Coarse Correction

The stock market experienced a very coarse correction of the "irrational exuberance" of the past few weeks by sliding 300 points or so on Thursday.

The experts say it's because investors are worried about the home mortgage market and all those foreclosures they've been having, and also waxed up about corporate lending markets.

Too much bad paper out there. Badd fuggum, and it is threatening to shut down the one major industry we've got left -- the building of ugly beige suburbs and ugly strip malls to go with them and blacktop roads to go with the McMansions and Burger Kings. Over the past twenty years, as American industrial enterprise has downsized and offshored and otherwise dried up and blown away, the uglification of our landscape has remained the one major viable hands-on activity.

But now if the construction industry slows down to a crawl because there's so much unsold real estate standing vacant and unsellable, we're in very big trouble. Foreclosures will only add to the excess housing stock, besides threatening the survival of the institutions who lent money foolishly to unqualified buyers over the last ten years or so.

Bad paper means bad business. Watch out for a major garbage avalanche in 2008, just like in Mike Judge's futuristic movie "Idiocracy."