9 Signs That 2016 Looks Ominously Like 2008 (Just Before The Crisis)
by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
ZeroHedge.com
03/18/2016
If you haven’t seen the 2015 Best Picture nominee, The Big Short, I strongly recommend it.
The Big Short is based on Michael Lewis’ book which examines how such an extraordinary financial crisis gripped the world in 2008, and the handful of people who saw it coming.
The movie opens asking a very simple question about the global financial meltdown:
Wall Street missed it; the Federal Reserve missed it; the government missed it; every major financial institution missed it; the homebuilders missed it.
So how is it that a handful of people were able to see it coming? How could they see what nobody else saw?
Easy. They looked.
For anyone who actually looked, it was obvious that the banking and housing boom in the early 2000s was built on a house of cards. The data was all there.
Given the financial establishment’s astonishingly short-term memory and capacity to make even bigger mistakes than ever before, we now find ourselves in a very similar position today.
Once again, the financial system is in desperate condition. And the data is all there for anyone who cares to look.
Let’s look at a few of the numbers together.
Back in 2008, much of the calamity was caused by an implosion of “subprime loans” in the housing market.
These were frequently no-money down loans at teaser interest rates made to people with poor credit and limited income.
Banks made these toxic loans with your money.
The best example of this was probably Johnny Moon, a homeless man with no income or employment history who was able to borrow more than $600,000 to speculate in real estate.
The total value of these subprime loans was a whopping $1.3 trillion.
Not much has changed.
The Rest…HERE
