Famous Berkeley Economist Says We’re Not In a Housing Bubble

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Monika Bauerlein,
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Dear MoJo Reader,

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Have you been following the news less? A lot of people have, and that can be good and bad. It's unnerving, because Mother Jones has a $350,000 fundraising goal right now. In "Slow News Is Good News," we try to reset after several chaotic years and make a longer-lasting case for why our journalism matters. Please read it—and please pitch in!

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Are we in a second housing bubble, as I suggested in a chart I posted a couple of days ago? Brad DeLong has an optimistic take:

There were three good reasons in the mid-2000s to believe that housing prices should jump substantially….How much were these worth? Not enough to boost housing prices to their 2005 values. But plausibly enough to boost housing prices to their values today. IMHO, the best way to view the graph is as a positive “displacement” boom caused by true fundamentals, a bubble upward overshoot, a crash downward undershoot, and now (we hope) equilibrium.

Maybe! Check back in a couple of years and I’ll tell you who’s right.