Don White wrote:
wrote in message
...
There is a bright side, less conversions of marinas to condos.
Basically, the subprime mortgages were intended to get poor people who
otherwise couldnt get a mortgage buy a house with low or no collateral
(a really bad idea). What happed was that everybody realized "What,
no collateral, I can now finance any bizarre thing I want as long as
its real estate". So, a lot of it went into what people expected to
appreciate, coastal property bought with almost nothing and often
actually nothing down. They couldnt lose. In Florida the state
forces everybody else to subsidize insurance on homes built in bad
locations. Not only could they afford a loan with nothing down, they
could afford the insurance. Older Marinas that are always of marginal
business worth saw their property values and hence their taxes
skyrocket, they HAD to sell out.


You still crying about the insurance?
If you don't like it...move elsewhere.



I don't believe he understands how insurance works. One of the
"fundamental" concepts of insurance is the mechanism insurance companies
provide for sharing the risks. The rates we pay for homeowners'
insurance here are partially determined by the losses our insurance
company incurs on the real properties of others, no matter where those
properties are. Same with boat insurance, of course.

When we lived in Florida, I was appalled at the rates insurance
companies charged for all sorts of coverage. At that time, it was
revealed in many news articles how the GOP-dominated state insurance
commission basically bent over for the insurance companies and allowed
them to charge whatever they wanted, sans any serious regulation by the
state.

That's the GOP dream world: no government regulation. It's behind the
mess we have on Wall Street and until he flip-flopped earlier this week,
it was part of the McCain Doctrine.