Affordable Housing Institute : US

Age has few enough consolations, of which one is that things others might have studied in school, you can remember.
 

Decades hence, who among us will still remember this class?
 
We think of microfinance as a post-electronic activity, yet some of us can remember a similar small-scale finance that comes from a time before the internet, before […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 
Yesterday, using a New York Times article as a springboard, we examined Humpty Dumpty’s question of value: what does value mean, and who decides that it means that? 
 

“Everything’s coming up roses”
 
For reasons I listed yesterday, the assets are often valued by people who have a vast vested interest in seeing them […]

“It’s worth what I say it’s worth.”
 

The louder I shout it, the truer it must be!
 
That, more or less, is the defense offer by Bear Stearns as to the value of enormous pools of highly structured complex instruments on their books, a declaration so patently self-serving and self-interested that, with Bear now absorbed into JPMorgan […]

The great Yogi Berra, whom I’m fond of quoting, upon being asked why he endorsed a product, replied:
 

“Don’t make that check out to ‘bearer’”
 
Because they paid me in cash, which is almost as good as money.
 

 
For financial institutions, capital is just as good as money, even if it’s not cash – and this matters enormously, […]

When a country explodes into violence, what we see are images of property destroyed:
 

From BBC Site: People walk around the charred remains of a market in Nairobi’s Kibera slum
 
…but the true damage is less visible, for whereas property can only be burned down, capital can flee – and it flees much, much faster than any […]