In 2009, the U.S. Congress passed and President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).  You may recall the phrase “shovel ready projects” or saw the big green signs along local freeways touting infrastructure work to be done locally. The initial price tag was about $787 billion.  There first object of ARRA was [...]

Bottom-pickers have smelly fingers. Ever since the first local home price declines of 2006, there have been groups calling the bottom. Realtors, mortgage brokers, home builders, and various economists crawl out of the woodwork each Spring to announce that home prices are about to start going up. Their logic is always flawed, their data too [...]

Interesting graph comparing Japanese home prices to the Case-Shiller index before and after the housing bubbles burst. Hat-tip Kevin Depew:

Wall St Journal, by way of Calculated Risk had some housing comments recently along the lines of markets “improving from the bottom up“. They referenced some data suggesting a surge in buying activity within lower price sectors of real estate in New York and New Jersey. They continued with analyst commentary suggesting that it was [...]

Many people assume that China is somehow immune from a housing crisis because buyers typically put down large down-payments. This is bass-ackwards. China is far more susceptible to economic catastrophe specifically because it is the people, not the banks, that will suffer the most. A culture of savings is watching it disappear. Combine this massive destruction [...]