That chart is of questionable origins don’t you think? Its a bubble bloggers homemade chart from what I can see. Still, nationally it even shows Japans price run up was worse than ours.
Our RE bubble certainly includes land and also CR just like Japan’s bubble did. So if we could find a US chart that shows just land I’m guessing we’d have the a similar chart to the Economist’s chart.[/quote]
The bubble bloggers’ homemade charts were FAR more accurate than the MSM’s charts all throughout this bubble. They appear to be more indepth and accurate in this one as well.
The Economist used this chart to attempt to show that Japan’s runup in prices was MUCH lower than the U.S.’s, when in fact comparing similar indices showed a similar runup in prices nationwide between the U.S. and Japan in terms of housing prices, and a significantly LARGER bubble when compared to large bubble cities (like San Diego or Miami compared to Tokyo or Kyoto).
Our land, btw, had further to run up than Japans did – at the beginning of the bubble, land was CHEAP in most of the US. It was NOT cheap in Japan pre-bubble.
As the blogger noted as well, inflation was substantially higher here over the same runup period than it was in Japan, which also has an effect (ignored again by the Economist’s shallow analysis).
