18 thoughts on “The Little Drummer Boy

  1. GrewUpInIrvine

    Mad Money said it right last week. Mr. Bernake is over his head. Although, who needs more spin-control? Greenspan or Bernake?

  2. tealeaf

    is there anyone or anything that can stop this freight train? name the person who could be put into this position that can avoid what we all know is headed this way.

  3. tealeaf

    Cramer is just a shill for the investment community. He wants 0% interest rates and will whine and moan with Erin Burnett until it happens. Value adjustments are painful but necessary.

  4. Mr Vincent

    I agree, nothing will stop what needs to happen.

    I think the fed is just prolonging the problem. Only one thing will stop housing prices from crashing – plenty of jobs and mega wage inflation.

    As long as hamburger flippers are not making 70k per year, housing prices must come back to trend.

    On the other side, we will have a vastly different credit market. You actually have to qualify using guidelines that are starting to resemble the way things used to be.

    At some point, 1.8 million will get you what 1.8 million should get you – a true mansion that is only for the rich.

  5. covered

    It could have been Greenspan, but Easy Al chose a different path. Now, the dominoes have been set into motion and can’t be stopped. I heard it expressed this way…”You can’t cheat someone who doesn’t trust you.” The banks don’t trust each other now because they know how much toxic debt they themselves are carrying on (and off) their own books and can only guess at how much their competitors are carrying…so they won’t lend to each other without a mark to market mass purge of the stinking crap, rendering many banks insolvent. That would be the Warren Buffett “we won’t know who’s been swimming naked ’till the tide goes out” moment. It would also be a free market capitalist correction. Politically, that would be untenable, so what you are getting instead is smoke and mirrors along with bald-faced lies. Can this administration buy enough time to pass it on to the next one?

  6. Alan

    Amen Mr Vincent,

    1.8M is a lot of money, when many posters talk about astromnomical 2006 values for their Irvine apartments and seem shocked that their apartment may not be worth that sum after the current correction, it’s good to pause and reflect that yes 1.8M is a lot of money and should buy real mansion and something strange and unprecidented did occur at the start of the 21st century.

  7. GrewUpInIrvine

    That’s the whole point! “Who” started this train? I think that its pretty obvious… and which is why Greenspan is in damage/legacy control mode.

  8. AZDavidPhx

    Indeed, 1.8 million is a lot of money when you actually have to pay it back rather than pass the bag on to the next guy.

    We will also see the definition of “equity” return to its true meaning being the amount of principal paid off buy the owner rather than its commonly mis-used meaning which analogizes it with “capital gains”.

  9. kl

    We just got word from our landlord that he will be selling the house and that we will have to move. Besides the waste of a weekend and a little back-breaking labor, their is nothing tragic, difficult, shameful, etc about the process. We just find another place and send out change of address cards.

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