"The Worst Since the Great Depression" Part 1

I have been trying to talk down both the housing "crisis" and this recent mortgage related market adjustment, but it seems the media is intent on blowing this up into something it is not. "Unemployment is at a 5 years high"? So what? Were we in a depression in 2003? Then what meaning does that have?

I wrote a shorter and less detailed argument about the same thing. If you are interested it is here:

http://andrews.blogtownhall.com/2008/09/19/hooray_for_debra _saunders!.thtml

And a related piece is here:

http://andrews.blogtownhall.com/2008/09/20/credit_where_cre dit_is_due.thtml

If you follow the embedded links, there are pieces where I discussed this at greater length.

The housing argument particularly irks me, as the regions which saw the greatest drop recently, up to 20%, also saw the greatest rise in the past 5-7 years, seeing houses triple in value, then drop 20%. That means that houses rose much faster than any other investment, even with the "crisis". So, unless you just purchases before the drop, you still are ahead, just not as much ahead as before the drop.

Still, hard to get worked up about a crisis when it is just the final adjustment after record setting increases.

Well, I am running out of space, so check out the articles and embedded links.

You read it while I was still editing! I post before I finalize.

But my thesis remains. I will try to finish part 2 in the next 2 days.

Thank you for your links, I will follow through.

Interesting take on things, LBP, I enjoyed reading it. Your statistic of the collective worth of Americans does indeed make the 1.5 tril look small. I am curious what that number was over the course of the Great Depression, perhaps if you were to add that into the picture you're painting it would make for a good comparison. Anyways, good luck with your future articles.

Thanks--good point--it would be interesting to see if net worth declined--at least as measured--during depression. One could get a better sense whether that is even a pertinent way to look at the problem. This number is derived directly from govt. released data--don't know if they tracked that data then