A little perspective never hurts. We just don’t get enough.

Here are two charts worth viewing. The first shows how housing can turn into a national phenomenon, but not an international one, sometimes fueled by a common language which breeds a common media. Call it the CNN factor. Real estate values in the US, Britain and Australia (and Canada) have flitted in and out of bubble territory since Nine Eleven, while in Germany and Japan, housing has been a bust. In fact adjusted for inflation, homeowners in both those countries have made absolutely nothing on their ‘investments’ for almost 40 years.

It’s also quite easy to see that if you plot a moving average and a trend line of each country’s market and make the assumption they will eventually return to the mean, that prices have a long, long way yet to fall.

Fodder if you are dumb enough at the moment to be thinking about a 5/35 strategy.

Now, to our fav metal. Gold of course had a bad week, shedding the most value in a month in the last few days. The reasons most often given were a new appetite for risk in the wake of the Dubai World mess (that could change again this week as a new bond defaults), and a resurgence in the US dollar.

Gold bugs claim the metal is money, or ‘private money’, which of course it is not. Gold is not a medium of exchange, which paper money is. That simply means you cannot exchange it widely for the necessities of life – gas, food, shelter or an iPhone. But as a commodity, it is a storehouse of wealth as is oil or corn, and subject to the same forces – with one addition. That’s human emotion, which makes gold more irrational, volatile and inherently more dangerous for average investors. That was shown in spades the last time gold hit an historic high, then spent 30 years trying to recover.

In any case, this chart should remind that it’s the fall of the US dollar, in which gold is denominated, more than an increase in the intrinsic value of the metal, which was behind the 2009 advance. If you happen to live in Euros or yen, the uptick in bullion was far less interesting than the dramatic rise in equity markets.