March 11, 2009
Housing, Mortgages and Financial Turmoil forum, 12 February 2009
A half-day public forum entitled “Housing, Mortgages and Financial Turmoil” was held on 12 February 2009 at RMIT University.
This event gave more than 130 attendees an opportunity to share first-hand the tensions and trials witnessed by American experts during the financial turmoil and housing crisis of 2008.
Professor John Quigley from the Department of Economics, UCLA, Berkeley, a leading authority on the sub prime crisis and ramifications for housing markets was planning to present the address but was called to Washington. He was replaced by associate and co-author Professor Karl E Case.
Professor Karl Case is the Katharine Coman and A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, where he has taught for over 30 years. He is also a founding partner in the real estate research firm of Fiserv Case Shiller Weiss which produces the well known S&P Case-Shiller Indices of home prices. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corporation and The Depositors Insurance Fund of Massachusetts. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, where he is a member of the Academic Advisory Board.
Karl has studied and written extensively on real estate markets and prices for the last 25 years. He has authored a number of studies that attempt to isolate the causes and consequences of boom and bust real estate cycles. He has recently written a paper with John Quigley for the European Journal of Housing Policy, How Housing Booms Unwind: Income Effects, Wealth Effects, and Feedbacks Through Financial Markets, addressing key issues central to the current crisis in financial markets. In 2003, he wrote a paper, Asset Prices and Monetary Policy, with Robert Shiller and John Quigley. This was published by the Reserve Bank of Australia.
Karl has also written a number of books in the field including Economics and Tax Policy and Property Taxation: The Need for Reform and Principles of Economics, a basic text co-authored with Ray C. Fair, now in its ninth edition.
Comment was provided by a varied panel of experts: Professor Susan J Smith from Durham University, UK; Professor Joshua Gans from the Melbourne Business School; John Edwards, CEO of Residex and Dr Val Colic-Peisker from the AHURI RMIT Research Centre.
Questions from the floor covered a range of issues around house prices and risk and explored the implications – in terms of policy implications and economic and social impacts.
The forum was the public component of The Second International Think Tank on Housing Wealth: House Prices and Risk, a meeting of invited experts from ten countries which met over the next day and a half.
The events were hosted jointly by the AHURI RMIT Research Centre and Durham University and sponsored by the Victorian Department of Human Services.
Presentation downloads:
Professor Case’s PowerPoint presentation (PPT 802kb)
Panelist John Edward’s PowerPoint presentation (PPT 100kb)
The other panelists did not use PowerPoint.
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