In an interview with National Real Estate Investor, economist Hugh Kelly addresses the availability (or lack thereof) of capital and takes a guess at when it may return:

There is such a volume of capital out there. I have three pictures I use in my talks, one is of Niagara Falls, one is the Sahara Desert and the third is the Hoover Dam. The argument is that for a long time we had a Niagara of capital, now people think we have a Sahara but we don’t. It’s a Hoover Dam. It’s all sitting back there. The question is when does it get released? And when it does you don’t knock the dam down, you just release the water again. That’s the 2009 scenario when you see some of this capital released into the markets in an orderly way.

We get his Hoover Dam analogy. We just hope he’s right about 2009.

Q&A Hugh Kelly [Nat'l Real Estate Investor]