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.
Every month, I try to post on the latest bankruptcy filing statistics using data provided by a private company, Automated Access to Court Electronic Records (AACER). Recently, Jason Kilborn, a law professor at Chicago's John Marshall Law School, posted a comment asking why AACER's filing statistics were lower than the ones provided by the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts (AO). For example, AACER reported 826,665 bankruptcy filings in the 2007 calendar year, about 2.9% lower than the 850,912 filings reported by the AO.
Melanie Fletcher lost her job in 2006, when her position as a program educator for Oregon's Washington County was eliminated. She was able to secure another job within the same office, and though it paid less she and her husband, an optician, managed to get by on their combined incomes. Then the Fletchers decided to sell their home in Beaverton last year and move to a rural area near their relatives, about an hour away. That was when the trouble started.
U.S. commercial bankruptcies soared 46 per cent in May from a year ago and many more are expected as the slowing economy chokes consumers and businesses, according to a bankruptcy management firm. There were some 5,233 commercial bankruptcy cases last month, up from 3,589 in the year-ago period, according to AACER, a database of U.S. bankruptcy statistics.
Trends