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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James Hutton who wrote (177642)	1/17/2009 7:03:53 PM
From: Skeeter Bug	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

James, i already explained that. he and greenspan fabricated a "new economy" and "productivity miracle" while simultaneously creating a massive credit bubble. this led to a stock market bubble that left people who had never turned a profit in their lives as $100s of millionaires, if not billionaires. that raised the expectation bar for execs that actually produced tangible goods or services that made a profit. they wanted more than people who couldn't wrestle a profit from a wet paper bag - and those folks made $100s of millions. pondering the bubble in hindsight, it also seems that the bubble mentality (clearly started under clinton and fed on over drive by bush) dramatically reduced risk aversion in people working with OPM - other people's money. leveraging 35-1 is just plain insane greed. nothing the US has ever seen is comparable to what we face today - and that is evident by... 1. the resources put forth in a damage control effort 2. the failure of said efforts (bank stocks down 70% since bailout passed, citi collapsing, BofA coming back to the money trough, etc...) take a look at these numbers... ritholtz.com pretty big numbers, no? inflation adjusted total WWII expenditures fall short of the $4 trillion and change figure. now consider they've already obligated the government to cover $8.5 trillion - and growing fairly rapidly. nothing is even close to this. you'll be luck to find something 5% of this. for comparison's sake, the s&l crisis cost tax payers $124 billion, about 1.5% of what we've obligated the tax payer to cover for this debacle. if you thought savings and loan execs were greedy, try multiplying that level of greed by over 60x to get today's level of greed.