Credit Crisis: $390 Billion in Writedowns so Far. The Epic Housing Bubble Explained.

The Washington Post has an excellent three part series that will be highlighting the epic in progress housing bubble. For those of you who are still uncertain how this entire jigsaw puzzle comes together, this resource will prove to be invaluable. You have to wonder how the entire economy has become so dependent on structured finance and archaic instruments that make no sense, even to some of those in the investment firms. Many estimates are predicting that we’ll be seeing about $1 trillion in writedowns so anyone predicting a bottom is completely calling the game way too early:

” The black-tie party at Washington’s swank Mayflower Hotel seemed a fitting celebra tion of the biggest American housing boom since the 1950s: filet mignon and lobster, a champagne room and hundreds of mortgage brokers, real estate agents and their customers gyrating to a Latin band.

On that winter night in 2005, the company hosting the gala honored itself with an ice sculpture of its logo. Pinnacle Financial had grown from a single office to a national behemoth generating $6.5 billion in mortgages that year. The $100,000-plus party celebrated the booming division that made loans largely to Hispanic immigrants with little savings. The company even booked rooms for those who imbibed too much.

Kevin Connelly, a loan officer who attended the affair, now marvels at those gilded times. At his Pinnacle office in Virginia, colleagues were filling the parking lot with BMWs and at least one Lotus sports car. In its hiring frenzy, the mortgage company turned a busboy into a loan officer whose income zoomed to six figures in a matter of months.”

This will be a three part series with Monday and Tuesday looking at the bust and conclusion.

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