Waiting for a burst of optimism: Colorado's real estate market, like the rest of the nation's, has yet to find its footing.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: [Q4] REAL ESTATE REPORT

Some people have started comparing President Barack Obama to ex-President Jimmy Carter. However, it is probably more accurate to compare Obama to President Richard Nixon.

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This is because President Carter inherited an economic mess, stagflation, which was compounded by an economic crisis and an OPEC oil embargo, which he then deepened and prolonged through price controls and such.

President Obama is more like Nixon, who from President Lyndon Johnson inherited a war, guns-and-butter Federal spending and a sagging economy, then got slammed by an Arab oil embargo, then messed that up with price controls and abandoning the gold standard. Then he resigned and handed the whole steaming heap to Gerald Ford, who handed out Whip Inflation Now buttons. When that didn't work Ford lost the election to Carter, who put on a sweater and gave Americans; a fireside lecture about their malaise.

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Come to think of it, maybe Obama seems like all of them: helpless.

Looking back over the decades, the U.S. economy generally--and finance, banking and real estate in particular--have really stunk for long periods. These long bad eras then are punctuated by bursts of optimism, which are followed by bouts of euphoria, which finally pop like a bubble.

Three years after the downturn began, we know real estate still slinks because we typed "real estate stinks" into Google and received 312,000 results in 0.18 seconds.

In the interest of precision we then typed in "the national real estate market," Colorado included, and received 258,000 results in 0.91 seconds. And we found it still stinks because the sum and substance of policies pursued by the Federal Reserve Board, and the U.S. Congress and President Obama (Bush, too) have been to attempt to let the financial, banking and real estate industries down e-e-easy, which has meant a long, slow bleeding period followed by an even slower recovery.

In October, 30-year fixed mortgage rates tied their record low, 4.32 percent, and 15-year mortgage rates reached their all-time low, 3.75 percent. At the same time consumer confidence fell to the lowest level since February. Yet in 2010, U.S. homeowners regained $1 trillion of the $7.5 trillion in home equity they had lost since first-quarter 2006, according to the Fed

Nationally, Fannie Mae in September reported that "serious delinquencies" on single-family mortgages (defined as loans 90 days or more in arrears) had risen for three straight...