The Dutch housing market

As I get more and more questions about the Dutch housing market (particularly from abroad) it seems a nice idea to write a post about it.
We all know the problems of the American housing market but what do we know about the Dutch?
I can hear you think, what's the significance of the Dutch market worldwide? Marginal indeed, but what I will try to make clear is that the significance to the Dutch economy as a whole is far greater than thought of at first sight.
We're going to look at the way this market has been organised and financed in the past and what probable changes are going to take place in the future.

With the knowledge that almost all houses in the Netherlands are bought with the use of a mortgage let's have a closer look on how this works.
Before the crisis of 2008 it was very common, for people living together, to get a mortgage based on two incomes. With a modest income in the Netherlands at € 32.500 this would make € 65.000.
With this € 65.000 it was possible to borrow up to 6 or more times the annual income. This has never been an official rule. The rules implemented a certain percentage of housing costs a month, but in the end it turned out to be even more than 6 times. 
Maybe it is unnecessary to say that when there was a change in the income negatively the problems immediately occurred. The problems though were not as big as they are today, because most houses were sold for a price higher than the mortgage.
Nowadays it's organised a bit different. Today the highest income is used in combination with an ever decreasing part of the second one. This does mostly result in a mortgage of 4,5 times the annual income.

Gold is money..NOT!

Across the internet we often are confronted with the following sentence: "Gold is money".
This is brought up as a reason for people to buy gold. There are numerous of people seriously thinking our next monetary system will use gold (and silver) as some kind of money.
Because these commodities today aren't used as money there should be a big, big price advantage for the clever guy to step in and buy these commodities.
As I also believe there are once in a lifetime opportunities here, it's not because of this money reason. This post should try to clarify the current situation. How do people come to this thought of gold is money?
Will it eventually make things functioning better than they are today, and is it even possible to happen?

For me to come to an answer at these questions I think it's important to define what is meant by the term "money". Ludwig von Mises describes it this way: Money is a medium of exchange. This is a view from the Austrian School. My take on this is a little different, but  instead of making this subject even more difficult let's stick to this definition. The next time I use the word money I hope we can agree on the fact that we mean the medium of exchange.

Gold-Silver Ratio

For more than a month now I've been able to succeed in not mentioning the S-word. But, al things come to an end. I'm talking about the gold-silver ratio.
Obviously there's still a great misconception relating to this ratio, so here's my challenge to make it as clear as possible.
To achieve my goal I'm not going to throw facts at you why gold is any different than silver. This hell of a job already has been done by FOFOA in this post. It couldn't be explained any better, so please read it if you haven't already done it before.
My purpose is to show that any comparison between these two precious metals is as logical as an eleven-city race in June.

In order to get a good result I would like to create an other comparison (or ratio if you like). Although I know it might seem strange on the first sight, I hope I can proof it isn't so strange at all.
So here is my own ratio.....the paint-pencils ratio.
This ratio simply shows us the amount of paint in the world related to the amount of pencils. Personally I think it's fair to put a ratio on this as they both are used by artists in various ways. It can show us whether the paint is expensive, or the pencils are compared to each other.