My brother sounded neither relieved nor beleaguered on the phone. But his voice seldom varies. If there were two bears wrestling in his living room, he might mention it in passing and then only to make fun of one for falling.

Forty years ago, he flew helicopters in Vietnam. When you’ve been shot at multiple times, life’s lesser distractions tend not to weigh so heavily in ensuing years.

He takes a wiseacre view of most things that come his way. Even hurricanes.

My brother lives in Katy, Texas, a city on the western fringe of the Houston metropolitan area. I called him as Hurricane Ike approached last week to check on his plans. He planned to stay put.

So I did the worrying for him. And after news reports said the storm had passed, I called again to make sure he hadn’t blown away.

Still there, my brother assured me. Lots of stuff scattered about. No electricity for a while, but he had a generator to power some critical appliances. No damage that couldn’t be repaired.

His voice betrayed no vindication in his decision to stay. Actions have consequences, he knows. Things work out sometimes, but that hardly means they always will.

The Census Bureau indicates that only about 3 percent of American residents today were living at the time of the stock market crash in 1929. Still, that leaves millions of people who remember Black Tuesday on Wall Street.

To those folks, a question goes begging: Did that day, all those years ago, seem like Monday?

On Monday, financial commentators used words like “turmoil” and “crisis” and “meltdown.” Some even used the word “unprecedented,” though that adjective almost never lives up to its billing.

It remains a fact that Lehman Brothers, a banking operation that survived the global economic mayhem of the 1930s, filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday. And Bank of America Corp. came to the rescue of another old-school investment house, Merrill Lynch & Co., washed over in bad paper.

The Dow dropped more than 4 percent on all the bad news.

Experts blame the bursting of the housing bubble. “Bubble” proves an apt image since the monetary backing of many of the nation’s home loans appeared thin on the day they were written.

Lenders forgot that risk played into the equation. Turns out, it matters that some homeowners are not loan-worthy.

You can’t really blame someone wanting the home ownership piece of the American dream. RealtyTrac, a company that keeps tabs on home foreclosures, identifies 111 such properties in St. Joseph. All but four are west of Interstate 29, a part of the city where housing prices are generally lower.

Those persons in this squeeze saw only a place to put their bed. They didn’t anticipate being sub-primed into a bad situation.

But those doling out the easy mortgages saw a quick cash turnaround for themselves, at the street level and all the way up to the Wall Street level.

That’s why “unprecedented” doesn’t work. Greed has a long track record.

In a world lubricated by money, actions always have consequences. Some folks can ride out the worst. But lenders should have seen the storm coming.

Ken Newton’s column runs on Tuesday and Sunday.