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
The rhyme and the reason behind the lingering Great Recession spelled out 13 years beforehand by a billionaire who also correctly predicted the 1987 stock market crash. The housing bubble predicted six years before it burst by a prescient law school professor and Obama Administration financial reform advisor…