The impending drop in the National Average Wage..

In a global market place, our children are being rapidly displaced by Asian graduates who will work for a third the wages and have higher qualifications.

White collar Offshoring..
As the entire Garment Industry found out..You can't compete with workers who outnumber you four to one and who will work for a third of your wages!
Over the last 30 years, we have lost millions of jobs in the Textile, Garment and Auto industries. The mantra that they could all be retrained in more relevant industries was a fiction. Most of these folk never held a rewarding full-time job again.
Today, employment agencies are noticing an alarming out-flow of white-collar jobs to Asia. (mostly India) With the advent of broadband and "Log In" software, entire departments (accounts, programming, back-office) can be off-shored for a third the wages.
A typical 'board room' quote.. "With Offshoring, our productivity is up and the quality of the work has improved. Our wages and office space have halved. We can interact with our Indian staff as easily as if they were in the same room! We can even watch them type."

Most of the Fortune 500 companies have offshored parts of their R&D, IT and back office functions.
One large offshoring provider in India claims on its promotional site that "IBM currently employs around 75,000 employees in India."

Asian Universities produce over 10 million graduates every year! Most of them can speak English (their final year classes are conducted entirely in English). Their skills cater to the entire outsourcing market.  E.g. software programming, web design, engineering, accounts, law, architecture, statistics, graphics design, SEO, data entry, payroll, bookkeeping etc.
All these students are made aware that equivalent graduates in America expect 6 times the salary of Asian graduates. By seeking offshoring work, they can double their earnings and still charge a third of the USA salaries.

Trade Unions all over the western world are describing this rapidly growing offshoring trend as an impending disaster that will keep our unemployment high and force our average wages to slowly decline.
There are 'self-help' publications in the USA to assist those retrenched by offshoring - the common advice is to work from home, to halve your 'charge rate' expectations and join one of the many "Hire an IT Guy" co-operatives. They are reminded that smaller businesses are afraid of $25/hour Asians and will prefer a $35/hour local IT person.
"Halving your charge rate" is advice that flies in the face of the common belief that our average wage will forever increase (like housing prices would always increase?)

Any lowering of the average wage will collide badly with rising home mortgage costs..
Normally, the money lenders of the world are not interested in home mortgages. The wholesale return of less than 4% over 25 years is equivalent to throwing money away. The only reason 'big money' was interested in home mortgages was that they could be bundled into fancy speculation 'instruments'. While house prices were rising, these instruments could be traded for enormous profits because they were based on 'Bricks and Mortar'. Mortgage providers were able to get almost unlimited international funding for around 1% interest! It's no wonder the housing bubble inflated so fast.
Now that these schemes are becoming illegal and house prices are stagnant, no one will be providing house mortgages for less than the 9% they can get from ANY OTHER investment.

News Items..

14-Apr-2011. A readers comment from MoneyManagement.com (in response to a House price article)
"Our IT company has noticed a massive drop in the cost of contract programmers in the last 12 months. Last year, the average was $80 an hour - it is now $40. The pressure is coming from "Off-shoring" and the million "English proficient" graduates PER MONTH produced by Asia. Most of these graduates are lining up for western IT and back-office jobs. All of our colleagues are reporting a similar drop in 'expected wages'.
90% of our (Australian) workers are NOT connected to mining and will soon be affected by lower wages - this factor alone will make the average house totally unaffordable! Once the Baby-Boomers notice this end to 'rising house prices' they will all try to unload their investment houses at the same time! And that will be a disaster!