When you look around your neighborhoods, it’s hard to find any good news. Friends and neighbors may have lost their jobs or be on short-time. There are foreclosed properties on every street. Shops and businesses have been closing down with increasing frequency. These are the signs of a real recession where unemployment and poverty stalk [...]

During the boom years, all you had to worry about was the color to paint your home. Everything else was just great as house values kept on going up, releasing ever more housing equity as collateral for your loans. Now we have a recession and a wave of foreclosures has been sweeping across the land. [...]