I rarely make financial predictions. And when I do, they're never bold. I believe stuff like, "the market always goes up over time" and "timing the market is for dummies" and not much else. 

That said, I do think that home ownership is due for a pretty decent correction. I believe this so much that Susan and I are holding off on buying a home. And I thought I'd share my reasons for hesitating. It might not help if you just threw in on a new place, but if you're wavering or entering the market, I'd urge you to wait a little longer. ​

I was doing some work regarding identification of genes that have an association with suicide (looking at you, SKA2) and found myself thinking about suicide patterns. In particular, I was thinking about a 2013 report that military suicides had increased to the point where there were more suicides than combat casualties (terrible, awful idea for a military commercial: "Marines: so tough that the only ones who can kill us are... ourselves). This thread led me to the following question: did invading Iraq/Afghanistan cost more lives than doing nothing? Did we (our government, but us in effect) kill more of ourselves trying to solve a problem than died in the precipitating incident?

So I took a gander at casualties, which led me to suicides which led me to thinking about the article I'd mentioned. There are some underlying assumptions for this idea, one of them being that there is an association between combat and PTSD which would be reflected in an elevated suicide rate. I had a hypothesis about this: more combat = more suicides.