The desert mirage of easy housing profits – Phoenix Arizona home prices on track for four consecutive years of year-over-year home price declines. 55 percent fall from peak and nominal home prices back to 2000 levels. What happens when investors dominate the market?
The foreclosure epidemic in states like Arizona and Nevada is breathtaking and incredibly disheartening. Prices have cratered much more quickly than the methodical rise up in the last decade. Home prices in Phoenix now sit precariously where they did in 2000 without adjusting for inflation. These desert communities largely built on a dream, fast construction, […]
The walking debt – U.S. public debt now surpasses $15 trillion. The financial sector has wreaked disaster in the American economy. Wall Street banks cause havoc in housing and student loans.
It can be argued that the world is suffering from an epidemic of chronic debt. The financial sector loves to play on words and would rather call certain debt issues as a credit crisis as if it were a temporary thing like a mid-life crisis. This is also similar to renaming junk bonds to something […]
The wonder years – over 70 percent of GDP comes from personal consumption. For the past decade home equity and credit from other sources fueled growth because of falling household incomes. What happens when credit contracts and home equity evaporates?
In a debt based economy a credit crisis is similar to an uncontrollable virus spreading from house to house. The slow infection hibernated for decades until it went into a pandemic. It is troubling to see how the middle class is slowly being dismantled. However there is one silver lining of the home price correction. […]
A new gilded age shines on America – 50 million Americans roam the countryside uninsured. 45 million Americans receiving food stamps up by 18 million since the Great Recession began in late 2007.
Much of the country is in psychological denial to the damage being created by the current recession. Some even believe that we are fully in a recovery. Part of this has to do with the way the safety net is designed but also the lack of coverage presented in the media. We have over 45,000,000 […]