Yesterday, just for Halloween, blogger Charles Hugh Smith told us a scary story [1] about the similarities between the Japanese real estate bubble and the unfolding of the US housing market to now. Of particular interest is his first graph, showing Japanese land prices between 1980 and last year. This repeats figure 17 of the famous MSM article "The New Road to Serfdom", which was the cover story of "Harper’s Magazine for May 2006". Harper’s had some fun with the image, making it look like Mount Fuji.
This mountain image is powerful, and can help us see how some less fussy news sources are spinning the current housing numbers in ways that may well be deceptive.
