Housing markets

Baby steps on getting the government out of the mortgage business, and thus out of the housing bubble creation business, elicit cries of horror from, not surprisingly, interested parties.

I remain puzzled by the American fetish for home ownership. Renters are people too and there is no particular reason to subsidize the one and not the other. Also, though it might surprise some folks, the mortgage market did manage to function before Fannie and Freddie came along.

Hat tip: Ken Troske.

Seville Beach Hotel

The most interesting thing we saw walking along the beach in Miami was the Seville Beach Hotel, which has been closed (surprisingly given the value of the real estate that it sits on) for over five years. I poked around a bit trying to find pictures from someone who had climbed the fence and gone inside but came up empty so my external pictures will have to do. Pictures of the hotel in better days from Tripadvisor here and news on its future here.

Adventures in working paper misbehavior

Regular readers of ECONJEFF will have heard me rant before about media outlets (like the NYT) that write articles about working papers, which have not yet been peer reviewed, rather than published papers, which have been peer reviewed.

An astute but anonymous reader forwarded me this piece on something called "Seeking Alpha" that excerpts (and so publicizes) a paper that hasn't even been released yet as a working paper. Right there at the bottom it says:

[Excerpt from a paper coming out in two weeks]

Of course, it only gets better, for the author of the excerpt on Seeking Alpha is also the author of the as-yet-unreleased paper.

One suspects that better feedback on the paper would be forthcoming, and the discussion of the paper's analysis and conclusions might be more elevated, if the publicity campaign for the paper began after the paper was available to readers, rather than before.

Sigh.