Barry Ritholtz asks a great question: Why does anybody still bother to quote what Greenspan says? Your eccentric uncle who builds pagodas out of used bubblegum would have as much credibility as the Maestro about the housing market and the financial crisis, but he never gets quoted. Successful economic forecasting was not a skill Greenspan possessed even before he was disgraced by the housing meltdown. Back when he was a consultant in the 1970s and early 1980s, his projections were notoriously unreliable.

“We are finally beginning to see the seeds of a bottoming [in the housing industry. The U.S. is] at the edge of a major liquidation [in the stock of unsold properties, which may help to stabilize prices]. —Alan Greenspan, May 12 2009

“I don’t know, but I think the worst of this may well be over.”
—Alan Greenspan, October 2006

Why does the public — and the Press — constantly seek out reassurances from the same people who misled them time and again in the past?

That was the question on my mind as I pondered yet another declaration from Alan Greenspan that the Housing Market has bottomed. That he has consistently made similar such statements before is cause for doubting him here. That these prior bottom calls were as far back as 2006 is cause for ridicule.

Few people have been worse than Greenspan in analyzing the Housing market. In fact, the only person / group I can think of with a consistently worse track record than Greenspan’s of analyzing the housing market was the group he spun his foolishness to yesterday: The National Association of Realtors.