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.
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.
Business and individual bankruptcy filings in the U.S. in October increased 20 percent over September and 37 percent above the same month in 2006, according to Mike Bickford, president of Oklahoma City-based Jupiter eSource LLC's.
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.
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