(iverson's) currentbuzz: Subprime and You.

Lots of people are just ignoring the subprime "thing." I know young people who work in banking and sell real estate who expect the slump to be a short-term thing. I wonder. When I bought my first house, the interest rates were 9% or higher. All the money was tied up in debt service and energy crisis. There wasn't money for lending to people who wanted to buy a house.

When lots of homes get foreclosed, what happens to neighborhoods? If you are sitting pretty in a condo, what happens to your assessment if and when a half of the units get foreclosed? What happens to a building when it starts to empty out? Will this harken an area of urban squatting as the formerly homed lose their homes and still need to live somewhere?

That so many homeowners are having such trouble meeting their mortgage payments could very well mean your own home's value has dropped, that you may not be able to get a home-equity loan, or that your retirement savings will grow more slowly than you planned. Conceivably, it could even mean that the global financial system -- and by extension the economy and even your job -- is threatened.

Source: poynter.org

And this doesn't address the larger question of availability of money and where it is going on the big scale. The government is competing with home-owners by spending so much on the Iraq war. That debt will strap consumers and citizens and make borrowing more costly for all of us. I hope I'm just sounding like my grandpa did when he used to talk about the Great Depression, and that we aren't slipping into a depression of our own.