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The government ordered the loosening of lending standards. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. The government forced lending institutions to give loans to people who as I say, couldn’t afford them.
—Sarah Palin on how big government forced lending and ordered the loosening of lending standards.
This marks approximately six months of improved readings in these statistics, beginning in early 2009.
—S&P Case Shiller announcement
These figures continue to support an indication of stabilization in national real estate values, but we do need to be cautious in coming months to assess whether the housing market will weather the expiration of the Federal First-Time Buyer’s Tax Credit in November, anticipated higher unemployment rates and a possible increase in foreclosures.
—David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor’s
There are now several months of data in which we have seen improvement. California in particular seems to be showing sustained improvement.
—Maureen Maitland, vice president for index services at Standard & Poor’s
We believe it unlikely that the overall price adjustment seen to date is sufficient to balance supply (which is enormous) with demand.
—Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist of MFR Inc
The market for housing will not become truly robust until market forces replace the prostheses of government support.
—Richard Fisher, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
The Case-Shiller Index is not seasonally adjusted which means price gains in the spring and summer should not be surprising. A seasonally adjusted index shows more muted growth while the seasonally adjusted 10 city index continues to show declines in prices. Despite the disparity these measures may be indicating, there is little doubt the housing market is improving. Prices are improving, the inventory picture continues to get better, and government support for the sector remains in place, for now.
—Dan Greenhaus of Miller Tabak & Co
If they invest in 21st-century technologies and we invest in 20th-century technologies, they’ll win. If we both invest in 21st-century technologies, challenging each other, we all win.
—David Sandalow, the assistant secretary of energy for policy, from Thomas Friedmans op-ed piece: NYT
All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms.
—Marshall Mcluhan, Understanding Media
The city’s water system was put in place by William Mulholland, the self-taught engineer who built the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the revolutionary, gravity-flow system of pipes and channels that carries water from mountains and valleys more than 200 miles away.
Doesn’t this detail in some way explain this statement?
The number of breaks – 36 during the first three weeks of September – isn’t unusual for a city the size of Los Angeles, said James McDaniel, senior assistant general manager with the Department of Water and Power. Rather it’s the severity of the breaks, including one that created a sinkhole so big it nearly swallowed a fire truck.
Google organized our memory. Real-time search organizes our consciousness.
The web is full of pophets…I’m not a prophet, I’m an editor
—David Remnick at a CUNY discussion
innovation isn’t something that innovators do — innovation is what customers adopt. And a supply-side definition of innovation guarantees the kind of self deception that you’ve described, because it is the market that determines whether something is innovative or not, and whether something is adopted or not.
And then there is an important critical next step. Just because an innovation is adopted doesn’t mean that it’s a successful business innovation. The challenge for business is not just to get customers and clients to adopt innovation, it’s to get them to pay a premium for the innovation.
—Michael Schrage interviewed in Ubiquity of the ACM…he goes on to say:
Business schools are like pathologists: we do our best work with dead patients.
what looks like a stupid and counterproductive choice from the outside makes perfect sense from within the internal economy of the organization
The other book I’m interested in doing is about innovation as an act of persuasion: it’s not just act of creation, it’s an act of persuasion, and I’m very interested in the role of demos as a medium of persuasion in getting individuals and institutions to explore or commit to innovation.
Ubiquity Volume 7 Issue 08 February 28- March 6, 2006)
From an earlier interview in Ubiquity
the real story of American innovation is the folks who adopted these inventions and thereby transformed them from mere inventions to full-scale innovations? Who are the great customers?
there are a lot of business people who confuse changes in technology with changes in their business,
—Michael Schrage: Ubiquity, Volume 5, Issue 39, Dec. 8 – 14, 2004
Housing has been the sector of the economy with the largest multiplier effect. Whether buying new homes or existing homes, people tend to fill them up with things: new furniture, new appliances, new window coverings.
—David Berson, former chief economist at Fannie Mae, current chief economist of PMI Group
I’m right in there with the rest of the cheerleaders, but there are no historical anecdotes, no historical data points to use for this
—Lewis Ranieri, the 62-year-old mortgage- bond pioneer who is chairman of New York-based Hyperion Partners LP.
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