It was Halloween and we heard a horror story, but it won't depend on the season, and the victim

could be you or me or anybody who has that American dream of home ownership. It's worth listening

closely to the man who came into the studios of KCRW. He's Aaron Glantz. He's a journalist,

and he's author of a new book called Home Wreckers, How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins,

hedge fund magnates, crooked banks, and vulture capitalists suckered millions out of their homes

and demolished the American dream.

That's quite a title.

It's great to have you with us.

Good to be with you.

I love the title, Home Wreckers.

It has a kind of soap opera quality to it. But that's not really what this is about.

It's not about people breaking up homes in a romantic sense.

It's about real estate.

Well, what I wanted to know was why is America so unstable?

Why are people so angry?

Why are populist politicians like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders so successful?

If the unemployment rate is so low and the Dow Jones Industrial average is so high,

everything is going great, supposedly, but everyone knows it's not going great.

So I decided to look at the eight million homes all across America that were lost to foreclosure

and ask what happened to them. They didn't all disappear. And, you know, it's important for your

listeners to know that the homeownership rate didn't just decline in 2008 and 2009 during the

exact housing bus. It continued to decline all the way until 2016 when it hit a 50-year low.

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