Money makes the world slow down
Let us, as E.B. White put it in a 1939 issue of Harper’s Magazine, “take a ride on the Futurama.”
According to Jeremy Grantham at Barron’.com we’re going to be knee-deep in bad debt, recession woes and a slow deflation of global financial markets until 2010. Our great-great-grandkids will be paying our mortgages long after we’re gone. Also, the long flight to the suburbs that started in the 40s will reverse. Currently affluent planned communities overflowing with McMansions will become slums and fall into poverty, crime and decay as populations who can afford to move back into the cities.
In my opinion, this all lends weight to Naomi Klein’s view that we’ve been hoodwinked by George Bush’s “ownership society,” doesn’t it? According to Klein, we’ve been fooled by a Thatcheresque switcheroo meant to lull us into a false sense of security, and put votes into Republican pockets by, among other things, looking the other way as risky loans were made to more and more people hoping to participate in the breezy free-for-all of homeownership.
Pop.
Well, maybe there’s some good news, or at least news that is less bad for Minnesota than much of the rest of the nation. Only .83 percent of Twin Cities area houses were in foreclosure in 2007.
Then again, maybe this has all happened before. Eighteen times before.
