21 août 2006
1
21
/08
/août
/2006
01:52
Q.:
…you have another thought, which is basically...whatever the situation is right now, you think that the weakness we’re seeing in housing, is going to escalate, and eventually lead and take this country into a recession… tell us why…
A.:
Yes, there’s a significant probability of that, and I’m not right away, in fact housing prices are still going up generally…
Q:
A significant probability…90 %?...
A:
I would …no, not that high…60%...I’m making that up…and maybe in 2008…ehmm, because the housing-market just doesn’t turn on a dime…but once we see prices actually falling in a number of cities…if that happens…then, that would harm confidence even…we’ve just reported into the confidence numbers…you know…the ‘Michigan?’ number incidentally…is more a long term than the confidence board number….the question goes further up…and I think that a lot of people, are fairly confident about the next 6 months…but not so sure about what’s going to happen and once the oil prices if they continue for a while….and if housing prices start falling…and so the people are uncertain about the more distant future…
Q:
…but…is there…I mean how definitive is your research…and is your correlation, that a housing slow-down will lead to a recession…ehmmm, some would argue that, yes we would see a little bit of a slowdown…and that’s going to be picked up by other areas of the economy…ehmm and there were…the correlation between a slowdown in housing and definitive leading into a recession…doesn’t necessarily always come up…and so I would like to find out from you…why is it that you feel…’One has to lead to the another’…?
A:
Well, doesn’t have to…the other thing is (…but you have been willing this in this situation…)…I have some diffidence even about predicting the housing prices before…because we’ve seen slowdowns in housing prices and that then get reversed…but the thing that really strikes me …if you just look at the broad picture of the data…is that we have had the biggest housing boom in the history of this country…it is just an enormous boom…and it has had an enormous psychology, which has driven the economy…and you can’t go on for ever….in fact its been… from year to year its been generally accelerating …that can’t go on for ever…and so once it stops accelerating and it starts going in reverse…I think there’ll be a big impact in psychology…and that’s what ultimately causes recessions…
Partager cet article
