United States Housing Bubble

The 2000s United States housing bubble was a real-estate bubble affecting over half of the U.S. states. It was the impetus for the subprime mortgage crisis. Housing prices peaked in early 2006, started to decline in 2006 and 2007, and reached new lows in 2011. On December 30, 2008, the Case–Shiller home price index reported its largest price drop in its history. The credit crisis resulting from the bursting of the housing bubble is an important cause of the Great Recession in the United States.

Increased foreclosure rates in 2006–2007 among U.S. homeowners led to a crisis in August 2008 for the subprime, Alt-A, collateralized debt obligation (CDO), mortgage, credit, hedge fund, and foreign bank markets. In October 2007, Henry Paulson, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, called the bursting housing bubble "the most significant risk to our economy".

Any collapse of the U.S. housing bubble has a direct impact not only on home valuations, but mortgage markets, home builders, real estate, home supply retail outlets, Wall Street hedge funds held by large institutional investors, and foreign banks, increasing the risk of a nationwide recession. Concerns about the impact of the collapsing housing and credit markets on the larger U.S. economy caused President George W. Bush and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke to announce a limited bailout of the U.S. housing market for homeowners who were unable to pay their mortgage debts.

In 2008 alone, the United States government allocated over $900 billion to special loans and rescues related to the U.S. housing bubble. This was shared between the public sector and the private sector. Because of the large market share of Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) (both of which are government-sponsored enterprises) as well as the Federal Housing Administration, they received a substantial share of government support, even though their mortgages were more conservatively underwritten and actually performed better than those of the private sector.

Background

Land prices contributed much more to the price increases than did structures. This can be seen in the building cost index in Fig. 1. An estimate of land value for a house can be derived by subtracting the replacement value of the structure, adjusted for depreciation, from the home price. Using this methodology, Davis and Palumbo calculated land values for 46 U.S. metro areas, which can be found at the website for the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy.

Housing bubbles may occur in local or global real estate markets. In their late stages, they are typically characterized by rapid increases in the valuations of real property until unsustainable levels are reached relative to incomes, price-to-rent ratios, and other economic indicators of affordability. This may be followed by decreases in home prices that result in many owners finding themselves in a position of negative equity—a mortgage debt higher than the value of the property. The underlying causes of the housing bubble are complex. Factors include tax policy (exemption of housing from capital gains), historically low interest rates, lax lending standards, failure of regulators to intervene, and speculative fever. This bubble may be related to the stock market or dot-com bubble of the 1990s. Plot of inflation-adjusted home price appreciation in several U.S. cities, 1990–2005:
This bubble roughly coincides with the real-estate bubbles of the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Spain, Poland, Hungary and South Korea.

While bubbles may be identifiable in progress, bubbles can be definitively measured only in hindsight after a market correction,A prediction of a correction in the housing market, possibly after the " fall" of 2005, is implied by ''The Economist'' magazine's cover story for the article "After the fall", which illustrates a brick falling, with the label "House Prices". which began in 2005–2006 for the U.S. housing market.
Former U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan said "We had a bubble in housing", and also said in the wake of the subprime mortgage and credit crisis in 2007, "I really didn't get it until very late in 2005 and 2006." In 2001, Alan Greenspan dropped interest rates to a low 1% in order to jump the economy after the ".com" bubble. It was then bankers and other Wall Street firms started borrowing money due to its inexpensiveness.

The mortgage and credit crisis was caused by the inability of a large number of home owners to pay their mortgages as their low introductory-rate mortgages reverted to regular interest rates. Freddie Mac concluded, "We had a bubble", and concurred with Yale economist Robert Shiller's warning that home prices appear overvalued and that the correction could last years, with trillions of dollars of home value being lost. Greenspan warned of "large double digit declines" in home values "larger than most people expect".

Problems for home owners with good credit surfaced in mid-2007, causing the United States' largest mortgage lender, Countrywide Financial, to warn that a recovery in the housing sector was not expected to occur at least until 2009 because home prices were falling "almost like never before, with the exception of the Great Depression". The impact of booming home valuations on the U.S. economy since the 2001–2002 recession was an important factor in the recovery, because a large component of consumer spending was fueled by the related refinancing boom, which allowed people to both reduce their monthly mortgage payments with lower interest rates and withdraw equity from their homes as their value increased.

Timeline

Identification

Although an economic bubble is difficult to identify except in hindsight, numerous economic and cultural factors led several economists (especially in late 2004 and early 2005) to argue that a housing bubble existed in the U.S. Dean Baker identified the bubble in August 2002, thereafter repeatedly warning of its nature and depth, and the political reasons it was being ignored. Prior to that, Robert Prechter wrote about it extensively as did Professor Shiller in his original publication of '' Irrational Exuberance'' in the year 2000.

The burst of the housing bubble was predicted by a handful of political and economic analysts, such as Jeffery Robert Hunn in a March 3, 2003, editorial. Hunn wrote:

Many contested any suggestion that there could be a housing bubble, particularly at its peak from 2004 to 2006, with some rejecting the "house bubble" label in 2008. Claims that there was no warning of the crisis were further repudiated in an August 2008 article in ''The New York Times'', which reported that in mid-2004 Richard F. Syron, the CEO of Freddie Mac