Not sure it will, or that it is a bubble in the usual sense of the word. The only people dumping ever increasing money into it expecting ever increasing returns are private banks and other corporations, but since the loans are federally guaranteed (much of their motive) they are all but assured a return unless America DOES declare bankruptcy for far more pressing reasons. It bones students to a degree that discourages attempts at a college education in a world where that is increasingly necessary but (am I am no expert) that is unlikely to affect the loans. It may put the squeeze on enrollment and tenure, and fuel the growth of places like the University of Phoenix, but I am not aware of any investor risk; that is kind of the problem.

Because most of those places have high infant mortality, low industrialization and no child labor laws or social security system. That makes childbearing a convenient source of cheap sorely needed labor, and the only hope current adults have of food and shelter when they are too old and/or sick to provide it for themselves. In other words, all the reasons it was the norm everywhere prior to the Twentieth Century.

Probably, because "free" trade has been killing the industrialized West almost from inception. Remember Perots "giant sucking sound"? Many economists are seriously considering whether double digit unemployment may be the new normal, and more "free" trade is the usual prescription to the issues you allude to in the ever-developing but never-developed world. The solution, IMHO, is FAIR trade, because it is absurd to say abolishing tariffs puts Third World nations with little or not labor, environmental or product safety standards on a "level playing field" with industrialized nations who paid a high price in lives to gain all those standards in the Twentieth Century.

My favorite example is the FDA, the modern name of the organization created by the Wiley Act just over a century ago. Perhaps the biggest reason for it was unscrupulous companies selling toothpaste and other medicinal products with ethylene glycol substituted for the closely related sweetener glycerin, with the trivial difference being that glycerin is non-toxic and ANTIFREEZE is non-non-toxic. It killed people, so the federal government banned it in products for internal consumption, then set up an inspection agency to ensure their safety; problem solved. Except—recently US supermarket chains have had to pull cutrate Chinese toothpaste (several times) after discovering it contained antifreeze and had killed people in Central America.

That is illustrative of the problem: For decades businesses warned costs would drive them from America unless we deregulated EVERYTHING, but tariffs made following through on that threat too expensive. So they cooked up "free" trade to abolish the tariffs and enable them to extort us into going back to the glory days of Dickens and Steinbeck.

Now we have an unelected WTO accountable to none that can and does impose fines on the US, Canada and European states for the great "crime" of enforcing our own federal laws. People complain about Third World sweatshops, but the irony is that a Chinese company can open a US sweatshop as easily as a US company can open a Chinese one. Companies in any and all WTO and NAFTA member nations can do so in any or all of the rest, because even if they violate laws where the plant is located, and are fined for it, both trade treaties allow fines on the nations in question to recoup both real and PROJECTED profits. It is like if I burned down your house, you sued me for damages and won, then I sued YOU for both the damages you won AND any money I could have made had you not collected them.

There are only two ways out of that. We either:

1) Repeal all the past centuries labor, environmental and product safety standards not also present and enforced overseas, so we can compete with those labor markets, or

2) We ban Western sale of all imports produced without enforced standards comparable to our own.

Because the whole "'free' trade will enrich and thus empower Third World populations until they force the reforms we did" just is NOT working. Just last week there was a photo running around the internet of a 150 mile wide cloud of smog over Beijing VISIBLE FROM SPACE. A few years ago escaped "workers" in a Chinese mine finally did what local police refused FOR YEARS refused to do for their increasingly anguished parents: Expose the mines habitual kidnapping and enslavement of local children. It is bizarre to hear (supposedly) God-fearing capitalists tell us we should do business like atheist "Red" China, without costly inconveniences like the EPA, child labor laws and the 13th Amendment.

If Apple made their products at AMERICAN plants like Foxconn, their founder and CEO would be in prison. Since they do it in CHINA, however, the president invites him to meetings about how to bring those jobs home to the US only to be told "those jobs aren't coming back." I mean, wtf is that?

"Hey, Steve, this is the White House; any way to get you to build products in the US?"

"Sorry, no; enslaved kids work for <$7/hr."

Make it as illegal for a US company to enslave kids and poison the water supply overseas, then sell poisoned food and drugs in the US, as it is at home. We do not say, "Americans raping 10 year olds go to prison for life, but Americans raping 10 year olds in Bangkok is fine." People caught doing that are rightly prosecuted when they get home, even if the country where they committed the crime refuses. Ban import and sale of all products made below US standards; if we can ban US sale or ownership of ivory to protect foreign elephants we can do the same thing to protect foreign kids and, indirectly, our own. If that means people do without the newest iPhone, so be it; in THIS economy many people already do that. Otherwise, the WESTERN economy will keep struggling like a drowning man given a glass of water.

Food and fuel prices rarely go down, but I remember hearing even five years ago that "inflation has not risen, except for the volatile food and fuel markets." Yeah, the ones that actually MATTER to people wondering how they will support themselves, the "commodities" that consume so much of their limited income. It happens because everyone needs those things to survive, and the people who own them know it, so they charge accordingly.

In the case of real estate, it happened because banks who knowingly made tons of bad loans expecting to profit either directly from that interest, indirectly from bundling and selling the loans as a high yield "investment," or by insuring them through credit default swaps and HOPING they failed, got a taxpayer bailout when their overextended speculation bankrupted them. The people who took the loans still went under, but the banks stayed solvent—AND got to keep the real estate.

What can we do about it? Well, we could start by sending some of those people to prison, which we have not even considered attempting. In fact, one little discussed provision of the bailout gave banking execs blanket immunity from prosecution for "robo-signing" MILLIONS of bad loans. Small wonder; if they did one DAY in prison for each bad loan they knowingly issued most of them would NEVER get out of prison.

Instead of toothlesss Dodd-Frank, we could reinstate Glass-Steagall, passed to prevent the incestuous lender/investor/insurer mergers that were so damaging in the Depression and became so within 5 years of Glass-Steagalls repeal. When banking execs who KNOWINGLY bankrupted their firms, investors, borrowers and the PLANET say, "no, no, we need no oversight; just pay our debts," my response is "shut your mouths, open your books and be grateful you are not in prison—yet...." And when I say, "oversight," and, "regulation," I do not mean by the EXACT SAME PEOPLE WHO CAUSED THE PROBLEM! Even a casual look at Obamas regulatory appointees reveals they are every bit as incestuous as Bushs; may be time to give the Greens a look.

I, er, believe I covered that in another thread recently. "Starve the beast" is no big secret even if most people are not old and/or politically aware enough to remember it. Voters understandably refused to go for "slit grammas throat so millionaires can pay less taxes," so Reagan tried a new tack: Keep the spending, cut taxes anyway, and when federal debt gets high enough you can say, "socialism failed; now we MUST end social programs." That is why the federal debt was <$1 trillion when he took office and >$3.5 trillion when he left. Same reason it went up another trillion before Bush 41 left; ironically, he lost re-election in large part for doing exactly what was necessary: Raise taxes to reduce the federal deficit.

Except for a brief bipartisan period in the '90s, when Dole and the Newt rammed welfare reform down Clintons throat in exchange for having tax hikes rammed down theirs, that has been the order of the day. The whole time Congressmen from both sides of the aisle kept warning that it was only being paid for (to the extent it was) by a Boomer financed SS surplus that would rapidly evaporate when they all retired around 2010. No one listened, because the social program beneficiaries would not give them up and the tax cut beneficiaries would not give THEM up either.

Here we are, right on schedule. The beast has been starved to emaciation by a federal debt now >$16 trillion (that is >16 times what it was before Reagan, if you are scoring at home, and despite Clinton balancing the budget in the late '90s.) After 75 years of constant surpluses, SS now pays out more each month than it collects. Those 75 surplus years and resulting $2.7 trillion balance in Treasury securities are the only thing that will keep it solvent through 2030—but we must BORROW to redeem those Treasuries, and can no longer get it from SS; that, after all, is the problem.

The best part is the suggestion we "reform" SS by abolishing it and "let" people give their retirement money to people like Ken Lay, Bernie Madoff, Citigroup and Lehman Bros. Because letting millionaires who do not need our pensions loot them anyway is not EXACTLY how we got into this mess. Social Security paid for their tax cuts for THIRTY YEARS, but now that is no longer running a surplus they have declared it a failure and want to walk away from that $2.7 trillion debt.

First socialism failed because we did no want to live in Hell holes with socialized medicine (e.g. Canada.) Then it failed because SS was always an unsustainable Ponzi (even though the EU, Canada, Australia and Mexico pay for itfine with more people and less per capita GDP.) Now socialism failed because the House Majority Leader says we need to get rid of mandatory overtime pay to "help" US workers. Funny how the closer the Republicans push us back toward Dickensian dystopia, and the more damage it does to America and the world, the more loudly they insist "socialism failed111" Yeah, "socialism" is not exactly what I would call what we have been doing since the Moon landing marked the summit of American achievement and, apparently, heralded our decline with the GOPs ascension.

I feel about like that. You, er, may get a few angry NBs for asking me though....