Why I Think We’re Heading into a Recession and Housing Crisis
In spite of what we are being told about the economy, my personal opinion is that we’re heading into a recession and possibly a housing crisis.
I’m not going to provide exact numbers and hard data in this post, because this is based on my opinions and observations. I have been feeling this way for months, long before there was any data on this time period.
If you are familiar with my work in the previous foreclosure crisis, then you know I figured out how to find the weak spots in a bank’s foreclosure case, which led to alternative and much better outcomes for homeowners.
I’m still offering this service, but with reservations. I’m feeling the pull to step back in to help people navigate what might be ahead. There were some frightening things that happened to me for talking about foreclosure and the things I found in homeowners' documents.
I haven’t ever talked publicly about this part of my experience helping homeowners before. I am considering talking about it in depth in another post.
I was harassed, followed, threatened with lawsuits and many other strange things happened to me and my family for talking about all the falsehoods I found in mortgage documents.
I was naïve when I started Desert Edge Legal. I knew I could help people, but I had NO IDEA how corrupt things were.
I mean, I didn’t set out to be a whistleblower. I thought the banks legitimately wanted to help people keep their homes. NOPE.
And then getting harassed and threatened on top of it? Terrifying.
That experience upended my beliefs about my legal career and I’ve been struggling with it for years. If I were OK with the whole system and the illusion of the law being able to help people, I would be in a completely different situation career-wise.
But I can’t un-see or un-experience all the stuff I’ve experienced, and I can’t ignore that the legal system is broken. I have a problem with participating in all that, so I’ve been one foot in and one foot out for a long time.
I’ve gotten clear that I’m no longer in alignment with the old legal system anymore. I’m just tired of fighting for what should rightfully be mine (or yours).
So it’s interesting that I’m thinking of writing about this topic again.
I could write a book on how to be a whistleblower and survive the experience. HA HA! I might do that and make it a paid subscriber post.
Although I feel like that trauma from that chapter of my life is healing, and I no longer have PTSD over it, there is still a residual defensiveness or protectiveness. I can remember wanting to leave a rifle behind the door during the foreclosure crisis, because there were so many random people coming to the door, attempting to open the door and lots of other harrowing things.
I prefer to be prepared but I’m working on not being paranoid or fearful.
So anyway, here we are…and for the last several months now, I’ve had a strange feeling that things are just not right with the economy, the job market and many other things, in spite of what we’re being told.
I watched my friends searching for jobs for MONTHS and not finding anything permanent. I watched one of my friends have multiple jobs offers fall through.
I had been looking for contract paralegal work and had very few responses to my resume submissions.
I applied for a server job. I didn’t get an e-mail or a phone call back from the restaurant that was begging for applicants on their Facebook page.
These are by no means huge indicators of the economy being bad, but they showed up in my experience for a reason. And if there were so many jobs and businesses that were desperate to hire someone, why weren’t they hiring anyone who was available to get the job done?
I told my friends that I felt uneasy and they would say things that made me think they were listening to the mainstream media.
I think my friends wanted to believe the message in the media and get back to work, too. But it just wasn’t happening. (By the way, this is not a judgment. It’s expensive to be informed.)
I think we all are desperate for HOPE right now. We want things to be normal, grounded and predictable, and the information we’re being given has been carefully crafted for that purpose.
If you pay attention you will not be caught unaware. And if you’re only relying on the mainstream media and the political narrative, you might be caught off guard if things fall apart.
And now that the publicly available information has caught up to my feelings that things weren’t right, here are my opinions on why we’re headed into a recession.
First: The massive real estate debt problem in China.
The real estate market in China is huge, about a third of its economy. Several Chinese developers are over-leveraged to the tune of 305 billion dollars and have missed bond payments.
The real estate situation in China could be the next Lehman Brothers and trigger the next global recession.
The Chinese government has already said it will not bail out the developers, probably because the bonds are held in US Dollars. The Chinese government has recently destroyed numerous industries, such as technology, because it doesn’t want Western influence to weaken its power.
The Chinese government has also said that it will prioritize the people who have paid for homes and the people building the homes. That means investors, mostly Western investors, are going to be the losers.
Second: There is a massive demographic shift happening in the United States. The people who have been oppressed will soon outnumber the oppressors.
It’s just a matter of time before the Dems pick up more votes in the Senate – the voter suppression and other tactics to keep things from changing will only work for so long.
Eventually some of these people will die and will no longer be able to obstruct progress.
Still, things are already changing rapidly and that’s because people are tired of the inequality.
Why is this leading to a recession? Well, anytime we're in the middle of a massive change, the old system goes offline and we're in the gap between the old and the new. I think we're definitely in the middle, between the old and the new, and as a result, things don't work the way they used to.
Third: The oppressed people and the younger generations are going to force policy shifts, law shifts and rules generally to make things fairer for everyone.
Again, we're in the middle of a massive change in our society, and the new isn't entirely visible yet. I think we will experience this as a recession.
Fourth: The planetary consciousness has changed. If you are profiting off the backs of the poor and disadvantaged, your business will not survive.
Although there are a lot of narratives about these kinds of topics, it's obvious to me that the establishment is collapsing and while that happens, we will see a lot of chaos, information, disinformation, and misinformation.
We can see this already happening, right next to the “lazy” narratives and about how “people don’t want to work” and the rest of the garbage spin that’s out there on this and other topics.
Ultimately, there will be a lot of investors, real estate agents and others who will be extremely disappointed in their ability to buy cheap foreclosures or make a lot of money off kicking people out of their homes.
Their loss is the homeowner's gain. If you’re a homeowner and you want to keep your home, there are some very good options when it comes to stopping foreclosure. I will talk about those options in future posts.
However, if you’re a real estate investor, I think it’s time to diversify.
I think this is the beginning of the end for real estate investment as a profitable business, not just in the US, but worldwide. We're going to see a lot more regulation in real estate, mostly because having a roof over your head is too expensive.
As a society, I don't think we don't want people living on the street. And that old story about how if you're poor, it's your fault or you are lazy, is just not true. We have rampant systemic oppression that is no longer going to be tolerated by the masses.
What do you think? I'm probably all over the place in this post, but I feel like I just put the training wheels back on. Thanks for reading!