[quote=patientrenter]I’ll piggyback on this thread to ask a question I’ve been mulling for a while:
You’ve all seen the Shiller charts that show this real estate bubble was the biggest in recorded human history. That’s right, what happened to real estate prices in just the last 10 years – in San Diego, in California, in the USA, in much of the rest of the world – was bigger than anything ever recorded.
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I haven’t seen Shiller’s charts, but Japan’s real estate and stock market bubbles were both much larger than ours by a factor. In 1989, the grounds surrounding the royal palace in Tokyo were worth more than all of the real estate in the state of California combined.
Comparing our peak with Japan’s peak, Japan’s ratio of (real estate market value + stock market value)/GDP was 3x ours. We had a huge bubble. Perhaps the second largest in history. But Japan’s was in a different ballpark entirely relative to ours.
