Two articles support the theory that exuberance about the housing market's "stabilization" is probably premature.
In the first, Gretchen Morgenson of the NYT explains why the troubles we've recently seen in the mortgage market may be only the beginning. The key point? For obvious reasons, banks are loathe to acknowledge that they've either made or bought crappy loans, so rather than pushing for immediate foreclosure, they allow borrowers to delay payments or otherwise enter a "workout" period. For debtors who couldn't afford the mortgage to begin with, these workouts just delay the inevitable, so loans (and lenders' balance sheets) that look fine may not be.
In the second, my colleague at Slate, Daniel Gross, highlights the similarities between what real-estate analysts and investors are saying now and what technology analysts and investors were saying in mid-2000, when the technology sector had just suffered a "correction." (I'm intimately familiar with the latter, having been one of those analysts.) In short, many real-estate analysts, led by the ever-sunny David Lereah of the National Association of Realtors, believe that the housing market has hit bottom and that prosperity is just around the corner. And so did most tech analysts, in the summer of 2000, when the NASDAQ was clawing its way back toward 4000.
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