Late last year, the research and brokerage firm CLSA commissioned me to write a report on the Australian housing market. CLSA was founded 25 years ago by journalists who were dissatisfied with the quality of existing journalism in finance–which then, like today, was often more public relations than investigative journalism. The company dedicated itself to independent research, and that tradition has been maintained through ownership changes that now see it operating as a subsidiary of Credit Lyonnais SA.
I became aware of CLSA’s existence via the work of its banking research team in Australia, who published some very frank assessments of the Australian banks that stood out against the run of flatter patter that dominates their coverage in the Australian media (a recent instance of this independence is this interview of CLSA analyst Brian Johnson on ABC Lateline Business). With this prior knowledge of CLSA’s independence, I happily accepted their commission to write up my analysis of the Australian housing market. The report, titled “Hand of Gov: The housing bubble–fact or fiction?” was only available to some of CLSA’s clients. Now that the housing statistics are making this a very hot topic once more, CLSA have given me permission to post this report on my blog.
If you’d like a copy, click on this link or the image below. As noted in “Debtwatch: Still free, but…”, downloads are now only available to paying subscribers to Debtwatch–with payments starting at US$2 per year. Associates, Fellows or Partners of CfESI can download it from the CfESI website, where you’ll find it on the Research Page. Be sure to login to CfESI first.
The data in the report is up to date to September last year. If there’s sufficient interest–which I’ll gauge by the number of downloads–then I will produce an updated report, which will also contain additional information on the new metric I’ve developed recently, the Mortgage Credit Accelerator.