Defaulting banks - where will it stop?

[Linda Minor]

It will be interesting to see if the election of a new president will lift the mood?

The other option that I have discussed privately is the possibility that this was, as Jan says, the last bank heist and the "boys" thereafter intend to decamp to other feeding grounds in the still emerging markets of the Southern hemisphere.

But my gut instinct stubbornly says there is still more to come and that the final departure of the American gravy train is yet to leave platform one.

Then there's also still that remaining 30% of GDP to be sucked up.

Maybe

I well remember the bank heist of the mid-1980's. I watched the real estate flips all around me as the local speculators went crazy, and I made out OK just drafting deeds and wrap-around deeds of trust out of my little office. There was a lot of fraud fueled just by high interest rates, which kept "values" going ever higher. It was a gamble on when the price would begin to fall, and who would be left holding the asset on which more was owed than could be recouped by sale. A lot of those, like poor Neil Bush (his Momma said he never did anything wrong!), raked in cash for holding the door open for their friends who were doing insider deals with no intention of repaying.

I got out of that end of real estate in time to spend the next three years foreclosing on family farms--probably the most distasteful three years of my career. Then I went to Houston just in time to work with a group of attorneys investigating an incident of alleged political bribery during that time and was present at an interview of a couple of fraudsters who were mentioned in Pete Brewton's book. While they were laughing about the title, Mafia, CIA and George Bush, one of them asked the other which entity he worked for--the Mafia or the CIA? The other just shook his head, and replied that Brewton just did not understand how it all works. I wish I had known enough at the time to ask them to explain it to me, but I was too afraid to hear the answer.