Monday, April 21, 2008

The following were in my comments section. (Hell of an ego to keep commenting on your own commentary, huh.)

Bilbobustbart calls me on the repeat nature of my posts, over on Bendbubble2.


"Even Duncan, while I have begged for over a year that he focus on his business, still blogs daily, he too could focus on fixing Bend, rather than writing the same insipid shit every fucking day, over & over. For dunc, everyday is ground-hog day."

Which really made me laugh. Serious belly laugh, which are hard to come by. He has a way of cutting to the chase.

But, sadly, I'm not writing this for Bilbo's edification. I'm writing this strictly for me. It's my way of psyching myself, of saving my wife's ear of the same damn message day after day. (She calls me Wiley Coyote because I always think I've figured a new way to catch to Road Runner but ending with the same stupid look in my face.)

Besides, what can we do? This is a market correction -- or, another way of putting it, this is just reality.

Too many houses, not enough jobs, prices too high, credit too sucky, and so on. Ain't nothing to do but hang in there.

I said from the outset -- I'm just an observer. That's what I do. But hell, isn't that what all of us do?

Writing this IS MY WAY of getting involved.


While it's probably true that it's boring and pointless to talk about the housing bubble now , I'd like to point out that in my experience most of the damage happens after most people stop paying much attention to it.

That is, the spectacular busts are not the end, but the beginning. The implosion of comics in 1995, followed by the bankrupcy of Marvel and the consolidation of distributers,was followed by years and years of downturn and scraping along the bottom. 80% of the damage happened AFTER the news. Same thing with sports cards.

So this downturn is something that business people will be dealing with for years to come....but I predict it will become boring to cover and some other crisis will hit the news instead.

But most of the damage will happen after, when people have quit paying attention.

Old news.


So in other words, it will be a daily grind dealing with the problems, and probably the main focus of a whole lot of businesses, but nothing exciting to talk about and probably boring to hear about.

New Orleans is still in pretty bad shape, for instance, but how much do you hear anyone talk about it?

A nine day wonder of, what are we doing about the poor? and then, how about them Red Sox?

So Bend's housing bust is going to be at the basis of every business and government and financial decision from here on, nuts and bolts stuff, and none too exciting.

Anticipation was so much more fun, wasn't it Buster?

Delete

1 comment:

Zoomie said...

Well Dunc,

Keep it up I enjoy reading your comments.
Housing has always been a topic worthy of my attention. You do a good job talking about it.
Been around a long time and have seen these markets four times before, they will keep trying to fix it but the only fix is time and market forces allowed to do their work.

Zoomie