If someone says we're at the bottom, good luck in believing that. We've got a lot of inventory to work through and a lot of loan losses to sort out.

Quote of the week: When asked how to solve the housing crisis, Bill Gross, from PIMCO, replied: "One of the wisest men I know has this serious but admittedly impractical solution: have the government buy one million new/unoccupied homes, blow them up, and then start all over again. Absent that, he's not quite sure what to do, nor am I."

See also, another snippet from Bill Gross:

Bill Gross, bond management genius and head man at Pimco, has recently written that the total write-offs for the mortgage disaster will total $1 trillion. At most, half of that has made it though the financial system.

From the archive:

Because all asset hyperinflations revert to the mean, we can expect housing prices to decline roughly 38 percent from their peak as they return to something closer to the historical rate of monetary inflation. If the rate of decline stabilizes at between 6 and 7 percent each year, the correction has about six years to go before things stabilize, leaving the economy in need of $12 trillion. Where will that money come from?

Mortgage Market Week in Review