Fifty-Two Pickup
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In the biggest financial catastrophe this nation has ever experienced, the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration's program of sweeping reforms and major interventions was called the "New Deal."
I'm not sure whether the metaphor of the "deal" was a reference to cars, or to cards — did it mean deal as in car deal ("make us an offer!"), or deal as in dealing a hand of poker or bridge? I prefer the cards metaphor, though. A financial crisis is like a card game where everyone has cards in his hand, and the game isn't over, but nobody has a card they can play — it's all "pass, pass, pass, pass ... now what?" If we want to keep playing, we might as well say, "Well, I guess that ain't workin," collect all the cards, and start over.
In the current economy, in the same sense, there's no way to keep playing unless we start over. People can't move unless they can buy a house; people can't sell houses unless they can pay off the loan; the houses aren't worth the loan amount, so nobody can sell, so nobody can buy, so nothing's happening. Debt has shut everything down.
So, most of the real estate transactions in the current game are the result of starting over. The house gets foreclosed on, and the homeowner is out on the street, or renting, or moved in with family, or whatever. The house price is radically reduced. There's a new buyer — but only because first-time home buyers have $8,000 in brand new Monopoly money to play with. It's a case of game over, re-shuffle, new deal. As Billy Idol put it (emember the 80s?), "It's a nice day to start again," ... or, as Steely Dan sang, "Any minor world that breaks apart, falls together again (any major dude will tell you)."
I've been thinking about this a lot recently. With or without the government intervening, this card game is only going to start again if we re-deal. And in a sense, the market is doing that for us — foreclosing on homes, destroying old arrangements, and cobbling together some all-new transaction based on a re-set of the market values. But it's not exactly the orderly re-shuffling envisioned by the phrase "New Deal." It's more like the way I learned to shuffle when I was five years old, when my older siblings were teaching me how to play "War." My hands couldn't manage shuffling. So I would throw the whole deck up in the air as high as I could, let all the cards fall wherever they fell, and then pick them all up again. It was called "Fifty-Two Pickup." Fifty-three, if you have a joker. That's today's game: Fifty-Two Pickup.