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Posted By: Todd Schultz

This from Alan Greenspan in 2003 according to Bloomberg.com:

Greenspan Backs Homeowner Debt as Prices Increase (Update1)

By Will Edwards

March 22 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. homeowners have amassed a record $6.82 trillion of mortgage debt as real estate values jumped in the past decade, and have borrowed against their homes for spending money. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, the nation's guardian of financial stability, is supporting them.

``We know that increases in home values and the borrowing against home equity likely helped cushion the effects of a declining stock market during 2001 and 2002,'' Greenspan said in a Feb. 23 speech in Washington.

Some economists including Yale University's Robert Shiller say they disagree with the Fed chairman, arguing that consumers shouldn't use home values to supplement spending when their hourly wages are rising at the slowest pace on record and the savings rate is a third of the last decade's average. As borrowing costs rise, mortgage payments may jump for households with adjustable-rate loans, causing delinquencies, Shiller says.

``Lenders are allowing people to borrow more against their house, but Greenspan is saying that home prices are outstripping that,'' said Shiller, a 57-year-old professor of economics at Yale, in a March 18 phone interview from Rome. His 2000 book, ``Irrational Exuberance,'' published before the 2001-2002 market slide, argued that stocks were overvalued.

The surge in house values is ``not going to continue,'' Shiller said. ``It's already slowing down in a number of cities, where we could see home price declines. There is a possibility of a real problem. I wouldn't minimize it.'' Last year's 7.5 percent jump in the median house price to $170,000 was the biggest since an 11.7 percent increase in 1980.

If need be, I'll dig up where Warren Buffett drubbed Greenspan in a 2003 discussion/debate involving many of these sam eissues.