by drgoodword » Tue 21 Aug 2007, 07:58:35
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Gideon', 'I') respectfully disagree that energy is one of the "big" reasons.
I think that the liquidity pump of the End of the Greenspan era would have led to this same result even if oil was 20 a barrel.
In short, the game was that ever more credit would be extended until the music stopped.
That's it.
The music has stopped.
Agreed.
The current housing, market and credit crisis has little to do with peak oil, whether we are at peak or just on the cusp.
During his nineteen-year reign as U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan systematicaly leveraged the U.S. petrodollar to sustain a relatively robust level of economic growth, despite a consistenly declining manufacturing sector.
The most dramatic era of this artificial economic growth was the period 2002-2006. Historically, a stock market crash like the one in 2001 is followed by a recession. Greenspan cut the recession short by supporting consumer spending through the creation of the biggest housing bubble in history. During the period 2000-2005, the median U.S. home price increased
an unprecedented 55%, while some areas experienced price gains as much as 130%.
The housing bubble did three things. Number one, it created tens of thousands of jobs in the burgeoning home construction industry, which in itself was a significant contributor to economic growth. Secondly, it made Americans
feel rich. As the average American homeowner saw the value of his main asset--his home--increase year after year, he was wealthier on paper, and this gave him the confidence to spend.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the nature of the housing bubble architecture--with systematic and incremental decreases in the federal funds rate--allowed the American homeowner to reguarly refinance his mortgage at a lower rate, thus putting an extra couple of thousand dollars into his pockets annually. Along with the larger phenomenon of massive mortgage equity withdrawal, consumer spending, and thus GDP, was maintained at a positive rate.
But this credit bubble was built with a number of explosive, self-destructive elements, the worst of which was the remarkable lowering of lending standards. The so-called no-doc mortgage allowed, if not encouraged, borrowers (along with their enablers, mortgage brokers and lenders) to lie about their income and other financial information, in order to qualify for a mortgage. Finanically irresponsible "interest-only" ARM mortgage were heavily marketed. And then these hundreds of billions of dollars of "toxic loans" were securitized via complex mathematical models and sold off around the world as high-grade investments, helping to fuel the the ever-expanding, U.S.-based global credit bubble.
Then, in 2006, foreclosures began rising. Housing prices stalled for the first time in five years. The great Greenspan housing/credit bubble ship finally hit its destined iceberg. Ever since, observers have watched in horror as the housing/credit collapse spread. It finally broke into public consciousness this year with major and universal stock market turmoil in response to the ever increasing effects of the collapse: multiple hedge funds experiencing crisis; possible bank failures in America and Europe; and the seemingly inevitable decline of consumer spending in the U.S.
Of course, peak oil will bring its own financial calamities--bad enough to dwarf the damage of the housing/credit collapse. But what we are experiencing now, in 2007, in terms of economic problems, is the result of the growth-at-any cost policies of the American Juggernaut, designed and implemented by Alan Greenspan, the man who destroyed the modern free market.