The Wall Street Journal reports on the decision of a bank in Texas to tear down 16 partially completed houses that came into its possession following a foreclosure. The bank calculated that it was cheaper to just tear down the buildings then to try to resell them. It would have been helpful if the article explained the obvious implications for the hundreds of billions of dollars of "troubled assets" that banks hope to sell with taxpayer subsidies. Many of these assets are in fact worth the low price at which the market now values them (@ 30 cents on the dollar). The media have helped maintain the fiction that these assets are in fact worth considerably more even though there is no evidence to support this position.
--Dean Baker
