Here comes your shitty future

Taking stock: This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a crash. Don’t be fooled if there was a slight up-tick in the stock market today. Wall Street is going down, and in a big way. Bipolar mood swings like we’re presently experiencing are the norm before big crashes. Bites gives the market till October, the traditional month for America’s economic disasters. Think Black Monday (1987) and Black Tuesday (1929). It’s gonna be that bad.

Financially, there’s nothing much you can do about the coming catastrophe, short of shifting your equities to gold, petroleum or SN&R’s advertising budget. Why should you invest in the SN&R and other alternative media? For at least the past three years, the alts were the only place you could read about the burgeoning real-estate bubble that has now popped, threatening to take the rest of the economy down with it.

Forget about the Sacramento Bee, which continues to push the idea that the housing downturn is a temporary glitch even as Sacramento County and the rest of California lead the nation in the number of foreclosures. This was of course easily predictable back in 2003, when Sacramento County and the rest of California were leading the nation in the number of adjustable-rate mortgages awarded by banks to first-time homeowners, in some cases up to $1 million to buyers with no discernable income and no down payment!

Blogging the bubble: Fortunately, readers can get the straight dope at the frothy host of local blogs and Web sites that have appeared in the wake of the collapsing bubble. For a daily update on regional housing bubble news, try sacramentolanding.blogspot.com. One of the more amusing blogs, at least for non-homeowners, is flippersintrouble.blogspot.com, which posts the prices of homes as they sell, charting both the number of days on the market and percent discount in asking price.

How’s $451K sound for a four bedroom home in Elk Grove that languished on the market for 350 days at $799K? That’s a drop in price of 36 percent, brothers and sisters. The record number of days on the market so far? How’s 482 days sound? Sharpest drop in asking price? Forty percent. Like gravity, economics is inevitable. What goes up must come down.

If the reader think Bites is gloating, well, the reader is right to a certain extent. The non-homeowning, non-stockholding Bites can’t tell you how many times friends and acquaintances have rubbed this columnist’s nose in their obviously inflated home and equity values. Hate to tell you Bites told you so, but Bites told you so.

New world disorder: However, schadenfreude only goes so far. As Mike Whitney, Bites’ favorite economic doomsayer, describes the downturn that has already begun, “It’s a bloodbath.” Several trillion dollars worth of the “subprime” loans mentioned above have been repackaged as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which hedge funds have been trading like hot potatoes in a globalized pyramid scheme where the loser is the player left holding the spud. The number of losers has now reached critical mass, and according to Whitney, in the resulting explosion of debt, “everybody gets hurt.”

The coming crash, Whitney insists, is by design, “a carefully considered plan to shift the nation’s wealth from one class to another” by exporting jobs and assets overseas, seizing the world’s resources, and controlling the global economy through a single Central Bank. The European Union is but the first cog in an infernal machine bent on world domination.

Up next is the North American Union, which, as Bites correspondent and Stockton schoolteacher Daniel Hutchins points out, is no joke, as suggested by a recent article in the Bee. The plan, tacitly embraced by both major U.S. political parties, calls for the economies of Canada, the United States and Mexico to be joined under one umbrella. Sound crazy? Perhaps. But it isn’t hard to guess which economy the alleged plan will base its wage scale on.