The financial meltdown that was barely averted could have tanked our economy for a decade, and we got off easy, and we let off the culprits of the whole mess, because our Congress would have let Rome burn than turn on their buddies. And you keep electing folks who refuse to budge on this crap. That’s why, because everyone’s focused on the biggest players, limiting competition, and merging players with the abandon of banana farmers adopting a single strain, and hoping nothing bad will happen…again… And we’re not demanding better. We’re at fault. All of us. For not fixing this half-assery… Your money is worth 10%_12% less now than in 2008, when Obama took office. Sure the stock market is up, but millions of us cashed out our 401’s to make ends meet. Because the banks weren’t at fault for the last recession, policy-makers were. And those same policy-makers spread those policies to the rest of the country. Maybe credit expansion increased home prices in low income zip codes outside the Closed Access cities by 5% relative to income growth. What we do see, however, in most cities, whether open or closed, is a collapse in home prices that is weighted toward low income zip codes. We did that to them. There is no getting around it. The persistent drop in home equity has been targeted on low income zip codes, because the housing bust was imposed through constraints on mortgage credit. We’re socking it to them coming and going. And, it has nothing to do with wages or negotiating power. First we refused to build houses, then we refused to fund them. We’ve been patting each other on the back for 10 years about how those low income rubes were being led like lemmings into homes above their means and how we put a stop to it and how the bankers did this to us and how they need to pay. It never happened. First policy makers in Closed Access cities created a systematic high cost refugee crisis, then, because we blamed creditors for the housing problem instead of supply constraints, we pulled the rug out from under households that depended on credit access to fund reasonable housing consumption (households that were going so far as to pick up and move cities, by the millions, in order to maintain reasonable housing consumption levels), and we continue to clamp down on the mortgage industry so that a decade later those households can’t fund reasonable housing transactions and they are sitting on properties that are significantly undervalued with much less equity than they rightly should have. And those that don’t own homes have sharply rising rents because the housing shortage has been exacerbated. We did it to them. It’s on us. Do we have the honesty and integrity to fix it? Can a country fix a decade long error that it has been this emotionally committed to? - http://idiosyncraticwhisk.blogspot.com/2016/05/housing-part-...osed-access-and.html Seriously guys, I know I’m ragging on the housing thing, but it needs to be ragged on. the United States has “probably managed this better than any large economy on Earth in modern history,” President Obama told The New York Times Magazine