Excerpt from an article by economist Michael A. Nystrom

....When history is written on the waning days of the American Empire, it might very well say that the final decades witnessed a series of increasingly intense temporary booms, driven by steady increases in debt - consumer debt, corporate debt, and government debt. Eventually, the debts simply became unsustainable. The Federal Reserve's trusty old trick of lowering interest rates stopped working. Markets stopped responding. Everything went into reverse. What the Fed failed to grasp is that printed money eventually reverts to its intrinsic value of zero, and that there is a difference between a lack of liquidity and just plain old-fashioned insolvency. More interest rate cuts and money printing won't help.... and they won't help the housing sector to recover. The Fed's credibility is all but lost. The endgame is upon us.