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Housing Bubble

The Long View 2009-03-13

The Long View 2009-03-13

From the "line go up" point of view of simply looking at stock prices since 2009, it could be easy to forget how much heartache there really was in 2008/2009. Which is a very good reason to take all such assertions, historical or contemporary, under due consideration,

The Long View 2008-11-22: Debt and the End of the Age

John J. Reilly links here to an excellent article in The New Republic, “Debt Man Walking”. Even though the 2008 Housing Bubble has passed, we still live in the financial world that TNR article describes. If you want to understand the slightly insane sounding but remarkably stable practice known as

The Long View 2008-10-05: Dégringolade

The 1983 version of Modern Times that John J. Reilly recommends here can be picked up for $3 USD used on Amazon. I have read parts of Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People, but only seen snippets of the earlier and broader work. I don’t find

The Long View 2008-09-27: Mortgages and the Curse of the Fendahl

The episode that John J. Reilly references here is called “The Image of the Fendahl”, which is even embedded in the now dead link he had included. I think I can see why he called it “The Curse of the Fendahl” instead, as the titular alien species parasitized the people

The Long View 2008-09-20: Parastatals

This is another spectacular essay from John J. Reilly. Here, he uses the term of art “parastatal enterprise” to describe the parts of the economy that are widely seen, by opponents and proponents alike, as market enterprises, but which are in fact extensions of the state and its policies. There

The Long View 2008-06-25: A Locomotive Pastorale

In speaking of Harry Truman, John J. Reilly mentions the small-town America that he was a part of, the same small-town America that produced the miracles of Silicon Valley. In 2008, rising gas prices were one of the many things that tipped the unwise lending practices into widespread default. Small

The Long View 2008-01-01: Happy New Year: Thanks & Advisories; The Mark of Soros; Uninformed Predictions

And so we come to a new year of John J. Reilly’s blog. As was usual for John on New Year’s Day, he issued some predictions. His 2008 predictions were unusually bad: The subprime-loan question is starting to look like the Enron scandal: an important story that has