Phil is just giving it to us straight. I got the impression from his words that he was fighting back from sounding too pessimistic. Here’s one particularly alarming excerpt from that article:

“Further, more than half of the 243,000 private payroll jobs added in California since 2003 are linked to real estate in one way or another from construction to mortgage processing.”

This worries me and does not speak of a “well-diversified” economy. I am worried because the more I read, the more I get the feeling that the housing bubble is what got us through the Dot Com bust, 911, and is the reason why our economy is where it is today. All the consumption that has pulled us through these events was driven largely by housing speculation and cheap money from the banks.