In 2001 with the day trader implosion, people typically killed themselves or sometimes their broker. Not their whole families. There is something else at play here. People don't wake up one day and morph into family exterminators. Not over money.

but you had to report it.

Senator Obama (whom I support ) has proposed a 3-month moratorium on mortgage payments.

I don't think this will be enough.

Within 3 months the homeowner has to find a job to pay the current month's mortgage. That is not always easy in an economic downturn.

Assume that the homeowner has a car to get to job interviews , a car for transportation. Failing that, the job seeker must use public transportation. This is not the end of the world, using public transportation, I am just saying there is more than one complication which causes default of mortgage paymnents.

Any past due mortgage payments would either have to be forgiven, or paid in installments over time. It could not be required to be paid at the end of the 3-month moratorium. Such an onus would still cause suicidal stress.

To be evicted from a home in which you have lived for many years, or even generations, is unspeakably trying for the spirit. The weight of such despair would seem insurmountable.

I read your report with sadness.

What do you think is at play?

Another suicide researcher indicates that suicides do not necessarily increase during economic stress.

http://www.livescience.com/health/081010-bad-stress-suicide.html

At least up until 2005, the white middle aged suicide rate was increasing while black middle-aged suicide rates were decreasing.

However, anecdotally, at least, we're seeing more murder-suicides among middle- and upper-middle class whites.

Whites who feel beleaguered by recent events and own guns and have a tendency towards violence and to regard family as possessions that can be destroyed in pique or so dependent that they're better off dead are, I'd generalize, more likely to feel threatened by societal change and the loss of white privilege, especially white male privilege. Losing one's home or job is the proverbial last straw, rather than being the single cause, something they could have weathered in times that seemed to reinforce their privilege.

I addressed this on another web site, but...when blacks rioted in the 1960's, they burned their own homes. Now distressed people are killing themselves over a crisis caused by rich people.

Why aren't these people going after the ones that caused this? Surely there must be someone with a high-powered rifle and a rooftop perch to go after the CEO's. Those people have no fear of prosecution or any responsibility for their actions, but I've never heard of a lawyer stopping a bullet.

But no, the angry people want the closest targets for their anger, instead of the most appropriate, so they kill their family, then themselves. What a waste.

This is a great service, to tell the story of the bloody consequences.

Rich people didn't cause this....it was each individual's greed, from the person applying for the mortgage, to the mortgage broker, to the wholesaler, to the i-banker who packaged it into an MBS, and to the investor who bought it in MBS or CDO form.

Or, would you like to believe that the person who signed the mortgage wasn't bright enough to understand what they were doing? That maybe they couldn't understand the fine print, and therefore shouldn't be legally able to sign a contract to go down. Thats not an ethical road I want to go down.

The sad thing here is these people see their families as another possession. I think someone touched on white male privilege...except that the most prominent case was a South Asian fellow.

Instead, as maybe tomreeedtoon can so from his perch in Michigan, this economy has been killing the white male for years. Some blame it on affirmative action...as a white male, I blame it on complacency. There's an irrational part of me that *hates* that we give undergrad and grad school tuition away to foreign nationals, but then again, there is dearth of white males that want to put in the effort to be engineers or quants.

I feel badly for those being pushed out of their homes. But I wonder, why the tears for the foreclosed homeowners, and not for renters in similar situations? The renters are often in more desperate situations, but I guess it just doesn't have the romance of someone being "driven from their home". I remember a few years back, a low-cost apartment complex in my area was torn down. The owner was cited for unsafe conditions and decided to raze the place instead of fixing it. The renters (mostly poor families) were desperate, begging him to leave the apartments in place, even if they were unsafe, because they had nowhere else to go. With no other affordable housing in the area, many of them ended up homeless. The response? A collective shrug, and a few letters to the editor saying "good riddance". A few weeks later, there was a story in the paper about a nice couple facing foreclosure. They had resources and could easily have found a rental apartment, but donations flooded in and they were able to keep their house.

Poor renters? Who cares. Middle class foreclosures? Terrible tragedy.

This is a complex world. People must rely on experts for specialized knowledge. The experts lied. They told people that equity was the same as income and that the market would go up forever and that only a fool wouldn't "put that money to work."

My bank has sent me literally hundreds of begging letters over the past few years, trying to get me to take a loan against my equity. Banks I've never had a thing to do with have sent me letters swearing that I could have 10k, 20k, 50k INSTANTLY! Just show up and take the money. No payments for the first year. These letters had full color spreads of the things I could buy with my free money if I weren't such a stick-in-the-mud - wide-screen TV sets, a new back porch. Some of the letters even claimed that by taking out a loan and playing the stock market with the money, I was guaranteed to make money. Most of these letters carefully avoided words like "loan" and "mortgage" altogether.

Okay, I didn't go for it. But are you really surprised that some people did?