I was running my own construction business in the years leading up to the collapse so i saw it first hand. Jeez ... those early years were the glory days. There was no end of work and i was booked at least 18 months in advance at any given time.

From what i was seeing with my middle and upper income customers ... it looked like they were racking up a mountain of debt !



I traced that back and realized that The Fed had done away with transparency and stopped reporting the M3. That, along with the M1 & M2 will give you a fairly good idea of how much newly created money is being pumped into the economy.

See ... at the time ... it didn't matter if somebody was creditworthy or not. The mission was to get all of this newly created money out into circulation by any means possible.

It was bound to be self limiting and it was. There came a point where all of my customers had hit their debt limit and all of the reckless spending came to an abrupt halt. That's when the recession hit over winter of 2007-2008.

I saw the lead up to it though. Things were going good for me but the work was starting to play out for the other guys starting in the second quarter of 2006. It finally hit me about a year later and net profits from the business dropped by about 47 %.

I had already diversified the business so i survived the hit but it was never the same after that.

Anyway ... the bottom line is that irresponsible economic policy from the early 2000's laid the ground work for everything that followed straight up to to The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 ?

True cost to the taxpayers will eventually end up being something like 16.8 trillion dollars ?