Blame the housing bubble on HGTV?

Economists will spend decades trying to assess what exactly caused the housing bubble and its collapse, but Marcus Thomas LLC creative director Jim Sollisch offers an explanation you probably haven't heard yet: Blame HGTV!

If you watch shows like House Hunters, Designed to Sell and especially My House is Worth What? regularly, you know what he's talking about.

In an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, Sollisch writes that "HGTV pumped up the housing bubble by parading the most mediocre, unworthy-looking homeowners into our living rooms to watch while they put their tacky, run-of-the-mill tract homes on the market for twice what they paid and then went out and bought houses with price tags too obscene to repeat. You couldn't watch these shows without concluding that you must be an idiot and a loser if you lived in a house you could actually afford."