His entry begins:I was caught completely off guard by the financial crisis. I don’t care if Nobel Laureates, Chairmen of the Federal Reserve and Harvard economists were also fooled, it still made me feel like a putz. Though I do have several excuses, none very good.Visit Chris Knopf's website. He is author of the Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery series, including The Last Refuge, Two Time, Head Wounds, and Hard Stop, which won the Benjamin Franklin
Around 2006 and 2007, I was astonished by the sharp increase in real estate prices, along with the inflation in the size and appointments of new homes. I wondered how people could possibly afford such excess. Since I’d been out of the mortgage market for almost ten years, I had no idea how easy it had become to borrow massive amounts of money without having to verify your income or net worth. I want to think if I’d known that, and also that millions of these loans had been handed out, I might have been more concerned. I just didn’t know.
I did know that mortgages were being securitized into instruments and subsequently gobbled up by investors around the world. Me and everyone else thought this was a good thing, since it spread the risk. What we didn’t realize was it also spread the exposure to catastrophic levels should those exorbitant housing prices fall. Duh.
I wasn’t just fooled out of ignorance. I also...[read on]
Award for Best Mystery. A copywriter by trade, Knopf is a principal of Mintz & Hoke Communications Group. He lives with his wife, Mary, and dog, Samuel Beckett, in Avon, Connecticut, and Southampton, New York, where he sets sail on the sacred Little Peconic Bay.Coffee with a canine: Chris Knopf & Sam.
My Book, The Movie: Two Time.
The Page 99 Test: Hard Stop.
Writers Read: Chris Knopf.
--Marshal Zeringue
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