A lot of people are intimidated or bored away from economics. Don’t be. We can show folks very easily what all the chatter has been about subprime lending and housing bubbles.

We linked the very excellent Michael Hudson primer (Road to Serfdom) on housing bubbles here some time ago.

Now is a very good time to look that over again, then go back and re-read the Google News listings for “subprime” + “bubble.”

On March 12th, Bloomberg published an ominous analysis, saying:

Hold on to your assets. The deepest housing decline in 16 years is about to get worse.

As many as 1.5 million more Americans may lose their homes, another 100,000 people in housing-related industries could be fired, and an estimated 100 additional subprime mortgage companies that lend money to people with bad or limited credit may go under, according to realtors, economists, analysts and a Federal Reserve governor. Financial stocks also could extend their declines over mortgage default worries.

The spring buying season, when more than half of all U.S. home sales are made, has been so disappointing that the National Association of Home Builders in Washington now expects purchases to fall for the sixth consecutive quarter after it predicted a gain just last month.

“The correction will last another year,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

For Bloomberg, this was terrible for investors and homebuilder corporations. ZNet at least published Dean Baker’s more people-centered account of this disaster, which took note that …

Tens of millions of people will be hurt as they see much of the equity in their homes - money that most had counted on to support their retirement - disappear. Millions more will be forced out of their homes as they find that they are unable to meet the payments on adjustable rate mortgages that reset at higher rates. People who had worked hard and saved in order to become homeowners will see their dream disappear.

For the American resistance this has a special significance. In the very subsoil of IA’s conceptualization of long-term resistance is a direct, legal, systematic, and ambitious struggle for land. The reiteration of the everyday-enigmatics of soil, space, and time here can be summarized in the term “land.” Any mass movement that takes up this challenge will be immediately confronted with the challenge of re-integrating our economic logic, political logic, and territorial logic. Capitalism’s crisis right now is in many ways definable (as Harvey has done) as contradictions between these logics. Our re-integration reference points” at IA are (1) Body, (2) Food, (3) Land. Relating every issue to these three things can keep us out of a lot of cul-de-sacs.

They can call it “real estate,” but it is space on the surface of the planet, finite space, which is being gobbled up and placed under proprietary control by massive enterprises, at breakneck speed.

No resistance can survive without either outside infusions of resources or native capacity. Native capacity means production under local control.

One main goal of all ostensibly revolutionary projects within the US should be acquiring land — urban, suburban, exurban, semi-rural, and rural. The object of land acquisitions must be to take this land off the market forever.

The nascent wave of current foreclosures will only be the first. The American masses from ‘hood to hills are substantially housed in mortgaged property. Property under a person’s, collective’s, or family’s legal (and final) ownership is not the same as property owned by banks. The former is better.

A public campaign to encourage paying down debts (credit cards first, then mortgages) may not sound very Che-like, but it’s about as firmly on the economic front lines as we can get.

In the long term, we need first islets, then networks, then continua of land-off-the-market-forever. This is our countryside, from which we can then establish an independent material basis for resistance.

Posted by stan in Analysis