housing bubble

House prices in the U.S., the U.K. and four other major economies will drop ``dramatically'' in the next few years, leading some of those nations to slip into recession, according to a report by the Economist magazine.
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The magazine advised home owners in the six countries identified as having a ``bubble'' to sell up and rent until prices drop. People considering buying a home should hold off until prices have fallen, the magazine said.

U.S. federal budget deficit could approach a record $500 billion this year

Gokhale said fixing the massive shortfall, assuming the government chooses not to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, will soon force the government to pick from a "menu of pain," in the words of economists Laurence Kotlikoff and Jeffrey Sachs, who in a recent opinion piece in the Boston Globe first reported the findings of the Gokhale-Smetters study. The options:

boost individual and corporate taxes 69 percent
raise payroll taxes 95 percent
cut non-Social Security and non-Medicare spending 56 percent
eliminate all other federal government spending