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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elroy Jetson who wrote (3648)	7/29/2002 12:28:38 PM
From: JBonline	Respond to of 306849

Fascinating, especially the life insurance policies. Thanks. I agree that things are worrisome. Part of the problem is the use of meat cleaver strategies when finely-honed scalpels are needed. Macro strategies alone seem too broad to narrowly target the regions or groups that need to be targeted. Bringing down the people or places who NEED to be brought down will be accompanied be a similar downturn for people who never saw the benefits of the prior upturn. In the Depression lots of formerly rich widows kept their houses but were forced to fire their servants who in turn promptly lost THEIR houses. Another part of the problem is that in the last 10-15 years the people who lived as adults through the Great Depression have pretty much died off. Without those people and their memories, politicians feel freer (fewer lost votes) to dismantle the various protections that were set up to prevent another big depression. One of my farmer grandfathers was lucky in the pre-price support days to have inherited his land (no debt) and did well throughout the depression, but the other was expected by his family to "make his own way" (take on debt to buy his own farm). The latter then lost everything when all 3 kids needed an operation in the same year. He couldn't afford both the debt and the doctor bills (nobody had medical insurance in the "good old days", something we may be going back to as well). The kids were subdivided among the various relatives for care for a summer or two; they ate sandwiches with lard instead of butter and spread with beans instead of peanut butter. They were luckier than others who did not have relatives to take them in.