Here's a front-page headline from the New York Times that gave us a chuckle the other day: 'Few Heard Ticking Credit Time Bomb.' Few who are not deaf, dumb and blind, perhaps. However, for the millions of sentient humans who live outside the warp in which the Times evidently is fabricated each day, the ticking of the credit time bomb was about as hard to detect as a giant asteroid bearing down on Cleveland. Seems no one at the Gray Lady thought to Google the words 'credit crisis' in recent years, since that would have turned up millions of leads that some enterprising reporter could have checked out. Both the Times and The Wall Street Journal have been doing some heavy catching up recently in the wake of revelations concerning the true condition of the U.S. real estate market. It took the bankruptcies of some big mortgage lenders, as well as subprime leverageur Bear Stearns' narrow scrape with death, to call attention to potentially disastrous problems that the financial-newsletter world has been heralding for years. Deflation Is Next The Times, the Journal, and other status quo purveyors of news must surely regard the mortgage crisis as something to be resolved in due time, presumably by an inevitable upswing in home prices and a little help from the central bank. But such thinking only confirms that they are as clueless now as they were when the real estate crisis reached critical mass nearly two years ago. And, we are certain, they will be equally clueless when the expected upswing in home prices fails to materialize and deflation tightens its death-grip on the U.S. and global economies. By then, the praise and respect the news media have mindlessly heaped on former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan will be under reconsideration. For the record,
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