In the Santa Clara Valley the same tilt-ups and houses have had three or four booms wash through them: Semiconductors; semiconductor capital equipment; personal computer & disk drive; medical instrumentation; dot.com and the genetic boom. My home is down to the price it settled to when the recovery from the dot.com bust began. It is still valued at an obscene amount more than I paid for it.

In this area there will always be something new just as it has been since Shockley and the Varian brothers moved here to be near their mothers. Other places with similarly limited real estate (like Seattle– confined between the sound, the lake and the Cascades) that have a history of technology will fare similarly.

The problem with this past housing boom is that they opted for “creative” financing first used in this valley during the disk drive and computer boom of the mid-80′s. A few, but not many, of these hard lessons were learned locally. The current damage is that the national market had no immunity to this stupidity (they elected Bush twice, after all) and the “creative” financing was applied to smokestack, flyover and rustbelt America which have nowhere near the powers of regeneration that we have.

Excellent analysis! However, I beg to differ with you that obama actually “won’ the election. Let’s not forget that Hillary won the popular vote and that the obama campaign (aided and abetted by the DNC and the MSM) gamed the caucuses. So, just like GWB, obama was selected, not elected, by the DNC. Even still, Hillary kept winning primary after primary.

Throughout the primary, the obamabots engaged in the same kind of politics as Karl Rove did on behalf of GWB. You know the kool-aid must be strong because they don’t care that they’ve become even bigger hypocrites than the neo-cons were when they called democrats “sore losers” and told us to just “get over it”, after GWB stole two elections.

I am certain that Hillary would have won the presidency if our elections process was not totally corrupt and broken. The party leaders choose who they want in order to remain in power in perpetuity. Hillary was not the party leader’s choice, but she clearly was the people’s choice and she clearly would have been the better president than either obama or mccain.

I agree with you, which is why I put in parentheses “imagine that”! However, the interview with Black clearly exposes that the banks perpetrated fraud on the American people. This calls into question why obama is enabling these bank with his bailouts, instead of holding them accountable.

In fact, there are likely to be several of these sucker’s rallies before we really turn around…and the smart money is waiting to see how successful Obama is in driving through his massive government programs…and then at that point, seeing the US as a BIG LOSER riddled with colossal insurmountable debt, the larger and institutional investors will invest offshore…not in America anymore….

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions…

So this is the result when the country becomes so PC and our left-wing controlled and dominated schools rewrite history and teach only from the ultra-left point-of-view, brainwashing our kids into thinking that the world owes them all a comfortable living without putting forth much effort. Too many believe that it is their right to expect to leave the comfortable homes of their parents and be instantly guaranteed all of the material comforts to which they have become accustomed, without having to work their way up as their parents’ generation had done.

Having said now dissed the “ultra-left”, I also would like do dis the “ultra-right” — who I wish would bug off as well. By trying to cram their religious beliefs down everyone else’s throats, they turn off a lot of moderate thinkers who would otherwise be inclined to join a coalition of fiscal conservatives.

Could we please just leave religion out of politics for a while, at least until we snatch the country back from a death sentence — condemned to a future of socialist/fascist Hell?

I’d be very happy to see moderates unite at least for long enought to set things aright in the next couple of elections, but I am not holding my breath expecting that to happen. I wish for that to occur, but I am not so naive to think it really will occur.

Too many American voters lack sufficient interested in educating themselves about responsible government and fiscal policy and are too easily swayed by Madison-Avenue-created Superstar candidates promising everyone a chicken in every pot.

Sadly enough, I fear that we are doomed….

So when the figures came out showing projections for the colossal debt about to be incurred by the Obama administration, I immediately phoned my brother to review the projections with him and I asked him if he were not now even more appalled….

His answer?

Well, giggling nervously, he responded with: “Well, maybe things won’t be really that bad…maybe they won’t really spend that much…maybe Obama will find some way to cut corners before things get too far out of hand….maybe this… maybe that… etc.”

I’m afraid that the truth is that so many of our fellow Americans turn a blind eye to the truth. They are either so lazy or so romantically involved with their “dreams about how cool it is to have contributed to putting the Tiger Woods of American Politics” in the White House, that they don’t care to see how far left Obama and his handlers really intend to take this country. Too many Americans find it hard to believe that Obama really is a fascist and totally into achieving “Social Justice”, that they turn a blind eye to all the early warning signs.

I don’t think they ever will really see what is happening until it is way too late — too late to roll back from the massive increase in government control we will have over nearly every aspect of our lives.

By that time, these Obama-voters will find a way to blame it on something or someone else…but never on their “dream candidate” or on themselves for voting for a “dream” without seeing what the man was all about. They didn’t care to do the research or the vetting, and now we will all pay.

So, in other words, they just irrationally think that things will magically get better…and are afraid to really look at what they have unleashed on the country….

With Nancy Pelosi telling reporters that the House will do the Executive branch’s bidding, (this while BO sings Give It To Me Baby to Nancy.) She can lie. Why? Because the Rebuplicans did. Why did they lie? Because they could.

Economies of fear never prosper for long.

Was that the guy with the two turkeys and the huge plasma TV?

The questions you raise a valid. The CBO numbers may be way off. So hypothetically speaking, if they are what else on the Costco parking landscape is lurking? As far as West Coast real estate being on the way back up, I disagree. 200k for a 3 BD in a town that the same house went for 475 is a lot of “equity” up in smoke. It will never return in my life time…UNLESS there is inflation. There will be and it will be the same death spiral that we are going thru now. So that your house return to its previous value, if only because thats how much TP it takes not that its worth that much.

As far as the lemmings go…I guess I will invest in parachutes…the demand will be skyrocketing.

All is revealed.

The Clinton-era ‘boom’ was not caused by government stimulus, but rather by the Fed messing with money and credit—especially heavily since 1997. As the technology sector was experiencing growth, the Fed’s monetary and credit expansion created a huge inflationary boom in tech stocks which made it seem as if the economy had grown enormously. We all know what happened to those tech stocks: the prices eventually corrected themselves. In other words, they ‘crashed’ and we experienced a recession. Those who had believed in their stocks’ inflated value lost a lot of money. Those who had gotten out because they recognized the overvaluation were more or less spared.

The same scenario has repeated itself in the housing and bond markets, made worse by bad credit risks such as risky loans and highly leveraged credit default swaps. But make no mistake, every trail of blame we trace always leads back to the Fed’s monetary and credit expansion policies as a primary source of the inflationary growth bubbles. Add to this lax (or absent) regulatory oversight and it’s even messier. The pricing corrections we have been experiencing are painful yet necessary. If prices have truly bottomed in a particular market and are now going up, I hope it is at around the rate of inflation and not higher, which would indicate a secondary bubble in that local market.

Government spending does not ‘fix’ things. Please read this excellent article on the flawed premises behind the idea that spending produces wealth. (If only it was that simple—I would happily make myself one of the wealthiest people in the world!) I wish I could summarize it for you here, but know I could not do it justice, and it contains arguments that are of the utmost importance for everyone to understand clearly these days:

http://capitalisthero.com/Keynesian_Economics.php

Finally, you say Democrats are refusing to raise money. Please rethink your wording. Government does not ‘raise’ money, it either takes (confiscates, if you will) money from people and/or creates printed paper out of thin air (fiat money) that we are all supposed to believe is worth something. For the most part we do and carry on, but this fiat money causes two huge problems. First, other countries like China who are investing in our fiat-money bonds start to say “Whoa, not so fast!” They realize this money has less and less to back it and so will either demand higher interest on it or slow down in buying it—our wells dry up. (And we are still stuck with those huge debts which even our grandchildren will be paying down.) Second, it creates inflation. Creating money is not the same as creating a good or service. More fiat money just means more dollars will be spread out over all the goods and services we already have. When there are more dollars out there prices become inflated. Inflation eats away at the wealth of all citizens because in an inflationary environment they can purchase less with the same amount of money they had before. It lowers everyone’s standard of living. Our government is setting us up for big time inflation. It doesn’t matter how ‘smart’ (snark) or ‘eloquent’ (blech) our president is—this is going to be some major hurting!!

Government does not make goods and services–government does not create wealth. Government only has the ability to confiscate money or conjure fiat money out of thin air. Looking to government to raise our standard of living as a nation is foolish. They cannot do it—as a matter of fact, they just get in the way of our doing it for ourselves. What they are actually doing is simply redistributing wealth and passing it off to the ill informed masses as “growth”. It’s a lie and it doesn’t do one thing to fix our economy. We need to accept price adjustments, stop borrowing and spending, stop expecting an easy and quick fix, and work harder to produce more goods and services–preferably ones that people in other countries will buy, thereby injecting real and fresh capital into our economy.

While I agree that the lemming instinct has taken hold in this country, it is not the clear-minded like Larry who have been transformed but rather the hopey changey Keynesian voodoo fallacy mongers that have lost their human capacity for logic and have mutated into kool-aid fed animal spirits ( http://mises.org/story/3413 ) who feel the power of believing will be enough to rescue this economy. It will not. It will take realism, honesty, work and sacrifice. (Unfortunately, these are not politically salable qualities.) And it will take We the People stopping the Fed from interfering with normal market corrections. Call your congressperson and tell him or her to support HR 1207–the “Audit the Fed” bill. It’s the first step to unraveling the tangled knot they have produced. If we continue to pretend everything is OK, we are just setting ourselves up for an even bigger crash and deeper, longer depression in the future.

Best of luck, America. Peace & out.

Now, the students chime in. ‘But it was an emergency! He had to get out a bill to fix what President Bush did!’ And there’s my opening. I chuckle.

‘Okay, let’s assume getting the money into the economy was such an emergency that the bill given to Congress on Thursday night had to be signed on Friday, before being read. (This statement, of course, sounds stupid on its face.) Once Congress signed the bill, it could not become law until signed by the POTUS, right? So, guess when BO signed this bill. Not on Friday, which means Congress and their constituents could have taken another day to read the bill. Not on Saturday, giving them 2 days to read the bill. Not Sunday, giving them 3 days to read the bill. Not Monday, making 4 days they could have examined the legislation. No; BO did not sign this bill he told the country had to be passed on Friday, until 5 days later, on Tuesday, at a special signing ceremony he had scheduled to take place in Denver, CO, BEFORE Congress even signed the bill.

Whenever I give them the facts about BO, I assure them, these facts are out there, but you have to take the time to look; because for some reason, the corporations that own the MSM are unwilling to entrust you with the truth.

But…but if Obama can get the banks and Wall Street percolating again, the results will trickle down . . . Wait a minute – where have I heard that before?