Noted economist and erstwhile Hollywood actor Ben Stein offers up the most succint explanation of just how things went wrong and why the stock market crashed. He believes that the government will solve this problem by magically making the trillions of Credit Default Swaps go away.
I don't. The only way for this problem to be solved is for
houses to go to whatever market value they will have.
That process will be painful. I suspect that a 1500 sf house is not worth $150,000, probably half that is more likely. At least the government is not going to attempt to buy all the bad mortgages, putting capital in the banks is the better idea.
I look for more tests of the recent lows. Mid December looms large as another test. Retail stocks have tgruly collapsed wtih even MCD and WMT joining the fall this past week. Yikes, a good time to be in school.
Professor Elam 
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