Tuesday, April 19, 2005

BUBBLE, BUBBLE, TOIL AND TROUBLE?

Yikes:

U.S. housing starts posted their steepest drop in more than 14 years in March, suggesting some cooling in the long-hot housing market....

Housing starts plunged 17.6 percent in March, their biggest drop since January 1991, to a 1.837 million unit rate from an upwardly revised 2.229 million unit pace in February, the Commerce Department said on Tuesday.

Wall Street economists had looked for housing starts to slip a far smaller 4.8 percent in March....

David Seiders, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders, said the plunge in starts most likely represented just a pause after a couple strong months....


--Reuters

Here in New York City, the housing market seems like the dot-com sector in the '90s. (A cartoon caption in last week's New Yorker pretty much sums it up: "We sold our two-bedroom in the Village at a great price and bought the Virgin Islands.") The boom can't last forever, and I don't know what the hell happens when the bubble bursts.

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