Affordable Housing Institute : US

I’ve always admired the Shakers, whose belief that faith alone will swell their numbers is so strong they renounce not just procreation but marriage itself.  God will provide, God will bring the new faithful.     Centuries ago, there were many of us.
 
Their commitment is admirable – and they are dying out.  Unless God provides, in the […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1 .]
 
Yesterday, wondering who might be next in the writedown game, I hauled out a June, 2007 story from Inside Mortgage Finance that reads much more scarily now than it did back when it was first published.
 

Back when the only thing we had to worry about was The Bomb
 
Who’s next?
 
Yesterday we […]

We’ve barely had two weeks so far in 2008, and already we’ve had mega-writedowns from big Wall Street banks (Citi, Merrill, and Bank of America), a monoline insurer (AMBAC) lose its prized AAA rating, raise new capital and implicitly announce that it was on a voluntary glide path to orderly dissolution.  I thus find myself […]

Every day I walk past panhandlers.  I never give them money.
 
 
Because some stories are inherently implausible
 
Why don’t I?  Because I doubt that it will do any good.  As I wrote back then:
 
A dozen winos (as we would have called them in my youth) frequent the sidewalks between my subway stop and my office.  Perhaps it’s […]

“So, Watson,” Holmes said, filling his pipe with a particularly vile shag that he sometimes favored, “you have been sufficiently enterprising as to visit brother Mycroft to have him explicate the science of securitization, a journey about which you were pleased to post.”

Mycroft was always willing to expound upon money
 
London that April was endlessly blanketed […]