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When Robert Shiller, co-creator of the SP/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices , speaks, he tends to make headlines, and yesterday was no different.
Claiming that he wasn’t making any predictions, he predicted that home prices could fall another 25 percent.
“That wouldn’t surprise me at all,” he hedged. And there was the headline, tragic as it is.
I happened to be at the conference yesterday where he said that. In fact, I was a speaker/panelist at the Standard and Poors “Housing Summit 2011: Boom, Bust and Beyond.” And, no offense, but that wasn’t the headline. What really struck me was what he said right before that.
“Statisticians deal with things that repeat themselves. This housing boom and bust is so historic and unprecedented, you can’t forecast the future because you have no comparison.”
That was not only the headline, but the theme of the conference, as I sat on a panel with economists from SP, Experian and Columbia Business School. Chip Case was there as well, disagreeing with Shiller on several points.
Audience members, largely from the finance industry, kept asking the same question in different ways, ‘When is this all going to get better??’
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Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/43354956?__source=RSS*blog*&par=RSS