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The small, construction contractor will not be coming back.  We have decided to destroy the publicly backed secondary market for mortgages, which made it possible for common people to own homes and frankly made the U.S. working class into part of the middle class, and so we are destroying the market for single family residences, which was what made small contractors possible.  We are abandoning an ownership society and exchanging it for an owned society.
by rifek on Thu Feb 24th, 2011 at 12:09:28 AM EST
[ Parent ]
A point of order: What is destroying the American middle class is that the income it used to use to buy stuff - including homes - isn't there any more. Give it back a reasonable income, and it will be able to obtain financing, with or without a secondary market for mortgages. That's the nice thing about having a central bank: It removes the loanable funds constraint, making the credit market a completely demand-side beast.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Thu Feb 24th, 2011 at 02:19:01 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Worse, that income was turned into un-payable debt. Until that is resolved, nothing will recover.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Thu Feb 24th, 2011 at 09:43:35 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Quite, that debt has to be restructured in the old fashioned way, through bankruptcy, to remove the private debt service burden which is bogging down the economy.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Sun Feb 27th, 2011 at 12:52:07 PM EST
[ Parent ]
We've dismantled the infrastructure for providing a reasonable income to a middle class of any size.
by rifek on Sat Feb 26th, 2011 at 11:20:54 AM EST
[ Parent ]
... demand side solution. There is, however, ample policy opportunities to do so in the actions that Big Oil has forbidden over the past three decades.

If a fight is necessary, better it be a simple fight, and Big Oil versus The Survival of the Middle Class is both accurate in depth and sufficiently simplifiable.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Sun Feb 27th, 2011 at 12:51:08 PM EST
[ Parent ]

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