大象传媒

I don't understand why any of this comes as a surprise. Every element was part of a trend or the result of long standing similar events which crop up periodically.

There is no credit crunch because the Treasury will pump liquidity into the system to whatever degree it has to to avert any but a mild recession and even that is worst case. That was the lesson it learned from the 1929 depression when it reduced liquidity at precisely the wrong time helping trigger the recession and making it worse.

There are countless millions of cars on the American market nobody wants including many brand new ones, often sitting around for years. A couple of years ago, I saw a fully loaded Mercury Grand Marquis in a dealer's showroom for $17,000, an outstanding value IMO. The catch, it was the previous year's model but there's hardly a change from one year to the next. I know at one point GM alone had over a million new cars on dealer lots it couldn't sell. Cars have been extended in lifespan from about 40,000 to 60,000 miles 30 years ago to 200,000 or more today. There are around 200 million cars on American roads in a country with a population of 300 million. 16 million new cars are sold to Americans every year. Anyone who wants a car can have one...or more. Besides, they are becoming more and more alike, the distinctiveness in styling and features they exhibited in the 50s and 60s almost entirely a thing of the past.

We get periodic housing gluts in the US. It's nothing new. There is hardly anything easier to build than a house. There's been a rash of new home building for years, why wouldn't there be a glut? The sub prime mortgages were invented to help sell them. Who would ever have thought so many highly paid investment experts with all their business credentials would buy these pigs in a poke but as P.T. Barnum's old saying goes, there's a sucker born every minute and the world of banking and finance is full of people who are full of themselves.

With huge trade defecits and government spending defecits, how could the US dollar not have fallen? As it turns out, it's been an incredibly powerful economic weapon the US hasn't even begun to explore yet. Just ask Airbus if it isn't true.

With rising fuel costs and fears of recession, how could consumer spending not go down. Will people spend as much money and take on as much new credit when they are worried about their own finances as when they aren't worried? China beware, your economy based on high volume manufacture and export of cheap junk consumer goods bought with discretionary money often on a whim is very vulnerable to fluctuations of American consumer confidence which is trending lower now. The irony is that China itself is pushing up the cost of fuel because of its consumption to manufacture more and more of them and the demands by Chinese consumers themselves for cars and warmer homes in winter. You'd have to be living in a cave not to understand what is happening on the world's fossil fuels market. This is one big element pushing American consumer confidence down. (BTW, the US could supply all of its own domestic energy needs from its own coal for the next 250 years if it wanted to.)

Higher than "expected" sub prime mortgage defaults? This strikes me as being as big a surprise as watching a deer standing on railroad tracks in the dark, paralyzed to move as its eyes are glazed over by headlights of an oncoming train, and then getting run over. What surprise is that? Selling houses to people who can't afford it? I saw widespread "createive financing" in California and the west 30 years ago. Many banks would sell you a foreclosed home they'd repossessed just for the ability to take over the monthly mortgage payments and pay the real estate taxes.

So are we in the perfect economic storm? Not yet, not by a long shot, which is not to say it isn't coming. What will trigger "the big blow?" Watch for fear of war in the Middle East as the threat of Iran looms larger, a resulting sudden huge hike in oil prices, collapse in the US stock market, and then the bottom falling out for Europe and China. The world will not end...but it won't be the same after the dust settles either. Who will come out on top after 5 or 10 years? Who always comes out on top?

So when will the economists begin to talk in these terms about the UK economy? Perpetually talking up the strength of the pound and saying how much less likely it is that any of the problems faced by the US will affect UK growth in the same way is just the standard smoke screen put out by those few people who stand to gain by the majority of Brits running up massive personal debt and by sustaining an overheated housing market by assuming prices can only ever get higher. Why would a mortgage lender ever tell you not to buy a mortgage?? We've had years of low interest rates which lulls people into believing they are richer than than actually are. Result? Any number of small financial upsets can converge to tip us all over the edge. You only have to look at just how sensitive oil prices have become to realise that any event, no matter how trivial (or non-existent, as recent headlines seem to suggest), can cause major shockwaves through such an unstable situation.

I agree with Mark; all of the current conditions are totally predictable if you look at all the hard data and history, instead of just talking about it.

Money Week seem to be on the ball most of the time. They have been banging on about the inevitable outcomes for a couple of years or more.

One thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history.

Perhaps mainstream commentators couldn't see it coming but many others have been predicting this for the last couple of years - I think these people have just been surprised it has taken so long.

Welcome to the collapse of the pyramid scheme and the never ending gloabl recession.

I think it has been pretty obvious for several that everyone living on debt was unsustainable. The problem was that living on debt and passing it around was fine for as long as you could pass on your parcel of it, and no-one knew when the music would stop. In the mean time people could earn more from buying and selling houses than working, and surely someone has to work. Now the harsh realities of spending more than you earn will hit a lot of people very hard and a huge amount of tough decisions that everyone had hoped wouldn't need to be faced will have to be made. I don't trust the bankers and mortgage sellers who have a self interest in saying that everything is fine, and wish people would stop reporting such subjective opinions as though they were somehow objective. The data is pretty ugly when you compare US debt with third world debt - the US has more - or when you think what would happen to all exporting nations if oil stopped being priced in dollars and became even more expensive for Americans.

I agree with contributor #1.

The big crunch must occur when the Iranian regime is dealt with.

And, after the dust settles, the USA will still be top-dog.

That particular empire has a long, long way to run, mainly, IMHO, because of the USA's outstanding scientific community and its translation into goods and services that people worldwide want.

The USA knows 'how to win' like nobody before.

This Englishman can only curse our forebears for being so short-sighted and 'letting America go'.

There is nothing wrong with debt ,only that most people do not know how to use it.
The key is to remember debt is a cost ,a mortgage on your future income stream and must be serviced. So you don't incur it unless you can fix it low to the relative return expected.

On topic. My wife's young colleague with a credit rating too low to get a mortgage offer did get one from the Northern Rock recently. I know the irony of that will not be missed.
I sold our last property recently to a chap and his son. No deposit on the exchange as they had a 100% mortgage. Parochial I know ,but it's good to get behind headlines and soundbites.

mentioned prices of $12000 to $17,000 are no bargain when those amounts are more than 2 years wages to most people.