The Crisis of Credit Visualized does a great job of giving a visualization to the current credit crisis. The description is a little too simplistic, but it’s one of the few I’ve seen that doesn’t point fingers and stays balanced.
(If you think finger pointing is necessary you might see that as a flaw. On the other hand it’s nice to talk about this stuff without seeing the phrase “fucking [name political party here]” on there.)
Worth a look, even if only for the excellent display of difficult concepts visually.
…wow, that makes a lot of sense.
I wonder where we would have been if we hadn’t wasted all that cash building McMansions.
Well, depends on how you want to look at it…. since 1995 we’ve gone through first the dot-com bubble and then the housing bubble. I think it’s safe to say the dot-com bubble’s money (what of it survived) probably fed the housing bubble.
So if you go back to the S&P 500 Index and look at the max time frame, then ignore everything to the right of 1995 and smooth out the old curve, I think (and this is me eyeballing it) we’d be right where we are now.
Except everyone would be sleeping better and we probably wouldn’t be worrying about whether there’s still a steep drop to go ;)
And just to cover my ass, while I do work for a financial company, I’m not licensed to discuss financial matters, which means I don’t really know jack about this stuff. So that’s about all I think I’m allowed to say… and everything I did just say is my opinion and not theirs.