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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (18086)	4/11/2002 5:04:02 PM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Talking about mountain of debt is not new: The US economy stands atop a mountain of 2.5 trillion debt...The US economy, is the debt economy, par excellence. It has the biggest lenders and the biggest loan takers, plus the most sophisticated financial system. Enterprise debt: USD 1 trillion Mortgage debt: 600 billion, federal government debt: 500 billion, sate and local governments debt: 200 billion, consumer debt 200 billion. To feed during 30 years the economy boom and export it to other countries, the nation was taken an average 200 million dollars each day. Every day since the end of WWII. Business Week, 1975. (Cannot precise the month.)

To: TobagoJack who wrote (18086)	4/11/2002 5:14:21 PM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Why housing "starts" are used as gauge of US economic activity. I can recall 20 years ago when I first started reading Business Week, this entity called housing starts as a indication of economic activity in the US. It started puzzling me. I knew defense was big. Oil was big. Airtravel, aviation, telecoms and electronics. But there was all the time this piece of evidence that I couldn't make sense of it. But the fact is that when the interested parties were looking to that figure, it hasn't much to with houses springing up in very place. It had to do with money related to houses. Mortgages to fuel consumerism. I looked to the tables, in a book publicized in the seventies and it is there. Using mortgages to fuel consumer is as old as 1961, the first year the table displays.