I wonder if the mid 2000s, will be remembered as the decade of sleazy realtors, mortgage brokers, and bankers..
It will be remembered as the decade when rich "educated" people with PhD's thought that lending hundreds of thousands of dollars to poor people with very poor credit histories was a fantastic investment.
That may be the true, but the politically correct version (with business people as the one and only culprits) will make the textbooks. I'm not a big believer in cycles, but the parallels between now and 20 years ago (S&L crisis, junk bonds, etc.) are almost uncanny.
Uneducated? I think if one don't have a basic math skills and even more important common cense you should not be allowed to buy a house. There should be a test if you can comprehend that if your salary 2000 per month you can not afford monthly payments of 2500.
Great article. First time the housing market goes down since the 1930's huh... ? Usually when a market goes up for a long and sustained period of time, it leads people to the wrong impression that the rules of the market somehow don't apply to this magical little market and that it never goes down [I've heard several professors state that land will always increase in value as time goes by]. In this such markets, once people wake up and see that prices in fact do go down, panic takes over and the crash is [for lack of a better word] spectacular.