This article makes my blood boil. >> There is still no consensus on why the last housing boom and bust happened. Yes there is. There was widespread fraud on t

This article makes my blood boil. >> There is still no consensus on why the last housing boom and bust happened. Yes there is. There was widespread fraud on the part of mortgage lenders and investment banks. Wow, crazy. Someone give me a Nobel. Pretty impressive of this guy to then hand wave around and say inane crap like "The problem for economists is that these changes don’t correspond to movements in the usual suspects: interest rates, building costs, population or rents." As if he's unable to stick his head outside of his office and interpret the world through things other than stock tickers. Political pressure in the 90's led to deregulation of the mortgage industry, which led to the proliferation of "sub prime" loans, which led to a huge boom in home ownership since people who shouldn't have been borrowing money were borrowing millions, which led to a consumer spending glut, which led to easy money in the market, which led to people papering over losses by playing hot potato with bad loans, until the obviously unsustainable cycle came crashing down.* We also had multiple wars increasing government spending, continued deregulation, unimaginable leaps in technology and automation, and huge amounts of consumer spending enabled by credit card and other forms of debt feeding into this cycle.* But yeah, nobody knows, says the Nobel Prize Winning Economist, so lets blame it on the plebes who were stupid enough to think they could get a piece of the pie during one of the greatest wealth booms in history. Silly poor people, taking advantage of unsustainable growth for personal wealth is for the ruling elite! What, you're mad because you got left holding the bag after taking out three mortgages because your lender encouraged you to do so with massive ad campaigns? You were mislead about interest rate hikes by your local banker because nobody cared to double check his numbers? Sorry, but personal responsibility. Oh and by the way we need you guys to pay for all our bad bets because we can't possibly be blamed for this when our models said everything was going to come out rosy!!! Seriously, things like this make me want to bring back the guillotine. * To be clear, this is obviously a simplistic version of events, but it's still dramatically more accurate than any of the drivel in this article and actually manages to frame responsibility accurately.