by Calculated Risk on 7/23/2008 08:50:00 PM

I participated on a panel today on housing at the Inman Real Estate conference in San Francisco. I wasn't the most bearish participant - that goes to John Williams of Shadow Stats - but it was definitely fun. We only barely touched on most housing subjects ... Oh well. I think it's safe to say that even the bulls were a little bearish.

Other bloggers included Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism and Noah Rosenblatt of UrbanDigs - plus a couple of real estate executives (the most bullish).

On blogging, from The San Francisco Business Times: FDIC learns it ignores bloggers at its peril

The federal agency insuring bank deposits learned that it can't afford to ignore the blogs following its seizure this month of IndyMac Bank, the largest bank failure since the 1980s.

"The blogs were a bit out of control," Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., told the San Francisco Business Times after a speech in San Francisco this week.

That's putting it mildly. Following the FDIC's takeover of IndyMac on July 11, widely followed blogs were speculating on bank runs on some of California's largest banks based on nothing more than people waiting for their branch to open or large deposits moving between financial institutions.

The FDIC plans to pay closer attention to the blogosphere in the future.

Looking back, I guess we were one of the voices of reason. I couldn't find lines at any other banks ... and as far as can tell, reports of lines at other banks (other than IndayMac) were inaccurate.