[MCN] Forests came down, houses went up, and then we get a situation

[Lance Olsen]

The Economist Aug 20th 2016
Housing in America
Nightmare on Main Street
America's housing system was at the centre of the last crisis. It has 
still not been properly reformed
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21705317-americas-housing-system-was-centre-last-crisis-it-has-still-not-been-properly

1st two paragraphs:

"WHAT are the most dysfunctional parts of the global financial 
system? China's banking industry, you might say, with its great wall 
of bad debts and state-sponsored cronyism. Or the euro zone's 
taped-together single currency, which stretches across 19 different 
countries, each with its own debts and frail financial firms. Both 
are worrying. But if sheer size is your yardstick, nothing beats 
America's housing market.

"It is the world's largest asset class, worth $26 trillion, more than 
America's stockmarket. The slab of mortgage debt lurking beneath it 
is the planet's biggest concentration of financial risk. When house 
prices started tumbling in the summer of 2006, a chain reaction led 
to a global crisis in 2008-09. A decade on, the presumption is that 
the mortgage-debt monster has been tamed. In fact, vast, 
nationalised, unprofitable and undercapitalised, it remains a menace 
to the world's biggest economy.

Other excerpts:

"Taxpayers, they say, are safe.

"Only in their dreams."

"Rather than allow the cycle of remorse and repetition to repeat, 
better to complete the job of reform and make sure that the mortgage 
system cannot be used as a political tool to stimulate the economy."

See it all here:
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21705317-americas-housing-system-was-centre-last-crisis-it-has-still-not-been-properly


-- 
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  3 from Nature's Special Issue on coasts.

Public Release: 4-Dec-2013
  Nature
Humans threaten wetlands' ability to keep pace with sea-level rise
Left to themselves, coastal wetlands can withstand rapid levels of 
sea-level rise. But humans could be sabotaging some of their best 
defenses, according to a Nature review paper published Thursday from 
from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and the Smithsonian 
Environmental Research Center.

Public Release: 4-Dec-2013
  Nature
Sea level rise and shoreline changes are lead influences on floods 
from tropical cyclones
Writing in the current special issue of Nature dedicated to coastal 
regions, UMass Amherst geoscientist Woodruff, with co-authors 
Jennifer Irish of Virginia Tech University and Suzana Camargo of 
Columbia University, say, "Society must learn to live with a rapidly 
evolving shoreline that is increasingly prone to flooding from 
tropical cyclones."

Public Release: 4-Dec-2013
Nature
Sea-level rise to drive coastal flooding, regardless of changes in 
hurricane activity
Clamor about whether climate change will cause increasingly 
destructive tropical storms may be overshadowing a more unrelenting 
threat to coastal property -- sea-level rise -- according to a team 
of researchers writing in the journal Nature this week.










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