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Millions of Americans were duped by the federal government and the Federal Reserve into buying homes they could not afford and failed to count the cost. When the financial crisis of 2008 hit, they could not keep up the monthly mortgage payments and defaulted.

We weren't poor growing up on Long Island, but it wasn't lavish - just a regular middle-class house.

Let us not forget, the financial crisis had its roots in the decision by Congress to embark on a course of social justice to get everyone that wanted a home into one, regardless of whether or not they could afford it.

I think homes are a palpable form of investment, and I understand them.

No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical.

People concerned about inflation today tend to buy big houses and nice cars.

My family wasn't terribly affluent and looked upon money very carefully as something that had to be saved, not spent. My father built the ducting that took air into the copper mines and made about 6 d a yard in the Thirties, which was good money back then.

So far as the economic condition of society and the general mode of living and thinking were concerned, I might claim to have lived in the time of the American Revolution.

Americans now know that housing prices can go down and they can go down by 10, 20, 30, and in some cases, 40 or 50 percent. We know they can go down. But five years ago, we thought they could only go up.