The Movie 'Escape From New York' Pretold Reality .... And So Did We

We have been writing for years that the epicenter of this crisis would eventually land in New York. And the city would experience one of the worst, if not the worst, real estate crises in the country. At the time we first started writing of this, there were few concerned. Definitely no one in New York. Wall Street was basking in its brilliance and New York was booming. But, as I wrote before, I lived through hellish New York conditions in the last real estate crisis. I saw real estate listings drop by millions literally overnight. And that crisis was minuscule comparatively.

Now we see foreclosure activity in New York is through the roof, albeit it is starting at a reasonably low level. Imagine what it would be were the government not to handed so much money to Wall Street crooks? And if the government would actually ban much of the ridiculous behavior of our banks - using our money to gamble with bets equivalent in scale to the GDP of the universe.

Separately, yesterday Governor Paterson made a personal pledge that New York would not run out of money. A laughable statement unless he is about to unveil himself as the caped crusader from Gotham. If the governor is really up to the task, I'd appreciate a visit to my house to fill my coffers first. The only way the governor can make this claim is to actually do the opposite of what government is doing today. That is, to empower Americans to recover this economy in lieu of spending money to prop up government and big business. Return America to a self-determined, self-sufficient, market-driven economy. A first step is for the governor to clean up the corruption in New York government.

New York is just starting to crack around the edges. New York is headed for a very hard landing as is Wall Street. Untold thousands upon thousands of New York jobs are going to be gone by the time this crisis is over. And they will be gone forever. That's a long, long time.

The caped crusader has much work to do.