America in Recession

--Government policy," he said, "is like a person trying to drive a car on a rough patch. If you ever get stuck in a situation like that, you know full well it's important not to overcorrect -- because when you overcorrect you end up in the ditch." --American household debt has more than doubled in a decade to $13.8 trillion at the end of 2007 from $6.4 trillion in 1999, the vast majority of it in mortgages and home equity lines, according to Fed data. But the value of U.S. householders' biggest asset -- their homes -- is now falling. --The Fed has moved to buy $400 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities for its $800 billion total securities portfolio in an effort to jolt that crucial market back to life and prevent rising mortgage rates from further depressing the U.S. housing market. --While there is continued debate about how to treat the current disease, there is a consensus emerging on the causes. "Soaring delinquencies on U.S. subprime mortgages were the primary trigger," that initial shock both uncovered and exacerbated other weaknesses in the global financial system." --For years, Mr. Rogoff and like-minded economists harped that the U.S. current account deficit was unsustainable. But despite the belief that it would necessarily reverse, it kept growing through the first part of this decade, going from 3.6% of gross domestic product at the end of 1999 to a record 6.8% at the end of 2005. Lately, the deficit has seen a slight narrowing, but the combination of credit crisis and the economic downturn may have proved the catalyst for a faster, and potentially more dangerous, adjustment. carry trade leads to the fall of dollar --The dollar and subprime -- they're two sides of the same coin," says Princeton University economist Hyun Song Shin. Many U.S. hedge funds and financial institutions were speculating in mortgage-related securities with money that was ultimately borrowed in Japan, where interest rates have been low for years. He notes foreign banks' net liabilities in the yen interbank market surged between April 2006 and April 2007. As investments bought with money borrowed in Japan get sold and converted back into yen, he says, "we see both a fall in asset prices and a fall in the dollar." --One worry is that we'll cross some line and there'll be a systemic wave of fund failures. It's a reason why the market is so nervous, --Mohamed El-Erian, co-chief executive officer of Allianz SE's Pacific Investment Management Co., says the hedge-fund community is unwinding its leverage. "This will push more of them into 'survival mode,' further accentuating distressed sales and nervousness among the prime brokers," he wrote to his colleagues Thursday morning. "In such a world, the quality of the assets matters less than whether you can finance them [or] how liquid they are."