Alan Greenspan to continues to pretend he saw the housing crash coming. Judging from some recent remarks in the WSJ, he also continues to speak out of all sides of his mouth:
"Home prices in the U.S. are likely to start to stabilize or touch bottom sometime in the first half of 2009," he said in an interview. Tracing a jagged curve with his finger on a tabletop to underscore the difficulty in pinpointing the precise trough, he cautioned that even at a bottom, "prices could continue to drift lower through 2009 and beyond."
So they'll bottom in early 2009 and then drift lower through 2010-2011? Clear as a bell.
(We sort of agree, by the way: by mid-2009, we expect that the rate at which prices are declining will have flattened but that they'll then move mostly sideways for years. Maybe that's what Alan's saying.)
