The Damage From the Housing Bubble: How Much Did the Greenspan-Rubin Gang Cost Us?

Eduardo Porter asks how much the housing bubble and its collapse cost us in his column today. (He actually asks about the financial crisis, but this was secondary. The damage was caused by the loss of demand driven by bubble wealth in a context where we had nothing to replace it.) Porter throws out some estimates from different sources, but there are some fairly straightforward ways to get some numbers from authoritative sources.

We can use as a starting point the Congressional Budget Office'...