I was listening to a BBC radio news show this morning in which they proclaimed today as the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the financial crisis based on the date in 2007 when the French bank BNP Paribas first blocked withdrawals from hedge funds that specialized in U.S. mortgage debt. The show then said that following this move house prices began dropping.
Really folks? House prices began falling after this date? That’s not what the data show.
At the most aggregate level, the Case-Shiller national index for the U.S. was already down 3.4 percent from its peak in 2006 by August of 2007, but there was enormous dispersion around this figure. House prices in Phoenix had fallen by almost 10.0 percent from their peak the prior year. Prices were down 7 percent in Los Angeles, 11 percent in San Diego, and 10 percent in Washington. And the momentum was clearly downward, with prices in many of these cities falling at the rate of more than 1.0 percent a month.
But wait, it gets better. If we turn to Case Shiller tiered indexes, we find that prices for homes in the bottom third of the San Diego had fallen by more than 13 percent, in San Francisco they were down 12 percent, and in Seattle they were down 10 percent.
In short, prices had already fallen sharply in many areas and there was every reason to think they would drop further. This is before we got to the official beginning of the financial crisis.
This is not a trivial point. The reversal of ordering matters because the key problem was an over-valued housing market. All the fraudulent mortgages and exotic financing would not have given us a worldwide financial crisis if they had not been based on a hugely over-valued housing market. The key problem was the bubble. If we don’t recognize this fact, then we have learned nothing.
As I have argued elsewhere, it is convenient for economists to blame the financial crisis rather than the bubble, because finance can be complicated. After all, who knew that AIG had written $600 billion worth of credit default swaps on mortgage backed securities?
