No News Isn’t Good

I find it odd -- if not downright disturbing -- that I had to find a news story about the human side of America’s sub-prime loan mess on the BBC’s web page. Why not an American media outlet ? Read this story and see what I mean. Oh and while you’re there, you might want to spend some time reading the related stories listed on the right side of the web page. The one entitled “Credit woes ‘need private action’” got my attention.

American Nightmare

” The result is a city blighted by house repossessions - with one in six households in Cleveland have faced eviction proceedings since 2000. Due to a glut of houses on the property market, house prices have crashed. Banks can no longer sell the properties on and they are left derelict and deserted.“

Why haven’t I read something similar is the U.S. papers ? I try to keep up. I don’t have any researchers or a staff but I do have the internet. I plugged in “sub prime” into Google News this morning and didn’t find anything like the BBC story. What I did find was interesting.

Sorted by date, the story’s countries of origin were:

Canada
Canada
Spain
Canada
U.S.
U.S.
U.S.
U.S.
United Kingdom
France
United Kingdom
Hong Kong
Japan

I’m not sure how much this says about Google and how much it says about the story. I did notice that the blame remains the same throughout the world though. This is a crisis made in the good old U.S of A. I suspect our unregulated financial industry isn’t going to win us any more friends than our war of choice did.

Everyone in the system - the brokers, the lenders, the investment appraisers - took their cut and the returns were good. But, as it turns out, so were the risks.

"We found the smoking gun, and everyone's fingerprints were on it," says Mark Seifert, director of ESOP, a local poverty action group.

There’s one other story on the BBC’s web page that you might want to read.

Financial crises: Lessons from history

That’s another thing we Americans’ don’t do very well -- remember history.

Don Brown
October 30, 2007