New Lee Adler, Aaron Krowne, and Russ Winter podcast is out. About 12 minutes of free preview is also available.The Bear Stearns Senate hearings can be found here.
For newer readers or listeners there is a primer of my terms, and a general review of my approach in the Primer on Winterisms, here. This is always located in the side bar as a dictionary of sorts.
Also discussed was how the extreme unaffordabilty in one-third of the country is leading to big problems. New bankruptcy data suggests the trouble is accelerating.
Bob Lawless over at Credit Slips has an excellent post today about the nationwide increase in bankruptcy filings. According to data he compiled using the Automated Access to Court Electronic Records (AACER), March saw more than 4,000 filings a day, the largest number of filings since new bankruptcy laws -- ones that made filing more arduous -- went into effect in 2005.
Bankruptcy filings in the U.S. averaged 3,541 each business day in September and are on track to reach 807,000 for the year, a 37 percent increase over the 590,500 filings in 2006.
At long last, the Administrative Office of the Courts yesterday released the fourth quarter and annual 2006 bankruptcy filing statistics; the headline on the Courts' press release reads, "Bankruptcy Filings Plunge in Calendar Year 2006". Of course, the numbers and what they might mean are old news to most of us: AACER information has been available for some time, and even related in an Associated Press story that gave us a solid indication of first quarter 2007 stats before the official sources gave us a peek at the end of 2006.
The folks at Automated Access to Court Electronic Records or AACER provided Credit Slips with statistics on U.S. bankruptcy filings through July 21, 2007. Experts are watching these data because we want to know whether the steady rise in bankruptcy filings since enactment of the 2005 bankruptcy law will continue. Still, we have to be careful not to overinterpret these data.