There’s nothing like a personal anecdote to cut right to the heart of a matter.
True, they are subjective but still, who can forget all the fantastic tales of open house bidding wars, transient neighbors making windfall profits or flippers trading pre-construction homes and condos like penny stocks?
Stories like those, have now become urban legends, and to a certain extent, have attained a status that will popularly memorialize the mania of the Great Millennium Housing Bubble in our minds forever.
As we all know, the up-cycle of the mania is now long gone, and with its departure goes all the wild, pre-burst stories, now being decisively succeeded by an ever increasing stream of down-side dialog.
In the spirit of symmetry, that is, taking the “bad with the good” even if it is hard to take at times, I have added a new feature to PaperMoney called “Paper Tales” which will provide a daily stream of un-edited “personal interest” stories and quotes ferreted out from various internet sources.
Keep in mind, the purpose of highlighting these stories is not to make light of peoples hardship or poor decisions, but rather, to assemble a log of events, particularly personal events, that have occurred and continue to emerge as we all ride this cycle down.
Hopefully, if not for any other reason, we can all learn a little something about how people behave under unusual circumstances so as to possibly avoid similar situations, if ever an insane housing binge, or any other asset binge for that matter, should ever occur again.
