Comment 28063

By A Smith (anonymous) | Posted January 08, 2009 at 11:52:31

Brandon, I understand your call for greater regulations and enforcement, but as an investor, how do you know that this is taking place. I was under the assumption that the numbers I was looking at were correct and yet they were not. How was I to know what that the government was doing? Who was watching them?

Furthermore, a big reason why financial companies made so many bad loans was due to the fact that money was too cheap. Since the BLS uses owner's equivalent rent in producing it's inflation numbers, rather than actual home prices, most of the increase in home values was illusory, based on nothing more than an expansion of the money supply. Had the government used median home prices in it's figures instead of OER, there would never have been 10% increases in home prices, but more like 2-3%. This would have allowed banks to slowly increase and decrease their balance sheet and not be whipped saw by a massive deflation that is now also understated in the U.S. economy.

Once again, reliance on inaccurate and incompetent government officials have led investors to let their guard down, thereby doing more harm than if they never existed in the first place.

Google "How owner's equivalent rent duped the fed" for a great primer on this subject. I think it will help explain why having zero government assistance is better than having inaccurate government assistance.

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