The New York Times has a fun story covering a number of breakout words and phrases for 2205. Our friend Froth made the list. Here is the original story and here is the froth excerpt:
The soap opera that is the housing market.
By DAVID LEONHARDTALAN GREENSPAN has earned a reputation in
his 18 years as Federal Reserve chairman as a master of the 50-word
sentence whose meaning is nearly impossible to untangle. Once in a
while, though, he turns a phrase that seems to capture the country’s
economic anxieties.In response to a question after a speech
in May, Mr. Greenspan said that "at a minimum, there’s a little froth"
in the housing market. He was not the first person to use the word, but
after it passed his lips, it quickly became part of the national
conversation.Part of its allure is simple: it’s a fun word to
say, one that conjures the image of a baby’s bath or a hot cappuccino.
But "froth" – like "frothy," which has become more common since May -
has the added virtue of describing the nation’s real estate obsession
in a more nuanced way than "bubble" does.Froth, the
dictionaries say, refers to a bunch of bubbles rather than a single big
one. In May, Mr. Greenspan emphasized that there was no nationwide
housing bubble, a position shared by most economists. If you have owned
a home in Indiana or upstate New York over the last two decades and
watched its value rise little faster than inflation, you understand
this notion better than many big-city residents do.But the
rapid increases in house values in much of the rest of the country
cannot continue long, Mr. Greenspan added. "It’s hard not to see that
there are a lot of local bubbles," he said.When prices
continued rising in the weeks that followed, Mr. Greenspan looked as if
he could be repeating his flirtation with bubble-ology almost a decade
ago. In 1996, he asked whether "irrational exuberance" had consumed
stock-market investors, and equity prices around the world briefly
tumbled before resuming their ascent.Mr. Greenspan then backed off, saying that bubbles usually could not be detected until after they popped.
This
year, however, he continued his gentle warnings, and the housing market
had already begun cooling by the start of summer. Houses now take
longer to sell on average, and prices have stopped rising in some areas.What happens from here is not clear, but soon it will not be Mr.
Greenspan’s problem. He will retire Jan. 31, to be replaced by Ben S. Bernanke, a White House adviser and former Princeton economist who can become the nation’s new economic phrasemaker.