And we survived both of those. Imagine that. It might not be doomsday.
Only if the S&L crises was a hysterically over blown non crises that effects 95% of American home owners not at all.
I’ve seen final-tally numbers for the S&L fiasco in the $120B area. With UBS coughing up another $10B in blood today I think we’re up to about $80B so far. We’ll get there, and then we’ll pass it, and then we’ll keep going.
More scare-mongering so that Wall Street can bail themselves out... meanwhile our dollar goes into the toilet and the rest of us are paying $3 per gallon instead of $2.50 per gallon so that lower interest rates can bail out guys making $5 million bonuses.
Part of the problem is that mortgage loans have been sliced and diced into so many pieces (tranches?), which were sold and resold to the point that it's hard to tell exactly where the rather unsavory pieces are and when they might blow up, if at all. And, the last thing we need is for a fearful and uncertain market to panic.
Something is happening. Perhaps the extent of the problems are hard to fathom, but hopefully the banks will not make the credit crunch worse by going from very loose lending to very tight lending (a shift which affects everyone, even those without mortgages), even in other loan types.
Just remember, though: America survived the Great Depression, but it wasn't pretty.
As a matter of fact, this has the potential of being far worse than the S&L crisis. We should not let the political use to which the MSM tries to put every economic difficulty to blind us to that.
This has nothing to do with Bush or even Bernanke. They managed to make the crisis a little worse by uncontrolled government spending and sitting by while the trade deficit with China worsened, but basically they inherited this mess.
And it has been made several orders of magnitude worse by the large banking and money management outfits.
Also, it is not just an American problem—it extends to Europe, China, Japan, and the rest of the world.
Much of this goes back to the economic crimes of FDR and LBJ, but the worst of it has been caused by the childishness of the baby boomers, whose philosophy has been, “take out a mortgage on your house to buy toys. Tomorrow will never come.” Of course the lenders and educators and gurus have encouraged this way of thinking. And other boomers packaged the mess as derivatives—more than $75 trillion worth of them—so they could pay themselves big year-end bonuses.
A house of cards.
It took me 40 days to get my first mortgage and you would have thought we were under investigation to be a FBI agent or something, what with credit checks they did in those days.
Now if your breathing you can get a $400,000 home on $9.50 an hour, and be an illegal alien to boot. This is a good idea for whom?
Banks appear to be hoarding their reserves for some reason.