Jonathan Last

The Housing Bubble
January 18th, 2005

In the Wall Street Journal Greg Ip wonders if the housing bubble will soon burst. It’s about time. While the popping will not do me any financial good, I will derive an enormous psychological payoff from it.

Anonymous January 18, 2005 at 5:43 pm

So Ip’s article includes a statistic that home prices are up 36% since 1995 after adjusting for inflation. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 4%. Definitely not bubbilicious. It actually sounds low given that one should expect returns to reflect a liquidity premium for investing in real estate.

Bill January 19, 2005 at 4:53 am

Geez, Jonathan, while you’re enjoying a psychological payoff, I’ll be trying to find some way to payoff the mortgage and HELOC on my $300K house that my town recently re-evaluated to almost $650K. Think leverage, young man, leverage….

MM January 21, 2005 at 6:19 pm

Of course, I know nothing of your housing situation, but for those of us who are journalists in New York City or Washington DC, it seems to me that the only way we’re going to be able to afford a house within 150 miles of work is a nice popping bubble . . .

"We should have called it The Virtue Rises. Humbug." — JVL

In the midst of PC police, low-budget holiday movies, and mandatory in-law time, the only Christmas spirit on most people's minds these days is the kind that comes in a flask.

"It's long and it doesn't have Spider-Man in it anywhere." — Cody Last

From the all-star cast who brought you The Seven Deadly Virtues comes a book with a look at the good life… or the crazy-stressful-overwhelmed life… of a father. As anyone who has spent time with a child knows, fatherhood is a mixed bag of fun, fury, and failure. So much is lost—no more catnaps during football commercials, no more exotic vacations or impromptu day trips. And yet, as authors like P. J.…

"The best argument for chastity since Bea Arthur." — Andrew Ferguson

An all-star team of eighteen conservative writers offers a hilarious, insightful, sanctimony-free remix of William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues—without parental controls. The Seven Deadly Virtues sits down next to readers at the bar, buys them a drink, and an hour or three later, ushers them into the revival tent without them even realizing it. The book’s contributors include Sonny Bunch, Christopher Buckley, David “Iowahawk” Burge, Christopher Caldwell, Andrew Ferguson, Jonah Goldberg, Michael…

""A powerful argument that the only thing worse than having children is not having them."" — P. J. O'Rourke

For years, we have been warned about the looming danger of overpopulation: people jostling for space on a planet that’s busting at the seams and running out of oil and food and land and everything else. It’s all bunk. The “population bomb” never exploded. Instead, statistics from around the world make clear that since the 1970s, we’ve been facing exactly the opposite problem: people are having too few babies. Population…