Dynamic pricing, long the norm for airline tickets — the same computer-generated practice responsible for hour-to-hour price shifts for hotel rooms and goods sold on Amazon.com — has come to bear on the nation's housing markets. Day-to-day increases and decreases, worth hundreds of dollars, are not out of the ordinary in many rental markets. Society …
Continue reading Early Signs of a Rental Market Bubble: “Grab That Apartment Before the Rent Spikes”
For all the talk of Wall Street reform and consumer protections the problem of predatory lending has not been eliminated. Subprime lending continues in the auto financing industry and elsewhere, and unlike conservatives' criticism of the housing market there are no federal subsidies to finger. Policymakers have, indeed, caused the problem but for reasons other …
Continue reading The Bubble Economy and the Rationality of Irrationality: Recapitalizing Virtue
Over the past 40-some years the U.S. economy has become largely service based. At more than $40 trillion in debt with about $1T added every 100 days, it's instructive to look back on how many earlier financial warnings we ignored.