Quite a day for new records, wouldn't you say? Only hours after Citigroup
Problem is, that looks less and less like it would matter. It's the housing, silly.
UBS
These are just the latest symptoms of a popping housing bubble, the collapse of which is sucking the wind out of what looks, in retrospect, like an economy built too much on the "greater fool" system of real estate. Homebuilders like Pulte Homes
If all is as it appears, and the lofty "growth" of the past few years was too dependent on house flipping, home building, and home equity withdrawals, there's not much hope for the longevity of the current party. Those soft home sales and bank-busting write-downs aren't a response to interest-rate problems -- they're a toppling house of cards, the result of unaffordable homes, bad lending, and the lack of a market for all that lousy real-estate-backed paper.