" There has never been a bust of this proportion"

[Capt Bringdown]

Shiller Says U.S. Home-Price Declines of 10% to 25% ‘Wouldn’t Surprise Me’ (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-09/shiller-says-u-s-home-price-declines-of-10-to-25-wouldn-t-surprise-me-.html)


Robert Shiller, the economist who co- founded the S&P/Case-Shiller index of U.S. home prices, said a further decline in property values of 10 percent to 25 percent in the next five years “wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

U.S. home prices plunged 33 percent in 20 cities through March from their 2006 peak, reaching their lowest level since 2003, according to a Case-Shiller report on May 31. The decline signaled a “double dip” as the index fell below its previous post-housing-bubble low set in April 2009. Prices more than doubled from 2000 to July 2006.

Forecasting home prices is impossible because there’s no historical precedent for the real estate bubble of the 2000s and the subsequent price drop, Shiller said.

“In real terms, there has never been a bust of this proportion,” he said. “Even in the Great Depression, home prices fell nominally approximately almost as much as they did recently. But that was with all prices falling. So real estate prices didn’t go down hardly at all during the Depression.”

[boutons_deux]

"For those who actually have jobs, there's another problem: average wage growth is way down. As Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute points out, in May 2007, before the Great Recession officially started, wages were, on average, rising at 3.8 percent annually. Last month, the annual growth was clocked at 1.8 percent"

http://images2.dailykos.com/i/user/6/snapshot_Nominal_wages_homepage.jpg

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/10/984005/-Job-growth-not-the-only-slowdown-for-American-workers-Annual-wage-growth-has-plunged?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos %29

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If inflation takes off, can we expect that wage growth with resume? GMAFB

In UCA, The Rich Get Richer, The Non-Rich Get Fucked.

And no politician has any plans, or even intention, to do anything about jobs or the widespread mortgage/housing disaster.

[Winehole23]

Prices have a ways to go before they even begin to approximate the historical mean, last I checked.

Are we getting close yet?

[boutons_deux]

"Prices have a ways to go before they even begin to approximate the historical mean"

a completely-bubble-popped 2011 historical mean would be what?

Looks to be getting close:

http://www.jparsons.net/housingbubble/united_states.png

http://www.jparsons.net/housingbubble/


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Case-shiller-index-values.jpg

different data, same curve:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/Median_and_Average_Sales_Prices_of_New_Homes_Sold_ in_the_US_1963-2010_Monthly.png/800px-Median_and_Average_Sales_Prices_of_New_Homes_Sold_ in_the_US_1963-2010_Monthly.png

[Agloco]

"Prices have a ways to go before they even begin to approximate the historical mean"

a completely-bubble-popped 2011 historical mean would be what?

Looks to be getting close:

http://www.jparsons.net/housingbubble/united_states.png

When looking at charts like this, is a linear fit appropriate? I mean, does this account for inflation adjustment, yeddah, yeddah.

I don't know, just asking.


Edit: Bah, helps if I actually read the legend on the graph.........

[boutons_deux]

I've seen these graphs going back to the 19th century.

Greenspan and the capitalists/banksters scammed the country with the biggest, maybe only residential housing bubble in American history, and got away with it.

America is so fucked and unfuckable. Human-Americans are renters, the capitalists are the landlords.

[boutons_deux]

Beginning of the double dip?

Dude! Where’s My Recovery?

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Screen-shot-2011-06-11-at-11.31.58-PM.png

Growth needs to exceed 3 per cent per annum to reduce unemployment—the rule of thumb known as Okun’s Law—and it needs to be substantially higher than this to make serious inroads into it. Instead, growth barely peeped its head above Okun’s level. It is now below it again, and trending down.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Screen-shot-2011-06-11-at-11.34.16-PM.png

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/06/steve-keen-dude-where%E2%80%99s-my-recovery.html

[Wild Cobra]

http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x262/Wild_Cobra/Politics/unemployment.jpg

[boutons_deux]

And NOBODY's even talking about the jobs problem (sooner or later leads to other problems) because the VRWC/Repugs have shifted the debate to the false problem of deficit, when the real problem is policy-driven revenue cuts and war spending (starving the beast).

[RandomGuy]

http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x262/Wild_Cobra/Politics/unemployment.jpg

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc. :nope

Logical fallacy number... I stopped counting.

Were your logic valid, we could play battling graphs all day long.

I would lead off with a ton of graphs showing the "results" of Hoover getting elected in 1929, that would be just as specious.

Wheee.

[boutons_deux]

The Swamp of Washington and the Morass of the Economy

Washington was built on a swamp. In the summer, temperatures can reach over 100 degrees -- as they did over the last few days when I made the rounds of Washington Democrats, repeatedly asking why no bold jobs plan is emerging.

Here's a sample of their responses:

"Dead in the water. We'll be lucky if we get votes to raise the debt ceiling without major spending cuts this year and next."

"Are you kidding? It's all budget deficit, budget deficit, budget deficit. Nobody's thinking about anything else."

"Republicans beat us up so bad over the first stimulus there's no way we're gonna try for a second."

"We got them [Republicans] cornered on Medicare. Now they want to change the subject to jobs. Forget it."

"No need. We'll see job growth in the second half of the year."

"The President doesn't want to put anything on the table he can't get through Congress."

And so it went. Not a shred of urgency.

This morning I was on ABC's This Week, debating jobs and the economy with Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. Shelby restated the standard Republican playbook of spending cuts and tax cuts (except for one instant when he inadvertently conceded America emerged from the Great Depression only when government spent big time mobilizing the nation for World War II).

But what struck me most was the similarity between Shelby's overall attitude and that of the Democrats I talked with -- a kind of shrug of the shoulders, a sense that it's really not all that bad out there, and that nothing can be done anyway. (In the green room, before going on, Shelby told me employment in northern Alabama was actually fairly good and the problem was near the coast.)

The recovery is stalling across the nation yet in the Washington swamp it's business as usual.

Americans are scared, with reason. We're in a vicious cycle in which lower wages and net job losses and high debt are causing consumers to cut their spending -- which is causing businesses to cut back on hiring and reduce pay. There's no way out of this morass without bold leadership from Washington to rekindle consumer demand.

If the Democrats remain silent, the vacuum will be filled by the Republican snake oil of federal spending cuts and cut taxes on big corporations and the wealthy. Democrats -- starting with the President -- must have the courage and conviction to tell the nation the recovery is stalling, and what must be done.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/post_2106_b_875686.html?view=print