It’s not going to be very much fun these next couple of years.

I hope you get a chance to listen to the show this evening. I have a fabulous guest and will address a lot of interesting topics.

You raise a lot of good questions.

I will address all of the above on the second half of my radio show this evening. I hope you ahev a chance to listen. If not the show is taped and archived.

Whatever happened to those toxic assets that caused this calamity in the first place? Where are they? Have most of them been written off and no longer pose a threat to bank balance sheets?

What about new toxic assets? You referenced rising residential loan default rates. In terms of scale, how do they compare to dollar amounts of toxic assets that triggered the financial crisis in the first place?

We’ve heard that the stimulus money would immediately fund “shovel ready” jobs. But how many of the job losses involved shovels? Where do you see the future job growth coming from?

While today’s unemployment rate is far lower than that of The Great Depression and there is now a safety net (FDIC insurance, unemployment
Compensation, food stamps, etc) that didn’t exist back then, hasn’t the average person today taken a larger financial hit through the collapse of home prices and stock values? Looking around we don’t see the deprivation of The Great Depression but do you envision the current crisis causing enough semi-permanent psychic damage that would make people spend more cautiously in the future? And could that possibly slow the economic recovery?

Autos and housing are two key elements of the economy. Typically the retail automobile business and everything connected to it account for 25% of retail sales. Right now sales are off 40% from their recent peak years. So, the car business is already in a depression. The housing collapse and its collateral damage on the sale of everything that goes into the purchase of a home — new furniture, carpeting, appliances, etc — continues to depress economic activity. What are the turnaround prospects for those two industries?

Many small businesses are under capitalized and rely on credit cards for cash flow and expansion. As you know, credit is very tight now, credit card default rates are continuing to rise and the securitization industry that helped fuel credit growth is currently in a coma. While nobody expects the easy credit days to return, what kind of inhibiting effect on the economy do you see from the retrenchment in the availability of credit card lines for small business?