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

To: ChanceIs who wrote (305086)	4/3/2011 9:32:52 PM
From: ChanceIs	Respond to of 306849

Contrasting (the case of) Robert Morris with Today's Scum I seem to recall (reading a Mitchner novel?) that one of the prominent American revolutionary patriots soiled his reputation by buying war bonds and/or revolutionary paper (if there was such a mechanism back then) from “impatient” citizen paper holders. He apparently told (begged) the citizens to hang onto it, because the government was going to be able to pay it off. They wouldn’t listen, so said patriot bought it at the proverbial 50 cents on the buck – and made a killing. For that he was reviled. I am thinking that it was Robert Morris. It matters not. Some time after Morris had secured his reputation he started making leveraged real estate bets in Washington DC (of all places) and in the southern US. He went to debtors prison after he got his margin call. So .... ummmm .... like ... Morris was a very "big wheel," so.... ummmmm .... like ..... why can’t we throw Henry Paulson, Jamie Diamond, etc in the slammer? To top it off, Morris put a lot of his own skin in the game to finance the revolution. It used to be that the investment banks in New York were partnerships. Un der the partnership structure, the partners had a lot at stake. The current set of worthless f&ks - who never contributed anything to society - took their partnerships public, and then gambled with the shareholders' equity. The venerable Morris went to jail. These guys got bailed out and are now getting even bigger bonuses. Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Paine etc have to be rolling in their graves. Also note the irony that in was REAL ESTATE where Morris lost his fanny. Just like today's miserable lot. Has much changed in RE speculation in the last 200 years??? Not that I can tell. And these f&ks couldn't see it coming!?!?! Who could have seen it coming - once in a thousand year event - a perfect storm. My disgust is complete. There have been at least two major RE bubbles since Morris, and probably 10 other regular sized ones. The brilliant Larry Summers was no doubt too busy blowing coke in college to study history. Per Wiki: Morris was later heavily involved in unsuccessful land speculations, investing in the District of Columbia, and purchasing over 6,000,000 acres (24,000 km²) in the rural south. An expected loan from Holland never materialized because England and the Dutch declared war on Revolutionary France. The subsequent Napoleonic Wars ruined the market for American lands and Morris's highly leveraged company collapsed. The financial markets of England, the United States, and the Caribbean were also suffering from the deflation associated with the Panic of 1797. Thus Morris was "land poor" (he owned more land than any other American at the time, but didn't have enough hard money to pay his creditors).[15] Although he attempted to avoid his creditors by remaining at "The Hills", his country estate on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, his creditors literally pursued him to his gate. After he was sued by a former partner, a fraud who at that time was serving time in debtor's prison himself, he was arrested and imprisoned for debt in Prune Street prison in Philadelphia from February 1798 to August 1801. Morris's economic failure reduced the fortunes of many other prominent Federalists who had invested in his ventures (e.g., Henry Lee). Morris's political adversaries used his bankruptcy to gain political power in Pennsylvania. Governor Thomas McKean was elected and refined the art of political patronage in America. McKean’s party then picked the Pennsylvania members of the electoral college for the election of 1800, and this helped Thomas Jefferson become president. en.wikipedia.org