Waiting for the Real Estate bubble to pop

MSN Money - Contrarian Chronicles: Interest rates won’t rise until it’s too late

Finally, for folks who believe you can't lose money in real estate, since "they're not making any more of it," or "there's not enough of it to go around," I would direct their attention to that little country known as Japan. While only about the size of California, it's got roughly half as many people as the United States. Even though Japan has less land to fight over, that hasn't stopped the price of its real estate from declining for 13 consecutive years. Since 1991, residential land prices have declined about 43%, and commercial prices about 67% -- the lowest levels since the government started tracking land prices in 1974. (I am indebted to Dennis Gartman of The Gartman Letter for those statistics, which come from Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.)