[quote=gandalf]I know what you mean. I’m somewhat in between and really goddamn pissed off about this whole mess too.
Has it impacted you yet?
No employee layoffs for us yet but reduced time. All of our receivables are late, clients watching cash, contracts still being renewed though and the checks are eventually showing up. We’re okay so far but these are really sketchy times.
Do you just let it crash? My take is if you do, there will be so much collateral damage. So many ‘honest’ businesses and people who will get dragged down with it, lives and families destroyed. It’s a situation that leaves me deeply conflicted, to be sure.
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IMHO, the cause of our current economic problems is not falling housing prices, but too much debt. Debt masked the gap between rising prices and declining wages because people could constantly take on more debt whenever some idiot with a fraudulent loan bought a house up the street at an inflated price.
We’ve been in trouble for a long, long time. What’s next? By what other means can we convince the sheeple to take on hundreds of thousands of dollars in more debt? It’s this debt that sustained our economy over the past decade. Even if housing prices stayed constant from this point forward, people would not be able to continue to spend like they did from 1995-2007 (first via the stock market, then via the housing market).
If we were smart, we’d let (even force) housing prices fall to a point where the average family would spend no more than 10-15% of their HH income on housing costs. The existing debt needs to be wiped out anyway, so we ought to streamline the foreclosure process so that a bank can have a trustee sale within 120 days of the first missed payment (30 days late).
If we did this, people would have enough money (not debt) so the real economy (not housing) could be revived.
Debt is the problem. We cannot sustain rising asset prices without rising incomes. Keeping housing prices high will make that problem even worse, and will make the downturn last longer, which will result in more lost jobs and the spiral would continue for a long, long time.
We will never solve the problem for as long as the PTB refuse to correctly define the problem. They are making things worse.
