Did the Housing Market Crash Catch You Off Guard?

[BenVitale]

I'm watching right now on NOVA (PBS) :

Here's the website

 

[Ivan Seeking]

That was excellent. I was going to post a link but it isn't available for viewing online yet.

 

[turbo]

I tried tuning in last night, but unfortunately this is one of PBS' "begging and pleading weeks" so regular prime-time programming is all superseded. I'll have to see if I can watch it on-line.

 

[BenVitale]

I found this podcast: http://castroller.com/podcasts/NovaSciencenow/1601226-The%20Deciding%20Factor

Jennifer Lerner,a social psychologist at Harvard University, studied the effects of sadness and disgust on economic behavior.

...
The researchers concluded that sadness triggered an implicit need for individuals to change their circumstances, thus a greater willingness to buy new goods or to sell goods that they already had, while disgust made people want to get rid of what they had and made them reluctant to take on anything new, depressing all prices...

Read more http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/2488

Related topics:

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/retailers-love-it-when-you-get-blues-15427.html

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/why-play-losing-game-study-uncovers-why-low-income-people-buy-lottery-tickets-16966.html

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Here we go. The Nova program is available.
http://video.pbs.org/video/1479100777

 

[turbo]

I just watched it, and the show is a pretty good one. One thing that was quite dismaying was how few people recognized the housing bubble for what it was. The people betting against the mortgage-based securities that they bundled and sold knew what was coming, but the market as a whole acted like everything was rosy.

My wife and I bought this little cabin with a nice garden spot and put our big in-town house on the market in 2005. After some long talks and number-crunching, my friend (the real-estate agent that sold our old house) and his wife bought a little place a few miles from here and put their big renovated farmhouse on the market. We both sold near the top of the market and watched as the people who bought our places defaulted and lost the houses to foreclosure. Our old house is back on the market, and the finance company is willing to take a $40K+ loss just to unload it.

Some of our friends looked at our smaller houses and acted like we were nuts for down-sizing so drastically. Then the housing crash came, and Bob and I didn't look quite so stupid, after all. We didn't have any "inside" information, just the realization that the market could not sustain the rate of growth that it was experiencing in 2005. He soon left real-estate and went back to operating heavy equipment - real estate agents are starving, still.