Paul Krugman Has Housing Market Pictures from the JEC

He writes:

Paul Krugman: The new Joint Economic Committee report on subprime is, aside from its policy moral, a great source document for facts about the housing bubble, illustrating some key facts about what happened, where, and when. I thought it might be interesting to readers if I gave you a few highlights:

Comments

[Howie]

Bob Shiller shoudl really use log scales. He's overstating his case w/ these graphs.

[Jim]

Why don't you have a facility that allows one to expand the size and clarity of your tables? They are very difficult to read as is.

[christofay]

These are pictures of our Bush/Greenspan industrial policy: have every American and the United States borrow heavily so the economy does not go into depression, Bush could win a term to keep him from going unemployed again

That's the domestic aspect.

The intl aspect of our industrial policy was starting a war of choice so that Dick Cheney could secure his oils so post-Mordor he could collect as a consultant, board member and speaker extracting largess from the natural resources extraction companies.

I read elsewhere that in an intelligence of crowds manner everyone going out to buy a house on borrowed money was a logical reaction to everyone knowing that inflation is greater than admitted, with interest rates below the rate of inflation it made economic sense to borrow cheap to buy an inflating asset, Americans were just trying to game the system back as the govt games it on us.

[prostratedragon]

Jim (and anyone else): if you happen to use firefox, there's a little extension called Image Zoom that might help you.

http://tinyurl.com/2qb8yc

Or, you can save the image (right-click on it) and view it in your own adjustable image viewer.

[James Wimberley]

Or you can just follow the link to Krugman's blog where the graphs are perfectly readable, even the fancy stacked bar job from the IMF. Brad: it's unfair, but could we have a bit more quality control on graphs? I know as a blogger that the preview function (in Movable Type at least) is inaccurate so it may be difficult to judge.

[Jim]

I'll try what has been suggested, but I have to say that it is all much easier for instance on "Calculated Risk" where all graphs can be expanded immediately so they are crystal clear.

[vt codger]

What seems to have happened with the graphs is that they have been resized to a different resolution at some point in their travels to Moveable Type. They are readable on Krugman's site, but adjacent pixels seem to have been averaged then separated again but now their color is the same. The lines survive that treatment pretty well. the text doesn't. It helps to expand them with the browser's Enlarge button if it zooms images as Konqueror's does. But they are still hard to read. Also, One of Krugman's charts -- Figure 13 is missing on my display of your site. There's just a label that says 27graph5.gif. Don't know if that is happening to everyone or just me and my decidedly non-mainstream browser.

[baileyman]

It would be helpful to see a vintage cumulative default chart. This one would show pretty clearly that these pools eventually default to zero, where some loans are refi'd out to join other pools. And it would show recent pools doing worse than older ones.

[Paul J. Reber]

There was a different time series posted here earlier on housing sales by volume from 1970-2007. I remember noticing that while it was obviously heavily cyclical, it was also basically flat overall until ~1990. On Graph 1 here, you can see the population is rising pretty consistently.

Maybe I can go dig up the source data from the JEC, but was it the case that population was rising faster than new home sales for a few decades? If so, why would that be? More renting & high-density living in the cities?

Just idly wondering if there was excess house-ownership demand building up over a long period of time that was somehow released by the development of the subprime mortgage market.

[lgm]

The famous quip that economists have predicted 10 of the past 5 recessions applies particularly to Krugman. His NYT columns have for years focused on impending doom. One correct prediction does not imply a low RMS predictor.

[lgm]

The famous quip that economists have predicted 10 of the past 5 recessions applies particularly to Krugman. His NYT columns have for years focused on impending doom. One correct prediction does not imply a low RMS predictor.