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I was determined to take Saturday off, but then right as I was headed off to bed last night- L sent me this Channel 12 News video: [L: You knew this one would get to me, didn’t you? : )]
Jay Butler, an ASU Professor whose monthly reports on the Phoenix housing market are quoted widely, [including here on Doom] passed on some of the worst home selling advice I’ve heard in awhile. Here’s the video, and the transcript of the offending section follows: [With my indignant comments inserted]
Yesterday was an extraordinary day at Housing Doom blog and everywhere else. Twist wasn’t up for a post after all the strain and excitement, so Doomers will have to put up with me. I’m an Elder serving with the Presbyterian Church in Canada, so please prepare yourself for a short sermon.
Alex Pollock asked in late March where the losses from the subprime meltdown were hiding. Yesterday the markets found them. Are we facing a crisis? Yes. Is it the end of the world? No. The majority of folk in the West hold to one of the three great Abrahamic faiths or the Humanism that arose from the European Enlightenment. Others adhere to one of the belief systems imported here from Africa or South or East Asia. None of that is going anywhere.
What will result from yesterday’s lock-up in credit markets, though, is we’ll have to let go of a lot of our other cherished assumptions. A similar thing happened to our brothers and sisters in the Eastern world sixteen years ago after the Berlin Wall fell. Their experience wasn’t easy, but they’ve mostly muddled through since then. Our future is certainly challenging after yesterday, but we can have complete confidence it will be no harder than what happened in the former Soviet Union. After all, we won the Cold War.
Someone asked Christ, Who is my neighbor? Even some Doomers who never went near a Sunday School will know how he answered that one. When one of the great hurricanes of ‘05 sawed it’s way through western Cuba, they lost almost nobody. America, Canada, and all the other Western countries will need to learn about that level of community solidarity to help them through the next few years. Lord willing we won’t be too fussy about who we learn it from.
