Rich Rocks the UT

[Zeitgeist]

It’s all Greek to me! Seriously, congratulations and thanks for giving us all a place to go or is this an experiment you are running on us?

[EconProf]

[quote=Rich Toscano]Thanks, EconProf. Though I should admit, I’ve gotten plenty wrong too, for the record. ;-)[/quote]
Welcome to the club.

[EconProf]

[quote=joecA lot of economist didn’t even see the bubble coming and there are plenty of stock market “experts” as well…[/quote]
Exactly right. Which is why one’s record should be fully disclosed before they are interviewed or quoted.

[Jazzman]

[quote=Rich Toscano]Haha, thanks CAR… more recently I’ve been accused of not being bearish enough on housing, because I’m an owner now… so I guess we’ve come full circle. ;-)[/quote]
Owning a home is going to influence how you view things I guess. But was there a turning point when you felt negative news was feeding off itself, or was no longer justified, or was bad for business. I sensed a shift probably around the time of the tax credits, or just after.

[Rich Toscano]

Owning a home has no influence whatsoever on how I view things. The data is the data, and my home ownership status is completely irrelevant — it was when I was renting, and it is now that I’m an owner.

I’m sorry to be prickly about this. But I’ve put a ton of work into trying to objectively figure out the housing market and trying to help people understand what’s going on. I haven’t always been right but my efforts have always been honest and my mistakes were honest ones.

I know you didn’t mean anything by it Jazzman, so no worries — but since you mentioned it, I am just explaining why I push back so hard on the idea that whether I personally own or rent has anything to do with my analysis of the data.

Anyway, onto your question. There was definitely a point where any time I posted anything positive, I would get all kinds of pushback. It was more obvious when I posted about the economy. I used to do a monthly update on jobs for Voice of SD, and at one point, any time I posted on positive job growth, people would give me all kinds of crap. One time, someone actually posted a comment stating with complete certainty that someone had bribed me to write something positive about the economy. (Who would do such a thing — bribe someone to write a positive article about the job market in a small local nonprofit news site? Nice business model). This was probably 2009, maybe 2010. You couldn’t point out a single positive data point without getting jumped all over by the peanut gallery (even though it was not opinion, but actual data that anyone could look up).

As far as housing I don’t remember it being as obvious a shift, but it definitely got ridiculous. For instance, when I posted about how I bought my house, one commenter pointed out the flaw in my math as he saw it: I had failed to factor in a permanent 6% per year DECLINE in home prices for the foreseeable future! But generally, the over-bearishness on housing wasn’t as bad as with the economy in general.

[Jazzman]

“…the over-bearishness on housing wasn’t as bad as with the economy in general.”

There has been a lot of understandable resentment towards the Great Recession and many still have pent up blame. The “pushback” you received over positive news was possibly that many think of Piggington as a bastion of truth, or refuge from the madness. That doesn’t imply it isn’t, but any sense of a shift away from the ‘crusade’ will get some pushback from the diehards. I’m not one of them, and neither do I believe your views are shaped by being a home owner. I do, however, believe a lot of what we are seeing in the current housing market, whether in SD or further afield, is not healthy. Low inventory, low interest rates, government guarantees, tax credits, over-valuations (in your own words), bidding wars, and investor speculation much of which was symptomatic of the 2006 housing bubble. To me that warrants continuing to look more critically behind the numbers. It is not in any way a criticism of what you do, which I think is great. You are well deserving of all the credit you get. I wouldn’t continue to read your posts after eight years, if I didn’t believe it to be so.

[Rich Toscano]

Thanks Jazzman. I certainly with your concerns about “unhealthiness” in a lot of aspects of this economy.

[Zeitgeist]

Excellent comments Jazzman and Rich.

[Anonymous]

That was interesting. You did a great job in the interview.

[Author]

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