{"id":5516,"date":"2009-05-12T20:08:53","date_gmt":"2009-05-13T03:08:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/seattlebubble.com\/blog\/?p=5516"},"modified":"2009-05-13T12:06:23","modified_gmt":"2009-05-13T19:06:23","slug":"economic-and-real-estate-truth-one-liners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seattlebubble.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/12\/economic-and-real-estate-truth-one-liners\/","title":{"rendered":"Economic and Real Estate Truth One-Liners"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw this on BoingBoing the other day, and thought it was interesting…<\/p>\n

Debt is not a good product<\/a><\/p>\n

I just had a great hour-long phone conversation with an old friend, Will Dana (now editor of Rolling Stone), who has strongly encouraged me to come up with one-liners that tell the truth about the economic\/banking fiasco – but that do it in almost zen-koan fashion. He thinks this might be the only way to penetrate ongoing confusion and resistance to moving beyond our falsely held assumptions about money and business.<\/p>\n

So, I figured I’d start with the generally unrecognized fact that finance is America’s biggest industry – our biggest business sector. How does banking make its money? In short – over-simplified, yes, but ultimately true – interest. It sells debt. And, like I’m arguing in my book<\/a>, this whole scheme was arranged by 14th Century monarchs as a way of making money by having money, rather than providing value. So “Debt is not a good product” helps encourage that line of thinking, sound-byte style.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I like this idea. Let’s apply it to real estate. Here are my entries:<\/p>\n