I know very little about real estate, but in trying to understand the mortgage crisis news and what it means for mere mortals, I’ve been reading Irvine Housing Blog. It’s kind of like the Arcata Eye Police Log: unusually sharp writing about unusually dumb behavior. At least I hope it’s unusually dumb. If people all over the place have been behaving like they did in Orange County, not just borrowing unwisely to buy houses but borrowing insanely against the houses they had—while the stock market was running partly on the juice from bets on those unrepayable loans—I can see how a whole lot of money is about to suddenly stop existing, and that can’t be good for anyone. It’s tempting to just laugh at some schmuck in Irvine who abused easy credit, but if you make a living selling bagels to the people who work for the people who supply gadgets to the people who sell the things that the schmuck from Irvine was buying... well...

I felt better when this stuff didn’t make any sense to me.

There’s a good article in this month’s Harper’s about this too (at least I think it’s good; it could be bogus and I wouldn’t know). The author thinks there’s hope for softening the crash, but that it’ll require a whole lot of rapid investment and borrowing, and the good news is that he thinks that might happen as businesses start to invest in renewable energy, so at least we’ll be making something we need. The bad news is that he thinks that’ll just be another bubble in the end—that the economy has become so dependent on these binges, there’s really no way to stabilize it.

(Of course every time money bites us in the ass, there are Republicans to tell us how the real problem is too much government intervention; the market would work it all out if we just let it be, etc. That always sounds to me like "Sure, Lenin and Stalin and Mao didn’t work out so well, but real communism has never been tried." Very possibly true—but it still sounds fishy when you hear it from Lenin’s golfing buddy.)