Well, the piece I linked to above claimed a doubling in 6-7 years in global fixed income securities. That's something like 10-12% growth a year. Which is.... insane. And a lot of that growth probably happened in the middle and latter years, reflecting the bonanza in the American residential mortgage market, so the growth in those years was probably even more. (I don't know what global fixed income securities is a subset of exactly.) Something's gotta be wrong here, but, assuming these numbers are true, the only explanation I can fathom for that level of annual growth is the fairy tale fiction that became the on-the-ground reality: that housing prices would never go down. And when you take something like that as a baseline fact, then I can imagine some ridiculous levels of economic activity. kleinbl00, am I getting something wrong here? I must be.