Flashback 2005: Margaret Hwang Smith and Gary Smith said "there is no bubble"

Margaret Hwang Smith and Gary Smith, economics professors at Pomona College in Claremont, California, argued in a paper titled "Bubble, Bubble, Where’s the Housing Bubble?" that "there is no bubble in the prices of single-family homes in 2005."

In a bubble, market prices are far above fundamental values calculated with reasonable assumptions about the future cash flow. By this definition, there is no bubble in the prices of single-family homes in 2005. ... The observation that real estate prices are higher than they used to be or higher than the values predicted by models using historical prices does not prove that current prices are above fundamental values. ... The relevant question, however, is not how much prices have increased in the past or how fast people expect them to increase in the future, but whether, at current prices, a house is still a fundamentally sound investment. Our answer is generally yes, if the owner plans to stay in the area for many years to come.

If housing was "still a fundamentally sound investment" near the peak of the market, then why is the federal government today trying to rescue homeowners from foreclosure? Why is the Smiths' home state of California in such an economic mess?

Congratulations, Margaret Hwang Smith and Gary Smith! I hereby award you the James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett Award for being completely unable to recognize an asset bubble.

Quote of the day

This quote from Dean Baker—one of the first economists to notice the housing bubble (about a year-and-a-half after I noticed it, but I digress)—actually comes from two weeks ago. I just found it and I like it, even if it is an exaggeration:

The Fed Is Responsible for 10.2 Percent Unemployment in the Same Way That Al Queda Was Responsible for September 11th

An elaboration:

There may well be an anti-elitist strain to the anger against the Fed and Bernanke, but serious people do not dispute their responsibility for the economic crisis. There was an enormous housing bubble that was easy for competent economists to recognize. It was inevitable that it would collapse and that its collapse would lead to a serious downturn. Bernanke and the Fed allowed the bubble to just continue to expand until it collapsed of its own weight instead of using the powers of the Fed to rein it in before it grew to dangerous levels. All of this is entirely clear to those who know the history.

Federal housing subsidies are insane

Federal housing subsidies are insane.

GDP revised downward

From The Wall Street Journal:

What last month had appeared to be third-quarter growth of 3.5% in gross domestic product turns out to have been a more modest 2.8%. Consumer spending was pared back to 2.9% from 3.4%. The cash-for-clunkers subsidy produced fewer new-vehicle purchases than first estimated. In short, we aren't getting much bang for our $787 billion stimulus bucks.

Cato on the housing crisis

The Cato Institute's view of the housing bubble and resulting financial crisis:

The housing bubble and its aftermath arose from market distortions created by the Federal Reserve, the government backing of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development and its Federal Housing Administration. Americans suffered through a severe recession in 2008 and 2009, a downturn unfortunately precipitated by perverse government policies.

Regarding bad decisions made by the private sector, the traditional remedy for severely mistaken investment policies was to shut and dismantle those firms making mistakes to stop the bleeding, to free their assets and personnel to go where they can add value, and to make room for firms with better entrepreneurial ideas. That sort of market restructuring should have been allowed to happen in the U.S. financial sector.

A financial market in which failed enterprises like Freddie Mac or AIG are never shut down is like an American Idol contest in which the poorest singers never go home. The closure of Lehman Brothers (and the near-closure of Merrill Lynch), by raising the interest rate that the market charges to highly leveraged investment banks, forced Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to change their business models drastically. The most effective and appropriate form of business regulation is regulation by profit and loss.

The long-term remedy for the severely mistaken government monetary and regulatory policies that have produced the current financial train wreck is similar. We need to identify and undo policies that distort housing and financial markets, and dismantle failed agencies and departments, such as HUD, whose missions require them to distort markets. We should be guided by recognizing the two chief errors that have been made. First, cheap-money policies by the Federal Reserve do not produce sustainable prosperity. Second, delivering mortgage subsidies by imposing affordable housing mandates on banks and by providing federal support to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds can backfire in a tragic way that damages the broader economy.

Almost one-quarter of mortgage borrowers are underwater

From The Wall Street Journal:

The proportion of U.S. homeowners who owe more on their mortgages than the properties are worth has swelled to about 23%, threatening prospects for a sustained housing recovery.

Nearly 10.7 million households had negative equity in their homes in the third quarter, according to First American CoreLogic, a real-estate information company based in Santa Ana, Calif.

These so-called underwater mortgages pose a roadblock to a housing recovery because the properties are more likely to fall into bank foreclosure and get dumped into an already saturated market. Economists from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. said Monday they didn't expect U.S. home prices to hit bottom until early 2011, citing the prospect of oversupply.

Existing home sales up 23.5% year-over-year

The month-over-month change was 10.1%:

Existing home sales surged in October to the highest level in more than 2-1/2 years, according to a real estate industry report issued Monday.

The National Association of Realtors reported that existing home sales rose 10.1% last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.1 million units, up from the downwardly revised rate of 5.54 million in September. ...

The gain was likely due to an influx of buyers looking to take advantage of an $8,000 tax credit that the Obama administration made available for qualified first-time home buyers, the report said.

The tax credit was scheduled to expire at the end of November, but it has been extended to April 30 and expanded to include more home buyers.

"Many buyers have been rushing to beat the deadline ... and similarly robust sales may be occurring in November," NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun said in a statement.
Make money in 2010: Your home

But such a spike means December and early 2010 will probably see a "measurable decline before another surge in spring and early summer," Yun said.

Adam York, economist at Wells Fargo, agreed that "it's really a story of the tax credit, and a payback is inevitable." ...

The median price of homes sold in October was $173,100, a 7.1% year-over-year drop. Distressed properties comprised 30% of the houses sold during the month.

Housing starts fell significantly in October

Month-over-month housing starts fell in October:

In a blow to the optimism that had surrounded the U.S. housing sector in recent months, housing starts fell a sharp 10.6% in October, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday.

New construction on housing units dropped to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 529,000, the lowest level since April. The 10.6% drop was the biggest percentage decline for starts since January.

Both single-family homes and multifamily units declined last month.

Prior to the October decline, housing starts have been flat for four straight months, on the heels of a big rebound earlier in the year from historic lows for the home-building industry.

As you know, I don't put much stock in month-over-month changes. However, I suspect October's decline was tax credit related. Since it was uncertain in October whether the homeowner tax credit would get renewed, this may give us an idea of what to expect when the tax credit finally goes away next year (hopefully).

Five myths about homeownership

Joseph Gyourko, chairman of the real estate department and the director of the Zell/Lurie Real Estate Center at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, lists five myths about home ownership:

1. Housing is a great long-term investment.
2. The homebuyer tax credit makes buying a house more affordable.
3. Homeownership is good for society because owners make better citizens.
4. It's safe to buy a house with a very low down payment.
5. Owning a home is cheaper than renting one because you save on rent.

For his explanation of why they are myths, click here. I don't necessarily agree with all of his conclusions.

When did the housing bubble begin?

The Wall Street Journal asks when the housing bubble began:

Why should we care when it all began? It’s politics. If the housing bubble began during the Clinton administration, it can be blamed on the Democrats and their efforts to expand homeownership to people who, in some cases, may not have been quite ready for it. If it began under George W. Bush, then it can be imputed to the Republicans’ love of deregulation.

Of course, as we all know, the causes of today’s mess are far more complicated than either of those hypotheses allow. But nuance rarely figures in the debates of our age.

Edward Pinto, a mortgage-industry consultant who was the chief credit officer at Fannie Mae in the late 1980s, argued in a WSJ op-ed essay Friday that “most agree that the housing bubble started in 1997.”

I asked Mr. Pinto why he chose 1997. He pointed to a chart of long-term home prices patched together by Robert Shiller, a Yale economist. The chart shows inflation-adjusted house prices starting to move up sharply in the late 1990s. ...

Tom Lawler, an independent economist who worked at Fannie Mae from 1984 to 2006, says few housing gurus think the bubble began as early as 1997. In his view, the bubble began around 2002. The collapse of the tech-stock bubble in the year 2000 prompted many people, searching for other types of investments, to focus on real estate.

I spotted the housing bubble in spring of 2001, so I think people who claim it began later than that are fools. Anybody who looks at Robert Shiller's graph of house prices can easily see that the uptrend in real housing prices began in 1997-1998. We were in clear bubble territory by the end of 2000. Rather than blaming it on politicians, the strongest argument coming from economists is that the bubble was caused by a global savings glut that began in the late 1990s.

Here's my graph of nominal and inflation-adjusted housing prices since 1970. Look for yourself. When do you think the housing bubble began? (Click on the graph to see the full-sized version.)

Update: I notice that the Edward Pinto article blames the housing bubble on the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). For Republicans who want to blame the bubble on the CRA and for Democrats who want to blame the bubble on bank deregulation, let me point out that the housing bubble was a global event. There was/is a simultaneous housing bubble in the United States, Australia, Britain, Ireland, and Spain, to name a few countries. The CRA does not explain why there was a bubble in Spain. Also, the November, 1999, passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act does not explain why real U.S. home prices began their ascent two years earlier.