fiscal policy

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It’s The Demand, Stupid

Things are not looking very good. When we have luminaries such as Greenspan and Rubin agreeing that the economy is weak, but that it will get through this minor lull in good shape, we have to worry. Neither of them has much credibility any more, so I take their unanimity on the positive outlook as a bad sign: the economy must be getting weaker.

In any case the data seems to suggest we have hit a tough patch. How tough is all we are debating.

The problem is that I don’t think there’s any way to tell exactly where this slide will end up. It is easy to make the case that GDP could continue to drop back into negative territory. It is also easy to argue that we will pull put of the dive before we hit the ground. My own view is that the evidence suggests a rocky second half with very low growth, but growth nonetheless. This is small comfort to the unemployed: it would be no surprise at all were unemployment to creep up as the swoon continues.

It is remarkable how quickly the discussion has turned to towards trying to size up the decline. Only a few months ago those of us who warned of a tough road ahead were being called unduly pessimistic. After all profits were rebounding, manufacturing was on the up, productivity was rising, and even housing had a semblance of life. Only profits remain healthy. Everything else has hit the proverbial bump in the road.

If you recall my view of 2010 was conditioned by the oddity or imbalance of the spurt in activity that generated all that hope. There was a genuine rebound from the depths of 2007/2008, especially later last and early this year. My issue was with the froth over and above that base rebound. A big inventory cycle reversal and the benefits of the stimulus, neither of which were permanent features of the ongoing economy, made it very difficult to determine just how robust the recovery was.

We are now finding out.

Which brings us to the question of what policy should be going forward.

The main line of attack should be supportive. Of that there is no doubt. Now is far too early to start any tightening. In fact, while I have argued against tightening throughout the past few months, that position is even more important now.

The Fed acknowledged as much yesterday with its begrudging approach to the money supply. As I predicted, the Fed basically avoided making any move in either direction, it stayed pat. It accomplished this by announcing that it would reinvest the proceeds of any maturities in its portfolio back into more investments. This means that it is not reducing its level of support for the economy. Nor is it adding anything.

Meanwhile the war amongst various policy camps rages on.

There are those who argue we should reduce or simply get rid of the stimulus since it has not achieved a total reversal of the crisis. This is, of course, nonsense. I agree that the stimulus failed to turn the unemployment situation around. But that was entirely predictable. It was too small to begin with. What the stimulus achieved was a far more limited goal: it stopped us falling into depression. So far anyway. The notion that we should look to investment activity and business to lead the way is totally without credibility. Yet this is the alternative being pressed by those who opposed the stimulus. Their line of attack is that we should reduce regulation and other ‘encumbrances’ on business. We should reduce the uncertainty in the business environment. We should subsidize investment. We should throw tax breaks to businesses. And, most of all, we should get rid of any silly notions of government interference in the ‘natural’ workings of the economy. Once this is all done, the sun will rise again, the birds will sing and we will emerge into a re-run of the good old days. Oh and there will be plenty of jobs in this rediscovered capitalist nirvana.

This sort of reasoning is the time honored approach adopted by all right of center thinkers. It can be summed up as: ‘get government out of the way and we’ll be fine’.

The problem I have with this is that all the evidence contradicts it.

Profits are strong. Companies have cash to spend. Interest rates are very low, which means that borrowing is cheap, and that even marginal investments will make a profit. Project hurdle rates are minimal. The economy is awash with cash – if it isn’t why are people concerned about the inflationary impact of the money supply?

Yet despite all this, business is still retrenching or standing still. The investment environment is strong. Why aren’t we seeing a surge of construction, development or expansion?

It’s the demand stupid!

Demand is weak.

That reduces the prospect for sales and so offsets the low cost of capital. This weak sales outlook cripples business expectations. And as any Keynesian will tell you: the most volatile component of the economy is business investment based upon those expectations. Until demand picks up even ridiculously low interest rates and the total elimination of regulation will not be sufficient to spur investment.

Which also undermines the parallel argument we hear from the same analysts that all that government debt implied by the stimulus soaks up the available savings and so ‘crowds out’ private investors from the credit markets. This is specious for the same reasoning. We are suffering from excess savings not insufficient savings. There has been a remarkable collapse in business investment. So there is no demand for capital coming from that quarter. In any case profits have recovered, so businesses are generating capital from internal cash flows. They don’t need, necessarily, to borrow. That represents a problem for the capital markets: where does the cash all go, if not into private investment? Into government. All that is happening at the moment is that the government is borrowing instead of the private sector, and spending, instead of the private sector, because the private sector has no intention of doing so.

Were the government deficits crowding out the private sector we should be seeing interest rates rising in response to the capital squeeze. But they are falling, not rising. If the prospect of government debt inundating the market was as awful as the deficit hawks tell us it is, those fears would be translated into higher rates, not lower rates.

The point is simple: all the signs are that the credit market fears continued decline more than it fears the bloating of government debt. This makes perfect sense when we look at the cost of lost wealth from recession/depression versus the cost of debt accumulation. The cost of carrying debt is far less than the cost of all that lost wealth from our failure to reignite the economy. The tradeoff is simple and the credit market is voting with its feet for more stimulus and more debt. Despite all the bleak words flowing from the denizens of the market. Plus, once we get GDP rising at reasonable rates we can run deficits for long periods and still lighten the debt load. This is because of basic math: as long as the increase in GDP outpaces the increase in debt, the debt load and its cost as a percentage of GDP goes down.

The goal has to be getting GDP going at decent rates. Not managing the debt downwards.

To put this in perspective: the rate on inflation proofed government five year bonds fell below zero this week. Think about that. There are sufficient investors, with enough cash, who are so concerned about the economy’s prospects that they will pay the government to keep their cash safe rather than look for an opportunity to invest it at higher rates. That’s what a negative rate implies.In other words business expectations are so bleak that the government could borrow almost endlessly at almost zero cost and still not absorb all the money looking for a safe home.

There is a savings glut.

We are in a liquidity trap.

The only exit is through more expansive government activity.

There is only one target for policy:

It’s the demand stupid!

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The Fed And Deflation: Are We There Yet?

Who knows?

Most likely nothing but issue a statement designed to let us know that they are still vigilant.

The problem is that the Fed is now highly divided between the fiscal hawks, and the newly energized deflation worriers. Under normal circumstances the Fed airs its differences around the table and not in public, but as the economy stalls – and there is no doubt it has turned down – a much more open argument has broken out.

And the stakes are extraordinarily high.

In many ways we have had an oddly asymmetric recession and pseudo recovery. We are now suffering from an all time record number of long term unemployed. As a percentage of all unemployed, those out of work for 26 weeks or longer is now almost twice its previous post-war record. That’s an astonishing level, and one that explains the enormous cost of the unemployment relief programs throughout the crisis. Any attempt to understand the Federal budget deficit must include an acknowledgement that much of the swing deeper into the red has been directly a result of unemployment relief payments. Normally this far into a recovery those payments would be shrinking rapidly and thus reducing the deficit. This time any reduction is more due to workers falling off the unemployment rolls because they have exhausted their support rather than having found work.

This stubborn refusal of unemployment to drop has re-opened a lively debate about the nature of the labor market. There are those who argue that the problem remains lack of final demand – I am in that camp – and there are those who suggest that we are experiencing an unusual level of ‘structural’ inflexibility in the market. The structuralists argue that we have a very large number of workers whose skills are inappropriate for what jobs the economy is generating, and thus they are unemployable rather than simply unemployed. I have pointed out in the past that this structural argument should be supported in the data by sectoral lumpiness: there should be some industries with very high rates of unemployment and others with little unemployment. The lumpiness results from the oversupply in the declining industries and the undersupply in the newer or emerging industries. Obviously, so this argument goes, not all skills in the declining industries are transferrable, so some workers find themselves unsuited to the kinds of jobs that are available. And with abundant labor supplies there is no or very little incentive for firms to hire unsuitable workers and then train them. Hence the long term unemployment problem.

While the structural argument may have some truth to it, in my mind it fails to explain the enormous level of long term unemployment we now have. Besides the sectoral data doesn’t have the kind of lumpiness in it that I think should be there to validate the argument.

A far better explanation for our ills is that final demand is just too weak. Yes it has perked up somewhat, but we are still suffering from a lack of demand sufficient to get us moving again.

And it seems to be getting worse again.

Plus, as I have argued here before, there are worrying signs that we are slipping into a Japan style deflation. That can only make matters worse. Much worse.

It is in this context that the Fed is now riven through. Long gone is any semblance of unanimity with respect to policy. Behind the scenes the staff is now more worried about deflation than inflation, but at the top of the house there are still hard line deficit hawks peddling the bond market crunch and imminent inflation threat theories. Bernanke himself seems to be in the deflation fears camp, or at least he ought to be based upon his academic research, but he has to balance the two factions.

Policy freeze is a likely outcome, pending more data.

I suspect one thing is certain though: there will be no tightening any time soon.

The war inside the Fed mirrors the war being played out in economics generally. And that war is eerily reminiscent of the 1930’s, when almost exactly the same arguments were being made.

Lest you think that the 1930’s were simply a case of Keynes versus the rest, let me draw your attention to a paper written by Irving Fisher, a giant of early 1900’s economic theorizing, in 1933. Entitled “The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions” its policy analysis is strikingly relevant to today’s problems and is very Keynesian at the same time.

The most notable part of the Fisher paper is his suggestion that it is the combination of a debt driven collapse, as in the case of an asset price bubble driven by borrowing, along with a subsequent bout of deflation that inevitably causes depressions. Unless the government steps in to bolster demand. Looking at Fisher’s paper today I am struck by how prescient it seems. It also fits well with Minsky’s analysis of financial instability being the root cause of crises. There can be no more vicious threat to our wellbeing than the combination of a banking/debt crisis followed by a steady downward spiral into deflation: debtors can never catch up with their debts and are thus driven to keep on liquidating assets to pay off creditors. This drives asset prices even lower, which means that the next round of asset liquidation yields less. And so on. In Fisher’s phrase: “The more debtors pay, the more they owe”. Since deflation means that cash gains in value in real terms, and since steady liquidation of assets reduces the value of assets with respect to cash, debtors can never catch up. They are doomed to end up in default, which undermines the banks and causes further panic.

While we are not yet in the cold grip of such a deflationary cycle, its potential presence should be enough to cause the Fed to act to head off the problem.

Anyone who is arguing against an anti-deflationary policy is most likely doing so on the basis of an ideological stance rather than an economic theoretical stance. Such a division along ideology rather than economic theory are exactly what Michael Kalecki spoke about in his 1943 paper “Political Aspects of Full Employment”.

Kalecki and others argued that perpetual government deficits are an essential feature of any economy running at full employment, and that any argument to reduce of eliminate such deficits was more driven by ideological than economic factors. Kalecki, unlike Fisher, seems outdated in light of the subsequent history, but there remains a kernel of truth in his position: those who are arguing for deficit reduction are almost always on the right in politics and pro-business rather than pro-worker. Such people do not fear radical crises since it strips workers of bargaining power and opens up opportunities to reduce wages relative to profits.

Lest you all gasp at the implied ‘class’ struggle nature of that argument allow me to point out a simple fact:

Profits are strong. Even in this crisis, firms have been able to protect earnings and avoid widespread bankruptcies. Indeed, despite the headline counter examples like GM, this cycle has been very benign for most businesses. They have stripped down their workforces and maintained payouts to investors. Cost cutting has protected business from the extent of the damage suffered by households. And this is not new. As I have described before, the Bush administration saw the same phenomenon: jobs were hammered, but profits rose.

It is this dichotomy, where some parts of the economy are doing well even in the depths of crisis, while others are being crushed, that gives Kalecki a glimmer of relevance. There is a clear political bent to the economic argument. We have long passed the point where the policies that helped the economy had no political ramifications, and thus little political controversy.

It will be interesting to see how the Fed reacts. My bet is that nothing much will be done. Things will have to be worse before the political gridlock breaks in the face of greater crisis.

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Deflation Express?

“It is hard to see a light at the end of the tunnel for housing. Lower rates are not spurring activity because the light may be from a deflationary train.”

Thus ends an article on the Federal Reserve Board’s holdings of mortgage backed securities in today’s Financial Times.

I hate to keep harping on this topic, but I see far too many articles cluttering up good media space talking about inflation and the impact of the huge government debt now piling up.

Yes the debt is an issue to deal with in the future. No it is not a problem today.

People keep thinking of the debt in all the wrong ways. The best way to keep a perspective is to calculate the cost of carrying that debt, not just its aggregate size. It is the burden of interest payments on future budgets that matter more than the total amount of debt. That burden can be managed only if we have a healthy growing economy. In other words we need to get GDP rising from its current slowdown. And we need to avoid deflation at all costs. If GDP grows at anything like its historic rate the debt burden is automatically reduced both as a percentage of GDP, and as a percentage of the budget. It is basic math. But if we wander around trying to cut and slice the economy in order to reduce the deficit, the chances are that we will shrink the economy by reducing growth rates. So all that hard thrift and blood spilling will actually end up increasing the debt as a percentage of both the economy and the budget. Again: basic math. Thrift is self-defeating. Keynes taught us that in the Great Depression. Evidently much of our supposedly well educated analysts community never read Keynes.

And another canard to avoid: I read in some places that people calculate the debt burden and then argue that the interest payments are equal to a certain dollar amount per person. In one example I saw the figure $30,000. I am not going to dignify that calculation with a direct response, but I want to point out an even more obvious issue: those supposedly crippling debt interest payments go somewhere. Most likely into a US based pension fund or similar creditor account. It’s called double entry bookkeeping. Something the Venetians invented centuries ago. This means that the ‘crippling’ payment is someone else’s, presumably less than crippling, income. This is crucial to bear in mind. Too often we forget that the biggest investors in US bonds are US citizens. Notwithstanding the brouhaha over Chinese investments in the US the vast majority of US debt is held domestically. So one person’s crippling burden is another person’s safe retirement fund. Yes the cash is re-allocated from one set of folks to another, but basic accounting tells us that it has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is predominantly right here.

Now back to the FT article.

The big point is that for all the cash sloshing about the US economy, investment is still weak.

Why?

Classic Keynes: business expectations are very negative. This means that businesses are refusing to invest in new plant, equipment, or workers because they are afraid of the future. These negative expectations are driving – perhaps not driving is a better way of looking at it – the entire economy at present.

And, as the FT hints at, the prospect of deflation will make matters much, much, worse. Firms just won’t invest if the economy is about to fall into a deflationary spiral. On the contrary, because deflation acts to create a positive return on plain old cash – which increases in value as deflation drives prices lower through time – it makes sense to build up cash reserves rather than spend it on speculative stuff like factories etc.

The same goes for households. Cash becomes king in a much bigger way than usual. The loss normally created by holding cash rather than investing it is eliminated by deflation, and the incentive to grow is sucked out of the economy.

Under those circumstances those debt burdens come into focus very rapidly.

Forgive me for saying it, but we need a healthy dose of inflation along with that stimulus. Not exactly what the textbook tells us, but exactly what Keynes would advocate.

Why are we even arguing about this?

Oh yea … politics.

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The Slowdown Is For Real; Is Deflation Next?

What can we say about today’s GDP report? Not much that hasn’t already ben said: the economy is slowing down quite quickly. Growth in the second quarter fell to 2.4%, compared with 5.0% in the last quarter of 2009, and 3.7% in the first quarter 2010. That’s fairly dramatic and a much more rapid slow down than is normal. There is no way that this cycle can be characterized as being normal. The track we are following is truly one of a kind and so we lack precedence to give us comfort as we try to forecast the next few quarters.

What we do know is that history tells us that recessions and recoveries following crises caused by banking and financial implosions are always difficult. Evidently that is the one precedent seemingly being played out again.

It is becoming tiresome to repeat the obvious: we face a massive shortfall in demand which is causing an equally massive shortfall in resource usage to linger on. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.

Interestingly a sharp debate about the nature of unemployment has now broken out in the ranks of analysts.

One camp argues that the downturn is healthy in that it is forcing inefficient sectors such as construction, where we had vastly over-invested, to shed jobs and thus – eventually – allow those workers to be re-trained for more useful and productive purposes. This analysis relies on the traditional, classical, view of economic cycles as being purges to be welcomed, rather than as crises to be avoided. Joseph Schumpeter, he of the “creative destruction” theory of capitalism is the leading architect of this viewpoint.

Others, myself included, regard this as nonsense.

We hold that ever since Keynes pointed out that capitalism can be saved from its own excesses through a combination of monetary and fiscal policy, society has no need of Schumpeterian purges. Indeed such purges are counter-productive and consign large numbers of people to horrible lives unnecessarily. Given that we know how to avoid such cycles, we believe that society owes it to itself actually to avoid them.

Which camp is correct?

The clues are all within the nature of current unemployment. Were this a ‘purgative’ cycle we would expect unemployment to be focused on those industries and sectors where inefficiencies had built up. Other industries should be less affected. But we don’t find such a pattern. Unemployment is both deep and widespread across the entire economy. For the Schumpeterian view to hold we would have to argue that the entire economy is rotten and not one sector. In which case there seems to be no informative or predictive content to the theory. Empty theories aren’t worth much.

In contrast the Keynesian view is holding up well to empirical testing.

This is, indeed, a cycle we could have dampened or ameliorated if we had employed the right counter measures in the right strength early enough.

Meanwhile, that the economy is now headed for more slowdown is a certitude.

Worse for all of us, all the characteristics of a depression are lingering near the surface. Sufficiently close that we are still under threat of a true calamity.

One example: this week has seen the auction of large amounts of bank debt at record low interest rates. US Bancorp was able to sell five year paper at the lowest interest rate ever paid by a bank. Think about that for a moment. The lowest rate ever paid by a bank. What leaps out from that is that we have absolutely no threat of inflation at present. None. In fact the real and present danger is deflation. So clear is this threat that, for the first time I can recall, members of the Fed are talking out loud about what they would have to do were deflation to set in. This is an incredible turn of events. Especially in light of the fact that the Fed officials making all the noise include some of the inflation hawks who were recently advocating hiking interest rates to stave off the inflationary threat of the massive build up in money supply engendered by the Fed’s bailout activities of 2008 through last year.

Textbook monetary theory says that such a huge build up will, inevitably, manifest itself as a surge in inflation. There will be too much money chasing too few goods. So prices will rise to bring about a balance between money supply and the goods being produced. That’s how we get inflation.

One of Keynes’ greatest insights was that, under certain circumstances, this traditional relationship will not hold. He argued, correctly, that if business expectations are severely limited, and if the prospect for profit from new investment is constrained by the lack of demand, businesses will not invest spare cash. They will hoard it instead. So the increase in money supply will simply sit in bank vaults and go unlent. This is exactly what we are seeing currently. The economy is awash with cash. Bank reserves are accumulating at rapid rates. But there is no, or little, demand for credit. Similarly households are sitting on what cash they have – debt pay downs and savings are taking a higher priority than consumption. We are saving too much, by which I mean we are saving more than we want to invest, and that is depressing demand. Our economy has fallen out of balance.

In other words the economy is frozen despite the plentiful money sloshing about. This is what is called a ‘liquidity trap’. The economy is flush with liquidity, but is trapped in a downward spiral because there are no profitable opportunities to invest at current interest rates and in the face of current demand.

Keynes’ solution to the trap was to inflate demand by whatever means possible.

Without such action he predicted that deflation would set in and the effort to break free would get progressively more difficult. Deflating wages makes it harder for households to pay off debts, so they have to save even more aggressively. This reduces demand further … and so on.

Are we there yet?

Not quite.

There are hints of inflation. But those hints are ebbing quickly. We have been in a ‘disinflationary’ mode for months now. And those bank debt auctions suggest that the credit markets think we are on the verge of deflation. If we strip out volatile items from the consumer price index it, too, has an ominous trajectory.

The danger is clearly there.

And it isn’t as if we don’t have plenty of recent experience of the trauma deflation can bring: Japan is still deep in its malaise twenty years after its real estate bubble collapsed. One anecdote from Japan tells it all: the story goes that the best selling consumer items during the 1990’s in Japan were safes for households to horde their cash. We do not want to fall into that particular hole.

What can we do?

The Fed can stop paying interest on bank deposits. That would make it more profitable for the banks to lend.

The Fed could also buy assets from the private sector in the hope that the money thus created is sufficient to put the economy past the critical level of money supply – we would be so inundated with cash we would have to do something with it!

Or: we could try to induce inflation. The Fed could raise its inflation target beyond the 2% ceiling it now has and attempt to get the private sector to adjust its inflationary expectations.

And, presumably, we could double down on the federal deficit in the hope that more stimulus would fill the demand gap sufficiently to encourage businesses to invest and re-hire.

Then there’s the Schumpeterian approach: let the devil take the hindmost.

This could get ugly.

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Consumer Confidence and Home Prices

Just a quick note on today’s news:

Consumer confidence continues to drop. The Conference Board report today has confidence at 50.4 in July, down from 54.3 in June and the lowest level since February. The standard explanation for this steady erosion is that unemployment weighs heavily on the minds of everyone. I put a slightly different spin on it: I think the decline is better explained by consumer’s observation that no one is doing much to improve the employment situation. So it is not the lack of jobs that dampens spirits, it is the lack of action. That lack of action implies we are all being left to our own devices. As a result local conditions and each person’s ability to save for contingencies dominate any goodwill that might be generated by national or Federal efforts – were they to exist.

I attribute this perception of lack of effort to two concurrent problems:

First: the divisive nature of national politics has rendered it impossible for any coherent message to be communicated about efforts to bolster employment. The fractious dialog over stimulus, where some regard it as massive government waste rather than a positive force, has made consumers wary and confused over what the Federal government is trying to do. Indeed for a significant number of people government policy is the cause of our problems, not a potential cure. While this disputed role of government gets the headlines, it is never going to develop support for a psychological improvement in consumer expectations. Such an improvement is the essential first step in getting consumers to feel that the worst is over and that a return to ‘normality’ is in the offing. Only then could a virtuous cycle be established of rising confidence begetting rising spending.

Second: what success the stimulus did render – and all non-partisan research shows it was a resounding success within its limits – has been offset by the catastrophe engulfing state and local governments. If we look at the sum total of all government spending in the US economy, then we find that almost all the Federal effort has been absorbed or offset by reductions in local spending. The net effect is that government spending is shrinking rather than expanding. Since, as I just suggested, that most people are more responsive to local effects of the crisis when they develop their spending plans, these local cuts are foremost in their minds. This also helps explain why the mood has turned so sour this year: the original federal stimulus enabled state and local governments to postpone cuts, but as the Federal effort wanes this year those cuts now have to be made. So, in some states in particular, the cuts are only now gathering force. Since cuts in local spending are inevitably concentrated in high visibility services like schools and police forces, the crisis has taken on new dimension: it is undermining the quality of life in places such as California. Hence the apparent sudden souring of the public’s mood.

I could, of course, point out that it was exactly these kinds of issues that motivated me to call for a far larger stimulus. The Federal effort has to offset the drop in national level demand, and insulate the states and other localities, from making drastic cuts in services. It is also supposed to be targeted at jobs: getting more people jobs is the single most effective way of stimulating demand and hence setting in motion a return to normality. That the stimulus was flawed is now beyond debate – we should have had an emphasis on infrastructure and jobs rather than tax cuts; and we should have pumped cash into the states to bail them out. It is only in the context of its flawed construction that the stimulus can be considered a success – as I noted above everyone who runs the numbers agrees it matched its goals. My point is that the goals were wrong. But that was a result of our declining political capacity, not an analytical error.

I do not expect confidence to pick up much, if at all, throughout the year. The employment picture shows no signs of a rapid improvement. And our politics is just stuck in an inane and juvenile backwater.

We need leadership. Don’t hold your breath.

As an afterthought: home prices.

Today’s Case-Shiller news report has prices rising slightly in May, the last month for which data is available.

In fact the index shows a rise in home prices of about 4% over the last year. Frankly I don’t put too much emphasis on this number other than to note that the long decline in prices appears to have ended. There are caveats of course. The index is very ‘lumpy’. Some cities are still showing weakness, while others are stabilizing rapidly. So we have returned to a period of locally determined prices rather than having a national trend. This is simply a reversion to normality. It was always the case that the US housing market was local. The recent crisis being an outlier. If you recall it was the sudden emergence of a national trend in home prices that undermined the mortgage backed securities market: the traders had assumed a continuation of past conditions where prices in, say, California, were unaffected by and independent of, prices in, say, Florida. The return to local pricing trends is shown by today’s report: the strong locations, where prices are recovering somewhat, are all those where the damage was worst – some parts of California have experienced a sharp upturn in prices as the worst of the bubble has been worked off. Other places have prices still declining – in New York prices are still trending down slightly as foreign demand for condos etc weakens along with the European economic difficulties.

Overall I just don’t see a prolonged, or strong, return to home price inflation. The problems of the economy run too deep to allow a renewed bubble.

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