MSNBC - Why Housing Is About to Go "Pop!"
One view on the housing market, from Business Week Online's Mark Weisbrot:
"If you still need proof that a bubble is building in the housing market take a look at the findings of my economist colleague Dean Baker at the Center for Economic Policy & Research in Washington, D.C. He has tracked national housing prices going back to 1951. Prices pretty much track the rate of inflation up until 1995. But since then, average prices on new and existing homes have soared more than 35 percentage points beyond the overall rate of inflation. Is that unusual? You bet it is..."


...and he goes on from there. An interesting argument, but this has been predicted many times and so far hasn't happened. People are reluctant to sell at a loss so they hold onto their houses, and that keeps supply low, and that keeps prices up. At least, that's what they told me in Econ 101. And it's what happened in California in the early 1990s, and I hear that even the Hawaian market is coming back after the collapse caused by the Japanese eternal recession (a factor that figures into the Weisbrot article). Give it a read.