Algunas cosas que dicen de nosotros en otros países

Nuestros averiados motores, construcción y turismo:

Exotic bargains are the hottest property deals under the sun
http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=1159412004
"Many of the most popular destinations enjoy wonderful settings, are steeped in history and have summers comparable with anywhere in the Spanish costas. "People are attracted by the landscape and the cultural aspects and the fact that the prices are very impressive," said Mr Davies, who knows one investor who has bought an entire island off the Croatian coast for residential development. "If you took an attractive, ancient city like Dubrovnik and compared it to, say, Venice then you would find the prices are way, way lower."

The vogue for what would once be thought of as "unfashionable" destinations is based on value for money, good weather and often stunning and unspoilt locations, according to Charles Weston-Baker, the International Residential Director for the estate agents FPD Savills.

"Spain has gone very quiet with us in the past few months or so, but interest in places like Croatia and Bulgaria is now very high," he said. "There is a boom factor where people come to a place because they think it’s exciting and different and new and people will continue to look at these markets because the prices are so attractive."

Bulgaria is a classic example of a previously little-known destination being touted in the travel and property businesses as "the new Spain"."

http://www.howestreet.com/story.php?ArticleId=688
"*** A chart on page 27 of this week's Economist shows what the Fed has wrought. Faced with a slowing economy in 2001, it did the same thing the Japanese central bank had done following the Plaza Accords in 1985: It cut rates sharply. What followed in Japan in the late '80s was a spectacular bubble in shares and property. What followed America's big rate cuts of 2001-2002 was "the first global property bubble in history," says the Economist. Australia, Britain, China, France, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain and South Africa have all seen big increases in real estate prices.
In America, the ratio of house prices to income was stable for the quarter of a century leading to 2000. But in the last four years, it has skyrocketed, leading householders to make the biggest mistake of their financial lives - believing themselves rich, they have gone deep into debt. The big question before us is who will pay for that big mistake - the borrower, or the lender? More¡z7=this...tomorrow..."

Unos que han probado su "medicina":
http://www.sundayherald.com/45354
The foolish things that remind me of socialism
Iain Macwhirter can hear the ghosts of socialists past laughing over the latest pension report
WHEN Tony Blair got up last week in Poland and started arguing for a greatly enhanced state pension, I swear I could hear a rusty cackle. It was from the ghost of Barbara Castle, the late Labour minister, who fought the Labour establishment for years to get the state pension raised and linked to earnings. She was accused of being an old Labour relic who wanted to take us back to the days of state socialism.
Well, come back socialism, all is forgiven. I’m not sure that the political classes realise how significant last week’s Pensions Commission report was for the debate about welfare. Suddenly, everyone accepts that it was wrong to have expected the private sector to provide security in retirement. It was like the “Apology” spoof in Private Eye.
Adair Turner, chairman of the government-appointed Pensions Commission, wishes it to be known that HM government had been living in a “fool’s paradise”. Well, it takes one to know one. I don’t recall Turner, a former head of the Confederation of British Industry, warning in the 1980s of the consequences of phasing out the state pension.
Pensions remain the biggest single item of welfare spending outside health – 6% of gross domestic product. There is a £57 billion shortfall and 12 million people are not saving enough for their retirement. But the pensions crisis isn’t just about feckless young people living for today. People are behaving entirely rationally in refusing to hand their precious savings to the financial services industry. To paraphrase John Kerry, I would rather take financial advice from Tony Soprano than from some of those commission-driven “independent” advisers who sold us endowment mortgages, with(out)-profit pensions, worthless ISAs, PEPs and all the other savings “vehicles” which crashed. Most people would have been better gambling – which possibly explains why the government wants to set up casinos in every high street. Is blackjack the new welfare?
The only institution capable of providing ordinary people’s financial security in the long term is the state. Much of the private sector is, quite naturally, interested in short-term profits, not long-term security. Small savers should never have been betting their futures on the stock market in the first place. That is for risk-takers who know what they are doing. And don’t take on trust Tony Blair’s assertion that higher pensions can be paid by axing disability benefits. They tried that once before and it led to wheelchair demonstrators hurling red paint at the gates of Number 10.
This could be the beginning of a reappraisal of the anti-state, pro-market ideas which have dominated welfare reform for two decades. It’s been a hard lesson, but one which may have to be re-learned elsewhere – like housing. In a few years another commission chairman will no doubt be announcing that we had been living in a fool’s paradise thinking that the private sector could provide mass housing for people on low incomes. At the moment, the government is desperately trying to get the private sector to build cheap and affordable homes – but one look at the property pages shows the problem. Private developers don’t build cheap affordable homes; they build only “luxury apartments”. Edinburgh is awash with two-bedroom flats for £175,000-£200,000. A lot of use that is to public sector workers on £15,000 a year.

The government has tried to use the housing association movement to create a kind of surrogate social provision by arranging a marriage with dodgy private finance initiative projects. But the policy is nowhere near meeting the scale of the problem, even in Glasgow where the government wrote off the council’s £1bn housing debt. As the housing crisis deepens, there will be increasingly bitter recriminations over the policy of selling-off council houses which has, over the past 20 years, stripped councils of their best and most valuable properties, leaving the state holding only the dross: high-maintenance high-rises and sink estates. Another fool’s paradise.
The housing shortage, reinforced by the loss of confidence in financial services, has led to a bubble in house prices, which makes the dotcom boom of the 1990s look rational. If trends continue, a modest semi will soon cost around £1m in London and £500,000 in Scotland. Great news for developers, but not for the rest of us.
And there are still some on the right who argue for the private sector to take over health and education. Yet, the reality is that, as with houses and pensions, the market is unable to deliver for ordinary people on modest incomes. The private sector is great at running places like Eton and well-heeled selective schools in Edinburgh, but only a handful of people can pay the fees. As for health, if the government handed hospitals over to the private sector, the first thing the new managers would do is close half of them. The recent hospital cuts campaigns show how difficult that would be; people love their local NHS hospitals, even when they are obsolete and a risk to health.
So, all the talk about the end of social democracy seems to have been premature. Here we are in the new millennium revisiting a lot of the old arguments about the role of the state, and finding that social provision is winning them. One of the reasons the Tories are so marginalised politically is because they have been on the wrong side of this argument. People aren’t stupid. They know that it was the Tories who originally cut the pensions link with earnings in the 1980s, which led to Britain having the lowest state pension in the industrialised world. The Tories also wanted an insurance-based health service. But look at America, where 45 million people are without health care because they cannot afford the premiums. The US system costs twice as much to run as the NHS and leaves a quarter of the population on the streets.
And after pensions and housing, I wonder what will be the next market shibboleth to be challenged? Well, my bet is transport. For all the talk of a new Virgin-ised deal, the rail system is getting worse. Decades of under-investment and privatisation have left us with a system which is dangerous, unreliable and a brake on the economy. European countries, like Spain, have bullet trains, publicly funded, which whisk people from the regions to the centre in a few hours. It should take no more than three hours to get from Glasgow to London – try doing it in less than five. The last time I travelled between Glasgow and Edinburgh it took nearly an hour and cost me nearly £9. Nine pounds for what should be a 30-minute commute!
No doubt another commission will advise us soon that it was a fool’s paradise to think that a private rail monopoly would be any more efficient than a state one. When BR was privatised by the Conservatives, the first thing managers did was enrich themselves, the second was to start siphoning state subsidies to their new private shareholders to keep the share price up – and their own share options.
Railtrack is already part-privatised since the Department of Transport took over two years ago. But we are going to have to go beyond crisis management and plan a sensible and stable state sector. Too often the state steps in after someone else has escaped with the cash. There needs to be coherent and strategic thinking; a new role for the state. We needn’t c

LA HORA DE LOS ESCÁNDALOS INMOBILIARIOS
Redaccion de lacartadelabolsa.com En Madrid, a 18 de Octubre de 2004.
http://www.lacartadelabolsa.com/frmValores.aspx?tipo=0
Los mejores analistas han revisado de manera drástica sus expectativas y recomendaciones sobre el sector inmobiliaro a la luz de los escándalos que han comenzado a aflorar en Alemania y que tienen visos de continuar en aquellos países con mayor influencia del sector en el entramado económico. España figura en la primera posición.

En urbanizaciones de lujo de la periferia de Madrid hay compañías que han decidido reconstruir bloques de viviendas unifamiliares que apenas han sido habitadas un año antes que salir en los medios, con denuncias de timos y malas artes a la hora de promover, gestionar y edificar. Por ejemplo, en Torrelodones, la zona norte de Madrid (Calle Alcalá) y barriadas fantasmagóricas como San Chinarro o Las Tablas.

Alemania da la voz de alarma

El regulador del mercado alemán (BaFin) abrió hace unos días una investigación acerca de lo que se ha calificado ya como el mayor escándalo por soborno del sector inmobiliario del país. El caso afecta a 40 de las principales compañías de Alemania, y en él se hallan implicados desde directores de fondos, banqueros o arquitectos hasta agentes inmobiliarios y abogados. Todos ellos forman parte, supuestamente, de una amplia red que pagó o recibió durante muchos años sobornos por valor de millones de euros, según la fiscalía de Frankfurt, que investiga el caso.

Filial de Deka

BaFin señaló que la filial inmobiliaria de Deka ha sido requerida para que dé explicaciones acerca de un amplio volumen de documentación relativo al caso que se investiga. Michael Koch, jefe de la unidad inmobiliaria de Deka, fue despedido hace dos semanas, tras ser destapadas las irregularidades en su trabajo. Koch es uno de los investigados por la fiscalía.

El diario alemán Handelsblatt ha informado de que las numerosas investigaciones de la fiscalía contra la red de corrupción en el ámbito bancario e inmobiliario de Frankfurt han sorprendido a todo el sector. Algunas fuentes del área inmobiliaria no han tardado en calificar el escándalo de 'terremoto' y afirman que ahora 'se empieza a hacer tabla rasa'.

Al mismo tiempo, se prevé que los casos investigados actualmente desencadenen nuevas crisis. Resulta para muchos sorprendente que 'los altos niveles de dirección empresarial de algunos de los grandes implicados estén enmarañados en el pago de sobornos', explican fuentes del sector inmobiliario.

Bancos y sobornos

Tras las declaraciones de algunos testigos, la justicia alemana quiere ampliar a otras entidades el marco de su acción, hasta ahora limitada principalmente a la filial inmobiliaria del Deutsche Bank, DB Real Estate, y contra Deka Inmobilien, la filial inmobiliaria del Deka Bank, propiedad de las cajas de ahorro. 'Ahora se han añadido más empresas, personas y objetos' a la investigación, dijo el fiscal Wolfgang Schaupensteiner al rotativo Handelsblatt.

Una red de directores de fondos, banqueros, agentes inmobiliarios, arquitectos y abogados pagó o recibió durante años millones de euros en sobornos. Las sospechas se despertaron tras abrirse el caso de un directivo de la filial de gestión de bienes de inversión de Deutsche Bank, DB Real Estate, que fue condenado el pasado mes de febrero a seis años de cárcel por gestión desleal y corrupción en cientos de operaciones. En un proceso continuado de corrupción, este banquero recibió entre 1998 y 2002, en 900 casos, sobornos y regalos por la entrega de contratos de servicios y reparación a ocho empresas con los que se embolsó un millón de euros.

El asunto llevó a la fiscalía a sospechar que se trataba de una espiral de corrupción más amplia y a investigar a otro directivo de la misma compañía por haber aceptado sobornos de un arquitecto a cambio de un contrato.

Sobornos a mansalva

Pero la investigación va más allá de la filial inmobiliaria de