Word: reals
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...prices fall]. The ability to short is essential to an efficient market, otherwise there's nothing to stop zealots from pricing things abnormally high. If you buy one of these long securities, called UMM, it's like buying a house, except you don't have to go through the real estate agent, take possession of a property, maintain it, rent it out. But we also have the DMM, which is short housing. Markets like this will also create an infrastructure for products. For example, insurers could issue home-equity insurance and then hedge themselves by taking a position in this...
...want to know what's going on in the U.S. housing market, chances are you follow the Case-Shiller index. Robert Shiller, the Yale University economist who helped create the home-price gauge, was something of a pop economist even before the real estate meltdown-a book published in 2000 warning about the coming crash in stocks made him a rock star of the last bubble, too. His latest book, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters For Global Capitalism , was written with University of California, Berkeley economist George Akerlof. Shiller spoke with TIME...
...conspicuous fact with our [Case-Shiller] data is that prices are still falling, although at a somewhat lower rate. There is also some sign of pick-up in pending-home sales. But to me the dominant fact is that prices are still falling. We've never seen a real estate market turn on a dime. For the longer horizon, though, it's possible that we are picking up. The other thing that is striking is that home prices have come down a lot, so they're no longer very overpriced...
...This crisis was substantially caused by a failure to manage real estate risk. Notably, we got individual homeowners into a leveraged position typically with their entire life savings in real estate in one city, in one house. That's very risky. I have one proposal for continuous workout mortgages. Right now we think it's a great thing if banks will give struggling homeowners a workout. Why do we only want to come in after the fact? My vision for our future is that it should be planned for and priced into the initial mortgage. We could update mortgages...
...have memory that goes for generations. I was struck by an LA Times article that I saw from 1886, after the Los Angeles housing bubble. The writer said something like Californians have learned. Never again will we allow real estate speculation to go so far. And he was kind of right. I don't think California had another massive real estate bubble until the 1970s. After a hundred years, we're allowed to forget, right...