en el club del progreso se discutía la decadencia

Y alguien nos trajo estos párrafos:

But let us look for a minute at the extent of the loss in perceived wealth that is the main shock to our economic system. If in real terms we assume write-downs of 50% in U.S. equities, 35% in U.S. housing, and 35% to 40% in commercial real estate, we will have had a total loss of about $20 trillion of perceived wealth from a peak total of about $50 trillion. This relates to a GDP of about $13 trillion, the annual value of all U.S. produced goods and services. These write-downs not only mean that we perceive ourselves as shockingly poorer, they also dramatically increase our real debt ratios. Prudent debt issuance is based on two factors: income and collateral. Like a good old-fashioned mortgage issuer, we want the debt we issue to be no more than 80% of the conservative asset value, and lower would be better. We also want the income of the borrower to be suffi cient to pay the interest with a safety margin and, ideally, to be enough to amortize the principal slowly. On this basis, the National Private Asset Base (to coin a phrase) of $50 trillion supported about $25 trillion of private debt, corporate and individual. Given that almost half of us have small or no mortgages, this 50% ratio seems dangerously high.

But now the asset values have fallen back to $30 trillion, whereas the debt remains at $25 trillion, give or take the miserly $1 trillion we have written down so far. If we would like the same asset coverage of 50% that we had a year ago, we could support only $15 trillion or so of total debt. The remaining $10 trillion of debt would have been stranded as the tide went out! What is worse is that credit
standards have of course tightened, so newly conservative lenders now assume the obvious: that 50% was too high, and that 40% loan to collateral value or even less would be more appropriate. As always, now that it’s raining, bankers want back the umbrellas they lent us. At 40% of $30 trillion, ideal debt levels would be $12 trillion or so, almost exactly half of where they actually are today! It is
obvious that the scale of write-downs that we have been reading about in recent months of $1 trillion to $2 trillion will not move our system anywhere near back to a healthy balance. To be successful, we really need to halve the level of private debt as a fraction of the underlying asset values. This implies that by hook or by crook, somewhere between $10 trillion and $15 trillion of debt will have to
disappear.