From the the Phoenix Business Journal last November “How the fiscal cliff could decimate Arizona’s real estate sector”.
… Arizona’s rapid recovery of its housing market will almost certainly relapse should the nation drop off the fiscal cliff, Elliott Pollack, an economist and CEO of Scottsdale-based Elliott D. Pollack & Co., told me this week.
“The fiscal cliff is quite real and quite ugly,” Pollack said. “It would have a severe impact on Arizona — almost draconian.”
I didn’t follow the fiscal cliff issue. The whole issue seemed overwrought to me with the opponents saying, as is common in politics, that if you don’t do what I say that it will be the end of the world as we know it.
Of course, what actually happened with the fiscal cliff could have been significantly toned down from what Pollack was talking about last November, but so far the impact hasn’t been “severe” or “draconian.”
“Negligible” would be a better description, at least so far. Arizona home prices continued to increase rapidly this year.
[Note to self: Don’t be overwrought when you make economic predictions.]