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John Burns joined The Real Story on the exhibit hall floor at last week’s Pacific Coast Builder’s Conference, to talk about—among other things—the ongoing presence of the Federal government in the housing market. The big surprise to most is that as the Treasury backed out of its position as the only buyer of mortgage-backed securities—to the tune of about $1.3 TRILLION—conventional wisdom said that interest rates would climb back up. Instead, they went down.

Rarely does one get to see a national housing market analyst like John Burns literally scratch his head, but there you go: the catch phrase for this particular phase in the economic cycle has got to be called “Who’d Have Thunk It?”