Monday, August 27, 2007

Is an economic collapse coming?
Let's take a look at some of the signs: First, consumers are defaulting on their credit cards payments: ["Credit-card defaults on rise in US"] and now, because of that corrupt bankruptcy bill, folks who are getting hammered by debt will never get out from underneath it.
Housing sales are crumbling, literally: ["Home Sales Hit Slowest Pace in 5 Years"] and this is one of the engines which has kept this economy growing. However, not unlike most economic growth, because it has been unregulated, it grew too fast and was corrupted by greedy loan officers selling people bad mortgages with high commissions. Now things are falling apart ... instead of steadily going along at a regulated pace in order to ensure that everything lasts and home buyers get into their homes.
Experts think it is a recession: ["US could be heading for recession"] but I wonder if it couldn't be worse. Between the hundreds of billions of dollars fleeced from consumers by the big oil companies charging way too much for gas and the subsequent increases in almost everything due to higher fuel costs, this recession could be pretty big.
One of the neat things about reading the WSJ is that you really get an incite into how these speculators see things. This morning, there was this interesting column from today's newspaper, about the leverage buyout craze: ["The Real Deal for Buyouts"]. These people seem to be sucking the life our of the credit business by buying up these businesses and squeezing every bit of life out of them.
And don't get me started on the globalism stuff. "Economists" have encouraged whole sectors of the American economy to carve out billions and send it overseas. And they really didn't think there would be some sort of backlash, financially?
Lastly, isn't it great that the Fed can basically just start printing money to make sure there isn't a "credit crunch." So, they can just start printing paper or clicking clicks on a computer screen but we can't do that for ordinary folks who are getting hammered, like those in the Katrina disaster. Up is down and down is up. The sky is green. Ugh.

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