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Guest Again · Guest

Great article about the administration's tradeoff: help current or future owners? Someone needed to say this: helping current owners prop up their home values makes it less affordable for others to buy homes. The bias towards sellers hurts buyers:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/business/economy/06housing.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

admin

balor123 · Joined: 08 Mar 2008 Posts: 1204

Well not exactly. It's really seller biased like all the other articles out there. Anyone know what it takes to get an OpEd in the NYT? It would be GREAT if BostonBubble could get one in there, explaining the conundrum from the point of view of buyers.

admin · Posted: Mon Sep 06, 2010 2:38 pm GMT Post subject:

Guest · Posted: Mon Sep 06, 2010 3:08 pm GMT Post subject:

At last, the voice of reason prevails.

GenXer · Joined: 20 Feb 2009 Posts: 703

I'm not sure there is a problem. Despite what the government did, everything continues to unravel. It will take however long it will take, but something tells me, future generations will be able to buy houses, maybe not now - in 5 or 10 years. It took several key events to align to give us this type of a market. Had the interest rates stayed high during the 2000-2003 crash, we probably wouldn't have had this much of a bubble. So IF our economy recovers enough and interest rates rise, prices will continue to fall. There will always be meddling and politics involved, but nobody has ever been able to influence prices long term. Not directly anyway. One way to influence prices however is to change the market environment, again, indirectly. When proponents of tax and spend get kicked out hopefully within the next 2 years, the only way to stay in power for the newly elected officials would be to stop taxing and spending. This should have a profound effect on the housing bubble. So instead of writing an article to NY times, maybe we all should just quietly (or loudly) support the candidates which will make it happen. For example, right now there are several candidates running against Barney Frank - wouldn't that be a great thing to vote him out of office forever? And to replace him with somebody who's actually going to be accountable for what he or she does?

admin · Posted: Mon Sep 06, 2010 5:13 pm GMT Post subject:

GenXer · Joined: 20 Feb 2009 Posts: 703

Anybody elected right now will HAVE to do what the people are expecting, or else they will lose their seat in a heartbeat. Just watch Scott Brown. I bet he isn't getting re-elected. I could be wrong, but at least I'm not voting for him again, and I'll make sure that nobody I know does. The people in power right now think they will stay on forever if they disburse enough cash to buy up the electorate. This works up to a point. We are probably not at that point yet when the government can buy votes with handouts. Nobody knows how everything will play out, but if it plays out like it should - we will see a lot less spending by ALL.

admin · Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2010 1:03 pm GMT Post subject:

GenXer · Joined: 20 Feb 2009 Posts: 703

You are right - enough baloney can get one elected, and I think this will stay the same. However, the current administration has raised the bar, and it may be difficult to be elected on this type of platform again. One thing that may happen, however, is the overshoot - that is, the next candidate will try to out-save the others, thereby creating a new reality in which only the savers will get elected, at least for a while. And this is definitely going to be true as long as the economy is where it is. Of course, if we ever get out of this, more money will be spent, but somehow I don't see this happening any time soon. It may take years or even decades of saving and not spending to ever get out of our hole.