. >> robert schiller is a professor of economics at yale university. bob, you're not one known to be, can i use the words, irrationally exuberant about the economy, but let's talk about the things that are not working yet. if there's an area of the economy that you or politicians or candidates could fix, whether it be jobs, housing, oil prices, that would help create or continue the momentum that this recovery has, what would it be? can we even isolate one? >> well, i don't know. everything is interconnected in the economy. but of the things you mentioned, i think jobs are the most important issue because they underlie confidence and the kind of thing that would bring back entrepreneurship hiring, lending. we've seen increases in the consumer confidence indexes, but i don't think that we're there yet. i'm not sure that these indexes measure what we want. we want to see people thinking we're safe now. our job is secure, we can spend money. if i'm an employer, i can hire people now. that's where i would put jobs first on your list. >> wf your areas of sp

here to explain his take is the aforementioned, robert schiller at yale. ourse, the schiller and s&p case schiller home price index. professor, good to see you again. i understand what you're saying, is that home prices, they're more likely to trend for an extended period. they have trended essentially for six years' time. how much more trend on the down side do you see in terms of years? >> well, it's really hard to tell, because we're just coming out of the biggest housing bubble in history. so we're kind of in uncharted territory. it could turn around, you know. it's been going a long time. we're seeing some good news now. starts, permits, confidence, the nahb housing index is strikingly up, though it's still low, but it's up. so it could turn around. i just don't see any scientific way to be assured what it's going to do. it could keep going down. >> this is your thing, robert. if you don't know where housing prices are going to go, how could anybody else have any hope of forecasting it correctly. where is the end game here, robert? what needs to happen

robert schiller, an economist who who is well-known for his work on the bubble including the housingble argued that the housing bubble began in 1998, which of course was well before the 2001 recession and therefore it the cut in the federal reserve interest rates. moreover, house prices rose very sharply after the tightening began in 2004 so the timing does not line up particularly well. now what the timing does suggest there might get couple of other possible explanations. one is obviously 98 was right in the middle of the tech bubble, the tech boom and it could be that again the same psychological optimism and the same mentality that was exceeding stock prices may have been exceeding house prices as well. another possibility is that has been pointed out by a number of economists, is that in the late '90s there was a very serious financial crisis called the asian financial crisis that hit a number of asian countries and other emerging market economies as well and after that crisis was tame one response was that many emerging market countries began to accumulate large amounts of rese