SiliconBeat

Most of us have shared certain economic hardships recently — high gas prices, falling home values, diminished 401(k) balances. A subset of us have been dealing with foreclosures and job losses, problems that many of us can easily empathize with. Here’s one that may take a bit more of an imaginative leap: the margin call.

This week Howard Lester, the chief executive of Williams-Sonoma (ticker:WSM), the San Francisco-based retailer of deluxe goodies for our kitchens, living rooms, bath rooms and nurseries, was forced to sell 1 million shares of his company’s stock that “had been previously pledged to collateralize a loan and were sold as the result of a margin call at the discretion of the lending institution,” according to his filing with the SEC.

Footnoted.org, the Web site that helped inspire Docu-Drama, has been keeping an eye on the developing trend, which looks limited to certain high-net-worth individuals who actually have millions of shares they can use as collateral.

So apart from indulging in a bit of schadenfreude, who cares? Other shareholders, for one. Shares of Williams-Sonoma, which touched a 52-week low today of $11.38, have lost more than half their value so far this year. They are down 40 percent so far this month, and lost 12 percent this week alone. The last thing they needed were an extra supply of them for sale.