I have a great conversation with Nicholas Retsinas, Director, Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. He and his staff just released The State of the Nation’s Housing 2010, a must read overview of the challenges facing the US housing market.

Here are other resources published by JCHS.

[click to open report]

I have a conversation with Mark Willis, a Resident Research Fellow at the Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy at New York University.

He is the co-author of Improving U.S. Housing Finance through Reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Assessing the Options along with Ingrid Gould Ellen and John Napier Tye.  This white paper was completed as part of the What Works Collaborative, a foundation-supported partnership that conducts timely research and analysis to help federal, state and local housing policy-makers frame and implement evidence-based housing and urban policy agendas.

The paper is essential reading as we go through a period of financial reform.  The report is described as a timely assessment of alternative proposals for the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, ranging from nationalization to dissolution.  The paper explains the role Fannie and Freddie have played, explores the goals a healthy secondary market for both single- and multifamily housing should serve, and develops a framework to help understand and evaluate the various proposals for reform.

The Wealth Report 2010 was released today by Knight Frank.  It is a much anticipated annual survey targeted at the high end consumer with great detail on global residential property trends. I have had an ongoing exchange of ideas and have followed their research for quite a while.  I was invited to provide commentary on the New York City market which is included in the report.  In this podcast I interview Editor Andrew Shirley and Liam Bailey, Head of Residential Research.  The interviews were conducted via Skype to their London offices so the quality is a bit lacking.  Nevertheless the quality of their conversation is terrific.

Download The Wealth Report 2010.

Barry Ritholtz of Fusion IQ, the The Big Picture blog and author of the must-read Bailout Nation had previously sat down with me last June so I was long overdue in inviting him back.

He is a terrific speaker and is always guilty of providing nothing less than clear cut commentary on the economic world around us. Plus he likes it when I call him irreverent.

This time we talk strategic non-foreclosure, existing home sales, interest rates, going to zero and the dumbest smart people in the room.

In this podcast I get to speak with Ben Jones, founder of The Housing Bubble Blog.  With a background in business, economics, and accounting, he’s been a prolific blogger/analyst of the housing bubble and crash since late 2004 and is considered the go to reference source for bubble conversation.  His site continues to draw a rabid readership who come there to lurk, exchange ideas, vent, call out spin and identify those in the real estate industrial complex.

In 2009, Mr. Jones was recognized by Inman News as one of the 50 most-influential people online in real estate. He also owns a property preservation, management, and investment company in Northern Arizona.

In this podcast, I have a conversation with Lakshman Achuthan, the co-founder and managing director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI), an independent organization focused on business cycle analysis and forecasting.  ECRI maintains business cycle chronologies for 20 countries around the world other than the U.S.

Lakshman is the managing editor of ECRI’s forecasting publications and regularly participates in a wide range of public economic discussions.  ECRI’s U.S. Weekly Leading Index is widely followed.

He is a member of Time magazine’s board of economists and the New York City Economic Advisory Panel (where I met him) and serves as trustee on a number of non-profit boards.  He is the co-author of Beating the Business Cycle: How to Predict and Profit from Turning Points in the Economy published by Doubleday.

In this podcast, I have a conversation with Justin Fox, economics and business columnist for Time Magazine and author of the book The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street.

As publisher Harper Collins says about the book:
“Chronicling the rise and fall of the efficient market theory and the century-long making of the modern financial industry, Justin Fox’s The Myth of the Rational Market is as much an intellectual whodunit as a cultural history of the perils and possibilities of risk.”

Here’s his interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

I first became acquainted with Justin by stumbling on his blog The Curious Capitalist which takes complex economic issues and translates them into everyday speak.

[Click to expand]

[Audio Quality Alert] What began as a 30-minute interview was cut to 18 minutes because of a random recurring podcast issue I have been trying to resolve: audio distortion. About 18 minutes into the interview I had to cut it short. My sincere apologies to Justin. But I got an idea and I set out this past weekend to solve the mystery. I am happy to report: problem solved going forward – I explain how at the end of the podcast – so much for myth of the rational podcast.

I was fortunate to have Jason Bram, Senior Economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York join me for the podcast.  We covered a lot of ground including regional employment, securities industry employment versus all other employment, the rent versus ownership ratio and confidence versus sentiment.

Jason referenced a few charts during the discussion including the forward looking Index of Coincident Economic Indicators.

Note: The views expressed here are those of the interviewee only and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System.

In this podcast I speak with Dr. Kevin Gillen, a vice president at Econsult and Research Fellow with the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Urban Research.  Kevin produces the seminal housing market report for Philadelphia.

He is releasing his Philadelphia regional report shortly and will introduce a new housing market report on the Jersey Shore in the coming months.

It was great to speak with Dr. Sam Chandan, President and Chief Economist of Real Estate Econometrics and an adjunct professor of real estate at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

I spoke with Matt Woolsey, Senior Reporter, Forbes Magazine, Forbes.com about his article covering the luxury housing market nationwide in the current edition of Forbes Magazine called:

The Other Shoe in Real Estate

Professor Robert Shiller took time out from his busy schedule when he was in New York to pay me a visit and let me interview him for The Housing Helix Podcast.

I invited him after I read his recent Op-ed piece in the New York Times, Why Home Prices May Keep Falling.

Dr. Shiller is well known for many things, including his New York Time’s bestselling book: Irrational Exuberance and his widely referenced monthly state of the housing market tool, The Case-Shiller Index. But he also continues to write about the housing market, having released two books over the past two years:

Last year’s The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It

and this year’s

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism

I hope you enjoy his insights.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Barry Ritholtz of Fusion IQ and The Big Picture weblog.  He’s a wealth of information and never pulls any punches in his characterizations of the current economic mess we find ourselves in.

The Big Picture is the leading financial weblog with must-read content and it boasts a huge following (self-included).

Barry recently released a terrific book: Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy. I highly recommend it.

This week I speak with Dan Gross, a senior editor and columnist at Newsweek and he writes the “Moneybox” column for Slate.  Dan covers economic topics in his columns and has written a number of books with the most recent available as an eBook  titled “Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation”

Here’s how Dan described the book’s message on the Colbert Report.

Keywords and phrases from Dumb Money:

• [BSH] Bourgeois Suburban Heaven
• Stray hedge fund managers scrounging for food
• Trumpensfreude

We also talked about the second home market and wondered whether the commercial real estate market was the next shoe to drop.

This week, I have a conversation with economist Dr. Kevin Gillen, Vice President of Econsult and is affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania as a Research Fellow in its Institute for Urban Research, through which he publishes his quarterly updates on the current state of Philadelphia’s housing and condominium markets.  He’s been sharing his research each quarter with the readers of my other blog, Matrix for which I am grateful.

In the podcast we cover his Philadelphia Housing Indices, as well as the three key economic hurdles facing the Philadelphia’s housing market:

1. Problems with the accuracy and proposed redistribution of tax assessments

2. The controversial 10-year tax abatement

3. Political turmoil relating to the building trades and the associated above average cost of construction.

Much of his commentary is in the context of the US housing market.

Note: I am still experiencing a lag in the audio capture via the combination of Skype and WireTap Studio so there are moments where it sounds like I am interrupting the answer.   Please overlook this – I’ll figure it out eventually and it doesn’t detract from the clarity that Kevin provides to a complex housing situation.