Posted on 06/26/2009 10:45:37 PM PDT by Lorianne
Duxbury, Mass. -- As millions of Americans struggle through the painful rebuilding of a crippled economy, a Massachusetts builder has published a book that promises to help average citizens understand just how the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression happened.
Doug Friesen, a Duxbury-based home designer and builder, decided to write a book on the roots of the economic meltdown as a way of productively channeling his anger and frustration over the financial crisis. Titled "The Age of Entitlement: How Greed and Arrogance Got Us Here," the 180-page book begins with a layman's analysis of the monetary system before exploring the perfect storm of economic conditions that converged to bring the U.S. economy to the brink of collapse.
It's just the sort of common-sense explanation Americans need, he says.
"Wall Street brokers and investment gurus have always positioned themselves as the experts," Friesen says. "Well, I just don't see that anymore. This economic meltdown has invalidated their claim to financial expertise.
"I wanted to write something for average, normal people in the workaday world like me, who lived by the rules and have ended up paying the price for other people's greed."
Spurred to action
Friesen was knee-deep in a dozen home design projects last fall when the bottom fell out of the U.S. economy.
"After many years of taking on as many clients as I could handle, just like that, my world was drastically altered," Friesen says. "My profession is based on hope for the future. It's going to take me years to get back to where I was."
Like many Americans, Friesen asked himself, "How could this have happened?" Unlike most people, however, Friesen actually set out to find the answers. He began researching the underpinnings of the crisis, sifting through reams of facts, figures and economic data.
"It was like peeling away the layers of an onion - there was this bombardment of information; it was like getting to the bottom of a detective story," Friesen says, noting that he spent four and a half months pounding out the book with two fingers on a laptop at his kitchen table. "The mainstream media under-reports this stuff because news rooms are being gutted, and corporate owned media has no incentive to upset the status quo.
I felt like riding through the streets like Paul Revere!" he continues. " I thought, 'There's a story here that I have to tell.'"
That story, Friesen says, is one of corporate greed exacerbated by a society that has developed a profound sense of entitlement and an expectation of instant gratification. With chapter titles like "Chronology of a Crash," "Self-Esteem Run Amok" and "The Housing Bubble - or Hell in a Handbasket," The Age of Entitlement concludes with a chapter that addresses what many people are asking: "Where Do We Go From Here?"
"The truth is, for the middle class there really was very little prosperity, we've really been living off of borrowed money for 30 years," Friesen says. "I hope my book helps the average person understand how we got to this place, while offering some common-sense suggestions for what we should do now. That's something the Wall Street experts don't seem to have much of: common sense."
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Goldman Sacs just paid out their largest bonuses in their history.
Probably the usual story, a few dollars under the table to politicians results in much, much, more taxpayer loot back.
It’s a mistake to think that the current crisis is U.S. based.
This is a global crisis. As a home-builder, he contributed to the world’s over-production of homes. Of course, the world also made too much of everything else. Too many factories. Too many shopping malls. Too many office towers (the epitome of too many office towers is Dubai, UAE).
In the U.S., this over-production means that we have 19 Million vacant homes...all of which are too big for the 77 Million retiring Baby Boomers who all want to dump their McMansions to downsize into little retirement condos.
The 77 Million Baby Boomers just started turning 63 this year. Social Security (partial payments) begins at 62. Retirement Age.
But this Baby Boom is global. And they all follow the same demographic path, and will, for the next 20 straight years.
This leaves the world with too many airlines and too many trains and too many cars (the real reason that GM and Chrysler are bankrupt) and too many cargo ships (pretty much too much of everything except oil and food).
Office rents are freefalling because there are 14% vacancy rates...forcing landlords to chase fewer and fewer surviving business tenants for the same amount of office tower real-estate.
Add in a mortgage crisis, a liquidity crunch as the Secondary credit markets wither, terrorism, a host of worldwide red tape, and a crushing debt crisis from every government on the planet over-borrowing, and you’ve got the makings of a fairly large Recession that won’t be over anytime soon.
Anywhere in the world.
Good analysis.
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