Oct
26
The mortgage banker’s lament
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This week I spoke to a meeting at the Sheraton Waikiki of the Mortgage Bankers Association of Hawaii. They’ve invited me before and I like them — they’re a good crowd, ask intelligent questions, and don’t get upset if I express an opinion they don’t agree with.
They were just a nanodegree less ebullient this year, though. They feel like people are lumping them together with the predatory lenders who created the subprime mortgage crisis by hard-selling loans to people who can’t afford them.
There is some sentiment in the mortgage community that there are some people who always pursue the quick buck, who got into the mortgage lending business when they realized they could game the system by pressing borrowers to put down more income than they actually had.
This is the same kind of person who a generation ago were hard-selling maginal high-tech IPOs as if each one was going to be the next Microsoft.
Jeff Booth’s birthday this week was also the anniversary of the Great Crash of 1929, which came about because of similar people. They sold stock on margin to people who didn’t know what they were doing, having first persuaded themselves that everything was going to be fine indefinitely.
The two lessons from this. The first is that there will always be a quick rich scheme that works for a while and then doesn’t. The second is that the next time it will be something different from last time.
Oct
25
Blogging about blogging
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A Scarborough Research study finds 12% of Honolulu adults have blogged or read a blog in the past 30 days, half again more than the national average.
Honolulu and San Diego tied for fifth bloggingest cities, after Austin, Tex. (home of Dell Computer), Portland, Ore., Seattle and San Francisco.
This is my first blog, though I had a column for several years in Pacific Business News that sometimes felt like a blog. My daughter has a blog which is really well-written and makes me very proud of her. I am a fan of Ian Lind’s local blog, which can include exclusive reporting about a local story or remarks about his cats, depending on the day.
I’m struck by the evolution of blog style. Early blogs tended to be full of attitude; now they are full of personality, like reading a first-person novel.
Most Internet writing has struggled for years to find a style. But the style of news writing on Internet websites is easier to explain, since I knew many of the key people hired to write content on AOL, MSNBC and other influential site in the early days. Basically, everyone tried to argue that Internet style should reflect whatever they were used to from their previous jobs in old media. The former broadcasters wanted a brief, breezy style; the former newspaper people wanted to follow print style.
Most Internet styles will eventually be close to current blog style, reflecting (1) the fast, frequent posting that is common to the most widely-read sites, and (2) the infinitely expandable length that is uniquely characteristic of the Web, in contrast to the time and space constraints of radio/TV and print.
Oct
24
Jeff’s day in history
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Jeff Booth, whose birthday we made some small reference to on “Sunrise” today, mentioned in the newsroom that he shared a birthday with the football great Y.A. Tittle.
That made me curious. What else happened on Jeff’s birthday in history? I looked it up.
He also shares his birthday with Kevin Kline, the Big Bopper, and that Asian guy who plays the shrink on “Law & Order.”
The astronomer Tycho Brahe died on this date in 1601.
Important events in history that occurred on Oct. 24 included the Great Crash of 1929, the Russian Revolution (1917), the founding of the United Nations (1945) and the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk (1911).
Jeff is a former art student and will be happy to hear that the much-painted Cathedral at Chartres was dedicated on Oct. 24, 1260.
The first transcontinental telegraph line was completed on this date in 1861 (spelling the end of the Pony Express after only a year and a half of operation) and this date in 1901 saw the first person go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
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