Housing Crisis

Jack Lessenberry Essay

Much of the time, when I see the presidential candidates squabbling on stage, I have a strong feeling that they are in a different world from the rest of us, and that none of them get it.

I have the same feeling every time I get a press release from one of the intellectual munchkins in the Michigan legislature. Today there are three or four houses on my block that have had for sale signs up for months and one actually in foreclosure. The building inspector told me nobody could remember when a house here was in foreclosure before. Full essay...

My comment on Jack's essay ...

Drawn by the promise of million dollar bonuses, our best minds have abandoned the research labs for the virtual world of Wall Street’s debt equity industry. No longer content with their historical role in underwriting the expansion of our economic pie, these post-modern arbitrage masters, liberated from the ethical restrictions of the previous century, have grown rich redistributing a now stagnant economic pie through the facile application of financial legerdemain. The embezzlement of our shared assets would have been impossible without the assistance of a political class whose accumulation of wealth and entitlements reveals its faith in the aristocratic myth. “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of our currency, first by inflation, then by deflation,” said Thomas Jefferson, “the banks and the corporations that will grow up will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”