Bubble mentality is still very well entrenched

Here are two great stories, the first one from the NYT, and the second one from Bloomberg.

CalculatedRisk points to this report from the NYTimes: Housing Fades as a Means to Build Wealth, Analysts Say

In an annual survey conducted by the economists Robert J. Shiller and Karl E. Case, hundreds of new owners in four communities — Alameda County near San Francisco, Boston, Orange County south of Los Angeles, and Milwaukee — once again said they believed prices would rise about 10 percent a year for the next decade. 

With minor swings in sentiment, the latest results reflect what new buyers always seem to feel. At the boom’s peak in 2005, they said prices would go up. When the market was sliding in 2008, they still said prices would go up. 

“People think it’s a law of nature,” said Mr. Shiller, who teaches at Yale.

Here's the Bloomberg one: Harvard Business School Drives Yale and MIT’s Edifice Complex

Aug. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Yale University’s School of Management, which aspires to be among the world’s best business schools, crams its students and faculty into 19th-century homes and former astronomy buildings linked by a rabbit-warren of basements. That’s a far cry from Harvard Business School’s 33- building riverfront campus, which boasts a chapel, health club and its own art collection.

Let's not confuse 'the world's best business school' with 'the world's most expensive business school'. Anyway, business, management and economics, like many other skills are better learnt by practicing. This frenzy for expensive diploma will end, because its price is unsustainable, and the 'great' results of such great university PhDs moving into banking has just

To help catch up, Yale is planning a glittering $180 million structure designed by Lord Norman Foster, who built London’s “Gherkin” tower. The new building, scheduled to open in 2013, will help the school keep pace with its rivals, said Dean Sharon Oster.

“You can’t be in a dump if everyone else is in a spectacular building,” Oster said.

A dump? You must be joking. And I thought that Universities are meant to be a place where you study. It looks like I'm confused, they are now holiday and vacation camps?

Elite business schools are locked in an “arms race” of building bigger and more elaborate business campuses to recruit the best students and faculty and climb magazine rankings, said Yale finance professor Matthew Spiegel. New buildings mean more office space for faculty and more classrooms for profitable executive education programs. Larger schools can also enroll more students, who pay as much as $80,000 per year in tuition, room and board and other expenses.

Students who agree to pay $80,000 a year to chill in a fancy university campus is a thing of the past, of the bubble economy that will not return.

[...] 

“The better the experience people have, the better they feel about the place, the more likely it will be that they would support it at some point,” said Robert Dolan, dean of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, in Ann Arbor, which opened a 270,000-square feet (25,084 square meter), $145 million building in 2009.

Since the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania opened its 324,000-square foot, $140 million Jon M. Huntsman Hall in 2002, rival business schools have scrambled to keep up.

The University of Chicago opened its $125 million Harper Center in 2004, while Michigan’s building debuted last year. Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Business, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will open new facilities this year, and Stanford Graduate School of Business, near Palo Alto, California, will follow in 2011.

Seems like there is a competition going on for the University which gets the most expensive building.

[...]
Applications jumped 30 percent the first year Chicago used the new building in its marketing, although improved rankings helped drive the increase as well, she said.

This was after 2004 or 2005. Things have changed since then. Those years were the bubble years, you're not going to replicate that in 2013 (the target date for the new building). Also note that the real estate prices have collapsed by 50% since the top, so the $180,000,000 corresponds to about $360,000,000 spent on the project if it were to happen in 2006 or 7...

A lot more in the report, worth reading...

Anyway, all this show that we are far from the realization that the Greater Depression is barely starting.