Commuters arriving in Brooklyn via the Manhattan Bridge are greeted with a shiny vision of New York City's future that never came to be: condo buildings with names like the Oro, the Toren, and Forté, towering monuments to real-estate developers' credit-bubble hubris. Two-bedroom apartments in the Oro were priced at nearly $1 million apiece; today, just 90 of 303 units have been sold. The Forté would have gone into foreclosure had its developer not voluntarily relinquished the building to the bank, losing investor Goldman Sachs its $13 million stake. Property records declare 37 of its 108 units purchased, and the high-rise itself feels even lonelier -- as night falls, just a few windows in its upper reaches are illuminated.

From Five Ways of Looking at Risk.

History will recall 2005 as the year the credit bubble grew fattest--when in much of Florida and California, real-estate prices doubled in a matter of months. But in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, it was the year that nearly 12,000 homes were abandoned to foreclosure, leaving streets littered with boarded-up houses. Many of the home sales turned out to have been between speculators selling property to one another at rigged prices, using phony paperwork. Other borrowers fell prey to sub-prime refinancing that put cash in their hands but lost them their home.