Housing's Where the Hurt Is

If ever there was a buyer's market for future homeowners, you would think now would be it. Unfortunately, numbers show that few people are looking for a house right now.

There's plenty of news about the increasing number of foreclosures across the U.S., and how banks and brokerages are taking a beating thanks to all their bad debt. But what may have snuck under the radar as many people have their eye on home prices and foreclosures are sales figures.

Houses under contract to be sold, or homes on the market that actually are going to change hands, saw a brief jump in April. But the bottom fell out in May, with pending sales dropping 2.8% more than economists had expected.

I wrote several weeks ago that the housing market hadn't yet reached bottom. And while I don't like to toot my own horn, I think it's easy to see that I was right.

The problem here is that all those foreclosures have made banks gun-shy, and unwilling to lend to all but the most financially secure borrower. Even with the Fed announcing a plan to step in and protect potential homebuyers from sketchy lending practices, home values continue to drop. Nobody wants to pay for a new home that could be worth 5% or 10% less in just a few months.

Problems in the housing market and the related credit crisis would be bad enough if it wasn't for rampant inflation causing gas, corn and steel prices to shoot through the roof. And after the worst June since the Great Depression, it's hard to find a ray of sunshine on Wall Street these days.

Hard, but not impossible! All of my investment services are tailored to avoid the problems in the housing market and financial sector, and to capitalize on the high cost of commodities like energy and food. My Emerging Growth subscribers currently are enjoying returns of more than 90% from five different stocks – two of which we bought less than a year ago!

It's true that there are persistent problems in the current economic climate. But if you avoid trouble spots like the housing market and throw your money behind the sectors that are still going strong, you'll still enjoy huge profits. To find out which stocks are safe investments amid this current market turmoil, check out Emerging Growth today!