All posts by Said E. Dawlabani

President & CEO of The MEMEnomics Group

Real Estate is Dead, Line up the Usual Suspects

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The New York Times ran a story this past weekend about the death of real estate as the traditional vehicle through which American families built wealth. The National Association of Realtors today came out with figures that showed sales of real estate for the month of July were at their lowest since 1995. Our recovery is threatened and we need an evil fall guy on whom we can blame the decline of housing. Let’s gather the usual suspects and see who’s done it.  First up is the sub-prime borrower who let go of the house next door to you. He looks normal, but without a job or unemployment benefits, no can’t be him.  Next is your local builder but he has just filed for personal bankruptcy and is working odd repair jobs to make ends meet, it can’t be him. Last is  your local Realtor and she looks tired. It must be the two other jobs she’s working  while helping the family stay current on their bills. Maybe this time around its the politicians. Well, no the current administration -although they actually thinks of themselves as modern day Jesus  raising the dead they’re delusional about the powers they have, its definitely not them.

There is one and  only one evil suspect and that is Wall Street. Yes the Wall Street that changed Location, Location, Location to Derivative, Derivative, Derivative and forever moved the control of the housing market from its traditional market forces to the forces that are subject to daily and hourly manipulations of  nerdy guys with PhD’s in Physics and Mathematics sitting behind Algorithms.  One equation can make them Billions in a fraction of a second and destroy the lives of millions who worked all their lives to afford a roof over their heads. Yes real estate is dead, and math and science have turned into evil machines of mass destruction.  Our government is so clueless to the nature of Wall Street’s work that if the the smartest scientist/investigator looks into any of their proprietary and highly secretive Mortgage Backed Securities models or into any of the hedge funds that made bets on the failure of the American Dream he/she can’t figure it out if their life depended on it. Yes these are the Masters of the Universe and part of their plan to dominate is to free real estate from its traditional qualities and let it bleed to death while they get rich from the fees they make in manipulating the securities they create.

So, as millions of Americans today were deciding to either let go their home because they can no longer hold on or to reduce their asking prices yet again, Wall Street was cashing in on its bets that confirmed that Housing is dead.

For a detailed Memetic analysis of how Wall Street caused the housing crisis, read my post from April 2009 at this link

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The Goldman Fraud Charge; is this the beginning of the end of Wall Street

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Goldman Sachs was charged by the SEC this morning with civil fraud in making billions (by taking out insurance policies from the likes of AIG in derivative forms called Credit Default Swaps) on the failure of the very same securities they made billions on just a few years earlier when they bundled them as AAA securities and sold them to you and me. This very charge by the SEC summarizes the entire financial crisis and sheds the light on the Memetic play between an unhealthy ENTERPRISE value system (vMEME)  that has escaped the detection of regulators many decades ago and a vacuous ORDER vMEME (SEC) who’s appointees use their time there as a springboard to lucrative careers on Wall Street (is there a more blatant case of the fox guarding the hen house?).

For those who are not familiar with the Wall Street culture, investment bankers and their regulators call themselves the “Masters of the  Universe”; a highly sophisticated and complex form of the finance ENTERPRISE vMEME that considers the ORDER/REGULATOR vMEME a nuisance that applies to lower forms of intelligence but not to them. This belief was further bolstered by over 3 decades of financial deregulation beginning with the Reagan administration and continuing on today where the SEC has become so ineffective that it must be abolished in order for a SYSTEMIC regulator to rise. For months the SEC couldn’t find anything wrong with Madoff after he handed himself in to them.

So, how much are we to believe that The Obama Administration and the current Congress are serious about regulating Wall Street? Goldman and the rest of the investment banking community have contributed tens of millions to Obama’s campaign and their congressional lobbyists have never been as powerful as they are today. This form of unhealthy ENTERPRISE vMEME is known to move at the speed of light when caught by the ORDER/REGULATOR vMEME. It has already started working on the next investment scheme that will evade the SEC’s detection and create another asset bubble resulting in another financial crisis and again the SEC will not know what’s happening.   I’m sure we’ll soon hear about an undisclosed settlement that will preserve Goldman’s stature as the “Destroyer God” in this Masters of The Universe play where the lives of millions are still being destroyed and global wealth gets more concentrated in the hands of the few on Wall Street.

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Slides from March Spiral Dynamics Integral (SDi) Training

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Some of the slides listed in this post were a part of a presentation I made at Adizes Graduate School in Santa Barbara during the March SDi training. The presentation makes the case for how the erosion in the ORDER value system (BLUE vMEME) that regulates money combined with unprecedented levels of cash flowing from TRIBAL-FEUDAL (PURPLE-RED) value system countries into Western capital markets were the main contributing factors that forever perverted capitalism. Understanding the financial crisis from a value systems perspective helps re-frame the the entire argument of how to regulate an UNHEALTHY EXPRESSION of the ENTERPRISE value system (vMEME)and anticipate its next move before it can become a threat and cause systemic damage and eventual collapse. Feel free to copy any of the slides for your personal use. You can also email me at  sdawlabani@ecovestadvisors.com if you have  any questions about vMEMEs and their relationships to the financial crisis or if you’d like for me to give a lecture to your group about the subject matter.

Dr. Beck, the co-author of the Spiral Dynamics Theory has shared my analysis with the Chicago Group (Paul Volker’s Group), Herman Wijffels (Dutch Economist and former Executive Director at the World Bank) and the office of the Prime Minister of Iceland. This blog provides a good chronology of where Economics meet Memetics specifically as it relates to the clash of value systems over the last two years. I highly recommend you browse earlier posts

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