Empire of Debt
Ahhh. Yeah. So, think about this next time you hear ‘real estate’ is the best investment possible. Try gold and wait for the debt pyramid to crumble so you can pick up land for pennies on the dollar. That would be cool.
“My tax guy has been bugging me…You know, real estate is where it is at.” In June 2005, NBC quoted a young woman who had bought a second home at a Colorado resort. According to the report, more than a third of the houses sold in the previous 12 months were not primary residences, but second homes or investments.
Down at the bottom of the pyramid are petty agents spreading deceit and misinformation - such as the aforementioned “tax guy.” You would think a young woman could trust her certified tax advisor to give her sound counsel. Instead, he urges her to get into the most bubbly property market in American history. Naturally, she went for it, aided no doubt by a whole industry of professional dissemblers. Press reports tell us that appraisers routinely stretch valuations to help close a deal. Mortgage lenders know perfectly well the appraisals are lies, but they wink at them with one eye while winking at the borrower’s phony income declaration with the other. Again, according to the press reports, lenders no longer verify income claims. They have gone blind!
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Further up the steps of imperial debt are whole legions of analysts, economists, and full-time obfuscators whose role is to make us all believe six impossible things before breakfast and a dozen more before dinner. Quack economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics do to numbers what guards at Guantanamo did to prisoners. They rough them up so badly, they are ready to say anything. This abuse of statistics is what allows Americans to deceive themselves about their own economy. It is healthy, they say. It is growing. It is stable. All these so-called facts are little more than elaborate prevarications.
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