To: SilentZ who wrote (562131 ) 4/21/2010 12:52:32 PM From: tejek Respond to Foreclosures on houses in their territory are sky-high. This fall, I heard that they were repossessing cars that the foreclosed-upon were using for shelter. A lot of people where I grew up were living in their cars, and they were even losing that makeshift shelter, too. Out of idle curiosity a couple of weeks ago, I ventured onto Realtor.com, and ran a search for houses under $250,000. I saw oceanside condos on the list that were listed at prices I hadn't seen since the late 1980s. One penthouse condo was listed at about $245,000. A five bedroom, three bath house with pool and tennis court was listed well below $200,000. That should tell you how bad it is. The company that owned the bank, and that issued those shares, still exists, but everything that made that company what it was came from that bank. It might as well not exist any more, either. One of the first notifications I got from the bank, after the estate settled -- and after I bought my house -- about the stock was that they were experiencing difficulties. They wrote, honestly and forthrightly, that they had invested in collateralized debt obligations. That, and the horrific damage that has occurred during the recession to the regional economy, sealed that institution's fate. What I do not know is whose CDOs they bought. I would like to find out that information, and I am not sure how to go about it. I have no idea where to even start. I am not talking about protecting fat-cats. My mother wasn't one of those people, she didn't come from one of those families. She worked damned hard for many years in public education. My mother sank a great deal of money into that bank stock, starting in the early 1980s, buying a few shares once a month for years. She was a child of the Depression, and grew up a Southern Baptist minister's daughter in rural Georgia during the late 1920s and through the 1930s. She made this bank stock the centerpiece of her investment strategy because she believed with all her heart that this was the safest investment she could possibly make. Bear Sterns collapsed a couple of months before her estate closed. I just thank God fasting that she did not live long enough to have to rely on the sale of that stock to pay for her care (she had surgery for a brain tumor that did not go well, and the tumor grew back, killing her). More, for all that I feared him, I wish my brother had had access to the funds a sale of healthy stock would have brought him. My brother could have used that money for health care. He died of lung cancer early this morning. For all the bitterness between us, as hideous a relationship as we had, I still wish he could have had the funds for medical care -- for you see, he had no health insurance and he was just a few years too young for Medicare. My sister-in-law is going to lose their home -- they haven't been able to pay the mortgage the last two months, because what money they did have went for the medical bills. She's now destitute and will probably drop the keys into the mail before she moves in with her siblings in another state.
