The more new stories I encounter about the economy, the more terrified I become.
I just watched my Tivo-ed copy of the McLaughlin Group where Mort Zuckerman said:
I think we are facing the worst financial crunch or crisis since the Great Depression. You have the entire banking system virtually frozen and not just the sub-prime mortgage thing, there are other things called credit default swaps where they are going to lose as much money - $250 billion - banks are frozen, they're not making loans because they have such huge debts that they have to take onto their balance sheets and nobody knows how to deal with that because you have a dramatic - you have 2 bubbles that have burst at the same time, the housing bubble, which has collapsed in this country, the first time since the great depression that housing values have gone down for a year and it's going to go down even more next year. The credit crunch - you've just exploded the whole credit system in this country. We were way over leveraged, the banking system was over leveraged. People didn't even know about it. The bankers didn't even know about it. They didn't assess the risk. Now the risk is piling in and everyone is going to pay the price. It's going to destimulate the economy. Nobody has money to lend. They are saving all their money to pay off their debts. They're borrowing money or looking at the rest of the world to enhance their capital and it's still not going to solve their problem.
Makes me want to just hide in the house and bunker down.
