You're telling us now?

An editorial from the LA Times: Home, borrowed home.

INVESTORS, BANKERS and economists — not to mention 80 million U.S. homeowners — are constantly sifting through data to figure out what's going on with the real estate market. New housing starts, raw material costs, time on the market, average rent/mortgage ratios, the Federal Reserve chairman's loose lips — all of these are supposed to give us vague and partial hints about whether the market is heating up, cooling down or "just right."

Yet the answer may be staring us right in the face. If you can't get a house with no money down, the sky is obviously falling.

Real estate is a topic so fraught with schadenfreude, forlorn hopes and visions of catastrophe that it almost seems like bad form to remain calm in the face of such bad news. The sub-prime market's 45-fold growth, from $13 billion in 1995 to $594 billion in 2005, stands as a monument to the nation's home-buying mania. You'd need the proverbial heart of stone not to laugh at the suffering of the gamblers who bet that the real estate market could increase indefinitely.

There's a puritanical impulse to say, "If you can't afford a down payment, you shouldn't be buying a house." But it may be more appropriate to marvel at a nation in which you can buy a house the way you'd buy a used car, and to thank the market's powers of natural selection that this behavior is now being curtailed.

Yep, it's certainly being curtailed in a Lizzie-Bordenesque way!