The so-called bailout of those struggling--or about to struggle--with steep increases in their mortgage payments announced by the Bush administration today--I'd post a link here, but why bother?--seems to me to follow the pattern I outlined in my last post. Save the predators from gorging on their prey.
Let me look at it another way.
They are dealing with it as a public health problem in the food supply. If the swine flu (remember the swine flu scare of the 70's?) breaks out among the swine in Akron, Ohio, well, the sooner Akron swine are slaughtered, the better; we're not going to try to save them. But if the swine in Columbus are perfectly healthy, we need to protect those swine for later consumption. And there's no point in worrying about the swine in Maine, who have sensible 30 year notes. (Remember the punch line to the old joke: "A pig that good you eat one leg at a time." )
The Bush administration is trying to innoculate the swine in Harrisburg and Erie and Columbus to protect the midwest vampires from the swine flu.
Only it won't work. The midwest vampire capitalists are going to see those sick little piggies in Akron and think, they can't run fast, why shouldn't I eat them? --Because that's how capital thinks. The flu will spread--has spread--throughout the real estate market, and they'll find themselves unable to eat--or even feed--many of the healthy swine.
To drop the metaphor, I'm implying that a tightening of credit and a glut of subprime repossessed homes on the market will spoil the market for good homes.
This will lead to homeowners whose credit could be salvaged losing their homes.
We've seen these cycles before, in the 80's, and less dramatically in the 90's. It'll take years for the market to fully recover. It will take The Motley Fool pointing out that over a 30 year period, the SP 500 outperforms real estate by 120% (or some crap like that), and Real Estate becoming the dirty word that "tech stock" was in 2002. And then the recovery will only have begun.
As Marvin the Robot might have said, I'm depressed just talking about it.
Life, don't talk to me about life.
1 comment:
Hello. I'm finally checking in to your blog. Over on my own, I just started annotating that poem I've been working on (in order to see what it will tell me about itself, what it resents deeply, and where it wants to go). While I was there, I discovered another poem I'd written a while back, so I shall bring it to the writer's group tonight along with the finished rough draft of the aforementioned poem. As a reminder, I am at apocalipsnow.blogspot.com. I hope we can use these blogs as another means to communicate, dear fellow word vampire.
Post a Comment