NEAL CONAN, host: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. The housing market has slumped its way into a double dip. Prices rose a bit last summer, but they're down seven percent since then, down 30 percent overall, which ought to be good news if you want to buy. Throw in historically low mortgage rates and real estate agents ought to be busy. Ought to be, but buyers simply aren't there in most places.
Have we soured on home ownership? Are banks too tight on loans? Is there a mismatch between where the houses are and where the jobs are? Now it's clear the recession left many with little or no choice: people who've been foreclosed or lost their jobs have few options.
But this hour, we want to hear from those of you who do have a down payment, do qualify for a loan, could buy a house. Whether you did or didn't, tell us your story, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.
Later in the program, the retrial of Rod Blagojevich gets set to go to the jury. But first, the case of the missing homebuyers. And let's start with a caller. John(ph) is on the line calling from Tucson.
JOHN: This is John DeCaulville(ph). Thank you for having me.
CONAN: And are you renting or buying?
JOHN: We are renting. We're paying $925 a month here in the Tucson area, and we have already prequalified for Bank of America for a fairly decent-sized mortgage. But I just felt the prices were too high, that the numbers didn't crunch.
CONAN: The numbers didn't crunch. As you looked, though, at if you could buy a house and what the mortgage payments would be every month, how does that compare with renting?
JOHN: I believe it needs to come down some more. Some of the prices around here are down to where they were in the early-2000s and the late-1990s, but most is still grossly inflated. We're still on that bell curve that sticks up far above where it was before the madness that hit us in '04 and '05.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CONAN: Madness. Did you have a house then?
JOHN: I sold a bunch of real estate. My primary residence I sold in 2000, but I had a rental that I sold in fourth quarter of 2004 and a bunch of other properties in that period, the last bit. I got rid of the last bit of property that we owned, of real estate.
CONAN: And is part of your concern about buying now the concern that if you wanted to sell or needed to sell, you'd have a hard time doing it?
JOHN: That's correct. I also believe that it'll still lock me in to too much monthly expense. Right now, it's very beneficial to me to stay put, maybe even negotiate with my landlord and looking around. But I still think here in southern Arizona, where we're fairly close to ground zero for the crash, the prices are still majorly too high.
CONAN: Well, John, thanks very much, we appreciate that.
JOHN: Thank you very much, Neal, see ya, bye.
CONAN: Arizona, one of the many ground zeroes for the crash. You could throw in Nevada and California and Michigan and Florida and a bunch of other places. Chris Arnold joins us here on the line. He's the economics correspondent here at NPR. He's with us from the studios of member station WBUR in Boston. And Chris, nice to have you with us today.
CHRIS ARNOLD: Thanks, Neal, it's nice to be here.
CONAN: And John is - a number of people you reported on in his situation, yet as you looked at the numbers in most places - we're not saying it's John's case necessarily - but in most cases this ought to be a no-brainer.
ARNOLD: Well, it's interesting. You know, we've covered the housing market at NPR, obviously, for the last five years of this downturn. And, you know, it became a little bit hard to make the story new and interesting because it was just, you know, one depressing set of figures after another.
And what's changed maybe in the last, I don't know, three months, four months, five months, you know, we had some housing stimulus last summer, which started to raise home prices again, got sales going up. That ended. Things slid lower again, and at this point, like you were saying, prices are down 33 percent from their peaks. They're lower than they've been at any point during this downturn.
Mortgage rates have dropped also. So it's very cheap from that standpoint to get a house. And it's not so much, you know, my take on it, but as I talk to economists who are respected, you know, both-feet-on-the-ground kind of people, more and more of them who would not say this, who didn't say this two years ago, three years ago, are now saying we're here.
You know, it's close enough to the bottom that it is time to buy a house if you're, you know, if you have savings and you're a responsible person and you, you know, have a job that you earn enough income, you know, you should seriously consider looking at buying a single-family house in many parts of the country.
And this is difficult to generalize about because, you know, housing is local down to 10-block areas inside of cities where things are very different, you know, right in the same neighborhood, almost.
So, but overall, they're saying there are a lot of indicators that prices have fallen, this is looking more and more like a buying opportunity.
CONAN: Yet, as we heard from John, a lot of people say: Wait a minute, they're too high still, and they've got more to go.
ARNOLD: Right, and I think that is one of the reasons that people aren't buying. I mean, they might hear an economist tell them this. They might read an article about it. But, you know, at the end of the day, prices have been falling. They're still falling, and nobody wants to catch a falling knife, as the saying goes.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ARNOLD: And I think that's keeping people out of the market.
CONAN: And is the problem still loans? Are banks still being tight with qualifications?
ARNOLD: That's part of the problem. It's a little hard to know how much of it that is. You know, certainly banks have tightened up their standards. There's also appraisers who tell you how much a home is worth, and they - realtors will tell you they're coming in low a lot, and so that's making things difficult.
But, you know, as far as access to credit, it is a problem. It's cited as a problem by the realty groups. But, you know, you can still go get an FHA loan with three percent down and, you know, a credit score that's kind of medium. So, you know, it's not as if, you know, half the country really can't qualify because they just don't have the savings or something.
CONAN: Here's an email to that point from Al(ph) in Nashville. One of the reasons, he writes, is credit ratings. It seems all agencies have tightened up their ratings. Plus, many lending companies have made it harder to get a good rating. Two years ago, one agency showed my rating at 713, which is, I understand it pretty good. Since that time, I have added no new credit and paid down my outstanding credit.
However, on one of my credit card bills, as I paid down, the company reduced my limit, thereby increasing my debt load ratio. As a result, when I last checked my rating three months ago, it had fallen to 589, which is too low to purchase a house even if I wanted to.
And those kinds of manipulations and those adjustments, obviously they affect different people in different ways. But we thought we'd bring one of those two-feet-on-the-ground economists into the conversation.
From our bureau in New York, Robert Shiller joins us. He's the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics at Yale University. With Karl Case, Professor Shiller created the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, the standard measure for the state of the U.S. residential market. He has, to my knowledge, never been accused of irrational exuberance. Thank you very much for joining us today.
ROBERT SHILLER: Neal, hi. My wife accuses me of that sometimes.
CONAN: Well, in a different context, I suspect.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CONAN: But would you agree that this seems to be a good time to, most people, most places, buy a house?
SHILLER: Well, most people still own. The home ownership rate has only come down a couple percent. So nothing seismic has happened. Most people who already own a house will want to continue to own a house.
I think that home prices may fall. And that's a concern. But I think that the decision you make is individual. And I think that if I were in a position to enter the housing market - you know, I had a family, children, that sort of thing - I would do it, definitely.
CONAN: You would do it. It's - presuming you're not planning to move in, what, eight years or 10 years or so.
SHILLER: Right. If you're going to move again soon, that would be a different story. I mean, you want to yeah, I'm thinking that people want to buy a house because they want to put down roots, they want to get their children into a school system. And, hey, you know, it's best if they can go through all the way to high school, you know, and make friends, all that sort of thing. So I would do that.
But if you are thinking of just moving again in three years, not so clear. You know, there's a lot of costs to moving, and home prices might be 10 percent lower then.
CONAN: I wonder, just as that aforementioned irrational exuberance helped to drive up, pump up the bubble, if you will, do you think that we're undergoing a little irrational pessimism right now, and it's helping keep things down?
SHILLER: That seems to be a good likelihood, yeah. I think so. I think people have seen - you know, this bust is five years old now, and it's not going away. It's not entirely irrational. It's not - people are suffering. We have an unemployment rate of 9.1 percent, and there are lots of people who don't know how they're going to pay their bills.
I mean, people are in trouble, and that poisons the atmosphere for everyone else.
CONAN: Let's see if we can get another caller in on the conversation. Let's turn to Matt(ph), Matt with us from Fort Myers.
MATT: Hey, the screener was asking if I was in a position to buy a house, and I said I am in a position to purchase a house if I wanted to. But I, just to go to the point that Mr. Shiller was making a minute ago is that work is so impermanent that if you were even to buy a house in this market, if a job were to lay you off or to close up shop, you're basically stuck with an anchor.
You can't move to another location. And I think a lot of people are willing to do that, even that have family, where they thought they have laid down roots, but they're just unable to move simply because they have this, you know, mortgage payment. It creates a huge - it's a burden on you, even if it is a great deal.
CONAN: Brian(ph) in Harrisburg wrote us an email to that point, too: I think the reason why, despite lower costs, lower rates, people are not making that big purchase is because people are more afraid to commit to a mortgage because nobody knows if their jobs will exist from week to week.
I'm ready to make a purchase, he wrote, yet I hesitate because if I were to lose my job, I don't want to face losing my home. It's a very big step. Honestly, the decision scares me. The economy's not improving, and who knows when it will? I've heard about so many people losing their homes lately, it makes me just not want to take that step to own my own home.
And Chris Arnold, I wanted to bring you back in on that point. We keep hearing that we're not going to get into an economic recovery, not really, until housing recovers.
ARNOLD: Yeah, and I think there's two things going on there. I mean, one is, okay, you lose your job, you might lose your house. But I think it's also, let's say, you know, you have a job or you might lose it, and you might need to move to get another job.
And so even if, you know, you've got some savings and you're not paycheck to paycheck and being out of work for three months wouldn't sink the ship, nobody wants to buy a house if they think, well, gee, you know, the job market is still so dicey, I might have to move to another city in a year or two.
And like Bob Shiller was saying, you know, you want to be able to plan to be in the house for five years. So yeah, I think that absolutely is one of the things that's going on out there.
CONAN: Matt, thanks very much for the phone call, appreciate it.
MATT: Thank you.
CONAN: We're talking with NPR economics correspondent Chris Arnold and Yale Professor Robert Shiller about the housing market and why so few are buying homes at a time of low interest rates and plenty of housing stock. Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
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CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan. We're talking about the housing market and why so many Americans are reluctant to take the plunge. In Las Vegas, 60 percent of mortgages are underwater, meaning the mortgage is more than the house is worth. In Cleveland, it's a lot cheaper to own than it is to rent.
Tell us your story. Have you bought a house recently? Why? If you've decided to wait, we want to hear from you, as well, 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.
Our guests today, NPR economics correspondent Chris Arnold and Yale professor and co-creator of the Case-Shiller Index, Robert Shiller. And I wanted to read a couple of emails we got. This from Linda(ph) in Honolulu: I live in Honolulu, just recently purchased a condo at 4.5 percent, 30-year, fixed rate. Purchasing has enabled me to make lower payments for housing than it was to rent last year. My unit was appraised at $225,000. I paid 180, a good deal, I think.
And this from Wes(ph) in north Phoenix: By way of dumb luck, I was not in a position to buy a house in the mid-2000s. Recently, I looked for homes to rent, since we'd outgrown our condo, and found it was much cheaper to buy a house for $110,000 and pay $800 a month with a mortgage than to rent one for $1,200 a month. I found the whole process to be so much easier than I imagined.
And Chris Arnold, numbers like that were what you prompted you to do a recent story that said, wait a minute, if you can get a mortgage and you can buy a house, you're going to be paying less than you are per month in rent.
ARNOLD: Yeah, you know, exactly. And what Bob Shiller was saying holds true absolutely. I mean, if you think you might want to move in a year, it doesn't matter necessarily if it's cheaper to buy, you know, because if prices do slide a little bit further, you don't want to get stuck, you know, with a house that you owe more than it's worth.
But yeah, that Hawaii example is perfect. I mean, if people do research in their areas and take a minute to think and say, okay, I'm paying $1,700 a month to rent, you know, after the tax advantages and everything else, and I get into a house and, you know, take some time and figure out what it'll be, the insurance and the taxes.
And, you know, if it looks like you can anywhere near break even, you know, there's a lot of things to think about there. Over time, if you lock in a fixed interest rate, that payment is never going to go up if you don't borrow, you know, borrow more against it and take a home equity loan, whereas rents, in the vast majority of places, your rent is going to go up, and you're not going to build any equity in your house.
It's - places like that, it's a hard argument to say it's not a good time to buy.
CONAN: And Robert Shiller, what impact - there are people - you know, housing prices have dropped, but for a lot of Americans, so have their incomes. So those numbers don't compute that well.
SHILLER: I'm sure that housing prices have dropped more than most people's incomes. GDP is still growing. You know, we had a few - well, we had seven quarters of decline. But basically, we're kind of back to the level where we were, you know, 2006 or so.
But, you know, I think Chris is right that the affordability is markedly improved right now for housing. And so, I think for a lot of people, it is a good time to buy.
But I keep thinking that it is still a bad economy and a bad market. So, individual decisions will have to take that into account.
CONAN: Let's go next to Adam(ph), Adam with us from Truckee in California.
ADAM: Hello, Neal, thanks for taking my call. I just moved to California, to the Tahoe area. We've been wanting to buy a home for a while, my fianc�e and I, and so I signed a job contract with a wonderful school down here. And then, all of a sudden there were some state budget cuts, and our escrow process that we had started came to a grinding halt, and we're all of a sudden unable to buy a home.
Fortunately, the school had a lot of integrity, and they were able to figure out a part-time contract for the year, but that puts us back in the renting pool. And we had the money together and were very excited to be homeowners. Now we're kind of on a different track.
CONAN: Now on a different track. So can you imagine getting back on that other track anytime soon?
ADAM: At some point soon. I was able to piece together the part-time that they offered with another part-time, but the other part-time job is helping to start a new school, and my full-time employment there over the next few years is contingent upon me helping to get enough students and establishing a viable school.
But, you know, until that's kind of going seriously, it doesn't make too much sense for us to buy, but we hope to in the next two to three years be able to get back on that track.
CONAN: Well, Adam, good luck to you. Thanks very much for the call.
ADAM: Thanks a lot, Neal.
CONAN: Let's go next to Tamika(ph), Tamika with us from Greenville in North Carolina.
TAMIKA: Hi, how are you doing?
SHILLER: Good. You're on the air. Go ahead, please.
TAMIKA: I am one of those people who owning a home has never been the American dream. I see no purpose, and there's nothing anything anybody could tell me to convince me because property taxes change, school districts change, roofs leak, water heaters go, air conditioning, and I don't see - I may pay a little extra in rent, but I don't have to worry about any of those things. If I need to move, I can move in 30 days.
CONAN: And has your rent been going up?
TAMIKA: No, actually it went down.
CONAN: It went down? So a good deal got better, as far as you're concerned.
TAMIKA: Yes, I just - no one can ever convince to me to own a home.
CONAN: Well, thanks very much for the call, and continued good luck on that rent. Bye-bye. And Robert Shiller, the rent equation is, for most people, that it is probably going to be going up sometime soon.
SHILLER: Well, rent has kept up with the consumer price index. So in real terms, you know, over the long run, I think it's actually - over the last century, it's been falling but only very, very gradually. I think Mika has a good point: There's a lot more convenience and flexibility in renting, and you don't have to get into all these do-it-yourself projects of fixing things, right. You get professionals to do it. It's the smart thing to do.
And the other thing is, if you had put your down payment in the stock market, you know, in 2009 rather than bought, you would have done so much better. You have to remember, there are alternative uses for your down payment.
CONAN: Let's go next to Elden(ph), and Elden's with us from Sacramento.
ELDEN: Hello, Neal, how are you doing?
CONAN: Good, thanks.
ELDEN: I'm excited to be on today. I actually studied real estate with Dr. Pizer(ph) at Harvard School of Design, and I've followed Professor Shiller's writings a lot over the last several years, so I'm excited to be on. I just wanted to add a few things, a few points to the conversation.
First of all, I think that people should make a distinction between what they're consuming when they're buying a house. You have a choice to consume shelter - that is, just a place to live, or you have the choice to consume it as an investment.
And the difference between those two, the criteria are very different, and so I think people should make decisions as to which one they're going to pursue. That would be a good rule of thumb.
I think also, there's kind of some maxims in real estate that they go in seven-year cycles. So, basically, seven years from the peak to the trough and then seven years up from the trough to the peak, so...
CONAN: If it was as easy as predicting seven-year cycles, I could be a professor at Harvard or Yale, too.
ELDEN: Well, it is that easy. You know, the next trough is pretty much scheduled to come around at the end of 2012, and if you look at a lot of the mortgages and the inventory, it should be pretty much washed out by that point. And if you look back, the last seven-year cycle started '04, '05, as one of your previous callers had indicated with the comment on the insanity.
CONAN: All right, well, Robert Shiller, let's - is a seven-year cycle, is that a good piece of timing there?
SHILLER: Well, I'm thinking that there were booms on the West Coast in the '70s and then again in the '80s. So that's like 10 years apart. And then in the '90s. I don't know.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SHILLER: But I don't think there's a scientific principle here. That sounded more like 10 years than seven years to me. So I look at the whole history, you know, any of these business-cycle theories is a bit iffy in my opinion.
CONAN: Well, he did raise an interesting point, though, about the housing stock. All of those houses that had been foreclosed upon, they're - some of them aren't on the market yet, but they're going to want to be.
SHILLER: Yeah, there are forces that might give you a tendency for cycles. I mean, it gets oversold, pent-up demand develops, and eventually population grows. They haven't been building them, and so the thing should turn up again.
But, I know another bit of evidence against a seven-year cycle, think of what happened in Japan. Their stock market peaked in 1991. That's 20 years ago. And it's been down almost every year since.
So, you know, the cycle story, it's appealing and it might have some vestige of truth in it, but I don't think we can predict that markets will turn up. They might well turn up in 2012, but we don't know.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CONAN: In which case your prediction, Elden, of - will we have then seven fat years?
ELDEN: Well, I would just make one more point also, just for people out there that are thinking about buying, and that is that any time that you can buy real estate for less than what it cost to build it, that's a way to minimize your risk.
CONAN: All right, thanks very much.
ELDEN: Thank you.
CONAN: Here's an email that we have from Matt(ph) in Phoenix: When I graduated college and bought a house in 2007, I was the victim of bad timing. However, now I'm trying to take advantage of the situation since houses are so cheap. I'm buying a second home.
I can rent out my first house for more than the monthly payments on the new one. So that's a different approach. From Brian(ph): I'm a realtor in San Francisco. At these rates, it seems like the tax advantages would be sufficient motivation alone, not considering the amount of money you throw out the window to never see again renting, especially in high-cost areas, such as the Bay Area of California and San Francisco. Due to the technology sector strength, the rents are up. I see many foreign buyers making all-cash purchase by very wealthy individuals. If Americans aren't going to take advantage of this opportunity, there seems to be a steady stream of people from Asia that are fueling our market in part as well.
Chris Arnold, you're there in Boston, another high-rent district.
ARNOLD: Yeah. You know, absolutely. And, you know, it's interesting. As we're talking about this, I think there is a tendency for people to view a home as an investment, sort of like a stock. And that's, you know, everybody who studies these things says that's absolutely the wrong way to look at it. And, I mean, I think of a home more as a savings vehicle, that if the price appreciates dramatically, that's gravy, that's terrific. And, you know, sure, you don't want to buy at the top. People like to buy at the bottom, you know.
But I think, you know, the idea that somebody could take their down payment and put it into the stock market at the right time, maybe they could do that. But if, you know, every month taking that mortgage, making that mortgage payment, human beings being what they are, it seems like once it's locked into paying a mortgage, people are very likely to keep paying their mortgage and keep paying down that mortgage and build, you know, hundreds of thousand dollar - hundreds of thousands dollars of equity over time. I think, in that way, there's a very strong argument that homeownership is a good investment.
As far as prices rising of your home, and here Professor Shiller has done some really interesting work, and we talked about this for a story a few months back. And I don't know, Professor Shiller, if you could - is it - talk how - talk about how you tracked places, you know, for 100 years, going back in the U.S...
SHILLER: That's right.
ARNOLD: ...and then all the way back to the 1790s in Amsterdam. I thought that was very interesting.
SHILLER: That's right. The interesting thing is that home prices didn't really appreciate if you correct for inflation either in Amsterdam or the United States over most of that period. And that puzzles people because they think, well, isn't land short and population growing? And so shouldn't home prices just keep going up?
But actually, 80 percent of home values in most places around the country is structure. It's only 20 percent land. And the problem with structure is that our construction industry is getting better and better over the years in building properties. They're more efficient. They're more mechanized. And also, people like the newer properties better. They're laid out better. They have better kitchen, all that, so all of that keeps the appreciation down.
So on the whole, historically, houses have been a good investment for the tax advantages, and for the advantages that they have for your lifestyle but not for their appreciation.
CONAN: And I wonder, Chris Arnold, as you talk to people about reasons they may not sell, well, there's all kinds of tax plans floating around. We're about to be into new presidential election. Are people concern...
ARNOLD: Yeah.
CONAN: ...that one of the - one of those tax breaks that's going to be cut out is...
ARNOLD: Yeah. I mean, there's some talk about that. You know, I guess, people will break down - you know, some people roll their eyes and think, oh, they'll never do it. You know, there's too many Americans who, you know, have grown to love this tax break. You know, for an economic standpoint, I think there's very - there's not much of an argument for that tax break. You know, I don't think it does much to help anything, really, except give people free money.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ARNOLD: But people have been getting their free money for a long time. And to take it away from them would be very politically unpopular. So I don't know. I mean, what might - what probably - I think is probably more likely to happen there is, now I think you can deduct up to a million dollars on a mortgage and maybe even including a ski house or something. So, you know, maybe we'll rein that in and say, OK, up to $500,000 or $400,000. You know, kind of the upper end of the middle class, their houses, you know, maybe we protect that but what's the argument for helping rich people to get this big tax rebate? But I'll think you'll hear more about going forward.
CONAN: NPR economics correspondent, Chris Arnold. Also with us, Robert Shiller of Yale University, where he's professor of economics. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
Let's go to Bob, Bob with us from Eugene in Oregon.
BOB: Yes. Hi. Good afternoon.
CONAN: Afternoon.
BOB: So I was one of those people that did it all right. I went in and I bought my house. I put 20 percent down, but I bought it at the top of the market. Now, I have a job opportunity that would require me to relocate. A lot better money. But if I try to sell my house now, the bank would come out fine. But I would lose all my equity. I couldn't afford to buy anything else. And I don't think that I'm, you know, alone in this. I think that part of the problem with the economy is that, you know, folks that own homes are no longer - have the mobility that they once had, even if home prices were steady, not increasing.
We'd lost so much value that folks that are, you know, have a mortgage, they can't unload that property. They can't be mobile. And, yeah, I think I would have been better off if I'd gone into one of those zero - you know, zero down loans and, you know, been able to do a short sale and kept my cash and bought something else down the road. But hindsight is 20-20.
CONAN: Hindsight indeed is 20-20. Robert Shiller, the desire to be able to be mobile when you want to be when opportunity presents itself in another part of the country, that may be a restraint too. You know, seven, eight years ago, you could sell your house in a flash, it seemed.
SHILLER: I thought it was interesting that Bob started out saying I did everything right, when he bought a house at the peak. Well, he did everything right, according to the conventional wisdom. It was conventional to think that you wanted to get on to this escalator like everyone else.
In fact, the subsidy for low-income housing was sometimes described as let's let the low-income people benefit in this huge appreciation. But it really wasn't right. It wasn't wisdom for exactly the reasons we're saying. It's putting all your eggs in one basket, in some risky asset, and allowing yourself to be tied down to it. If you really want that, OK. But to make that the conventional wisdom, what everybody must do, that is just a mistake.
CONAN: Well, Bob, good luck to you. Thanks very much for the phone call.
ARNOLD: Yeah. And I actually thought that was interesting with Professor Shiller's research - it's going all the way back to the 1790s - because I think people do figure, oh, yeah, my house probably appreciates five, seven percent a year. But if you go back to 1790 in Amsterdam and say your house was, I don't know, the equivalent of $100,000 or $200,000, whatever, you know, if that really appreciated at five or seven percent a year for hundreds of years, you know, a house - the house would be worth like a billion dollars, you know. I mean, it just - and then if you look at it that way, it starts to make sense that, yeah, houses just don't appreciate in value that way. But it seems like the expectations get out of line during the housing bubble, and people came to sort of expect that. And so now...
CONAN: Oh, Chris, if you bought the right piece of art and put it on the wall, it would have appreciated at those rates, so...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CONAN: But anyway, thank you very much for your time today. We appreciate it. Chris Arnold, NPR economics correspondent, with us from WBUR, our member station in Boston. Robert Shiller, the Arthur M. Okun professor of economics at Yale, joined us from our bureau in New York.
Coming up, we're going to talk about the retrial of Rod Blagojevich. That case, expected to go to the jury today. Stay with us. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.