October 23, 2008

HousingPANIC Stupid Question of the Day

Do you feel like you're reading a history book, but that it's actually happening in real time?




Seriously, the headlines today are straight out of 1929. The names may have changed, but that's about all.

Even thought HP'ers knew it would come, it's amazing when it actually comes.

Let's see if this book turns out any different than the original...





34 comments:

Anonymous said...

This depression will be different than all the others - it will never speed up or, or reinflate. The losses are pemanent.

Anonymous said...

I knew "it" was coming but now I am in awe how fast and furious events are now unfolding. A few month ago we had investment banks going out of business, now we have entire countries (Iceland, Pakistan, Argentina) folding.
I never imagined it would get that bad. House prices falling, flippers flopping, a few banks going under, some hedge funds blowing up, that's all fun 'n games. I figured it might get as bad as the S&L crisis in the late
80s. Unfortunately we're already far beyond that. Where will it stop? I have no idea but this has the potential to get downright ugly. Especially when you consider that the people now trying to fix this mess didn't even see it coming as recently as 8 month ago.

Anonymous said...

It ends differently this time, as the USA will not leave it as a leader in the world like last time. Our days are done at least for a while as being a super power.


Sequoia

Anonymous said...

Big difference seems to be that before the depression, a lot of people's lives sucked. But,in a way, that was a good thing. They had to be thrifty and self-sufficient.
Today, we are a consumer society, with a large amount of service jobs that depend on others having excess income. So, what happens when a culture based on affluence and want, rather than need, truly hits the wall? Start your Victory Garden now...

Anonymous said...

I get such a kick out of the "this is permanent" idiots on here! I remember well last summer when these same idiots were like, "oil to the moon!", "These prices are permanent", "Never will go back under $100 EVER"! LOL! They watched the housing bubble, but couldn't understand when another bubble stared them RIGHT IN THE FACE?

Keith, if it werent for you, these people wouldnt know anything but their parents basement and their security blanket, so I guess you have acheived something.

We will fix this mess, and be prosperous for another decade or so, then the shit will hit the fan for some reason, and we will contract and then move forward again.
Meanwhile anyone with a brain will be living life to the fullest because you cant take your money with you. And believe it or not, being your own person and taking on some risk to live a better than average life is better than living in your one room shithole apartment or parents basement and talking about how evil homeowners are.

DOPES!

The losses are temporary, humans want to move ahead and succeed. AND THEY WILL! Accept it or go back and cuddle up to your "wooby" you pathetic losers!

Anonymous said...

If anyone is looking for a good book to read on the Great Depression get the Studs Terkel book called Hard Times. It gives a person by person account of what went on during this time. You can get it from your local library.

Anonymous said...

.


Headline,


"DOPES back on his knees just to get something warm in his stomach"!



.

Anonymous said...

Just thinking - A huge difference between 1929 and now.

Today - We have a military that is by far the best in the world and can project power anywhere.

If worse comes to worse - we can take what we need. And there is not much a the world could do about it.

Imagine an American military like that of the Russians or Chinese - and we are not talking building schools and meals-on-wheels

Anonymous said...

Today - We have a military that is by far the best in the world and can project power anywhere.
---------------

You're joking right? You try to take over the world and let's see how fast the Chinese will take to dump your bonds and force you to cut military spending or to generate hyperinflation!

You've just promised over 1 trillion to every tom, dick and harry, wait till you actually start printing those bonds!

Peahippo said...

Well, YES, I am watching history in action. The Great Depression II is here. And society is as clueless as ever, and the talking heads are as deceitful as ever.

What I'm wondering is what the mob (of common men acting in concert) will do and who it will blame, since it CLEARLY isn't prepared to blame every White guy in a business suit that willfully designed this crash. All this talk about the CRA shows that the mob is considering targeting Blacks who took out unsustainable mortgages. Will the mob then try to burn these people out? Notice that by burning houses, the mob will try to create a shortage of housing, which by no accident will sustain prices.

And BTW, Ben Stein is a complete liar ... because it's either that, or he's defrauded people over the years with his claims of being financially savvy enough to make informed statements about the markets. If we let Stein get away with claiming he didn't know about the hedge bubble, then we won't be able to hold ANYONE responsible for their clear involvement.

Anonymous said...

In 1910, the British military and economy was also the top in the world, with the gold-backed pound sterling the world's safest reserve currency.

U.K. was the leader in just about everything then.

That didn't stop them from losing that status and their wealth.

1950's U.K. was far, far poorer than the USA, and probably quite a bit poorer than 50 years prior for most of its citizens.

Paige Turner said...

RE: Do you feel like you're reading a history book, but that it's actually happening in real time?

The economy is going in one direction: DOWN! This is exactly what happened, starting in 1929.

But the stock market seems to be doing this roller coaster thing that didn't happen in the 1930's.

As a preamble to the Great Depression of the 21st century, we were told by influential bankers that unless we handed them the key to the US treasury, the economy would crash. As our few remaining loyal representatives in Congress expressed their outrage at such a suggestion, the stock market crashed. But after the first truckloads of loot were distributed to private interests, the stock market miraculously recovered. Well, pretty much, anyway.

During the Great Depression of the 1930's, the US government didn't buy up toxic corporate debt with borrowed money.

This time around, the financial news goes from bad to worse as the taxpayer debt load increases and the stock market goes up and down. This cycle seems to be repeating itself, with no end in sight.

"We’re in the money, come on, my honey, let’s lend it, spend it, send it rolling along!"

V.L.

Anonymous said...

The problem with having read HP and other housing bubble blogs for the past two years is, now that all the predicted stuff is happening, I'm not shocked or outraged at any of the latest news. While everyone around me is either mad or frightened, I have an attitude of, "Wow, it's finally happening". I think I'm coming across as uncaring.

Anonymous said...

I honestly think the recession will be different than ones seen in the past. For the first reason, globalization is like anything seen before. So when one entity runs into serious trouble they all encounter difficulties. Secondly, the financial complexity of the financial instruments in today's financial zoo. Just think, a while back derivatives didn't even exists. Overall , I think this recession will be informative for everyone ... even if too much.

Anonymous said...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/10/01/fiorefireside.DTL

The hapless and doomed John Herbert Hoover McCain begins a new series of Fireside Chats.

Here's the first one.

The Straight Talk Express

Bwa ha ha ha

DIE U PIGS

Anonymous said...

I am vacuuming the hell out of all the news sources and archiving it for my descendants; so that they may get a sense of how it looked as it happened.

A lot of this will be forgotten/lost in years to come.

Learned my lesson on 9/11. Anybody seen a copy of the Saudi's TV commercials just after the attacks?

Anybody remember those?

Anonymous said...

Tom Joad just drove by...in a Hummer.

Anonymous said...

Seems like society is following a script. You would think leaders would read about the past and act appropriately. Then again, Hoover tried everything before the outright socialism of fdr.

Anonymous said...

OH MY! What a depression!!

Tickets for the GA/FL game next week are going for $400.

Anonymous said...

Yo, mark in philly, how come that great military of yours can't defeat a bunch of rag-tag, uneducated, underfed, under armed afghan peasants? Except for Kabul the rest of the country is Taliban territory, no?
Soviets tried to "win" there for a decade, remember, or where you too busy watching MTV at the time? Now the mightiest military in the world is there, tied up in the endless skirmishes.
And what would Russians and Chinese do if US just "tried" to take something that didn't belong to them, in the future?

Anonymous said...

JDallas said...

I honestly think the recession will be different than ones seen in the past. For the first reason, globalization is like anything seen before. So when one entity runs into serious trouble they all encounter difficulties.

===========

Read your history books dumbass. The world was a lot more globalized in the late 1800s and early 1900s than it is today. As a % of world GDP, exports/imports were much higher than today.

But you go on believing it's different this time if you must.

Anonymous said...

for 15 years they stopped calculating house price inflation as inflation and the use of interest rate raises as the method to stabilize house prices and encouraged borrowing and debt as the method of the basis for the economy instead and the manipulators set up todays system to profit themselves.....................

Anonymous said...

rich fools? er?

Anonymous said...

DOPES!

The losses are temporary, humans want to move ahead and succeed. AND THEY WILL! Accept it or go back and cuddle up to your "wooby" you pathetic losers!


Someone is losing his shirt in the market. bwahahaha That's right genius, I bet you were doubling down and got screwed with your bet. Now you're raging...we call that "projecting" in psychology.

Anonymous said...

The losses are only temporary if you have something left over.

If you lose everything, what do you have left?

You can start over, but the losses are indeed permanent.

I stand by my wry comment.

Mammoth said...

"And what would Russians and Chinese do if US just "tried" to take something that didn't belong to them, in the future?"
-----------------------

And what would the US do if China just "tried" to take back Taiwan?

I believe that we would give China a big scolding - that's all.

Start a military conflict with the Chinese? Fuck, we don't even hardly make capacitors or resistors in the US anymore - the Chinese could cut our supply line and bring us to our knees if they wanted to.

-Mammoth

Anonymous said...

Reading HP is like that history book. Keith you turn HP into a book. You write well, and that is a rare skill. If you are lazy get a co-author.

Anonymous said...

The pictures will be glossy this time around!
No sad black and white dust-bowlers.

Anonymous said...

"Yo, mark in philly, how come that great military of yours can't defeat a bunch of rag-tag, uneducated, underfed, under armed afghan peasants?"

They're terrorists. They don't play fair.

Anonymous said...

I think it's far from Depression. If it's depression; we will not be posting messages. Unemployment is far from 25% what it was during depression. Media goes to extreme both ways.

AndrewHac said...

Quote from "Ass-Head from Philly Cheese Steak Sandwich":

-----
Mark in Philly said...

Just thinking - A huge difference between 1929 and now.

Today - We have a military that is by far the best in the world and can project power anywhere.

If worse comes to worse - we can take what we need. And there is not much a the world could do about it.

Imagine an American military like that of the Russians or Chinese - and we are not talking building schools and meals-on-wheels
-----

I bet you 10 cents to a U.S shitty dollar that the Red China will kick the Americano ass in 2 years should there be an open war between the two of them. Any taker here from the land of the patriotic Americano, the Great Snapper Turtle ?

The Americano Housing Bubble has revealed the true anatomy of the Americano Australopithecus species. And what that anatomy amounts to is a heap of putrid, rotten to the core, maggot filled, rat chewing pile of garbage.

Greed, Ignorance, Irresponsibility, Laziness, Materialistic-Craze, Hoity-Toity attitudes are all part of the Americano rotted anatomy, stinky gut.

How a fat-ass, obese, beer-gut, rotten teeth, putrid breath, dumb-ass Americano male driving by himself a Ford Expedition on the road, consuming 10-15 miles per gallon of gasoline is just beyond the realm of reasoning.

How a whole family of cracker-nuthead, GrandPa and GrandMa, Joe6Pack and JaneZinfandel, 6 of the spoiled-brat runny nose snotty kids swarming the Walmart aisle after aisle piling junks on the shopping cart is pure hilarious and pitiful at the same time.

How a whole family of Hicks and HillBilly chomping down on oily, greasy McDonal french fries and Wendy’s hamburger is just so resembling the scene of the bunch of hogs roosting and wallowing at the feed trough.

The Americano nation is pathetic and sinful beyond the point of redemption !

Anonymous said...

"I bet you 10 cents to a U.S shitty dollar that the Red China will kick the Americano ass in 2 years should there be an open war between the two of them."

It would depend on what China and the US were trying to do. If it was simply to destroy the other, China doesn't have enough nuclear weapons. China would have a hard time breaking though our navy to take Taiwan. If they wanted South Korea they would win.

Anonymous said...

It seems to me that many of the things happening now happened after the crash of 1929 and unfolded after.

This time it seems many things are imploding and the stock market crash is happening gradually, and afterward...

When it does finally tank, any minute now, it's going to become gruesome, overnight, or it will feel like it.

So I see some dis-ordering of similar events, and it's a bit puzzling to people. Some hacks are still quibbling over whether we are in a recession,but the public by and large, knows it's a depression that's really on the table, but are confused because the job numbers hadn't caught up.

But I guess it probably was like that in the GDepression, we just have a compressed cultural memory from news histories which cover it as one.

One of scariest thing I've found in life is to realize there's something really serious to be faced, and I was far behind the curve, when I needed to be on top of it, to do well by myself and mine. Imagine that collectively...

I get a piercing fear sometimes, reading economic news, like it's going to get ugly, not just poor, but behaviorally. I don't think people had such high expectations
of what they were entitled to.

I'm old enough -64-to remember years of few material things, so it won't be so shocking to me, but in the 20's, things as simple as toasters were the luxuries people bought, or a washer, but still hung clothes outside and ironed them. Still cooked from scratch..in a sense we expect life handed to us, on a collective platter...In a mix.

Breathe.....

grandma pkk

Anonymous said...

Re the targeting of minorities with sub-prime loans...isn't it interesting how racism is coming back to bite us all; I'm sure those who sold those mortgages, even to people who qualified for better and more do-able loans felt they could act on their biases with no consequences...

Going around, coming around...

grandma pkk