From the Pranic Healing mailing list:

Join Master Co as he leads us in a special meditation to Bless the U.S. with Pro$perity Energies and Divine Protection.

We hope you Can Join us!
With Love and Blessings,
U.S. Pranic Healing Center

Tues., Feb 5th, 7pm
Live on PranaTalk!

Call: 605-772-3434
Code: 142-339-546 

I, more than anyone, understand that sometimes things happen that are outside your control and hit your finances. In my case, it was illness. And yet, as you read more and more articles on the housing bust, it’s clear that a lot of people don’t want to take responsibility for their own poor financial choices. Read more

The housing bubble has apparently spread across the Atlantic - subprime mortgages have also infected the housing market of Britain, and now Britain’s financial regulator is warning that more than one million people could lose their homes in the next 18 months.

If you want a very clear, balanced report on the housing bubble and how it all went down, this 60 Minutes report, “House of Cards: The Mortgage Mess,” is a must-see. The video is available online along with a transcript.

Ben Jones runs the wildly popular Housing Bubble Blog. I’ve been following this blog for a few years now and it has been right on the money. The blog itself consists mainly of excerpts from financial news all over the country; the meat of the blog is in the comments and analysis of its readers. Ben himself sometimes writes in the comments, and this comment of his today caught my eye:

I was excited, too, in 1984, when I went to become a real estate major in Dallas. And why not? It had been the hottest market in the world for 5 straight years. And then things started to fall apart. Looking back, I can see we had a real estate bubble and those prices were unsustainable. And as we slipped into what was probably a mini, regional depression, lots of people were angry as the resolution trust commission came in and started to carve everything up.

But those feelings gave way to concern about our failing economy, our friends and family. Everyone soon knew people that had lost everything, financially and personally. Some fell to desperate measures. Those were tough times. And just this week, I saw two stories that reminded me of that time. One was an executive at a failing mortgage firm that killed his wife and then himself. Another was a couple that lost some houses to foreclosure and the mom inexplicably killed her baby. It is impossible to make sense of stuff like that, but people make big mistakes in strained times. Read more

This is an amazing story, straight out of the movies. A young French futures trader, desperate to cover up his losses at a financial institution, covered them up by creating a fictitious trading firm that ultimately siphoned billions from the company’s coffers. That the losses went unnoticed for so long is shocking; that any one person could wipe out over $7 billion in a few keyboard strokes is another. It also goes to show that most money isn’t really much of anything at all except numbers in a computer.

Individual families may be excited to be getting a few extra hundred dollars back from the IRS this summer, thanks to an economic “stimulus” package passed by what appears to be a desperate government…but will it help in the long run? An article in the Los Angeles Times suggests that we’ll need to do more than put a few band-aids on the problem:

“People are going to have to buckle up their seat belts and expect some dicey economic times for much of the year,” said William Grenier, chief investment officer at UMBS Management, a $12-billion asset management firm in Kansas City, Mo. “We’re going to have to let the excesses wash out of the system.” Read more

OK, blessed new age people, please don’t get freaked out because I’m discussing a negative here…but since I don’t believe in the Law of Attraction I don’t think talking about something is going to make it happen. Actually, I think sticking your head in the sand is more likely to make a bad thing happen.

So let’s talk about the American economy for a moment. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the subject lately and quite a few people are predicting more than just a recession, but an actual depression, the likes of which we have never seen before. Why? Read more

I highly recommend the following article:

What’s it Going to Take? Challenging our Faith in Wealth

Here is a brief excerpt:

Eighty percent of people think that if they work hard enough, they’ll be rich. And so, there is no outcry against soaring profits for corporations and tax cuts for the rich because everyone believes that some day they will be rich, and they’ll be happy. Read more

While the United States is suffering from a major crash in real estate, Mexico is undergoing a housing boom. The Mexican housing boom differs from the U.S. housing bubble in two main ways:

1.  Credit standards are much, much tighter in Mexico.
2. There is a huge, untapped market for new homes in Mexico as many Mexicans still live in homes with dirt floors.