KB Homes official: "It's just shut down. It's stopped". HP: Housing was a debt-fueled joy ride of a ponzi scheme collapsing fast and hard now

 Nah, real estate never goes down. Nah, there was no housing bubble - it was different this time. Nah, there's never a bad time to buy.

HP'ers, we are in the early stages of the biggest economic collapse this country has ever seen. A debt-fueled joy ride of a ponzi scheme, that is now collapsing faster and harder than anyone ever imagined.

Watch KB Homes, under SEC investigation now, either file for Chapter 11 or be acquired, along with a lot of other tier-2 and tier-3 builders quickly running out of cash and access to credit and sitting on massive inventories of overvalued properties just waiting for a balance sheet restatement. There was a massive shakeout during the dot-com collapse, and the same thing will happen here.

(Oh, check out KB Homes "moonlight madness" sale this weekend! Open 'til 11 so you can make a horrific financial decision when you're either drunk or groggy!)

KB Home has stopped building new houses in the Victor Valley and plans to lower prices to a level that brings buyers back to its communities."We're going to bring the market where it needs to be," said Rex McGuire, senior director of operations for KB Home Inland Valley, who spoke at an economic enhancement forum in Victorville. "And it's not easy. It's like turning the Titanic."

He added that no new inventory would be added until the new-home inventory was brought down.

"We're sitting on a lot of dirt right now and it's killing our balance sheet. But we're adjusting to that. We're taking a haircut," he told the group of about 50 Realtors, brokers and business owners at the event, sponsored by the Victorville Chamber of Commerce.

One area that is not selling in the Victor Valley is KB's higherend luxury communities, Mc-Guire said."It's just shut down. It's stopped," he said. "We were going full-throttle, and as soon as this market had a correction, our brakes weren't that good. It took a little while."McGuire said a price correction would lure buyers back in search of deals and that the slowdown in home buying was merely "a blip."

A realtor at the same meeting added this:

"If you really need to sell your home, price it right. Take your 80 percent and be happy," she said. "Maybe you don't make 130 percent on this home, but you'll probably get a bargain on the next."

And a Countrywide official added this:

"For the first time as a nation we're actually seeing a levelization, a decline in prices," he said.

Imo, the bell is tolling as a result of this bursting bubble, although I openly confes the smoke-and-mirrors men in this country may delay it a little.