real estate development

Photo by Muriel Gottrop (April 2005) - from wikimedia commons

If you have a somewhat perverse sense of humor, you'll have great fun reading “The End” in the December 2008 issue of Condé Nast Portfolio, by Michael Lewis, whom you may remember as author of Liar’s Poker, "one of the books that define Wall Street during the 1980s." I was intrigued by one passage in which he notes that investors looking to short bonds backed by really bad residential real estate mortgage loans (i.e., those most likely to default) looked for bonds backed by mortgages on real estate located in “what Wall Street people were now calling the sand states: Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada.”