We vaporized 60 percent to the shadow banking system, the SIVs and CDOs, the people who actually bought US mortgages, who bought student loans, who bought credit cards, who bought car loans. That’s gone and it’s never coming back. As we’ll see, it’s going to take well into the next decade for us to create a completely new infrastructure to replace the broken one.

This week I am in Maine on vacation with my son, and next week is my daughter Tiffani’s wedding, so for the next two weeks I am going to send an updated version of a speech I have been giving the past few months on what I think is the likely potential for the rise of a brand new asset class.

It is too long to be sent as one letter, so we will start with the first part today and finish with the second part next week. This first part can be read as a standalone letter.

The Rise of A New Asset Class

I think we’re at a watershed moment, what Peter Bernstein defines as an “epochal event,” with the very order of the investment world changing as it did in 1929, in ‘50, in 1981, where a number of things came together – it wasn’t just one thing but a number of events happening that conspired to change the nature of what worked in the investment world for the next period of time. It took most people a decade after 1981-2 to recognize that we were in a different period, because we make our future expectations out of past experience. It’s very hard for us to recognize a watershed moment in the process. We’re going to look back in five or ten years and go, “Wow, things changed.” As we will see, it’s going to be a change that’s going to cost people in their portfolios and in their retirement habits.

We’re going to look at a number of different concepts and separate ideas that in and of themselves don’t make that much difference. But I think their confluence in the present moment is going to change things.

Now, some of this is new, some of it is old. The old stuff we’re going to fly through. Most of you have been reading me for a while now, and you’ve got the concepts down. So let’s start.

The first thing to note is that we’re in a Muddle Through Economy. We’re in a recession that’s fueled by the bursting of two bubbles: the housing bubble and the credit crisis. The real question is: when do we come out of the recession? At what time do we come back to trend growth, which is 3 to 3.5 percent a year?

I believe that over the next 20 years the US economy will grow at roughly a rate of 3 percent compounded, in real terms. But I believe that we have some headwinds for the next year or two. So I think the real bottom of this economic cycle will be later this year, during the fourth quarter and possibly into the first quarter of next year. But it will take two years, for some reasons we are going to get into, to get back to long-term trend growth. It will take much longer than normal because the things that created the problem – the housing bubble and the credit crisis – aren’t things that can respond to Fed policy, and they aren’t things that can respond to the normal cycles. It’s going to take a long time to work through these.

First, we had an investor-driven transaction bubble in housing. There were 48% more houses built since 2005 than should have been built, if you were simply looking at trends.

What that means is there are 3.5 million homes we have to work through. Now, that means that the 8 or 9 hundred thousand homes that we’re now down to building a year, is going to end up going down to 400,000. It’s going to take some time to work through those excess homes – for the prices to drop enough that people can go in and buy them or rent them. We are probably talking 2011 before we finally work through this housing crisis and get back to a normal market where housing contributes significantly to GDP growth.

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