The 18-Year Real Estate Cycle in the Age of Financial Consolidation: The New Hampshire Case

This project analyzes the 18-year real estate cycle, as first described by Homer Hoyt and augmented by contemporary writers such as Fred Foldvary, Mason Gaffney, Fred Harrison, and others, in New Hampshire during the modern era of big banks and financial conglomerates. Using New Hampshire as a case study, I investigate why state-level deregulation of the bank sector led to catastrophic losses but federal deregulation of the 1990s—the repeal of interstate banking restrictions and the central pillars of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933—did not. I hypothesized that the deregulation in New Hampshire in 1979 and 1981 made the country susceptible to a real estate bubble in the 1980s, while the slowing economic and population growth made it less likely to experience a speculative bubble in the 2000s. That hypothesis is only partially correct: New Hampshire’s lack of bank failures since the onset of the 2008 crisis is the result of the consolidated nature of the country’s financial system and the effect thereof on continental sprawl