(no subject)

[which_chick]

On an entirely different tack (I hate the spacebar on this fucking keyboard), the NYT Magazine has a nice big article on Ben Bernanke and our current economic woes. It's here.

Comments

[brni.livejournal.com]

His faith in modern forecasting models notwithstanding, he failed to foresee that the sudden rise in homeowner defaults, which triggered the crisis, would have such far-reaching effects.

Maybe the people who run things need to earn less so that they notice this sort of thing. I predicted this back in 2000, when I was shopping for my first house, and the bank pre-approved me for a mortgage that well in excess of 50% of my gross income. And I said, "I'm not falling for that." But I knew that a lot of people would, and that when things collapsed, it would become a cascading failure. The only way that the current economic model is sustainable is through a spiral of eternal growth of the the rate of growth. As long as there's even one limiting variable in the equation, you don't even have to be good at math to see where that leads.

Ditto

[ardvaark99999.livejournal.com]

When my wife and I were looking at houses, we utterly ignored the, "you can afford a mortgage of $XXXXXX.00. We...uh...looked at our budget and figured what we could, you know, afford and stuff. I remember gagging when I thought about the obligations on some of the amounts people were suggesting we could (should) borrow for our house. My general thoughts can be summarized as, "Are you f...ing nuts?"