In the wake of all the recent chatter about how rising home prices are going to save the U.S. economy (if not the world) and in advance of the monthly report on existing home sales from the National Association of Realtors in about an hour, wondering about what the last decade or so of the Case-Shiller Home Price Index might look like as a bar chart of annual gains/losses prompted the creation of what you see below.
From this perspective, it’s easy to see why everyone’s so excited about the year just concluded. Perhaps more importantly, it’s also easy to see how avoidable the whole late-2000s mess really was, that is, if policy makers had acted back in 2002 or 2003 after a string of double-digit price gains rather than patting themselves on the back for a job well done that only lasted a couple more years until the bubble burst.