Doctor Housing Bubble is usually worth reading, but especially today when he (she?) lays out what's going wrong with our economy in vivid detail, complete with instructional graphs.
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The Greatest Heist of the Century: Stealing and Mortgaging the United States’ Future.
It is becoming commonplace to hear negative news regarding the housing market. Dollar signs get thrown around in conversations with no real practical sense for the public to grasp the magnitude of the problem. HSBC for example announced that they are pumping $35 billion into their ailing SIVs to avoid a fire sale of assets. You must ask yourself, why are large institutions so frightened about putting assets onto the market? The so called mark to market fear that many structure finance players are trying to avoid at all costs. These short term bailouts are only pausing the inevitable. At a certain point the curtain will be removed and most suspect that the wizard isn’t so powerful after all. I’ve been contemplating this and think that we need to examine multiple areas of the economy to realize that this housing market is merely a symptom a larger epidemic. There have been many articles pointing out the fallacy in assuming that the current credit crunch was caused simply by subprime loans. In fact, after reading this article you’ll realize that the majority of this nation is subprime; that is, there is no realistic way that we will ever pay off our debts.
This article is a culmination of years of looking at data and tying many things into the current economy. We will first look a the exponential growth of mortgage debt. Next we will examine the looming issue of trade deficits and how a falling dollar is something that the Fed is silently hoping for. Then we will look at the DOW and show that in real terms, it is now in a very negative territory. Finally we will look at the data and try to examine what path we are heading down.
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http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/