Predicting the future has become so passe that we now like to predict the past. Visiting the funhouse of colossal gaffes gone wild might even be worthwhile were it not for the egocentric nature of such excursions. The one doing the recollecting and post-mortem whistle-blowing typically prescribes himself a completely passive role in the train wreck that was, or issues himself the “greater forces at work” stamped pass that magically absolves a revisionary time traveler of all culpability. Those passes are not dispensed with impunity, mind you. All the other idiots should have seen the disaster coming.
In an ever-changing present, I break from the modern day Gong Show of Monday morning quarterbacking to let my mind’s eye drift into the mystic. I tire of the talk of the past, find myself all blabbed out about the present and abhor the prostrate card counting by a one-eyed chimpanzee with a broken abacus that epitomizes the prediction of the future. The derivative credit swaps. The zero down, no doc loans. The found equity. The lost equity. The sublime and the subprime. The mortgage backed securities. The short sales. The banks. The credit crunch. The jobs report. The DOW. The tax credit. The fund rate. Cats and dogs, living together … I just can’t take it anymore. I am bored to tears with the round the clock exhumation schedule for the late housing market. Let the poor bastard rest in peace already. We ideological grave-robbers have already deprived the putrid corpse of its dignity, we can at least leave the watch and gold fillings.
There is no full accounting for or understanding of this place in which we find ourselves. There is no single factor other than our own human nature that can be isolated and excised from our collective evolution to preclude future bouts of similarly convergent idiocy.
The takeaway in it all?
“Shit happens. Let’s get a taco”
I am out of ways to say “bankers suck.” I refuse to foretell where home values will be in the year 2075. Constrained by the whole time-space continuum thing, it leaves a guy with a dearth of topical options.
Shall we open up a Real Estate worm hole and do a little time & space bending?
We interrupt the regularly scheduled “underwriters are evil” broadcast for a test of the Retroactive Emergency Optimism System.
The year is 2010. It looks a lot like our 2010, only the people are cleaner. No eight day stubble on every other unemployed neighbor who barricades himself inside the home he hasn’t made on a payment on in twelve months. No ghost towns where entire developments went under, leaving the lone resident to weigh the safety of his fallout shelter against the siege perpetuated by advancing weeds and greening swimming pools. No “declining value” markers in appraisal reports.
It’s the world you know, only in Technicolor.
Turns out the bubble never burst. All of those admonitions to get into a home before being priced out forever were prescient after all. Flippers kept flipping, buyers kept buying and lenders kept lending until entry-level housing in the greater Phoenix area hit the $750,000 mark. A million dollars sure doesn’t buy a million dollar home anymore. The luxury market doesn’t start in earnest until you hit the 2.5 mil range. As equity abounds, the financial markets never took the nose dive. Happy homeowners continue to borrow against lines of credit to purchase yachts, cars, more houses … more happiness. Happy homebuyers can obtain financing to purchase waterfront property on a McDonald’s shift manager’s salary and refi out of them when the teaser rates adjust. The water tastes like wine, and the wine tastes God.
We all sing Kumbaya by Alan Greenspan’s campfire.
Of course, the bad news is that our kids aren't going to care much for the fact that most have been offered up as collateral. Or rather, their future earnings equity has been tapped by their legal guardians to pay for the stable of ponies they were "given" for their fifth birthdays or the eight dollar per gallon cost of filling up the new Toyota Ginorma on the way to and from soccer practice. The really bad news is that the Treasury Department is bundling this government backed debt and selling it to China to finance the new lunar public housing project. Default on that pony and your kid might as well start practicing his Mandarin.
Hmm. This doesn't look like the land of milk and honey, after all.
There is no Utopia, even where we perceive it to lie. There's just this petri dish we call life. Move the cultures around all you like; slice them up and rearrange to your heart's content, but you are left with the same roiling purgatory of flawed inhabitants. Scrape off the undesirable elements and they ball together with other cast off malignancies to form the latest unholy global terror.
No matter how much we revel in the vicarious thrill of plotting a course to where we should be instead of where we ended up, there is no rationalizing ourselves out of the daily human struggle for relevance. Likewise, there is no girding against all future woe by merely finding obsolete solutions to past catastrophe. Solving one of life's great mysteries only re-scrambles the rubix cube. Just when you line up the blues and reds, green comes along and drags them both back into the grey.
Though we may be temporary stewards of this earth, we are still but passengers on a cosmic ride to a final destination unknown. No sense fretting about the in-flight entertainment when we have no say in the matter. We get to adjust the air flow through the overhead nozzle, position the seatbacks and select a beverage from amongst the Pepsi products (sorry, no Coke).
The rest is out of our hands.
Changing metaphorical horses midstream, what say we leave the study of our recent fossil record to future historians and get on with finding a way out of this tar pit? It doesn't care how we got here or where we were heading, but it will welcome our carbon to its bottomless depths if we don't take a narrow view of the immediate task at hand. There is a time for academia, and there is a time for action.
Work on your housing thesis if you prefer, but I'm grabbing a frigging rope.
And with that, I climb over the emaciated body of Real Estate past and direct this blog to matters only of immediate benefit to today's consumer. Self-indulgence, thy name is Mud from hence forth.
As to the very nature of the problems we now face, we've got it relatively easy when examined against the broad spectrum of possibility. I, for one, thank my lucky stars that the hobgoblin which reads us to sleep in the here and now is but a simple economic beasty. Beats the flesh-eating amoebas that are terrorizing a parallel 2010. Or the Rosie O’Donnell / Janet Reno mud wrestling match that incapacitates yet another. While A + B does not always equal C these days, at least it doesn’t equal rectal typhoid.
Except on days that end in "y," that is.
Times are hard, but when are they not? You'll read no more "woe is me" type bellyaching from this here scribe. I'll gladly take the seven/deuce offset suits we've received from this crooked dealer and try to bluff us through to the next hand.
How will we fare?
Beats me, I'm not into predictions. But I ain't rolling over for this market anymore.
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