Kunstler: The dirty secret all along was that by 2005 there was no economy left in the USA beyond the suburban sprawl economy with its so-called "consumer" nexus -- largely devoted to the outfitting of suburbia.

Kunstler: More mortgage debt (and credit card and car loan debt) will go bad and the investment paper that represents it will go bad and it will eventually destroy our current system for accumulating, valuing, and deploying wealth. It will not destroy the function of capital -- no matter how many angry intellectuals inveigh against the straw man of capital-ism, as if it were merely a belief system - but it will be a long long time before anything sturdy or credible in the way of banking will be reconstructed out of the wreckage.

SHOOT: Here Jim Kunstler makes the point that we can't go back to the way things were even if we insist. Finance has become, just like almost everything else, fantasy.

clipped from kunstler.com The suburban project caught a second wind in the 1990s, when the last great non-OPEC oil fields of the North Sea, Alaska, and Siberia nullified the grip of the Islamic cartel for while, and sent the price of oil down to $11-a-barrel. Ironically, it was during those years that the warnings of "peak oil" first circulated beyond the geology offices, and it was clear to anyone who reflected on the connections that the project of suburbia was doomed. By a fortuitous coincidence, the revolution in computers enabled Wall Street bankers to concoct abstruse new species of tradable paper securities based on bundles of debt that seemed to produce miraculous earnings. It had the added advantage of being inscrutable to both investors and financial regulators Due diligence became impossible and moral hazard spread like ringworm in a dormitory.