Professor Elam

Sunday April 3, 2010

The Washington Post reports on why Texas has weathered the real estate crisis better than other states. 

Seven years before 1845 would be 1838, you will recall, of course !, that the battle of the alamo and Texas Ind as a nation was achieved in 1836. The real reason that the assorted crew of misfits was at the Alamo, was to found a nation where one could not have land, the farm or ranch, re possessed in bad times by bankers, thus losing everything. Crockett had gone bust in TN and Bowie had several incidents of dubious land speculation in his past. Indeed as it says it was 1998 before one could get another mort

The reference to Texas of all places was no doubt reference to the land and savings and loan collapse here in Texas during and following the run up in oil prices to 1981, land and building speculation were rampant, insiders at s and ls were flipping land for higher prices, sometimes multiple times in one day. The S and L crisis began and died here.

Here are a couple of sayings born of that era

Lord please give us another oil boom and we promised not to screw the next one up (honest that was a bumper sticker)

and indeed the banks did not go bust again when oil zoomed collapsed and now has come back

Texas can't run a S & L but everybody down there thinks he ought to be president (Bush, Connally, two months ago Gov Perry was on the cover of Texas Monthly with the headline Perry for President, the Greeks have nothing on us in the hubris dept)