Fate Of The States: The New Geography Of American Prosperity (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
A producer for the CBS news show had been hounding me for weeks, begging me to appear in a segment about the looming state and municipal budget crisis. Steve Kroft had already interviewed New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Illinois state comptroller Dan Hynes, and despite some initial misgivings, I agreed to speak with Kroft about all that was at stake economically. It was a wide-ranging interview. When he asked about municipal-bond defaults, I told him that they were coming and that investors would be wise to ignore conventional wisdom. “When individual investors look to people that are supposed to know better,” I told Kroft, “they’re patted on the head and told, ‘It’s not something you need to worry about.’ It’ll be something to worry about within the next twelve months.”1 Muni bond defaults did increase 400 percent in 2011, to $25 billion from $5 billion in 2010, according to the Distressed Debt Securities newsletter.2 But for the record, I never said those fifty to a hundred defaults would all happen in 2011, which was how my critics spun the story.
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