Categories: Bubbles

Tata's Nano Home: Company behind world's cheapest car to sell $7,800 apartments

Posted by: Prashant Gopal on May 07

Tata, the Indian company that made worldwide headlines with its $2,000 Nano car, now plans to build 1,000 tiny apartments outside Mumbai that will sell for $7,800 to $13,400 each....

Robert Shiller (and me) on housing

Posted by: Dean Foust on November 14

A shameless plug here that I participated in a 30-minute segment on the "state of the housing market" on NPR's Talk of the Nation show yesterday, along with noted Yale...

This American Life, $1,000 bottles of Mortgage Bubbly

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on May 20

The public radio show This American Life had a great program on the housing bust on Sunday. It was called the Giant Pool of Money and it detailed how Wall...

Who caused the housing meltdown? She did.

Posted by: Dean Foust on March 07

Who caused the housing meltdown? Stephen Colbert, intrepid reporter that he is, has found the culprit. It's this little girl. Here's his evidence. Why didn't I think of this???...

How'd we get in this mess? Here's how...

Posted by: Dean Foust on December 10

All the headlines over the debt burdens that consumers are dragging around made me think of this old skit from Saturday Night Live featuring Steve Martin. In it, the...

Showing Mortgage Execs the Door

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on November 20

H&R Block CEO Mark Ernst resigned today, the latest casualty of the mortgage industry meltdown that's already claimed Citigroup's Charles Prince and Merril Lynch's Stanley O'Neal. How many more CEO...

Washington DC Bubble Redux

Posted by: Dean Foust on November 09

The thread that I started two years ago on Washington DC sparked the most heated -- and most active -- debate of any topic to date. Though the comments have...

Move Over, Dean, and Make Way for A More Plausible Suspect in the Housing Bubble

Posted by: Peter Coy on August 02

Dear Dean, While we journalists are often suspected of causing the housing bubble and bust, I just don't see how a bunch of scribblers and talkers could have such influence....

I confess: I caused the housing downturn

Posted by: Dean Foust on July 31

Go ahead, tell me. I can take it. Am I to blame for the downturn in the housing market? I mean "me" as in "we" as in "we" in the...

Could this happen again?

Posted by: Dean Foust on June 30

Fascinating newsreel piece from the 1930s about the housing downturn and subsequent recovery. I like the same scene: Without giving away the punchline, compare the size of the downpayment required...

The next housing bubble?

Posted by: Dean Foust on April 23

You think housing prices got out of control in Las Vegas and San Diego? Consider the escalation of real estate prices on Entropia Universe, a virtual world where one participant...

The Donald "trumped" by condo bubble

Posted by: Dean Foust on April 10

As I've traveled on business, it seemed that Donald Trump's mug was on billboards in every large city I visited. In most cases, the billboards were advertising some big real...

Is this what $700k buys you in Washington?

Posted by: Dean Foust on February 16

Tip of the cap to one of the posters on our popular "Washington D.C." thread (if you live in Washington, you owe it to yourself to check out the discourse...

Deflating Bubbles, and Tanking Markets

Posted by: Toddi Gutner on January 09

Okay, so let’s say our reader, who commented on my last entry, is right. Wes said that: "We will have a number of months (18?) where the numbers show close...

Maine bubble leaking...

Posted by: Toddi Gutner on January 05

While most real estate watchers are keeping their eyes peeled on the big metro areas like Boston, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, folks would be wise to pay attention to...

Talk about being leveraged to the eyeballs...

Posted by: Dean Foust on December 14

This article in one of the San Francisco newspapers talks about a single mother of three, who following a divorce, decided that investing in real estate would be her ticket...

Are the headlines ahead?

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on November 17

A headline on the front of today's Los Angeles Daily News caught my eye. "Housing sales finally slowing," it said. It almost sounded like relief. The information in the story...

A Less Curvaceous Yield Curve

Posted by: Peter Coy on November 01

What could kill the housing boom? David Rosenberg, the chief North American economist for Merrill Lynch, argues that the trigger could be a flattening of the yield curve. Here's what...

Greenspan's Legacy in Housing

Posted by: Peter Coy on October 24

Forget inflation, recessions, and stock market crashes. Hot Property aficionados want to know one thing about Alan Greenspan and one thing alone: What did he have to do with the...

What the Federal Reserve Is Seeing

Posted by: Peter Coy on October 20

Here's what the Federal Reserve had to say yesterday about the housing market in its Beige Book summary of economic conditions: Residential real estate activity remained generally strong, but reports...

Another Sign of a Housing Bubble?

Posted by: Peter Coy on October 17

Housing optimists like to talk about "unmet needs." As in: The housing boom will never end because there's a huge "unmet need" for more and bigger houses. You can find...

Goldman Sachs Economist on the Bubble

Posted by: Peter Coy on September 23

Just got off the phone with Jan Hatzius, a Goldman Sachs economist who has written extensively on the housing market. He gave me permission to post a research note that...

Housing Markets Are Stable ... Until They're Not

Posted by: Peter Coy on September 22

Three top economists made a splash on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page this past Monday with a piece headlined "Bubble Trouble? Not Likely." But the way I read the...

There is No Bubble

Posted by: Dean Foust on August 25

While most commentators these days insist there is a housing bubble, there's at least one economist, Jude Wanniski, who is willing to take the other side of the argument. For...

Speakes speaks

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on August 11

Countrywide Financial Corp. is the nation's largest mortgage lender, handling nearly one out of every six new mortgages in the country. So it's worth taking note when the company's in-house...

And all I got was this lousy Tshirt...

Posted by: Dean Foust on August 09

T-ShirtHumor.com now sells a cute T shirt (and poster and coffee mug) playing on the housing bubble. Worth a look. Buy one for your favorite real estate speculator......

Real estate and Recession

Posted by: Amey Stone on August 08

There is a whole class of economist that doesn't believe we are in the midst of a serious real estate bubble, but is nonetheless quite concerned about the health of...

Riskiest housing markets

Posted by: Dean Foust on August 01

The PMI Group, a California-based provider of mortgage insurance, recently published an interesting study that ranks the riskiest housing markets in the country ("riskiest" meaning which are the most at...

Flipping in Florida

Posted by: Dean Foust on July 27

The latest sign of the Apocalypse: In south Florida, where housing speculation is white hot, some entrepreneurs have unveiled a pair of Internet-based exchanges – USCONDEX.com and CondoFlip.com -- where...

Short Countrywide?

Posted by: Peter Coy on July 27

Let's say you fear housing prices are bound to fall but you still want to own. Is there any other way to protect yourself? Here's one unorthodox idea I got...

Trapped

Posted by: Dean Foust on July 27

I suspect there are a lot of homebuyers (particularly investors and speculators) who believe that even if they're buying in at the top of the market, they'll be able to...

Homeowners Less Worried About a Bubble

Posted by: Amey Stone on July 19

A new study sponsored by ING Direct came to the surprising conclusion that homeowners are less concerned about a housing bubble this year than they were last year. Of 1,000...

Housing Bubble? Most People Don't Think So

Posted by: Peter Coy on July 18

Bulls on the housing market like to say there can't possibly be a bubble because almost everyone thinks there's a bubble. According to this contrarian logic, if everyone thinks there's...

Are Red Hot markets cooling?

Posted by: Dean Foust on June 30

On surface, the latest report on national home sales was good: While sales of existing homes sales slowed in May (7.13 million vs. 7.18 million in April), they were still...