Uncomfortable answers to questions on Economy

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/19/business/economy/19econ.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087&em&en=c29054f685d998d6&ex=1217044800

by ranparas • 18 years ago

21 13 18 years ago

nytimes.com

tdavis• 18 years ago

At least to me, it seems this entire recession (or whatever you want to call it) is an entirely natural occurrence. When the average debt for a household becomes 120% of income, something is drastically wrong. From indiscriminate lending to sub-prime mortgages, it all makes me wonder, "Well, what did you think was going to happen?"

tx• 18 years ago

What I don't get is why aren't housing prices falling even further? In my recent memory (I moved to US in 2000) house prices rose by 200-400% and they haven't fallen nearly as much lately.

A decent houses/condos in all interesting US metro areas are still in $400K+ range, which is absolutely insane, considering median family incomes.

Even most financial planning books/sites will tell you that it's "normal" to spend about 30% of your after-tax income on housing. WTF? Since when it's been "normal"?

nostrademons• 18 years ago

Anchoring. It takes time for people's expectations to adjust to a new reality. Folks are still saying "Well, if I can't sell for $400K [or $1M in my neck of the woods], I'll just take my house off the market and wait for the market to turn around." This'll continue until they realize that they're paying more in taxes and mortgage payments than their house is likely to appreciate in the forseeable future.

A good leading indicator for home prices is home inventories, which are still at record levels (though they've seem to have stabilized for now). The inventory report is a measure of how many homes are nominally on the market but aren't selling because the price is too high - the price has to adjust downwards until inventories reach normal, frictional levels.

curiousgeorge• 18 years ago

The mortgage bailout is an effort to keep people in houses, even if they can't afford them. It keeps homes from going back on the market where competition would further lower the price level.

The Bush attempts to buy stock directly in the two Fannies are almost equally embarrassing, being a bailout of shareholders that in no way affects the viability of the business, which is guaranteed by the government anyway. Let them all go broke.

hugh• 18 years ago

Even most financial planning books/sites will tell you that it's "normal" to spend about 30% of your after-tax income on housing. WTF? Since when it's been "normal"?

30% of after-tax income doesn't sound unreasonable to me. Given that:

(a) in most areas there's more people than blocks of land in nice places, and

(b) living in a nice place makes a very significant difference to your quality of life

it makes sense that people are going to be willing to pay a significant fraction of their income in order to live in a nice place.

The only problem is the places where you can no longer buy a house on ~30% of the average local income. That's not sustainable.

bokonist• 18 years ago

The prices are actually only falling in areas where it's possible to build more houses. In those areas, the price of housing must eventually fall to the marginal cost of production. In areas where zoning laws and density make new construction very difficult ( Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, New York) housing prices remain very high. Houses have essentially become collectibles ( like paintings or baseball cards). Because you can't create more of them, the price holds up against an inflating dollar.

ars3• 18 years ago

One thing I'm wondering: where did the money go? Money is not destroyed (is it?) it just goes to someone else, so where did it all go?

troystribling3• 18 years ago

Money can be destroyed by unpaid debts. The past bubble originated from money creation by loans. Read Wikipedia article on fractional reserve banking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

ars3• 18 years ago

The money was not destroyed, the person who took out the loan has it. Maybe he spent it, so whoever he gave it to has it, but it was not destroyed.

Fractional reserve banking is a lovely canard that is trotted out constantly, but it is not the monster the internet makes it out to be. Don't believe popular logic just because it's repeated over and over.

Fractional reserver banking, at it's core, is a way of converting collateral into cash, without having to sell it so someone. No value was created. Money was created, but not value.

And writing that just helped me understand what happened: value (of houses) was destroyed, so the money value that went along with it vanished too.

fharper1961• 18 years ago

What this and other articles on the subject don't seem to explain very well, is why this has happened.

A 1973 article from Time concluded :

"Today, outside the mortgage field, U.S. usury laws are full of holes; business loans, car loans and charge accounts are almost always exempted. As borrowers have been discovering since the federal Truth in Lending law took effect in 1969, they pay as much as 20% on loans from finance companies and even 36% annual interest on mail-order loans. So long as such rates are permitted, usury laws are useless and should be scrapped." http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907860,00.h...

So guess what? People in government listened (or listened to the financial industries lobbyists...), and they did scrap the few remaining usury laws that were still effective.

25 years later we are seeing, in graphic detail, why all those usury laws weren't so useless after all.

Uncomfortable answers to questions on Economy

Related Stories