"History is a wonderful thing, if only it was true"
-Tolstoy

Friday, June 10, 2011

Housing ? hah

"What flavor of crisis are we having right now?
All in all, we are still trying to dig out from under all the debt that accumulated over the past decade.

The 10-year yield is now around 3 percent. What does that say about expectations for slow growth?
The bond yield to me is the market's assessment of what the growth rate is for nominal GDP on a year-over-year basis, and 3 percent is pretty pathetic.

We come to June with 9 percent unemployment. What portion of that is structural, and what is cyclical?
There's a structural component. There's still a lot of people who were employed in housing industries who just haven't moved on.

It seems the next hurdle for housing is straightening out the paperwork.
No, it's not. It's mold and mildew. You are right that there's all this paperwork. It takes forever to foreclose on a house, and it's not even clear if you've got the right papers. So the buyer might say, well, I'm not convinced that everything's legal here. And so houses are on the market that are owned by the banks, they're sort of in limbo, and they're starting to deteriorate in quality. It's a major problem.

When do we get back to normal with housing?
Look, it could be seven, it could be 10 years, all total."

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