Housing Bubble: Japan vs US

"Take It From Japan: Bubbles Hurt" came out Dec 25, 2005, but is a good reminder on what happened in Japan and how we in America is going through the same thing right now (popping of the bubble). We'll see how far down we'll go and how long it'll take to hit bottom this time around.

Here are two great quotes:

"During a bubble, people don't believe that prices will fall," he [Yukio Noguchi, a finance professor at Waseda University] said. "This has been proven wrong so many times in the past. But there's something in human nature that makes us unable to learn from history."
In the 1980's, the expectation of rising real estate prices made many Japanese homebuyers feel comfortable about taking on huge debt. And they did so by using exotic loans that required little money upfront and that promised low monthly payments, at least for a short time.

What they mean for us today in America, I'm afraid the answer is: only time will tell....

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