No. I'm a builder and have worked in my field through three housing corrections. The meltdown originated because the tipping point was reached in the speculation reaching its saturation point. The law of diminishing returns came to the point of flat lining. In the past you would get teachers and firemen, watching ten episodes of This Old House, then they would go out a build a spec house. In the past you would get too many new homes on the market and the market would tip past a growing bubble and crash the market rapidly. In this latest market you could just purchase an existing house, hold it for two years, and sell it for a decent profit.
This time is different in several ways. Not only were new homes being speculated but existing homes were added to that spec market based on government's desire to add more people to that growing market. And last but not least, the bail out and the foreclosure intervention has attempted to cause a soft landing in the housing market. All it has accomplished is extending the time it takes to reach the bottom. So they have taken an existing market, manipulated it so that it would crash like the Hindenburg, and purchased a trillion feather beds so as to soften the blow.
More dweebs be in, how nice.
“No. I’m a builder and have worked in my field through three housing corrections. The meltdown originated because the tipping point was reached in the speculation reaching its saturation point.”
I think your perception is accurate and you were well positioned to see what was going on. This time was different. But the reason that this cycle didn’t top out from its own excesses as early as 2003 is because of the credit made available via the private label CDO market. This is the market that continued making credit available to buyers long past the point where traditional lending didn’t make sense. This is where the stated income/stated asset “liar loans” came from, the payment option ARMS, and other similar loans that began blowing up in 2006.