From Globe and Mail (Canada):
U.S. housing bubble has the potential to blow up real good
I don’t subscribe to the theory that because of a couple of benign recent U.S. housing statistics, there’s going to be the fabled “soft landing” and now is a good time to buy a house. I mean in the United States, of course, since Canada so far has neither the myriad variants of exotic mortgages that our American cousins are so fond of (though there are ominous signs of some pushing of the traditionally staid mortgage envelope up here), nor the perverse incentives of interest deductibility. (If you’re frugal and pay off your mortgage principal faster, your income taxes go up, so why not extract your equity instead and buy a TV the size of a Cineplex screen?)
No, I’m in the camp that thinks we’re only seeing the first leg down in what BMO Harris’s chief strategist Don Coxe refers to as a Triple Waterfall Event (see http://www.donaldcoxe.com/triple_b.html). The portents of that parlous occurrence are not to be found in the official stats, but rather, on the margins of the housing market.
Official statistics are so massaged and seasonally adjusted and weighted-averaged and smoothed that I often find them hard to believe. It seems like only yesterday (Dec. 12, 2005, actually) that the National Association of Realtors was predicting that the U.S. national median house price would rise about 6.1 per cent in 2006. After all, gushed NAR, over a full year, the national median price “has never declined since good record keeping began in 1968.”
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Now, I’m not saying this is going to happen — only that it could, and while bubbles are lots of fun when they are inflating at exponential growth rates, let’s hope we don’t have to find out just how ugly this one can be when it is deflating exponentially.