My conclusion: the price is often wrong, and sometimes very wrong. Furthermore, when prices diverge from fundamental value by such wide margins, the misallocation of resources can be quite big. For example, in the United States, where home prices were rising at a national level, some regions experienced especially rapid price increases and historically high price-to-rental ratios. Had both homeowners and lenders been Econs, they would have noticed these warning signals and realized that a fall in home prices was becoming increasingly likely. Instead, surveys by Shiller showed that these were
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