From today's WSJ:

When people fear for their future, they invest in gold; jewelry and coins can be sewn into clothes and smuggled out of the country. When people feel confident about the future, they buy real estate.

Guess which is happening in Iraq?

I'm not going to register to read the article, but I'm betting on real estate.

You don't need to register--it's at OpinionJournal. You may have to enter an email address, but it doesn't check to see if they're real.

Robert Musil made a post about this very thing. Strangely, the real estate prices in Syria also seem to be going up due to Iraqis fleeing the country.

The amazing thing is that our beloved MSM continues to tell us how bad things are in Iraq, and how bad our own economy is. I guess Iraqis aren't reading the NY Times, LA Times, or watcing the Big 3 network nightly news.

And Al Jazeera isn't convincing them that they will never get their country democratized.

I don't see much difference in Al Jazeera and NBC, CBS and ABC. (I just don't need translation for the latter 3.) They all hate the U.S., they all want the war ended NOW and they are all gonna go down in flames!!

We don't actually know that Iraq isn't buying more gold too. Still a rise in real estate without obvious signs of significant inflation seems a very good sign.

I suspect the increased oil revenues -- and the perhaps-surprising-to-the-Iraqis fact that the US isn't stealing the oil! -- has been a big boost to the economic picture and mindset there.