Word: sunbelters
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...properties are hitting a real estate market that is generally far weaker than during the go-go days of the 1970s and early 1980s. The overbuilding of offices and condos has produced a huge surplus of such structures all across the Sunbelt, and some excess properties even in Northeast states like Massachusetts and Connecticut. "What you're dealing with is the aftermath of , a massive speculative excess. It tends to drive down the value of all real estate," says Austin-based banking analyst Alex Sheshunoff. To make matters worse, mortgage rates have risen a full percentage point in the past...
...particularly hard to catch because they tend to keep their operations small. The typical setup is a "boiler room" in which a dozen or more employees reading from sales scripts feverishly work the phones, contacting hundreds of potential victims a day. Thousands of boiler rooms are located in the Sunbelt states stretching from Florida to California. At one point, so many sprang up in part of Fort Lauderdale that federal investigators dubbed the area "Maggot Mile...
...fast-buck artists who contributed to the savings and loan crisis, Herman Beebe Sr. is among the most notorious. Rising from an impoverished boyhood in Louisiana's woods, Beebe had built, by the early 1980s, a $150 million financial empire that stretched across the Sunbelt. But the brash, stocky financier was actually a ringleader in a network of good ole boys who helped ruin more than a dozen savings institutions by handing out as much as $10 billion in reckless loans -- some of which ended up in Beebe's own pocket. Recalls Beebe's son Ken, who worked...
...real shocker came a day later, when the Bank Board announced the largest rescue in its history. It plans to merge eight nearly moribund Texas S and Ls -- including Dallas' Sunbelt Savings, which lost $1.2 billion in the first three months of 1988 alone -- into one financial organization with assets of $6.9 billion. The Government will provide $2.5 billion of aid initially and possibly as much as $5.5 billion over the next ten years. Although the Bank Board had several offers to buy all eight S and Ls, it determined they were in such bad financial and legal shape that...
...greed. "People got into the J.R. Ewing syndrome," says Henry Oncken, the U.S. Attorney in Houston. "The more they made, the more they got caught up in making more." Some S and Ls that believe they were plundered by their officers are taking them to court. Dallas-based Sunbelt Savings Association is suing former Chairman Edwin McBirney III and other ex-managers for $630 million. The suit alleges in part that McBirney paid "excessive commissions and fees" to friends and relatives. In one instance, McBirney is accused of allowing a company owned by his wife to borrow more than...