Seattle Bubble on Google News, NPR
Re: [seattlebubble.com] news suggest
Edit: Also, tomorrow morning on NPR's "Morning Edition" I believe they will be talking about the housing market, bailouts, and all that. I did an interview with the guy doing the segment, so there's a good chance I'll have a few sound bites on there.
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Edit: Also, tomorrow morning on NPR's "Morning Edition" I believe they will be talking about the housing market, bailouts, and all that. I did an interview with the guy doing the segment, so there's a good chance I'll have a few sound bites on there.
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Anyway, the P-I REP blog has been on Google News for quite some time, so it's nice to be included here finally as well.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89490052
As much as I am against a bail-out myself, I think the economist from UW made a good point. A major recession will hurt all of us, including renters. Frankly, I suspect we are going to see one of the deepest recessions in living memory, and there will be a lot of pain for all due to the economic contraction. Sure, it might be great to have housing prices decline, but if you are laid off those cheap homes are still out of your reach.
That said, I still think a bail-out is a bad idea, but not because it will prevent housing from becoming afordable. The problem with a bail-out is that it will prevent the economy from properly re-balancing itself and clearing out mal-investments. The last thing we need is further incentives for investments in real-estate rather than productive economic activity. Unfortunately, a bail-out will just convince everyone that real-estate is one of the best investment options there are: after all, the government has your back.
That's not the only problem. We would never be starring down the muzzle of such a bad recession if previous bailouts hadn't screwed up the market cycles. In 1998, they bailed out that one hedge fund (I forget the name), which allowed the dotcom bubble to thrive. If it had popped in 1998, it would have been a significantly smaller burst (perhaps half the size for the Nasdaq). So that would have been a relatively mild recession, and perhaps now (or in a few years) we'd be staring at another mild recession.
Instead, we bailed that thing out, built a stock bubble, bailed that out, built a real estate bubble, and now look at where we're heading. You cannot bail out a bubble with a smaller bubble, only with a larger bubble. So if we bail our way out of this bubble, we set ourselves up for a worst collapse in 2013-2014.
UGH!
If the world were "fair" people like you would become millionaires doing public good as opposed to the "suit and tie maggots" infesting Wall Street & banks....who provide zero value to the public good.
If the bail out and regulation hand in hand however would not happen, we would all be looking into more severe issues then just a 30% drop in prices from the peak. We would all be sitting on a brink of your money in your banks being devalued, no jobs to accomodate the population, and everyones value wiped out.
Unfortunately, I don't think that "better" regulation is the answer to preventing bubbles. The problem is that the further one gets from a the last bust the laxer regulation enforcement becomes. It is hard to justify strict regulatory structures, and supervision, when most of the policy makers (and voters) have never experienced severe economic trauma themselves.
We can throw up all the draconian regulations we want over the next few years, and appoint fire-breathing bureaucrats to run the watch-dog agencies, but give the economy another 70 years or so and it's a virtual certainty that the whole regulatory regime would have become dangerously lax. It just won't be possible for our great-great-grandkids to take the possibility of a depression seriously. They will be firmly convinced that they have "learned" how to avoid such calamities: until it hits them in the face.
If anything, regulation itself exacerbates major economic contractions. The regulatory system setup in the 1930s did a tremendous job of preventing the economy from over-heating, and facing significant busts, for many years. But it was this very success of "managing" the economy which bred the complacency that got us where we are now.
It is far better to have NO regulation, or implicit guarantees of bail-outs. If investors (and consumers) realized that there was no one around to bail them out in times of trouble, we would have much more prudent financial activity.
Or, to put it another way, it is better to allow the economy to face periodic crisis, and recessions, rather than try to "protect" everyone and wind up encouraging a massive depression.
I don't think that history has born this idea out. Otherwise, why was their a Dutch Tulip Bulb bubble? Look at this bubble. Do you honestly believe that any of the consumers were thinking "this is too much, but if it goes sour the feds will bail me out." Rather, they were thinking $$$.
Same with the builders, the bankers, the lenders, and the investors. Everybody did a little calculation in their head, where they thought the upside was $$$ and the downside was -$. Clearly, the upside was greater, but of course these people were all wrong.
I think whenever there is money to be made today at the expense of tomorrow, people will rush in. And that's why we regulate. We regulate pollution for the same reason, which costs some GDP, but we are all much better off with the regulation than without. Let's just face the facts. Unregulated capitalism only works sort of OK for society.
True, Dutch tulip investors were hoping to get rich. However, the causes behind their mania are eerily similar to our own housing bubble.
http://www.mises.org/story/2564
Wrong-headed monetary policy led to abnormally low interest rates (cheap credit, anyone?) and a lot of hot money looking for someplace to park. In 17th century Holland the appreciating asset of choice was tulip bulbs. In millenial America it is real-estate. In both cases, government economic policy led to encouraging mal-investments.
Agreed. And if you had suggested that we alleviate the Fed of their market maker role, I would have agreed with that too. I just don't agree that we can unregulate our way out of this mess. If anything, I think we need more regulators.