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Home price drops exceed Great Depression: Zillow

And now the bernanke has taken his place...

Absolutely correct. He is a Greenspan mirror image. I used to believe in the system, but it's broke. It's ONE GUY with no checks or balances to limit his power. Not to mention it seem the Fed Chair has the President's hand up his ass and whatever he wants gets done. These people are going to print us right out of existence.
 
i find the final point here most telling. the whole damn thing can be laid ultimately at the feet of the fact that Americans have got alot of stupid ideas about Debt; and how it is anything but a danger and a drag.

...Yes, this crisis was avoidable. To avoid it, we would have had to do a number of things differently. The first is to alert the authorities, beginning in the 1930s, that federal policies designed to encourage homeownership — well-intentioned though they have been — would create, and today continue to sustain, a set of economic incentives driving vast amounts of capital from around the world into the U.S. residential real-estate market. From the Federal Housing Administration to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the mortgage-interest deduction, U.S. government policies distorted the market, creating a massive misallocation of capital under the naïve theory that housing prices only move in one direction: up.

The second action would be to prevent the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, of which the housing-market meltdown was both an echo and a consequence. Like the real-estate bubble, the dot-com bubble was cheered on by the American government, the American consumer, and the American banker, because nearly everybody likes appreciating asset prices and the illusion of wealth that accompanies them. When the dot-com bubble burst, Washington responded the way Washington always responds: by slashing interest rates, hoping that a sluice of cheap money and easy credit sloshing through the economy would stimulate productive economic activity, or the illusion of productive economic activity, sufficient to disguise the damage done by the bubble. Having been burned by unprofitable start-ups at home and disappointing emerging-market investments abroad, a great many Americans decided to invest that easy money in houses. Washington was keeping interest rates down and encouraging the loosening of mortgage-lending standards; at the same time, Washington’s creatures, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, helped give the mortgage market enough liquidity to alarm Noah. They were helped mightily in that endeavor by the rise of massive savings in China and elsewhere in the developing world, all of which went looking for somewhere to invest: Where better than the American mortgage market, where a great many of the underlying loans were insured by the government or its proxies?

Third, we would need to convince a great many Americans not to take out mortgages they could not afford should their houses fail to appreciate, and convince a great many financial managers not to make bad investments large enough to bring down their firms....

The dot-com bubble actually destroyed more wealth than did the decline in housing prices; the housing meltdown became a crisis because the related securities losses were concentrated in a small number of firms, and because those firms were dramatically over-leveraged. If there is a public-policy proposal to be extracted from this mess, it is that in a world of “too big to fail” banks — and, like it or not, that is the world in which we live — large financial institutions should be subject to tighter leverage controls, with higher standards for capital reserves and liquidity...
 
well with the fed now leveraged at a multiple of 81x, we'll soon see how much of a mistake this was.

(people laugh when i say it, but i say it so you'll be amazed when it happens. get ready for $20 can of corn.)
 
well with the fed now leveraged at a multiple of 81x, we'll soon see how much of a mistake this was.

I don't know if it's precisely '81X', BUT, when you put a dollar in the bank that allows the bank to create loans of between 8 and 10x that dollar (depending on the country). Then, you add in factors like 'short selling' and that might add an extra 40-50x the actual hard values of investments... THEN, you add in derivatives on virtually all investments...

I don't know if 81 times is accurate... it might be somewhat conservative of an estimate though, the reality is that the sky is the limit since there is no longer a law protecting the US from corporate created ponzi schemes. Oh, and when these ponzi schemes collapse, guess how gets to bail out the crooks??? WE DO!!!!

(people laugh when i say it, but i say it so you'll be amazed when it happens. get ready for $20 can of corn.)

I've said it many times now, the federal reserve has decided to follow the zimbabwean school of economics.... that's where you print money to cover your debts until a 10 trillion dollar bill MIGHT buy a beer and a bowl of soup at a restaurant.

"That can't happen here"... well, it's ALREADY HAPPENING. Honestly, find out what a jug of milk and a loaf of bread costs today, compare that to ... well, even last year this time. THe problem is that the majority of americans are still asleep at the wheel and won't see it coming until it hits them like a ton of bricks.
 
Almost eleven percent of American homes are empty: News Headlines


Depends on who you believe and for what reason. Another source said foreclosures during the thirties was over 80 percent.

Not surprising because there was no FDIC, or any other kind of protection, Social Security had yet to mature, and there were no pension plans.

ricksfolly
 
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