So yeah -- let's get really worried about taxing a few middle class families $100 a year -- that will put them all into poverty.

If you look at the data on stock ownership, this is about the most progressive tax that you can imagine. And it can make the economy more efficient by eliminating an enormous amount of wasted resources in the financial sector.

He then went with another agent and listed at a price about 10 percent higher. It didn't sell that time either. I believe that he is now renting to someone.

Anyhow, I never expected that we would have gotten the peak, but given that our buyer must have put $10k-$20k of work into the unit, it doesn't look as though the price went much higher after we sold.

FWIW, we bought a place last month. I don't think we got the trough, although we did catch mortgage rates at their bottom.

i did warn people about the stock bubble -- beginning in 1997. if you just wanted to gamble and get out, you could win, but long-term investors were sure losers. It should have been easy for an economist to see. I don't blame ordinary investors who don't follow the market for living.

actually I was doing everything I could to warn people about the housing bubble after July of 2002. I didn't want to engage in pointless exercises, which is why I did not go knocking on doors, but i certainly wrote about as much as i could and talked about it on every interview show I could.

As far as Greenspan and Bernanke's other concerns, they may have had them, but they were hugely wrong. That is why they should get fired.

Whatever they thought was important in 2003-2007 was absolutely trivial compared to the bubble. The impact of the collapse (which was 100 percent predictable to anyone who understands any economics) dwarfs whatever items they wasted their time in these years.

the housing bubble led to record rates of housing construction and therefore a huge oversupply of homes. This is why construction has fallen by 50 percent, a loss in annual output of $450 billion. Illusory housing wealth fueled the consumption boom, pushing the saving rate to zero.

With the disappearance of $6 trillion in housing bubble wealth, the saving rate has now risen to almost 6 percent. That translates into $600 billion a year in lost consumption.

This loss of more than $1 trillion in demand (throw in another $250 billion or so from the collapse of the bubble in non-residential real estate) was an entirely predictable result of the collapse of the bubble.

Greenspan and Bernanke should have seen the bubble and they should have recognized the disaster that would be follow from its bursting. It was all completely predictable and the failure to try to have stopped this disaster is inexcusable. What were they doing that they thought was more important?

As one of those manufacturing boosting troglodytes, let me quickly clarify the position (or at least my position) on manufacturing and the dollar. The U.S. currently is running an enormous trade deficit (temporarily shrunk by the recession) because China and other exporters are effectively subsidizing their exports by buying up huge amounts of dollars. This raises the value of the dollar against their own currency, making their imports cheaper for people in the United States.

At some point, China and other major exporters will likely tire of subsidizing our consumption. They can pay anyone to buy their stuff, including their own populations, they don't have to pay Americans to buy it. When they stop paying us to buy their stuff, then the dollar will plunge.

In that case, our manufacturing sector is likely to prove more competitive than other sectors open to trade. Our wages are less out of line with the rest of the world in manufacturing than in areas like computer or financial services.

While the U.S. does currently enjoy modest trade surpluses in these areas, this is likely to be reversed in the near future as world class industries develop in places like India and China. On a per worker basis, the gap in pay in finance and software engineering swamps the gap in pay in manufacturing.

For this reason, when we get to a world where we actually have to pay for the goods we import, we are likely to end up both importing fewer manufactured goods and paying for some of these imports with manufactured goods.

And you did not need the FBI, you just needed someone who could do arithmetic to see the bubble. The tax cuts and war were both bad news for the economy, but it was the bubble that sank the economy. This destroyed the housing sector and the loss of wealth in the wake of its collapse was responsible for the falloff in consumption.

so will they lower the value of the dollar against the yuan (i.e. stop "manipulating" their currency)? That would be a real twofer -- we get stimulus from spending money and we get further stimulus from the improvement in our trade balance.

Let's go for it!