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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: tejek who wrote (450529)1/25/2009 7:20:17 AM
From: Road Walker  Read Replies (3) of 1573939
 
It is a recession and it is mainly about real estate......at least right now.

Real estate was the spark. But now it's about deflated asset values across the spectrum. And the debt they were supposed to support. Most everything was too highly leveraged.

So until the statistics suggest otherwise, I am calling this a recession.

We nationalized much of the mortgage business and a big chunk of the insurance business. Most of the big banks have failed or are failing, have been semi-nationalized, and are working on up-sidedown balance sheets (as assets continue to decline in value). The unemployment rate is sky rocketing, and with each lost job there is a better than 50% chance of mortgage and credit card defaults. This IS NOT a plain vanilla recession... I've been through a bunch of those. This bears a lot closer resemblance to 1929.

So then, you want to go back to the time before WW II when there was little credit.....no credit cards. It was cash and carry. Housing is bought after you save up for a life time and then you can pass it off to your kids? Is that what you are proposing? Is that what you call the great unwind?

What I want doesn't matter. What I'm going to get does matter. Stimulus or no stimulus I think there is going to be a lot of destruction. The question I think is: Does the stimulus package curtail the pain and bring back asset prices, or does it just prolong the pain over many more years? I don't know the answer, and the collective wisdom of all the world's economists don't know the answer.

But my gut tells me there is something wrong with throwing gasoline on a fire. We'll know in about four or five years I think.
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