Originally posted at The World Complex blog [6],
...viewed in real time is like watching paint dry, but without the possible dramatics of runs. Hence, the long break since the last time [7]I looked at this.
In case you are unfamiliar with it, the Case-Shiller index [8] is an inflation-adjusted index for house prices in the United States (data available here [9]; methodology here - pdf [10]). As the recent data is presented quarterly, the annual values in the graph below I have calculated as the average of the four quarterly values for a calendar year.
The analysis is the same as last time, where I outlined three possible scenarios we could see to 2015.
[11]
So far we are headed right down the middle towards the main area of stability, where inflation-adjusted house prices remained for about 50 years after WWII. You can throw an apple really high, but it's hard to keep it from falling afterwards.
Clearly, if people are to get wealthy from real estate, Bernanke needs to keep blowing (or is it sucking?)
Below is the same index, but quarterly.
[12]The long and winding road has leads us back to our door.
We'll stop in and look at this later (next year)--after all we don't want to be like the crowd watching Thomas Hardy write in that famous Monty Python skit which would have been embedded right here except all that came up is a notice saying that "this video cannot be viewed on certain [chart-porn] sites".