Vintage 90's...or dot.com to sub-prime

Staying abreast of the news that past couple of days, watching as more and more of the "sub-prime" lenders see their empires slipping away, I've been having a niggling feeling that I've seen all this before.

This morning, waking up at the crack'o'dawn with my daughter coughing and feverish and my dog's wet nose plastered against my cheek, I had the feeling that I'd been waking up like this for some time. And then, (of course, because what ELSE would one think about before the sun rises) I had a 90's flashback -- of the dot.com crash, where everyone realized that the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes -- followed by the deja vu of seeing the sub-prime market come crashing down. I always thought the no-interest, sub-prime market was ridiculous because it was lulling people with insufficient financial savvy into a false sense of ownership, thinking that their financial picture would change before mortgage rates rose. Kind of similar to stock prices climbing over the concepts of web-based companies, with venture capitalists looking for the next manna from heaven.

We'll see thousands of employees flooding the marketplace after losing their sub-prime jobs and thousands of bankruptcies and foreclosures. The job market will stagnate slightly as the marketplace rebalances again. Sound familiar? But whereas there were no assets to pick up on after the dot-com crash, there is real property that was stacked up again the sub-prime mortgages. People will be picking up property from the misfortune of others and the real estate market is projected to readjust and then restabilize. I sense that 50 plussers, with some financial savvy and a bit of savings may end up the big winners as this game unfolds over the next few years.