There's no such thing as regulation without too much of "the wrong kind".

Where are house prices rising?

I referred to the article by Luskin that Don linked earlier. Luskin claims, "According to the latest report from the National Association of Realtors, the median price of an existing home is up 8.5 percent from the low of last February. And according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median price of a new home is up 1.3 percent from the low of last December."

The Case-Shiller Composite-20 index was still falling in June (the most recent figures I've seen), but it was falling more slowly than in Q4 '07 and Q1 '08. The index in June is still above its level in June '04 and nearly 60% above the level in June '00. A 60% rise over eight years is hardly a housing collapse.

9 of the 20 city indices, including New York, were up May to June, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the N.Y. index is falling rapidly now, because financial services are the center of the storm.

I wish you the best of luck, but those of us outside of Manhattan and similar environs don't see the stratospheric heights of asset inflation, so we don't cry loudly when your prices collapse either. The price of my house has never been up nearly 60% since 2000. The C-S index for N.Y. was still up over 90% since 2000 in June of this year, after falling for two years.

If you have Excel, you can download the Case-Shiller index from S&P here.

Where are house prices rising? I live in Manhattan and the market has just now turned south. And that is before half of the people I know were just/are in the process of getting laid off. There is a long way to the bottom still.

With out these "free market" changes I'm not convinced this bubble or collapse would have occurred.

These complex products are built on a similarly complex, legalistic framework of forcible proprieties, and state agencies like the Peoples Bank of China bought a large proportion of the dubiously priced mortgage backed securities, so the "freedom" of it all is debatable.

Tulip bulbs happen. I don't see how the recent run up in house prices is "not a bubble" unless we simply define "bubbles" out of existence. The downside is not therefore as steep as the upside, because the housing market is the leading edge of an inflationary expansion practically designed into our monetary system. We're now in a phase in which house prices correct a bit while other prices catch up, so house prices and more general prices meet somewhere in the middle. House prices are now rising as commodity prices fall, so we're still bouncing around the new equilibrium. Wages must catch up as well.