Housing: the last bubble

joanna bujes joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com
Sun Jul 21 16:20:10 PDT 2002


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



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list