Spencer's Blog
This is my blog where I discuss things I find interesting, including: real estate, venture capital, entrepreneurship, economics and pop culture.
ARCHIVED BLOG POSTS
2009
A lot has been made about the government's extraordinary intervention into the housing market in the post-bubble era. In fact, I recently participated in a lively debate on CNBC about the Treasury Department's Christmas Eve decision to increase its $200 billion backstop of Fannie & Freddie to a b...
12/29/2009
If you spend any time in the venture capital or startup community, you quickly hear the platitude that "it's so much cheaper to start a company today because of web2.0 technologies". After all, startups can use Amazon's cloud computing rather than buying expensive hardware storage, Google Docs an...
12/28/2009
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It seems like such an obvious question to ask ourselves in retrospect, but I admit that I never thought about this before. Until I read this paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland titled "Why didn't Canada's Housing Market Go Bust?" Although this paper was one of the most digestable Fed...
12/21/2009
In this interesting working paper from the Altanta Federal Reserve, economists look at every residential mortgage in Massachusetts from 1989 to 2008 to determine the cause of the foreclosure crisis. They conclude that home price depreciation was more to blame than lax underwriting standards. Lax ...
12/19/2009
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I have an investment property in Florida. In the last three years, twice I’ve listed it for sale. Twice I’ve ended up renting it. Twice I’ve relied on my agentto help me with the decision making that took me down this path to simply get the home occupied. It is a big reality that today’s real est...
12/15/2009
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I try to keep most of my blog posts here focused on real estate, but I also love the travel industry. So I want to give a quick plug for Disney Cruises. My family went on one with friends of ours a few weeks ago and it was fantastic. I highly recommend a Disney cruise if you're lookin...
12/14/2009
