June 22, 2011
It must be very hard to get information over at Fox on 15th Street. They still do not seem to have heard of the housing bubble. The Post noted the weak sales in existing homes for May reported yesterday, as well as the drop in prices, and told readers:
“The housing market is still struggling to recover from a historic slump, according to industry data released Tuesday.”
Of course it is not struggling to recover from a historic slump. It is correcting an unprecedented bubble. There run-up in nationwide house prices between 1996 and 2006 was a break with a hundred-year long trend over which nationwide house prices just kept even with the overall rate of inflation. Over this period, they outpaced the overall rate of inflation by more than 70 percent.
It was the collapse of this bubble that gave us the huge economic slump than the country now faces, but apparently the Post still hasn’t heard about the bubble. House prices have to fall another 8 percent or so to get back to their trend level. Rather than expecting a rebound, we should be expecting a further decline.
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