A *Macroeconomic Overview Back in April, I ran a post called “Real Estate & Inflation” that isolated wage growth as the key to whether any inflationary outbreak would help or hurt real estate (incidentally, that post is now ranked 18th in the world, according to Google). Specifically, if inflation spilled over into workers’ wages, it...Read More
“Geithner Says China Has Faith in U.S.” –headline, The New York Times (6/3/09) [Editor’s Note: Sorry, I’m on a China kick — just one more in that vein. And yes, it does bear on real estate. In fact, whether China keeps buying U.S. debt — and therefore whether mortgage rates stay low — is probably...Read More
Rebutting Paul Krugman on InflationIf you don’t know whether to worry more about inflation or deflation — economists seem to be evenly split at the moment — a good technique is to parse the arguments being made by the two camps. Here is the case made by Paul Krugman, a leading proponent of the “worry...Read More
Inflation’s Effect on Housing [Note to Readers: please also see the update to this piece, posted Oct. 20] One of the big questions in the (financial) air is whether all the money that’s been pumped into the system (the various TARP’s, the Fed Reserve’s serial loan guarantees, government purchases of bank equity, etc.) the last...Read More
