“Bedroom community,” it should be remembered, can also be a euphemism for “no jobs”—Vidor has an 11 percent unemployment rate. It has none of the charming historic structures that link this part of Texas more closely to the South than to the West; the battered shacks and rusting ...
Lax lending practices, a lack of oversight and regulation, and widespread corporate malfeasance led to double-digit unemployment rates, a collapse in home prices, the evaporation of more than half the stock market's value, and the disappearance of nearly $15 trillion in household wealth. It was...