WELLESLEY COLLEGE OR YALE UNIVERSITY WHO IS RIGHT?

The magic of the news is by far our point of view, with one view or another it all depends on who’s hype you want to believe. Statistics are of course not lies, but the people who interrupt them will take the liberty of skewing or slanting the analysis to support one or another view that best serves their constituents or stake holders. Beware I declare for what the WSJ publishes could be just another declaration of misdirection to give us what we want to read, so we will come back for more and buy: OH yea those click through Ads as if we didn’t know what the game really was all about.

“Far from perfect — measures of housing prices are the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight’s index and the gloomier Standard & Poor’s Case/Shiller index. Both are based on a concept, developed in the 1980s by Karl Case of Wellesley College and Robert Shiller of Yale University, that looks at repeat sales of the same houses.” 1

“Ofheo’s index says home prices rose nationally by 1.8% between the third quarters of 2006 and 2007. But the S&P/Case-Shiller national index of home prices was down 4.5% in the same period. The Ofheo index showed a 2.16% increase in house prices in Chicago; the Case-Shiller index showed a decline of 2.48%.” 2


“HOW LOW?” 33

1,2 & 3 Source: “Tracking Housing Prices Why the Numbers Conflict”
By David Wessel From The Wall Street Journal Online


The inevitable collapse of the dollar:

Do we point the finger at Bush, Greenspan and Bernanke (02/14/08 Remarks) or do we look in the mirror of our own consumption?

If you want detail from the Professors tune in below…

World Economic Update

Peter Hooper, Managing Director and Chief Economist, Deutsche Bank Securities. Robert J. Shiller, Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics, Yale University. Stephen S. Roach, Chairman, Morgan Stanley Asia. With President: Daniel K. Tarullo, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center