I've been selling real estate for 24 years. I remember the last economic/real estate decline/bubble...I see the decline lasting another 5 years where there will be a bottoming out period of approx 3-4 years. I know the U.S. real estate bubble began deflating 3 yrs ago....because of the blatant excesses which occured thereg. I am Canadian and annually attend real estate sales seminars in the U.S. I met brand new liscencees, selling 40-50 homes/year earning $500k/yr in there their very first few years in the bus and scoffing at my production after being in the bus over 20 yrs.
People & companies need to unload some debt. This is going to take a few years to accept & come to terms with. It's a gradual process of deflating this balloon. 60-70% of the Mortgage business has been and still is REFINANCING! This means people are still using credit to keep afloat and are refusing to live within their means in an attempt to keep up with the Joneses!
Thus the coming of the layoffs. Layoffs force people to come to grips with reality and gives them an excuse to cut back & still keep up with the Jonses in a deflationary way.
As for countries....well they just continue to add zero's to their debt because they are the worst at living within their means. As long as the developed countries each add zeros at roughly the same pace...there is no problem.
Problem is...Free Trade is subtracting the zeros from developed countries and adding them to the emerging countries. Hopefully someone will figure that this is not working very well & try to balance out the whole thing without China inc. etc. screaming bloody murder too loud.
Lucky
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