CNN 2010-04-30（在线收听）

Lucky to be alive, a mother, her son and his friends survived a tornado strike on a home in Darlington, South Carolina. Twister picked up a house, flipped it, and it was only with a little warning.

‘Power cut off, and if it wouldn’t have, I would have never heard the tornado and I told you, I must say it’s something like a Mack truck sound. I jumped up and looked out the bathroom window and I’ve seen a piece of tin about 100 feet in the air. I knew, I knew some wasn’t right.’

‘I looked and I said get in the hall. So we sat down in the hall and just held each other. And then we were sitting on top of all that when it was over.’

Well, the family plans to rebuild with help from friends and neighbors.

This is the house Jack bought, Jack Booken, an Aberdeen, New Jersey heating repairman. Jack fell behind on his mortgage. So far behind that he lost the house to a foreclosure. On Monday, it was put up for auction at the Monmouth County Hall of Records.

‘Thank you for inviting me to appear today.’

This is hedge fund manager John Paulson. He bet that Jack and thousands of other Americans would not be able to pay their mortgages. Paulson bet right and made a billion dollars. This is Goldman Sachs, the nation’s most prestigious investment firm. Goldman Sachs set up the bet for John Paulson. Jack’s house was one of the cards and Goldman Sachs was supposed to be shuffling the deck. German Bank IKB bet that Jack and thousands of other home owners could pay their mortgages. IKB bet wrong and lost 115 million. This is the US Securities and Exchange Commission. It says Goldman Sachs committed fraud by letting Paulson pick the cards at the gambling table without telling IKB.

‘Allegations against Goldman Sachs are that they sort of loaded the dice, stacked the deck by designing a portfolio that was weaker than average.’

The SEC says IKB was a victim. But IKB is not considered to victim in King County, Washington, home to Seattle. King County bought one of the investments IKB was selling. It lost more than 20 million dollars. And these are King County’s libraries, also victims of that losing bet.

‘I did have to scale back the operation of the library system and to look more carefully at all the things that we are doing.’