Off Grid Tiny Homes

This is the kind of thing I fantasize about doing after I retire :-)

Looking back at the credit crisis

I thought it worthwhile to re-post my 2008 slides on the credit crisis. I wrote these slides just as the crisis was getting started (right after the big defaults), but I still think my analysis was correct and better than post-hoc discussions that are going on to this day.

I believe I called the housing bubble back in 2004 -- see, e.g., here for a specific discussion of bubbles and timescales. The figure above also first appeared on my blog in 2004 or 2005.

(2004) ... The current housing bubble is an even more egregious example. Because real estate is not a very liquid investment - the typical family has to move and perhaps change jobs to adjust to mispricing - the timescale for popping a bubble is probably 5-10 years or more. Further, I am not aware of any instruments that let you short a real estate bubble in an efficient way.

I discussed the risks from credit derivatives as early as 2005; see also here and here.

Finally, there was a lot of post-crisis discussion on this blog and elsewhere about mark to market accounting: were CDO, CDS oversold in the wake of the crisis (see also The time to buy is when there is blood in the streets; if you want to know what "leading experts" were saying in 2008, see the Yale SOM discussion here -- oops, too embarrassing, maybe they took it down ;-), or was Mr. Market still to be trusted in the worst stages of a collapse? The answer is now clear; even Fannie and Freddie have returned $180 billion to the Feds!

Expert predictions: Mark Zandi edition

I came across this compendium of Mark Zandi (Chief Economist, Moody's Analytics) predictions. I've read and heard many interviews with Zandi over the years, and he always seems like a thoughtful guy. But it's not surprising that he, like other experts, has no more predictive power concerning complex events than monkeys throwing darts.

What is amazing to me is how Zandi can remain so confident about his capabilities when sufficient evidence has accumulated to the contrary. I suppose talking heads, pundits, market economists (and even some successful scientists and corporate leaders) are selected specifically for this kind of overconfidence. There's no room for intellectual honesty when you're trying to get ahead ;-)

Ritholtz: The Fed, Treasury and the Senate Budget Committee appear to have a favorite private sector economist, one who has managed to become a favorite even though he works for a unit of the same rating agency whose analysis is intrinsically tied to both the market, banking and housing crisis.

Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com is routinely trotted out as an independent expert. He was the sole economist at the August 17 Treasury Conference on the Future of Housing Finance, the Fed’s REO and Vacant Properties conference and has now testified at the September 22nd Senate Budget Committee hearing on “Assessing the Federal Policy Response to the Economic Crisis”.

Never mind that, based on Zandi’s record, either his analysis is just wrong or his independence is compromised. Everyone seems to like to hear the guy who is saying what people want to hear, even the press appears to prefer “feel good” analysis to considering the accuracy of his record. ...


“It’s at least three or four quarters before we see the bottom of the housing market,” Zandi said.

Wire & Staff Reports – Oct 27, 2006

“The housing market correction is in full swing but it probably has another year to go before it bottoms out,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

Los Angeles Times – Jan 6, 2007

“Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com, said jobs and wages were growing too fast for their own good. He warned that higher wages could induce companies to raise prices, which could lead workers to demand higher wages — an inflationary wage-price spiral.”

[Note: The chart below shows 3-mo. Changes in total civilian compensation. It seems not to demonstrate any wage-price spiral:

Marketwatch - March 26, 2007

"Zandi sees a bottom for sales in spring as sellers become more motivated and start cutting prices." [Note: In August 2010, new home sales fell to the lowest level since 1963, when the government began to keep records.]

New York Times – March 18, 2007

“Weakness in the market has been concentrated in certain segments,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com. “We’re not witnessing the entire housing market in metro areas caving in.”

MTG Foundation – April 28, 2007

...

Ruh Roh!

The dreaded double dip!



Non-Americans see here for explanation of "Ruh Roh" :-)

Almost over? part 2

Are further price declines in the cards? If you think there's some inflation around the corner (say in the next few years), now might be a good time to lever up and buy some real estate.

Here's an interesting figure from a recent paper by Case, Quigley and Shiller. The paper is primarily about wealth effects, but it has some nice panel data. They find that the wealth effect is stronger for housing than for equity assets.



Here is a video from the Financial Times discussing the paper and recent housing data.

More discussion and figures like the one below in this earlier post.

Almost over?

What's a factor of 2 between friends? :-) Note no long term appreciation of houses relative to CPI.




Here's Japan for comparison. Our bubble has popped much more quickly.




Yes, Virginia, we knew it was a bubble back in 2005, but no one believed us. Next time, watch the price to rent ratio:




Yes, equities beat housing over the long run, and even at the peak of the biggest housing bubble of the 20th century.

Bay area housing market has cracked

To all my friends in the bay area: I told you so, I told you so, I told you so... :-/

SF Chronicle:

“Twenty percent of Bay Area homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, according to a study being released today. This dubious distinction has entered the American lexicon as an all-too-familiar term - being underwater.

As home values continue to plunge, the real estate valuation service Zillow.com said that 20.76 percent of all homes in the nine-county Bay Area are underwater. The rate is much higher than the national average of 1 in 7 homes, or 14.3 percent. That’s because the Bay Area - like most of California - was a classic bubble market, where buyers in recent years paid overinflated prices for homes that now are rapidly losing value in the market downturn.”

(Via Barry Ritholtz.)

Michael Lewis on the subprime bubble

Michael Lewis nails it in this long Portfolio article. It's the single best piece I've read on the subject.

...In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?

At some point, I gave up waiting for the end. There was no scandal or reversal, I assumed, that could sink the system.

...Enter Greg Lippman, a mortgage-bond trader at Deutsche Bank. He arrived at FrontPoint bearing a 66-page presentation that described a better way for the fund to put its view of both Wall Street and the U.S. housing market into action. The smart trade, Lippman argued, was to sell short not New Century’s stock but its bonds that were backed by the subprime loans it had made. Eisman hadn’t known this was even possible—because until recently, it hadn’t been. But Lippman, along with traders at other Wall Street investment banks, had created a way to short the subprime bond market with precision.

Here’s where financial technology became suddenly, urgently relevant. The typical mortgage bond was still structured in much the same way it had been when I worked at Salomon Brothers. The loans went into a trust that was designed to pay off its investors not all at once but according to their rankings. The investors in the top tranche, rated AAA, received the first payment from the trust and, because their investment was the least risky, received the lowest interest rate on their money. The investors who held the trusts’ BBB tranche got the last payments—and bore the brunt of the first defaults. Because they were taking the most risk, they received the highest return. Eisman wanted to bet that some subprime borrowers would default, causing the trust to suffer losses. The way to express this view was to short the BBB tranche. The trouble was that the BBB tranche was only a tiny slice of the deal.

But the scarcity of truly crappy subprime-mortgage bonds no longer mattered. The big Wall Street firms had just made it possible to short even the tiniest and most obscure subprime-mortgage-backed bond by creating, in effect, a market of side bets. Instead of shorting the actual BBB bond, you could now enter into an agreement for a credit-default swap with Deutsche Bank or Goldman Sachs. It cost money to make this side bet, but nothing like what it cost to short the stocks, and the upside was far greater.

...But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.

As an investor, Eisman was allowed on the quarterly conference calls held by Moody’s but not allowed to ask questions. The people at Moody’s were polite about their brush-off, however. The C.E.O. even invited Eisman and his team to his office for a visit in June 2007. By then, Eisman was so certain that the world had been turned upside down that he just assumed this guy must know it too. “But we’re sitting there,” Daniel recalls, “and he says to us, like he actually means it, ‘I truly believe that our rating will prove accurate.’ And Steve shoots up in his chair and asks, ‘What did you just say?’ as if the guy had just uttered the most preposterous statement in the history of finance. He repeated it. And Eisman just laughed at him.”

“With all due respect, sir,” Daniel told the C.E.O. deferentially as they left the meeting, “you’re delusional.”
This wasn’t Fitch or even S&P. This was Moody’s, the aristocrats of the rating business, 20 percent owned by Warren Buffett. And the company’s C.E.O. was being told he was either a fool or a crook by one Vincent Daniel, from Queens.

...That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all.

Housing bubble: one third to go

Via Calculated Risk, Case-Shiller indices (10 and 20 city composites) show that, adjusted for inflation, we have given back two thirds of the peak relative to 2000.

Here is the last 100 years:





International comparisons (not inflation adjusted):

Lessons from Japan

It took the Japanese two decades to recover from their 80's-90's bubble. This Times article discusses the similarities and differences between their crisis and ours. (Our current crisis is also affecting them -- the Nikkei is down 11 percent as I type this.)

I first posted the graph above in 2005.

NYTimes: ...The similarities with Japan are striking. Like the United States today, Japan in the early 1990s faced a banking and real estate crisis that undermined the entire economy and required large government intervention. Some of Japan’s most venerated financial institutions collapsed as snowballing losses from failed business and property loans plunged the nation’s financial system into paralysis.

But the differences are also pointed and revealing. The United States reacted far more quickly than Japan, committing taxpayer funds just over a year after the subprime mortgage problems surfaced in summer of 2007. Japan took nearly eight years to pass a sweeping bailout, a delay that contributed to a long economic slump that Japanese call their “lost decade.”

“Japanese government and financial institutions realized there was a problem, but they tried to cover it up,” said Junichi Ujiie, chairman of Nomura Holdings, Japan’s largest investment bank. “The United States has done in months what Japan took years to do.”

...Most of the government officials, business leaders and economists interviewed praised America’s plan to spend $700 billion buying troubled mortgage-related assets from banks. But they also said they expected that Washington would soon have to put together another huge bailout package, this time to recapitalize American banks, especially with the International Monetary Fund now estimating total bank losses from the subprime mortgage crisis to reach $1.4 trillion.

On the other hand, another lesson from Japan is that the American bailout may end up costing taxpayers far less than $700 billion or whatever the final figure may be. Japanese regulators were eventually able to recover all but $100 billion of the $450 billion spent by selling off the troubled loans and bank stocks later, after the economy had rebounded.

Simple question, complex answer

A former physicist (but non-financier) writes:

I have a question, and who better to ask than you. ...something isn't adding up.

I keep hearing that mortgage defaults are what is bringing down many financial institutions, and the the default rate in some particularly bad mortgage pools is up to 50%. Because housing prices are down about 20%, financial institutions can still regain 80% of the value of those loans, no? Actually the real value is probably a bit better, as most loans will be partially paid off. At any rate, doesn't this imply that even in the worst loan pools, there is only a total 10% loss. And most financial institutions will have some higher quality loan pools also, and stocks, etc. So the total effect is going to be smaller than 10%, unless financial institutions were all constructing some sort of horrible options based high risk bets on housing prices, but I doubt this would happen except in some risky hedge funds.

Is this reasoning correct? If so, I don't understand how our system can be so fragile that a few percent drop would bring everyone down. Of course everyone holding a share of these funds will have a small portfolio dip, but this happens every few years anyway.

Your calculations are reasonably correct (see comments for more detail). So why the crisis?

1) Leverage. Many I-banks had 30:1 ratios, so a small movement in value of a subcomponent of their portfolio could wipe them out. It's like a guy who puts 10% down on his house, who can lose everything if the price goes down by 10%. Of course this only matters if he is forced to sell, or, in the bank case, if shareholders and counterparties start losing confidence. This is happening simultaneously in financial markets due to the second factor...

2) Complexity. No one knows who is holding what, who has sold insurance (credit default swaps) to other parties and is on the hook, etc. So trust is gone and credit markets are paralyzed -- no muni bond issuance, no short term loans to businesses, no car loans, etc.

The efficient functioning of our economy is built on trust -- I have to trust that the grocer will give me food in exchange for a dollar bill, that I can get my money out of the bank, that my employer will pay me at the end of the month, that its customers will pay it, etc.

We are nearing a dangerous point. Confidence, once destroyed, is very hard to rebuild.

Relative to the size of our economy, the amount of money involved is not that great. If we had perfect information we could solve the whole problem with about $1 trillion. (About the cost of the Iraq war; not bad for a bubble that involved housing -- our most valuable asset.)

Orders of magnitude and timescales

As a physicist I can't help making some comments about orders of magnitude and timescales :-)

If home prices return to normal (historical) levels, total mortgage debt losses will be about $1 trillion. This is a staggering sum, but won't destroy our economy. After all, our misadventure in Iraq will end up costing us about the same amount. [Insert anti-Bush diatribe here.] If necessary, we could socialize the whole loss like we've done with Iraq -- put it on the nation's and taxpayers' balance sheet.

The problem is that the credit bubble losses are concentrated in financial firms, which are getting hit with a huge shock as their portfolios approach the day of mark to market reckoning. This shock is going to have to be worked through the system over a relatively short timescale if we are to avoid systemic paralysis, or worse. Once a particular entity becomes insolvent, the entire web of counterparty transactions between it and the rest of Wall St. is in jeopardy.

Dealing with that relational web is the real challenge -- can we recognize the losses without impairing the functioning of our financial and banking system?

A trillion in the balance

Via Calculated Risk. If house prices return to historical norms, mortgage credit losses will be roughly $1 trillion.

From Jan Hatzius, Goldman Sachs chief US economist, presented at the Brookings conference, Beyond Leveraged Losses: The Balance Sheet Effects of the Home Price Downturn. Here is a short excerpt on estimating mortgage credit losses (note that Goldman is now forecasting prices to decline another 10%):

If nominal home prices remain at their 2008 Q2 level until mid-2009, before reverting to a +3% annualized trend, our model implies that mortgage credit losses realized in the 2007-2012 period will total $473 billion. If nominal home prices fall another 10% through the middle of 2009, the model projects losses of $636 billion. Finally, if prices drop another 20%, predicted losses increase to $868 billion. Moreover, the table suggests that losses peak in the third quarter of 2008 if home prices are flat going forward; in the fourth quarter of 2008 if prices drop another 10%; and in the second quarter of 2009 if prices drop another 20%.

Credit crisis: half way through?

Case-Shiller is down about 20% since the peak in real terms, and we have another 20% to go before the metrics are back in normal range. This would give back all the housing gains since the late 90s. Commercial real estate and consumer debt crises have yet to materialize but are likely to follow.

10 million Americans are underwater on their mortgages. The UK is in even worse shape, with a 70% drop in mortgage approvals.

Bear is gone.

Paulson and Treasury looked closely at the GSEs and decided it would be better to move now than to pay more later. Was there a trigger event? Were there scared Chinese bankers on the phone with Paulson? (Who do you think are the biggest holders of GSE paper?)

The Korea Development Bank looked closely at Lehman and took a pass. Lehman's stock is now in free fall.

Merrill financed 75% of its recent sale of $30B in mortgage securities at 22 cents on the dollar. The counterparty is a straw man, so Merrill will have to take the securities back if the price falls even further. That means Merrill could still go the way of Bear and Lehman eventually.

No mark to market, no resolution in sight.

Socializing losses after privatizing gains in the fat years.

Of related interest: great podcast interview with Robert Shiller. Act now, because Bloomberg has a tendency to take these down after a while.

Bye bye Fannie and Freddie

On my way back from Europe, I noticed that Fannie and Freddie have been nationalized, with shareholder value going to zero! It's a huge development -- much bigger than Bear earlier in the year. The housing bubble still has further to pop, so stay tuned!

Here's economic guru John McCain on the subject -- his sentiments are right, but the fact that he can't get the exec compensation to within 3 orders of magnitude is a bit worrisome. (I suppose Palin could have nailed it within two orders of magnitude or better ;-)

NYTimes: “It’s hard, it’s tough, but it’s also the classic example of why we need change in Washington. It’s an example of cronyism, special interest, lobbyists. A quasi-governmental organization, where the executives were making hundreds of — hundred some billion dollars a year, while things were going downhill, going to hell in a handbasket,” Mr. McCain said, adding that the two companies need “more regulation, more oversight, more transparency, more of everything, and frankly, a dramatic reduction in what they do.”

But not to worry, McCain / Palin's grasp of economics and finance is every bit as solid as that of our most recent great Republican leader George W. Bush, and look how well he did!

Video: [Bush, blathering off the record on something he doesn't understand -- was that Bush on July 18, or McCain this weekend?] "There's no question about it. Wall Street got drunk ---that's one of the reasons I asked you to turn off the TV cameras -- it got drunk and now it's got a hangover. The question is how long will it sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments."

I'd post the video itself here except it's old news, and, well, nobody wants to talk about GW anymore -- especially not the people (the same ones who are backing McCain and Palin, more or less) who predicted what a great president he'd be. Too bad we don't judge voters on their records like we do traders. I know who I'd fire.

You voted for GW? Twice?!? Your P&L is negative one trillion dollars for the united states. Put your stuff in this box and follow the security guard out the door. No, you don't get to take a position on this election or advise any geneticists on evolution.

Note I'm not trying to blame Bush for the credit disaster -- the trillion dollars is for Iraq alone.

LA Times: no bottom yet for housing

The article Should You Buy A House Now? runs with the figure below, which pretty much summarizes the situation. They should have printed these statistics repeatedly in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 together with patient explanations of what price to income and price to rent ratios mean. Maybe that would have slowed down the bubble. Then again, maybe not :-(

Bay area housing market begins to crack

It's about time! See Calcuated Risk for further discussion. (Note this data covers some regions which are quite far from the bay itself.)

Standard bubble wisdom: they last longer than you think is possible, then pop faster than anyone expects.

I've been calling the bay area bubble since as far back as 2004 / 2005 (actually, from before I started this blog!). I expect the last bubble market to pop will be Manhattan, but pop it will.

It must hurt to think that a house you purchased a year ago might be worth a third less today, with still further to go.

SF Chronicle: Across the nine counties, the median price paid for resale homes, new homes and condos in June plunged 27.1 percent from a year ago to $485,000, dipping below the half-million-dollar mark for the first time in four years, DataQuick Information Systems of La Jolla (San Diego County) reported Thursday.

Among resold homes, bank-repossessed foreclosures - which usually are discounted - accounted for 28.7 percent of all existing-home sales, up from just 3.5 percent in June 2007. Solano County, with foreclosures at 57.7 percent of all resales, had the highest percentage; San Francisco, at 3 percent, had the lowest.

Affluent areas such as Marin County and San Francisco, which until now had resisted most price erosion, saw existing single-family home median prices fall by about 11 percent. Including new homes and condos, the Marin County and San Francisco medians fell about 12 percent to $846,000 and $726,750, respectively.

"This is pretty grim; double digits across the board," said Christopher Thornberg, principal at Los Angeles' Beacon Economics. "It was eminently predictable if you had a realistic view of the world. I heard a lot of people say the Bay Area was never going to see prices fall, San Francisco was untouchable; in San Mateo, it was impossible; San Jose, not with all the tech money, blah, blah, blah. But prices at the peak relative to people's incomes never made any sense."

Note the 27% figure for change in median price is a bit tricky to interpret: it's alway possible that the composition of units sold has changed, with a lot of owners of high end homes sitting on them, refusing to accept the current market price. In that case the average price decline would be less than 27%. It is typical in a real estate crash for sellers to remain in denial for some time, during which the big decline is in number of transactions rather than actual price levels. It's only after the sellers have capitulated that the big price drops occur. In light of that, it's rather ominous that only 7,178 new and resale homes changed hands in June - the lowest June figure since 1993 :-)

Inflation, deconstructed

This NYTimes illustration of the various components of the CPI (inflation index) is one of the most impressive web graphics I've seen in a while. I suggest you click through and look at the original -- it allows you to zoom in and see the contribution from individual components (gasoline, computers, college tuition, eyeglasses, etc.) to the overall index. Blue regions represent deflation (reduction in prices); reddish regions are strong inflation (the big red blob is gasoline).

One interesting point is that the CPI uses "owner's equivalent rent" to calculate the housing part of the index. This missed the run up in house prices (rents were pretty flat over the last few years, meaning price to rent ratios were very high, a strong signal of a bubble). Had the cost of ownership, as opposed to renting, been factored in, inflation would have been significantly higher in recent years. Of course, most of that will go away now that the housing bubble has popped :-)

See previous discussion here.

Pop goes the housing bubble

Figure via Calculated Risk. Larger version here

I believe the outlines of the bust are becoming as visible as the bubble itself was to any astute observer a few years ago. But no bottom yet! If I had to guess, I'd say we are going to give back most of the integral over the curve from 1997 to 2007 or so, net of overall inflation during that period (say 20-30%). In other words, extend the blue trend line beyond the early nineties, and integrate your favorite curve minus this trend line from 1997-2007 to get the overvaluation. (Note the graph is of year over year price changes in nominal dollars, not absolute price.)

Or, just look at the figure below to see that prices might have to drop 30-40% to return to consistency with the long term trend.





As we've discussed before, house price increases tend to be quite modest if measured in real dollars. (Except, of course, for bubbles and special cases :-)

The Case-Shiller national index will probably be off close to 12% YoY (will be released in earlylate May). Currently (as of Q4) the national index is off 10.1% from the peak.

The composite 10 index (10 large cities) is off 13.6% YoY. (15.8% from peak)

The composite 20 index is off 12.7% YoY. (14.8% from peak)

Housing bubble: dynamics of a bust

The first figure is from today's WSJ and incorporates data from Q4 2007. The second figure appeared in the Economist some time ago and was discussed previously on this blog. Does anyone care to predict the future for bubble states like California, Florida and Arizona using the Japanese data as a guide?

Lower interest rates will not re-inflate the housing bubble (although they may affect the rate at which it deflates; note the BOJ dropped real interest rates below zero in the wake of their bust). People understand now, as they did not just a few years ago, that home prices can go down. This change in ape psychology (try putting that in your macro model!) makes all the difference.

Below is historical data compiled by Yale economist Robert Shiller showing that home prices have not on average provided attractive real returns (right hand axis is inflation adjusted returns for same house sales over time; previously discussed here -- the real rate of return was 0.4% between 1890 and 2004). This is yet another example in which market participants (home buyers) made decisions based on faulty assumptions that might have been easily corrected by a modest amount of research. So much for efficient markets!



Here's some detailed data from Case-Shiller and OFHEO indices (also from WSJ; note OFHEO only tracks conforming mortgages so has less sensitivity to the high end of the market):



Finally, it is worth noting that the subprime mortgage meltdown is merely a symptom of the real estate bubble. If home prices continue to fall we will see (as we are already beginning to) higher default rates in so-called "prime" as well as subprime mortgages.

WSJ: ...I assumed, for the sake of calculations, that California prices fell 8% last quarter from the third quarter, a huge number by historic measures but not out of line with Zillow's data. For Florida and Arizona I assumed declines of 5% and 5.5%. You could use other, more modest estimates for the recent declines: They won't change the outcomes much. I also assumed personal incomes in these states rose in line with recent and historic averages."

The results? In all three markets, the prices are well off their peaks when compared to incomes. But they remain far above historic averages.

Median prices in California peaked in 2006 at 13.3 times per capita incomes. Hard to believe, but true. They may be down now to about 11.1 times.

But that's still way above the ground. Throughout most of the 80s and 90s they ranged between six and seven times incomes.

Just to get down to seven times incomes, prices would have to fall 37% tomorrow.

Those who bought at the peak of the cycle may be pinning their hopes instead on "incomes catching up" instead. But they had better be patient. Even if house prices stayed exactly where they are, it would take around 10 years for rising incomes to bring the ratios back into any sort of alignment.