"The Perfect Storm"

It all gets down to two things: rising housing prices in the last two decades and stagnant or falling wages for an even longer period of time dating back to the 1970s. Briefly, ( and far from explainly completely) Federal economic policy dictated much of this, under heavy pressure from corporations and the wealthy elite who used lobbyists to basically buy Congress to implement policy which strongly favored and benefited them at the expense of an already declining middle class and the poor. The result was a staggering ratio of income inequality which resulted in a vast misuse and abuse of credit to maintain or establish a standard of living. A house of cards was built and it had to fall, which is what started in mid to late 2006 in parts of the nation and parts of the economy, and now is afflicting the economy and citizens most everywhere. Until home values and housing prices do not return to their historical norms of a 3:1 ration roughly with per capita median incomes, a recovery will not begin and grow. And based on where the economy and the nation is now, it does not look as if that will happen until 2011 or 2012 with the vast numbers of unemployed and underemployed making up the nation and only increasingly so.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/01/29/economic.crisis.explainer/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-01-28/news/what-cooked-the-world-s-economy/

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