PS Thanks for the reference, i ordered the book.
Wojtek
On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 10:15 PM, Andy <andy274 at gmail.com> wrote:
> So I just finished Eugene Linden's Winds of Change, on how climate
> change effects civilizations past and present. He doesn't make a
> super-strong case for ancient civilizations -- probably because so far
> there isn't a super-strong case to be made -- and he leans heavily on
> Mike Davis's work on El Nino precipitating famine around the Indian
> Ocean in the late 19th century. He does make a cogent if brief case
> for how it can complicate our current situation. Not bad overall.
> But what really surprised me was in his account of the American
> southwest, where regional climate prediction tends to line up moreso
> than most places, forecasting drought:
>
> [quote]
>
> In Southern California, many homeowners have very little equity at
> risk because banks have been willing to finance nearly all the costs
> of buying homes. Will banks continue to do so if prices start to
> stall, or if insurance companies balk at insuring homes in high-risk
> areas? And what would happen to the banking system if banks become
> suddenly saddled with a huge increase in non-performing mortgages and
> unsalable properties possessed through foreclosure? With no cushion
> and no buyers, foreclosures would quickly propagate back up through
> the financial system. Because mortgages have been sliced and diced
> into so many derivatives, the crisis could quickly become systemic as
> investors fled markets.
>
> [end quote]
>
> The book is copyrighted 2006.
>
> --
> Andy
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