Interesting story from NPR: Washington Mutual Executive Predicted Collapse For casual observers, bank collapses like this one [WaMu] may seem to have appeared out of the blue. But for executives like William Longbrake, who worked at Washington Mutual for 26 years before September’s tumult, the collapse looked more like a slow unraveling. Longbrake served as…
Category: News
News, current events, etc.
Weekend Roundup: 1873, Hiring Freeze, Un-Sale…
Here’s a brief roundup of a bunch of noteworthy items that have popped into my inbox and RSS feeds in the last day or two. Aubrey Cohen: Current economic woes more like 1873 than 1929. “When commentators invoke 1929, I am dubious,” writes Scott Reynolds Nelson, a professor of history at the College of William…
Party Like It’s 1929: Bailout Passes House
It’s official: Congress is not interested in addressing the underlying issues that caused this mess. Instead, they would rather pour trillions of dollars we don’t have into a doomed attempt to maintain the broken status quo. I predict we’ll be repeating this whole routine in less than six months with a new bailout, after these…
Forbes: Seattle is #1
Good news everyone! Seattle is at the top of another one of Forbes’ famous lists! Hardest And Easiest Places To Sell A Home As the dismal U.S. housing market slides further downhill—home prices in July posted a 16.3% annual drop—some sellers are unloading their homes to bargain-hunters. But in cities like Seattle, Jacksonville, Fla., and…
Seattle Times: “Sellers are Growing Desperate”
An article in today’s Seattle Times goes nicely with Mr. Cohen’s article in the P-I a couple days ago. More sellers are growing desperate as homebuying stalls locally I especially like the first part of the subtitle text (emphasis mine): The Puget Sound area housing market, supposedly immune to the forces pulling down others across…