I’m like Chairman Mao. I win hearts and minds and I live off the land in my little hovel. I devote myself to providing good blog posts for the community so they can have something to share with each over the dinner table.
I had about $2,000 in savings and I invested them with a friend who was making a killing in real estate. Then Paul Volker started raising interest rates and the real estate game crashed. Oy vey!
I learned about things the hard way. More particularly, my parents bore the brunt and I learned from their suffering.
In the summer of 1980, my father lost his employment with the Seventh-Day Adventist church. My family moved from Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley, where we were renting, to the Auburn area, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range 45 minutes drive north of Sacramento.
My father set up his own non-denominational evangelical Christian foundation Good News Unlimited.
I’m reading this new book by economist Thomas Sowell — The Housing Boom and Bust.
From 2000 to 2005, the average home price in the United States increased by one-third. Millions of Americans began using their homes as ATMs, getting credit lines from numerous banks to pay off their other debts (whose interest was not tax deductible, only mortgage interest payments are deductible). Then in 2007, it all crashed.
For more than a decade, US newspapers have editorialized that banks are more conservative than they should be about lending money to blacks. The current foreclosure debacle suggests otherwise.
A 1991 Federal Reserve study found that blacks and whites with the same income had different mortgage loan acceptance rates. Is this racism? It’s not clear. Income is only one factor in determining whether someone is a good bet to repay a mortgage loan. Blacks and whites with the same income tend to have very different levels of wealth.
