Economy’s tumble even worse than expected in 3Q
This is the headline in an article today on Huffington Post.
My reponse is: “Really? Its worse than EXPECTED?”
What were they expecting? Weren’t they (apparently economists, or Wall Street, or the US Government, or who knows?) watching or speaking with Main Street?
Because everyone I know cut back their spending last holiday season, watching home prices tumble 15% between November 2007 and February 2008. Homes sat on the market, abandoned by the giddy, easy money buyers of the 1990′s. Homeowners have been worried about the ratcheting up of interest payments on their Adjustable Mortgages or Lines of Credit, scheduled for end of 2008/early 2009. Real estate agents have tried to sell homes with negative equity, for at least ten months. The huge bank-offered rollercoaster rides of ‘free money’, using your home as an ATM, had already slowed to a crawl by mid 2007. And this isn’t because homeowners suddenly found ‘financial religion’, its because the greedy leeches, the banks and the shadow banking industry who sold loans to homeowners, had sucked all the rich blood out and were pulling back from the kill.
Shadow banks had to carry a loan for only 3 months in order to keep their high fees. So they gave out loans, handed out tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars, hoping their hapless debtees could make three months of payments so they could sell off the loans to bigger financial idiots than themselves.
Now we’re bailing out the big financial idiots, as though they deserve it. And we’re SHOCKED? that Middle America has pulled back on spending?
Ask any parent, ask any business owner, ask any employee. They’ve been crunching their numbers for over a year, wondering what variable (credit cards, mortgage, home equity line of credit, business loan) is going to be the eye of the tornado that finally plucks them from their safe spot and destroys them.
Seriously, if this tumble is WORSE THAN EXPECTED, then someone making money as an analyst or an economist should be fired and I should have that job. I have been watching home prices, watching my own budget, watching families around me, watching my community. Its been obvious for over a year that very serious, very dangerous financial grumblings are erupting.
Why can’t our government see? Oh yes, because they’ve been cooking the books for years, knowingly painting us a more healthy picture than really exists. They’ve said ‘we’re good’, when we’ve been terribly bad. My past posts about Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism highlight these financial lies.
Until we can slow down from our ‘we’re the best’ parade (holy cow, look at the list of signators on that document!) or ‘of course they hate us, we make them seem powerless and insignificant in comparison‘, and listen to what our own citizens and, yes, other countries say about us, we won’t know what our own government and shadow banks have done to us. We need to be told the truth. But we also need to hear the truth.
[...] The media is only now recognizing that the US economy is in the pits. But there are many, many Americans way below Main Street. For them, there is no oppressively unfolding recession. They’re poor. They don’t have home, mortgages, credit cards. They don’t know where their next meal is coming from. They have lost jobs, lost homes. [...]