An Insightful Description Of What Is Occurring On Main Street

As I have been saying would happen, the housing market bounce of the last 18 months is starting to crack.  This is a crack that I expect will widen into a big canyon, into which home sales and prices will fall.  It will be a resumption of the bear market trend in the housing market that began in mid-2005 and which needs to go a lot lower and exact a lot more pain before the excesses of the Greenspan/Bernanke/Bush/Obama era have even a chance of being cleansed and fixed.

Existing home sales for October were released yesterday.  And while the year over year headline result was announced as being a big positive, it turns out that if you dig into the actual month-to-month numbers the housing market is slowing down - quickly.  You can read my analysis of the numbers and the overall housing market here:  October Existing Home Sales

Meanwhile, as the stock market plows inexorably toward the moon and then, with a lot more QE, onto Pluto, I was discussing with a friend how QE has done nothing for the economy other than help out a few homebuilders, realtors and most of the corporate insiders who are unloading their company shares at a record pace.  In the context of chatting about the rampant systemic Government and corporate corruption, we discussed how small businesses and individuals have been left in the satanic dust created by the Government and Wall Street.  His commentary on this was too priceless not to share:

It's a horror show.  I know 2 guys in their 50's and 60's who are close to running out of money.  For younger people, generally blue collar guys are the only ones who'll talk openly and freely about reality, and they're angry. The white collar set is brainwashed into pretending that they're keeping up with the Joneses, too stupid to question if their neighbors are living an illusion propped up on credit cards. I freely tell whitey to stop watching TV or it'll finish the chemical conversion of their brains into cat food.

The real "tell" is the Kohl's parking lot (visible from McDonald's where I take coffee every day w/a friend), always brimming with minivans and hot mommy ass. Whence comes Kohl's meteoric popularity of late?  The answer lies in the high-end faux upper middle class stores like Williams-Sonoma--barren without stragglers seeking elusive bargains there.

Society's veneer is down to rice paper. After Christmas, it'll be gossamer.

So what happens when interest rates revert to reality and spike up, destroying even the ability to pretend all is well?  That's when the fun starts.

As a nation, we're a kerosene-doused tinder box awaiting a flame. No accident, this.

I strongly suspect that even the very well-to-do are hurting, fretting many a country club membership and private school tuition check.

I wasn't kidding about the cat food thing...

"Even a dog knows the difference between being tripped over and being kicked." -Oliver Wendell Holmes

Americans are being kicked to death, and do nothing but expire in the lambent glow of TV's illusion, less significant than dead dogs.