The End Of The Housing Boom?

"It is obvious to me that today's real estate prices are a speculative bubble that is bound to burst. Of course, this has been obvious to me for about three decades and wrong almost all of that time....My next-door neighbor got three times her asking price before she even put it on the market, from a professional mind reader who divined that she was thinking about selling. . .

Perusing the real estate ads like pornography and imagining what our houses are worth is the great American pastime. But a real estate crash, if it came, would have some advantages. The 19th-century American Henry George explained how rising real estate values harm the economy by operating as a tax on both labor and capital. Money for labor makes people work harder. Money for capital makes people save more. Both make the country richer. Money for land just makes the owner richer."