re: Why do the talking heads keep mentioning the 150% run up in the last 4 years

The real estate bubble had already started in 1996 or 1997 though, so whatever mistakes Greenspan made around 2003 are largely irrelevant. No matter what he did, he couldn't have stopped the inevitable. That's always been my point.

It's not like Greenspan was some super dove on interest rates and inflation. Far from it. He produced much lower inflation rates than Volcker, and he did try to tamper down expectations and prick asset bubbles more than once. He was just constrained by the situation he found himself in. A different person in his shoes might have done things slightly different at the margins, but in the grand scheme of things, it would have made little difference. For all the hyped up "maestro" talk, in reality Greenspan was a lot more ineffectual and lacking in genuine economic influence than people make him out to have been.

At least that's my story.

P.S. -- And I don't know shite about real estate in particular. To me it's just part of a larger picture of monetary policy that I'm interested in, and so I look to it for signs of bigger macroeconomic trends that might be occurring.