Tag Archives: Housing Bubble

A housing warning: affordability, at long last, is approaching its housing bubble nadir If current price and mortgage trends hold, we are about 6 to 12 months away from matching the very worst housing affordability at the peak of the housing bubble. Let’s start with a comparison of existing home sales (blue, reported today for January), new home sales (gray), and mortgage rates for the past 16 months:  Note that the NAR doesn’t permit...

I've been reading Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World), that I bought at the ASSA Meeting in San Francisco. There is a wealth of data. One topic discussed here before was the expansion of credit in the 1920s, and the role of the housing market in the boom of the roaring 20s. Gordon says with respect to the housing market: “One reason homeownership rates soared in the 1920s...