THE FINANCIAL CRISIS: KINDA LIKE FLOODING IN MEYERLAND A rising tide sinks all prices! “When Dr. Mahmoud Amin El-Gamal, chairman of the Rice economics department, is asked — as he has often been in recent days — ‘What’s is going on with our financial institutions?’ he likes to begin his answer with an analogy of local origin. ‘It’s a lot like in the 1980s when the flooding in Meyerland caused the price of all the houses in the area to go down,’ he said, ‘even those houses that did not flood.’ El-Gamal said the same can be said of mortgage securities, many of which were ‘perfectly fine,’ but had been grouped with debts that would likely continue to go unpaid.” [West University Examiner]