I am outsourcing this item to colleague Jamie Smith Hopkins, who has some interesting reading on how the real estate industry is blaming newspapers for the housing slump because they are -- OMG! -- reporting on it. Her posts are here and here.

Clearly, the homeowning and homebuying public would have been much better served by listening to David Lereah, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors. Lereah, author of Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom?: The Boom Will Not Bust and Why Property Values Will Continue to Climb Through the End of the Decade - And How to Profit From Them (2005), was so wrong so often about housing trends that he inspired a whole blog dedicated to tracking his goofs. Lereah is no longer with the Realtors. This chart from the blog, via InvesTech Research, is very interesting. It tracks Lereah puffery alongside what was going on in housing stocks.