I think it would be safe to say that real estate gurus have had their day. I guess you will always find a clueless group here or there that think they're going to "think and grow rich" their way out of insolvency by flipping houses for quick profit or something, but we won't talk about them.

Let me just say that, in my humble opinion, I put most of the blame for the real estate and sub prime mess on the backs of two individuals: Robert G. Allen, author of Nothing Down and Mark Victor Hansen, the Chicken Soup For The Soul guy, as well as their legion of clones, for making people think there's some magical formula for generating wealth by spreading pixie dust and thinking positive affirmations.

Now I don't profess to know anything about real estate, but it becomes fairly obvious to anyone who happens to be paying attention that if you have an increasing army of wannabe Trumps being cranked out of boiler rooms like the Robert Allen Institute, you're going to run out of buyers.

I remember sitting at a traffic signal back in 04 and noticing for the umpteenth time a hand scribbled sign saying "I will buy your house! Call for a free message" yadda and so on.

I will confess to having actually attended a few of these free seminars that profess to showing you the secret to wealth in real estate, which included this so called psychological trick of hand writing your sign with a marker instead of having them printed. It's supposed to seem less intimidating to people desperate to sell their houses. Does it actually work? Well, as P.T. Barnum knew, "there's a sucker born every minute" - enough to bankrupt our entire economy, it seems!

And what were these people actually selling at these wealth seminars? A "proprietary list" of private hard money loans, and you can attain this list along with their invaluable coaching for a $3000 fee for weekend workshops!

So now the landscape is littered with people licking their wounds and comiserating about another round of stagflation, and just to add insult to injury, the oil companies have put the screws on anybody who happens to own a car.

Oh well, what can I say to cheer you folks up about this sad state of affairs? Well, probably zilch, but that's what cartoons are for (the cheering up part I mean). Wanna few laughs for a change? Tired of phony wealth gurus and life coaches telling you how to live your life? Cartoons would never do that, and there's plenty at www.ginovia.com. So come visit Ginger and her alien sidekick on their next mission to plunder the universe, or read some whacky cartoons on our comics page, we're all waiting for you on Ginovia.com!