There is no doubt that the entire housing market was exploited to float the US economy and covered up a recession dating from 2000-2001 until the housing market could no longer be sustained resulting in a complete collapse of the financial markets and banking. The housing market didn’t “snap back” rather two unprecedented tax payer stimulus packages totaling just shy of $2T were given to the banks to finance millions…
> There is no doubt that the entire housing market was exploited to float the US economy and covered up a recession dating from 2000-2001 This is false. There is no doubt that, while there was a short recession in early-mid 2001, there was a general economic expansion, not a recession, after that; to the extent that housing market was exploited to paper over something, it was the unusually top-loaded distribution of…
That’s one long sentence.
The thing is it’s impossible to decouple any economic expansion from 2000-2008 from the trillions of dollars that flooded into the economy during that period as a direct result of the artificial housing prices and newly available debt.
I agree with you though to the extent that any actual wealth that was generated was concentrated to the top, it always is. There hasn’t been real income gains for the working class in about 50 years, but the explosion in household and consumer debt in that time is incontrovertible from about $300B in 1970 to $11.5T in 2010.