Oh no! There's a burger bubble too?

You keep doing what you're doing, and you just keep assuming that growth is going to go on forever. And then at some point it just drops out from under you," said Alan Pisarski, a transportation expert and author of "Commuting in America." He compared the years of overproduction [of automobiles] to putting a Burger King on every street corner. "The world just can't use that many hamburgers," he said.

[From Too Many Cars, and They're Not on the Road - washingtonpost.com]

And it gets worse.

"There was a car bubble," Steven Rattner, who President Obama recruited to head a Treasury Department group charged with finding solutions to the mountain of problems facing the American auto industry, said in an interview last month. "We had this artificially high sales rate."

Bubbles everywhere! It's more fun than a Saturday night bath! How did it happen? Well, Jeff Schuster of J.D. Power and Associates - you know, those guys who know all about the auto industry - explains cars became too affordable. Imagine! (And which one of you forgot to tell me?) And then, says John Townsend of AAA, "People were taking all kinds of risks buying cars beyond their means."

So, not only were those bad, bad house buyers buying too many cheap houses, the bad, bad car buyers were buying too many cheap cars.

I'm having a little trouble following this.