3
2
1
13. With the Federal financial regulatory agencies in a Republican/Democrat-enforced somnambulance, the coast is clear for brigands, shysters, fraudsters, con artists, liars, cheats, and assorted riff-raff in the realtor, mortgage and appraisal businesses, who all feed the ravenous maw of the money-center banks' apparently limitless appetite for real estate assets to securitize and leverage in exotic and highly profitable ways.
14. For a wonderful five years circa 2001-2006, “the game” is afoot. No-down-payment Jill and $100-million-bonus Jack get immensely enriched. Meanwhile, the underlying real economy is becoming ever more fragile, ever more weakened, as real production and real productivity plummet, and every moneyed person rushes to the speculative riches of exurban McMansions and malls.
15. This last best speculative leveraged bubble pops, gutting a Wall Street that had grown utterly dependent on ever greater degrees of leverage & debt, fraudulent accounting, and bubbles, for its rising profits.
16. Doubly devastated by the implosion of housing and their stock investments (mostly in retirement funds), the middle class faces the terrible consequences of its 26-year stupor regarding the ever-rising indebtedness that has surrounded and engulfed them.
17. Just as in the Great Depression, the much surprised Elite has also suffered catastrophic losses/declines in capital and income.
18. Having borrowed and squandered trillions of dollars since 1981 on unaffordable entitlements, military misadventures and assorted worthless “bridges-to-nowhere” pork spending, the Federal government (specifically the Fed and the Treasury) finds that its ability to borrow its way out of its current debt hole is surprisingly limited. The rest of the world has finally caught on to the con, and Chinese university students openly mock Treasury Secretary Geithner's Orwellian claim that "we support a strong dollar."
19. With the global media concentrated in a scant few corporate hands, this pulling away of the curtain is purposely ignored by said media, as they stoke their campaign of "green shoots" propaganda.
20. As the wheels fall off the US economy and bubbles cannot be re-inflated, fruitless attempts at holding back the tide with incantations (“stop, tide, I am Obama/Geithner/Bernanke!”) and loopy claims (“the market bottom is here, buy a house now! -- green shoots are sprouting everywhere”) abound. Unresponsive to such propaganda, the real economy grinds down into a global Depression without foreseeable end.
