Housing: the last bubble

[joanna bujes]

At 10:26 AM 07/21/2002 -0400, Nathan wrote:
>Now- the real dangerous crisis (as someone posted from Stephen Roach) is the
>housing market-- if that starts to go down, all bets are off.  Given how
>that would kill consumer spending, that could really mean Depression time.

Not, if, when. It costs about a half a million dollars to buy a fixer upper 
in Berkeley these days. It costs about 750,000 to get something that has 
already been fixed up. A friend has just completed a two-month trial run of 
house shopping. Mind you, we're not talking about mansions here, just 
normal family homes.

Alan Ableson's current editorial in Barron's excoriates (sp?) Greenspan for 
feeding the bubble (knowing that it was a bubble, refusing to raise margin 
requirements) through the nineties and points to the fact that Greenspan is 
now feeding the last, housing, bubble by encouraging folks to borrow 
against THAT equity and just keep on shopping!

Joanna