Saturday, November 07, 2009

How Nice to be Out of the Spotlight

Here's some reading with which to idle away the weekend: Calculated Risk is maintaining a list of almost-in-trouble banks (link)--some 550 at the moment, to match the 120 actual failures so far (link)--so you can learn who is coming soon to a receiver near you. It's searchable and sortable, although it does help to have a widescreen monitor.

But here's a curiosity: we're up in northern California, but inland, not the tourist part, Californie Profonde. And I skimmed the list to look at our neighborhood. And you know what? Nobody. Redding, Red Bluff, Chico, Paradise? Zip. Yuba City/Marysville? Nope. No Sacramento either,although we do find the Granite Community Bank of Granite Bay in the Sierra Foothills just east. With 2009 assets of $137,28,000, it is fairly small potatoes, bankwise (for some details, go here). But so far as I can tell, that is the only one even remotely close to this neck of the woods.

I haven't been buying or selling real estate lately (I paid off my last mortgage about eight years ago) but this pretty much fits my intuition. So far as I can tell, prices around here never skyrocketed that much, and haven't fallen that much either. From local gossip, I hear that neighbor put her house up last year at $300,000; she thought she had a deal at $295,000 but it fell through; she sold it a second time a few weeks later at $305,000. Sheesh, what century are we in, anyway?

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