We're Still Heading Into The Woods, People.

The commercial real estate market is collapsing. Vacancy rates are increasing by as much as 50% around the country (10% to 15%). And the stock market is going up Up UP! because they are not paying attention to the "strong" or "sound" or "completely broken" (or whatever) 'fundamentals of the economy' down on Wall Street.

Credit card companies are increasingly saying that defaults are going to be increasing to 10-ish percent, soon.

And finally the Depression is starting to kick in. The fraud and liar loan foreclosures kicked us into Recession, but now that we are into a full-tilt-boogie Depression, unemployment is forcing more and more people out of their homes because you can't make a mortgage note without a paycheck.

Click on the above link and scroll down. Those who have been through College Algebra courses will recognize the beginning of a logarithmic increase in the number-of-defaults-graph for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They hold most of the crappy mortgages out there. If you have a million houses you lent $100,000 each for, that makes (counting zeros on my toes) $100,000,000,000 worth of potential losses on paper. That would be $100T which looks like it can't be right*, and they won't lose ALL the money (assuming somebody pays SOMETHING for the foreclosed properties) but it's still a pretty ugly picture. We're pretending just so I don't have to use a calculator that a whole LOT of those loans weren't closer to $400,000 than $100,000. Oh, but don't worry those losses will just fall on Fannie & Freddie right?

Hold on there.

Who backs Fannie & Freddie? The full faith and credit of your children, that's who.

*1) If $100T looks like a familiar number, it's because some people have tossed it around as the amount of unfunded liabilities YOU the taxpayer have, between Medicare, Social Security, national Debts, national debt interest, and intra-agency accounting shenanigans. But don't worry! President Obama just put you on the hook for $12T more to get us out of this mess so I'm sure it will all be okay. Also if you are interested in purchasing a used bridge, please email me. . . .

*2) It can be right. This is the kind of insanity that follows when you allow [deleted]-for-brains people like Barney Frank to oversee the regulation of gigantic financial companies that stake everything on perpetually-increasing growth of the economy, and you have a fiat currency "based" on fractional reserves.

So, do you still think the USA's economy is strong? To me, it's looking closer and closer to time to hit the Reset button. I'd even vote for Governor Perry the first time he ran as President Perry, if he would lead us away from the basket-case that is the rest of the country. Oops, I guess that makes me a rightwing extremist.