UK that Gordon Brown is proposing to spend £200m to buy up some of the excess.

The U.S. economy is in a recession, and the over-leveraged U.S. consumer won’t be able to ride to the rescue as they have in the past. And I don’t expect the stimulus checks to help much either, as they are way too little too late.