June 28, 2008

Here's the latest from good little REIC monkey Nicholas Retsinas at Harvard's REIC-corrupted Joint Center for Housing Studies


Home prices in have crashed by the biggest amount since the Great Depression.

There are millions of unsold, still overpriced, unwanted homes.

Foreclosures are rampant.

Congress is running around like monkeys trying to find a way out of the mess.

And yet here's the REIC's good little poodle Nicholas Retsinas, sent out by his REIC masters (i.e. Harvard JCHS sponsors) to pump housing to the all-too-gullible MSM, even after finally admitting to the crash.

Over the horizon, a housing recovery

The current housing market is bleak: home prices and sales are plummeting, foreclosure proceedings are skyrocketing and mortgage rates are on the rise.

When will things be better?

A new study from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, "The State of the Nation's Housing 2008," finds the country poised to see an increase in housing demand over the next decade.

"The good news is that we still have a growing population," said Nicolas Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies and one of the study's authors. "As long as you have more households, more people are going to need places to live."

Some background for HP newbies:

* Many of you will remember when Retsinas stupidly went after HP'ers after we called for his ouster. Retsinas did the classic REIC "blame the messenger" after housing crashed, exposing himself for the bought-and-paid-for REIC hack he is:

"HOUSING BUST AHEAD." The headline hints of catastrophe: a dot-com repeat, a bubble bursting, an economic apocalypse. Cassandra, though, can stop wailing: the expected price corrections mark a slowing in the rate of increase -- not a precipitous decline.

This will not spark a chain reaction that will devastate home owners, builders, and communities. Contradicting another gloomy seer, Chicken Little, the sky is not falling."

- Nicholas Retsinas, mocking HP'ers, September 2006


* Here's the Harvard JCHS's dirty list of REIC masters (since removed from their website)

* And this classic rant from Tim Iacono over at SeekingAlpha:

"Adding to the growing evidence that you can work at Harvard and still be a moron, Nicolas Retsinas, director of Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies commented "The fundamental problem with housing is oversupply.''

No, the fundamental problem is that a speculative bubble just burst and now everyone is thinking rationally again - home prices are still too high, potential buyers realized home prices are still too high, lenders are now interested in the borrower actually paying back the home loan, and investors don't want to go near securitized debt."

11 comments:

Paul E. Math said...

Bijon Frise.

I can't understand how Harvard allows it's good name to be abused like this. With an endowment fund of $30B+, it's not like they need the money. But then again, with that endowment, Harvard has become more of a tax-free hedge fund with a university store-front. Pathetic.

Which brings me to Nicholas Retsinas. I wonder if he, as Greg Swan so eloquently put it, will ever admit that he has been very publicly very foolish.

And don't forget that the MSM just copies and pastes anything with the Harvard brand on it without subjecting it to any level of criticism.

While this is a subject for another blog, the argument can be made that the US is also infected with an HEIC (Higher Education Industrial Complex) only slightly less insidious than the MIC and the REIC.

Anonymous said...

He's a goofy looking tool, isn't he?

mphill said...

Look, MONEY doesn't buy houses, WARM BODIES do. Most people don't have more than 2 children these days. Oh, and most of our population growth was from (illegal) Mexicans. And guess what? The succulent tit that is the AMERICAN tax payer is slowly going away so these illegals are packing up and going south. Don't be surprised if our population starts to drop over the next decade. There are 17 million unwanted homes now... Builders are still building. Housing panic will continue well into the 2010's.

Or until Obama gets in and starts to fix house prices by buying them to curb supply.

Anonymous said...

Nick has been smoking too much weed at the Joint Center. Those silly college professors

Anonymous said...

DEFINITELY A POTENTIAL RUNNING MATE FOR JOHN MCSAME...

DOPES!!!

Dixon Ticonderoga said...

How can the Harvard brand name have any respectability left when we have all been suffering for nearly eight years under the misrule of a Harvard "educated" imbecile?

The Ivy League is nothing more than a country club for ill mannered trust-fund babies who spend a few years there networking with the rich children of their rich parents rich friends. They just go there to kill time in a socially acceptable way while theiy wait for their turn to take over and f*ck things up more and more with each succeeding generation.

Anonymous said...

A tool does what its handler tells it to do.....

"Good tool!!"...."Now roll over"

Anonymous said...

Here's another idiot "expert" (Jim Jubak) who said there was NO housing bubble:

http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/P116257.asp

(If that's too large, here's the tinyURL version)

http://tinyurl.com/bcbp9


And let's not forget talk radio fossil/financial "expert" Bob Brinker, who just a few weeks ago was taunting as "Cassandras" all people who said the market was headed for a correction. As his evidence, he held the March to May 2008 rally (AKA sucker's rally) as proof-positive that we're out of the woods! Uh, NOT!

He hit on the "Cassandra" comment not just once, but REPEATEDLY, over the course of a weekend or two.... He was trying to rub it in, saying the Cassandras missed out on the 30% run-up in equities in that period. Of course, the market has given it all back within the last week or two.

It'll be interesting to listen to his show today (and I always record it as MP3s) to see if he mentions how WRONG he was, and how the market has tumbled in the past few weeks to hover within 0.1% the definition of a bear market....

Do you think he'll fess up to being wrong (and not just wrong, but SPECTACULARLY WRONG), or do you think he'll just shut his mouth and hope no one was listening!? I suspect the latter, or he'll try and divert the blame to price of oil, etc.

Anonymous said...

if you were a nerd, you'll always be a nerd. don't know squat about reality.

Alan Static said...

I read that garbage report in the Times I think last week. It brings me back to the early 2000's, when I remember reading articles saying how "the economics of housing have changed fundamentally."

Chris said...

Cracks me up that Retsinas goes back to the most fundamental element of optimism about the housing market...that the population is increasing. Oh, how far the mighty have fallen. "Don't worry everyone...people are still sneaking into the country and reproducing like rabbits, so it's all good!"