Ben Bernanke is speaking later at an Atlanta Fed Conference, so in the meantime we were checking out some of the presentations that have already been giving, including this one A Bird's Eye View of OECD Housing Markets by economist Christophe André.

Anyway, a pair of charts in the paper should scare the US housing bulls, who have been increasingly making an argument about the price of housing reaching cheap levels relative to US rents/incomes.

In each chart, the dotted line is the price to income ratio and the solid line is the price-to-rent ratio. 100 is the sample average.

Anyway, here's the United States, which has seen a nice decline from recent highs in both price to income and price to rent.

chart

OECD

Great, we've improved.

Now check out Japan.

japan housing

OECD

No doubt, people have been screaming about "affordability" all the way down.