Those who don't learn from history...

"Then one day, I say, 'Fuck fish.'" Chris Cooper, Adaptation

If the borrowing and bailing out of these conglomerates keep continuing, we're all going to be saying fuck fish... forget this luxury we call the fish hobby, we'll be lucky to be eating fish if hyper inflation sets in and the entire U.S. infrastructure drops out under the cloud of speculation Wall Street's built for itself over the last eleven years.

Remember all the books, movies, and cultural fears from the eighties and early 90s about the Japanese market dominating the dollar and taking over America? It's in all kinds of movies: Gremlins, Rising Sun, Black Rain, Robocop 3.

Cause America has been reduced to soundbytes and lipstick, here's Wikipedia to connect the dots about Japan's economic rise and fall, largely in regard to their housing market:

With so much money readily available for investment, speculation was inevitable, particularly in the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the real estate market. The Nikkei stock index hit its all-time high on December 29, 1989 when it reached an intra-day high of 38,957.44 before closing at 38,915.87. The rates for housing, stocks, and bonds rose so much that at one point the government issued 100-year bonds. Additionally, banks granted increasingly risky loans.

At the height of the bubble, a commonly-quoted claim was that the land beneath the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was worth more than the entire state of California. A sense of national pride and assertiveness was regained as a result of its new power, which manifested itself in works such as The Japan That Can Say No by Shintaro Ishihara and SONY founder Akio Morita. Many outside Japan were alarmed by this resurgence, leading to criticism from foreign observers. Michael Crichton, for example, wrote Rising Sun at this time, which highlighted US concerns with the growing Japanese economic power.

Prices were highest in Tokyo's Ginza district in 1989, with choice properties fetching over US$1.5 million per square meter ($139,000 per square foot). Prices were only slightly less in other areas of Tokyo. By 2004, prime "A" property in Tokyo's financial districts had slumped and Tokyo's residential homes were a fraction of their peak, but still managed to be listed as the most expensive in the world. Trillions were wiped out with the combined collapse of the Tokyo stock and real estate markets.

With the economy driven by its high rates of reinvestment, this crash hit particularly hard. Investments were increasingly directed out of the country, and manufacturing firms lost some degree of their technological edge. As Japanese products became less competitive overseas, the low consumption rate began to bear on the economy, causing a deflationary spiral. The Japanese Central Bank set interest rates at approximately absolute zero. When that failed to stop deflation some economists, such as Paul Krugman, and some Japanese politicians, spoke of deliberately causing hyperinflation^[1]. To this day, 2008, the Japanese Central Bank has the lowest interest rates in the developed world.

The easily obtainable credit that had helped create and engorge the real estate bubble continued to be a problem for several years to come, and as late as 1997, banks were still making loans that had a low guarantee of being repaid. Loan Officers and Investment staff had a hard time finding anything to invest in that would return a profit. They would sometimes resort to depositing their block of investment cash, as ordinary deposits, in a competing bank, which would bring howls of complaint from that bank's Loan Officers and Investment staff. Meanwhile, the extremely low interest rate offered for deposits, such as 0.1%, meant that ordinary Japanese savers were just as inclined to put their money under their beds as they were to put it in savings accounts.^[2] Correcting the credit problem became even more difficult as the government began to subsidize failing banks and businesses, creating many so-called "zombie businesses". Eventually a carry trade developed in which money was borrowed from Japan, invested for returns elsewhere and then the Japanese were paid back, with a nice profit for the trader.

The time after the bubble's collapse (崩壊, hōkai^?), which occurred gradually rather than catastrophically, is known as the "lost decade or end of the century" (失われた10年, ushinawareta jūnen^?) in Japan. The Nikkei 225 stock index eventually bottomed out at 7603.76 in April 2003 before resuming an upward climb. (Wikipedia)

Check out HGTV's "House Hunters" to get the low-down on the American housing market. We're not quite at 100,000 bucks per square foot, as we're a much larger country that still has frontier lands and plenty of real estate for speculators to theoretically develop. But you just won't find a house in a major city (or an entire state, depending on where you live) that you can afford without ridiculous credit lending. How many times do the "House Hunters" go for broke on a 400 K 2-bedroom, 100-year old "fixer-upper" in a minor city in California?

Remember the housing bubble in Japan. You do the math.