Housing Doom

It’s Op-Ed Friday, and I’m taking one of my rare weekends where I and my computer part company for a couple days. [The family isn't convinced I can do it without breaking into cold sweats, but the B&B has no internet.]

John will be around, and of course the ever faithful Igor.  Please help them keep Doom running with your links, comments, emails and ideas.  Anything of a time sensitive nature, please pass along to John, as I won’t see my email from Friday afternoon until Sunday night.
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The subprime mortgage sector has now partly collapsed and hundreds of thousands of Americans are threatened with the loss of their homes. Many thoughtful analysts have looked into the mouth of hell and concluded — "We don’t want to go there." However, finding a way out of this mess is going to be tough. Serious thinkers have been reconsidering the new bankruptcy laws, and now find them to be far from ideal in an era of falling house prices. Yesterday Housing Doom reader John Ryskamp sent along his thoughts on the subject. He’s generously given us permission to post his work here. We understand this article will also be appearing in the Social Science Research Network.

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Last week for Op-Ed Friday, I posted a graph of the NAR’s predictions for home price appreciation through the second quarter of 2008.  The graph looked like this:

This week however, the NAR came out with a different set of predictions, and the graph looks like this: [I can't find the data for last weeks chart on the website now- the chart with the new data replaced the old one.]
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