“I am here to enable dreams,” he explained to me long afterward. Bob’s view was that if I’d been unemployed for seven years and didn’t have a dime to my name but I wanted a house, he wouldn’t question my prudence. “Who am I to tell you that you shouldn’t do what you want to do? I am here to sell money and to help you do what you want to do. At the end of the day, it’s your signature on the mortgage — not mine.”…. My lenders weren’t assuming that I was an angel. They were betting that a default would be more painful to me than to them. If I wanted to take a risk, for whatever reason, they were not going to second-guess me. What mattered more than anything, Bob explained, was a person’s credit record…. “Don’t worry,” Bob reassured me, saying what almost everybody else in real estate was saying at that moment. “The value of your house will be higher in five years. You’ll be able to refinance.” (From here via DeLong.)
The pyramid isn’t there on the dollar bill for nothing. Because of complexity, emergence, disseminated intelligence, the singularity, the cosmic vortex, the Aquarian Age, the Power of Love, Jesus, and the free market, there are no limits anymore. Be all you can be!
More: The tweakers are crashing on us
We are living in Greenspan’s experiment
A funny math joke just destroyed half of everything)
Trollblog 
May 17, 2009 at 7:06 pm
You got an unclosed tag, there, pardner.
May 17, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Fixed.
May 22, 2009 at 2:04 am
The last three sentences of this post are the definitive statement of the era. If you’d come up with them five years ago, and learned to say them with a straight face, you’d have your own show on CNBC.
May 22, 2009 at 2:23 am
I just had a flash from something in the news. Among other things, the present crash has a social-psychological cause: the human error was randomly distributed among individuals, but was distributed according to a pattern of excessive optimism.
I was just wondering whether this has been called distributed stupidity yet.
May 22, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Scott Adams is stealing from Trollblog.
June 16, 2009 at 1:00 am
Emerson didn’t hit the streets, Pz. He’s fucked up, but not that fucked up–and he would still have had library access, and library box. Ergo, he’s either like locked down–as in psychiatric watch, sedated, deep inside some state or Fed clinic, seriously down on thorazine or mellaril or somethin’–or broke on through to the other side, like whacked. One other slight possibility: he fakes his death, ala Morrison, maybe for ID theft, or insurance purposes.
June 22, 2009 at 6:37 pm
The Holblow/CT/unfogged’s hit appears to have been successful. Or at least they got Emerson the Malefactor locked down somewhere, with Nurse Ratched keeping the thorazine pumpin’.
Ave atque vale, JE.
July 22, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Come back, John!
July 23, 2009 at 11:26 pm
Amen. The Internet ain’t the same without you!
August 14, 2009 at 10:21 am
emerson – i am worried – as worried as a complete stranger can be – where the hell are you…?
August 15, 2009 at 12:46 am
bb: check the Crooked Timber thread on Les Paul for the latest appearance by JE. Other than that though I’ve not seen him around. I wonder what happened. The intertubes just ain’t the same without him. Come back zizka! we miss you.
September 4, 2009 at 12:45 am
Excellent site, keep up the good work