I get so enthralled reading real estate articles and blogs every morning that occasionally, like today, I almost forget to blog myself. (Go blog yourself!)

For example, today I read Steven Pearlstein's comparison of the current crisis to 1929. He actually posted that a week ago. The whole article was illuminating. You can read it at the Washington Post site, or here on Brad DeLong's blog. Actually, you should read it from Pearlstein's Post site, because the comments are as enlightening as the article.

What can you learn?

Maybe a lot, if you opt in to my mortgage savings tips by email:

Pearlstein explains how mortgages were marketed, graded for risk, then the murky middle was reclassified and regraded as though it were something unmurky. Mortgages that were below the triple-A rated ones were now labeled as AAA because they were the tip top of the murkiness. So if your fifth-grader is making C's in everything, and along with other C-students is whisked off to a separate room only for C students, she now has the potential to be an A student when compared to all other C students. Then she and the other A students from the classroom where all the A students stayed can now vie for the position of valedictorian.

There's a lot more in Pearlstein's article. The best simple explanation of how we got here that I've read. But as I suggested above, you may really want to read the comments, including the ones that say Pearlstein doesn't know what he's talking about, over-simplified the mortgage crisis, over-complicated the unrelenting greed of investors (remember junk bonds?), left things out….(I don't think there was a comment that he padded his remarks with extra things.)

These are your peers, folks. Some rich, some poor, some highly educated, some undereducated, some who have already bailed and listed their homes for sale before the market price falls to less than half of what they still owe on the property, and some who enjoy renting and living within their means.

I love the quote Pearlstein started off with, and ultimately, the comments show he was right:

It was Charles Mackay, the 19th-century Scottish journalist, who observed that men go mad in herds but only come to their senses one by one.