The Housing Bubble has Popped? You don't say.

I was listening to NPR in the car on the way home (KQED again. didn't have any fresh podcasts for the commute. I wanted them when they started into fundraising, let me tell you.), and they were discussing, yet again, the housing bubble.
What gets me is that everyone is still scratching their head over the fact that it popped! "We could have never predicted this!" and "Isn't hindsight 20/20?" and "I thought it would never end!"
Funny thing is, I know jack shit about economics, finance, banking or real estate, but if you'd asked me a year and a half ago, I'd have told you that the housing bubble was going to burst. I couldn't have told you when, but frankly I was hoping for sooner rather than later, and I couldn't have told you how. But I could have told you that the housing bubble was dangerously overinflated, and dependent on a large fraction of money which simply didn't exist.
Now that I think about it, I can't understand how anyone with any sort of umbilical cord to reality could have *not* seen this coming.
It's like totaling your car in an accident where you hit a cow. They're not camouflaged and it's not like the cow jumped out in front of you. You had to be blind or high or stupid or drunk or all of the above to have a car smash with a cow.
I grew up in one of the cheaper parts of the midwest. My family was upper middle class at the time, and we lived in a small house, which my parents sold. They put the money towards a bigger house. My family had loans, but my mom always found enough cash in the till to make the monthly payments. My father's income was such that he could afford to pay off the house in less than thirty years.
Cut forward twenty years. I've moved to California. I make about what my dad made when I was a kid, and don't tell him this, but I think I have roughly the equivalent "rank" at work that he did. My friends are starting to get married, and with marriage comes the purchase of their fist house--they usually try to find one in a good neighbourhood with a preschool, just in case they find themselves with kids in the comming years. The problem is, with what they are paid, around 60K a year apiece, 120 K with both husband and wife maintaining a fulltime job, they can't afford to make any sort of normal monthly payments on ANY houses in the area. This includes the ones near the train-tracks on the bad side of town. House prices in California in 2007 are greater than 10 times more expensive now than your average Utah house twenty years ago (lest you think this is an invalid comparison, houses all over the west have increased in price by large factors. Of course, we all attribute this to the damn Californians).
But wages are about the same.
So my friends would take out these massive loans which they knew that they could only pay off through selling the house at a price that was significantly greater than the exhorbitant price that they had paid for it. The only thing keeping these people out of massive debt was the faith that their house was worth more than what they paid for it, which was sold for more than the previous person paid for it and so on. These houses hadn't actually had anything valuable added *to* them. In some cases, I reckon the wear and tear of 20 years of family usage probably devalued the houses.
So, the question comes down to--what's going to happen when one person can't pay off this debt they've gotten themselves into? What happens when they can't afford the expanding interest on their "bubble" loans because these loans are given on the premise that they have money that they cannot possibly have with today's wages? What happens when this happens to a bunch of people? What happens when the bank finds out that a lot of money they'd counted on having from these loans simply doesn't exist? What happens when people who are already scrambling to pay their mortgages get laid off?
*Pop*
If you didn't see that one coming, you weren't looking, and if it was your job to *be* looking, then you'd better get to work finding a solution. Hint: the solution is not doing anything and everything in your power to raise house prices again, and it doesn't involve giving loans or credit to people who cannot by any arithmetic trickery afford the loan they want.

The King and You

Perhaps you have read the recent news story about the Australian man who has gotten sentenced to prison for publishing a book FOUR YEARS AGO which sold less than ten copies and was then recalled. Apparently, in his book "Verisimilitude: Is the Truth the Truth", author Harry Nicolaides said some rather nasty things about the current king and crown prince of Thailand.
In Thailand, it's illegal to say anything not nice about the royal family, whether or not it is true or is valid criticism. Insulting the King carries a sentence of up to 15 years in prison.
Mr. Nicolaides was on his way home to Melbourne, when he was arrested at the airport. One thinks that this could be a political statement--if you're going to arrest a man for slander, why wait three years? Three years, sadly, is what Nicolaides will be spending in a Thai oubliette--the prosecution decided to go "easy" on him because he plead guilty.
Anyway, what struck me the most about the articles I read, and I read about five, was that none of them would say what exactly it was that Nicolaides said that was so insulting to the king! The above article insinuates that it was something bad concerning the love life of the crown prince. The reason for this lack of full coverage comes out in the frank Christian Science Monitor article.
What? International reporters are too chicken-shit to do their job because they're afraid that they'd be thrown in jail or barred from reporting in Thailand? Ok, I guess that this is one thing that Blogs are good for.
So, since I am not ever planning to go to Thailand*, I did do a little internet research as per the CSM's suggestion, and here is what Nicolaides wrote that has gotten the pants of Thailand's government in such a twist.

“From King Rama to the Crown Prince, the nobility was renowned for their romantic entanglements and intrigues. The Crown Prince had many wives “major and minor “with a coterie of concubines for entertainment. One of his recent wives was exiled with her entire family, including a son they conceived together, for an undisclosed indiscretion. He subsequently remarried with another woman and fathered another child. It was rumoured that if the prince fell in love with one of his minor wives and she betrayed him, she and her family would disappear with their name, familial lineage and all vestiges of their existence expunged forever.”

Oh, come on! Like this is something that everyone on the planet who has seen "The King and I" didn't already know.
The censorship is even extending into the blogosphere, with this site removing the copy of the book that it posted because of fear of retributions towards Mr. Nicolaides. However, if you request a copy of the book, they'll send you one. I encourage you to do so!
This is bullying by the Thai government on people who are NOT Thai citizens. That a person who is not a Thai citizen could be coerced into censorship for fear of retributions upon an innocent person is twisted and wrong. The royal family of Thailand has shown themselves to be petty tyrants paying lip service to justice--the 81 year old king himself has expressed displeasure with this law but has not made any action to change it!
If I had a curse to wish upon the royal family of Thailand, it's that they be the subject of the next stupid 4chan internet Meme, but until then, I encourage everyone to find their Thai embassy and send them a letter, email or call of protest. You can also do a video response to one of the many Free Nicolaides clips on Youtube.
I encourage people to blog about this and to get the word out. The more people know about this heinous affront to liberty, the better.
Since GOD himself apparently can't punish people for criticizing him, the King of Thailand should get no better.

*From what I have heard, you can't walk through the airport in Bangkok without getting offers for hookers, drugs, and the latest scam directed at people who can't speak the local language. It seems like a totally tiresome place to visit where the harassment outweighs any pleasure one might get from getting to know the local culture. Thailand has real issues to work out while their court system is busy apparently wanking and prosecuting imaginary offenses like this one. Until they get their act together, I have no intention of visiting.