If I were a professional economist and my reputation mattered to me, I’d be a bit circumspect, too. Since nobody knows or cares who I am I can get away with not having to worry about that on this blog.
He somewhat has to express his public opinions in conservative tones. Nobody can account for the unforseeable. Better to be wrong by degree than by direction. He gets almost full credit for being right even if the market winds up overshooting his initial projections.
As for where it settles, I spent a couple hours over the weekend looking at all the closed sales so far from May 2007 in the MLS for Carlsbad and Oceanside. I was looking for properties with recent prior sales from 2003-2006. I found a number of examples of current sale prices matching previous sales prices on the same home from mid to late 2004. That doesn’t include the losses from 2005 and 2006.
The 05/2007 price didn’t retract to the 2004 price in 100% of the examples I saw, but it was more than 70%.
