Wikipedia Opines on the Current Situation

I continually surprise myself. Instead of going to wikipedia first, I inevitably go to it last. Yet I know from experience that it's really only valuable in the first steps of learning something new. And it's especially valuable if you can't see the forest for the trees and just need someone to break it down in layman's terms. I heartily recommend, therefore, "Subprime Mortgage Crisis" and "United States Housing Bubble". Reading them - and I have to think this is a mixture of being an economist, teaching principles of macro (but being a microeconomist by trade), and trying to sell a house (on the market for approximately 10 months and counting) - at times I really felt like I could puke. Like when I read this:

"Greenspan warned of "large double digit declines" in home values "larger than most people expect." Problems for home owners with good credit surfaced in mid-2007, causing the U.S.'s largest mortgage lender Countrywide Financial to warn that a recovery in the housing sector is not expected to occur at least until 2009 because home prices are falling “almost like never before, with the exception of the Great Depression."

Now, I love gossip as much as the next person, and so of course I know that this is just talk right now. So much of forecasting is guess work. But the whispers are that Lehman Brothers are next.