6 comments

  1. LeeAnne

    Maggie,

    Thank you for the link. I’m less than halfway through -will save it for later in my own little archive. For those interested in the state of news reporting its an invaluable exposition of trends and business models with lots of links –a real eye opener.

    The Kings Cross neighborhood web site is particularly interesting. Let a thousand neighborhood web sites bloom!

    Should I admit I didn’t know Murdoch’s SKY existed on the net (a conspiracy?).

  2. Rickstersherpa

    In Lieu of Yves, I will post a link. One is to Calculated Risk’s report on the Special Tarp IG report on that “Government risks reinflating the housing bubble” http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/01/tarp-inspector-general-government.html. This is not really a shocker since from the beginning of late 2007, when this started becoming a political issue, to the present moment, Professor Summers and Mr. Geithner and the whole political class have spoken about “supporting housing prices” as one of the prime objectives of their policy. It appears that a whole generation of mainstream economists (see John Taylor’s comments on Economist View), bankers, financial regulators, and politicians have completely internalized the mantra “U.S. housing prices only go up” that they are gobsmacked by collapse and view it as an aberration. When shown the Case-Schiller chart of the last 100 years of house prices and the ratio to the General price level, they just don’t see “the huge up followed by the down (but not all the way down yet), “bubble” at the end of that chart. They don’t compute that for the median income earners in the U.S., whose median income has been stagnant (and now is falling) for the last 20 years could only buy a median price home in the bubble years through “creative financing,” and now, once the tax credits and Fed purchases started coming out the system, the market will again start to dry up until prices fall to a level that the median income earner can afford when making a 20% down payment and paying a 6% mortgage, about 3 times median gross income.

    This has been the fundamental flaw in the Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats approach to this problem: their believe that housing price collapse, and not the bubble, was an aberration that can be reversed.


    Rickstersherpa

    1. LeeAnne

      These people have no social conscience. Anyone in the markets knows how all bubbles end. The people you list above know this. But they all profit from it: he ” …bankers, financial regulators, and politicians …” They are the insiders.

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