Our friend Ray Niles has just published an article on the housing crisis in the George Mason University School of Law’s Journal of Law, Economics, and Policy, Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring 2010. entitled “Eighty Years in the Making: How Housing Subsidies Caused the Financial Meltdown”.

Diana and I have both had the pleasure of reading it, and I found it especially valuable because it presented a thorough historical overview of the many decades of government intervention in various aspects of the market that led to the housing bubble (and subsequent collapse).

I had read several prior articles that discussed one or more of these causes, but Ray’s article did a nice job of presenting all of that information in a nice integrated fashion, accessible to a layperson without specialized economic training.

The article is not available in downloadable form, at least not at present. But Ray has permission from the publisher to send PDF copies. So if you’re interested, send him an e-mail at: “rayniles (at) rcniles (dot) com”.

I highly recommend his article, and I’m glad to see him building on his excellent work from the past few years.