My worry
 

This financial crisis is just too immense for human intervention to make a difference. It's like spitting in the ocean. Every square inch of the western world is hideously overvalued and mortgaged to the hilt on those fictional values.

I visited one of those web sites with areal photgraphs and a program to indicate estimated house values. You run your cursor along the rows of houses and dollar figurs pop up. I went to neighborhoods I knew and it was sickening. Everything monstrously over valued. Houses I'd sold, I KNEW the numbers were lies. All lies. Lies lies lies!!!! The words ringing in my ears. I had to get out of the site.

Did you know AIG has already used up that $85 billion loan and just got another $37 billion. I think banks and insuarnce companies may continue to fail whatever governments do. That may be the only way out of this, to reach equilibrium again. An epic blood letting across the west. Right now, we may be just pumping fresh blood into terminally ill companies, blighted by the virus, or even corpses.

Like I said before--my brother's house in SLC, a piece of crap, next to a halfway house, smaller than my own piece of crap house. Doubled in value in one year.

Prices in some areas may need to come down dramatically. And that may take years.

The NY Times says Greenspan fueled real estate inflation by keeping interest rates at historic lows. So we got low low rates but obscenely high housing prices, and this now. The problem was compounded because the derivative markets encouraged banks to lend lend lend and "hedge" the risk through derivatives. The problem is eveythng got too incestuous, and house prices kept spiralling up...

Greenspan now rarely speaks anymore, since the crisis. But when he does he blames Wall Street greed for wrecking the market's magic. WHat happened to greed is good?

Yes. But why did they keep it low?

If growth is strong, unemployment low, and the CPI is under control, why put on the breaks?

Should the Fed care about asset bubbles? Is the Fed going to determine the value of assets for every market?

This is the biggest cop out I've heard in the last 20 years. Wall Street greed? Wall Street is *based* on greed, it's how the whole thing operates.

Translation - "We should have regulated better"

No wonder Greenspan is laying low. At least he didn't try to blame the whole thing on Barney Frank.

I don't know. I'm sure questions like this will be revisited, and after this year the fed will never be looked at the same way again. What we're seeing happen is of historic consequence and proportion and all thoughtful people should reevaluate their beliefs.

One of my partners just asked rhetorically whether economic libertarianism would go the way of socialism. In these times those aren't fighting words.

I don't get your partner's statement: if economic libertarianism goes the way of socialism, that actually means the return of socialism -- they're swapping places. They're like opposite forces: as one recedes, the other proceeds.

I think he would say they are two polar extremes like facsism and communism, and something in betwen will prvail.

The free market left entirely to its own devices is cocaine. That's the hard lesson being learned.

If it came down to even 5% less material wealth, who here wouldn't want better stability?

Houses in my area that were just over $200k 8 years ago are now selling (in a supposed bad sellers market) for $375-400k. I guess it is a bad sellers market if you consider that values haven't risen in about 1.5 years, but that doesn't change the fact that after 8 years, prices have nearly doubled.

And trust me, these houses are not worth $400k.