Excerpt from ‘Random Thoughts from the First Decade of the New Millenium’, Part 3 (as seen in Rethink Monthly)

Money:

As the decade and the millennium began, the economy was soaring high off of the last remnants of the dot-com boom. And as people were freely spending money, banks were freely lending it without doing their homework to make sure that it could actually be paid back.
Because people were borrowing so much money so freely, they were investing in real estate like never before- buying big houses that only a decade earlier they would not have been able to buy. And the prices of homes sky-rocketed.
And as the decade drew to a close, people’s interest rates on their loans rose along with the prices of the homes. People, who were barely scraping by with lower interest rates, could no longer afford their mortgages. House were in foreclosure like never before, property values began to take a nose dive, the stock market plummeted, employers laid off record numbers of employees, and before we knew it we were in a full-on recession.