Foreclosures Hit Record High This Month
Filed under: Foreclosure — admin @ 10:36 pm
From Bloomberg today: U.S. Mortgage Foreclosures, Delinquencies Reach Highs
Everyone wants to know when this “market correction” is going to end. You can watch media pundits and dime store economists throwing their expertise into the ring. CEOs of the largest Wall Street firms underscore the monkey with a dart theory of prognostication, considering that we have reached the “bottom” almost every quarter since the inception of this fiasco. In reality, it doesn’t seem that anyone really has a clue. Paulsen has been wrong on at least three occasions; however, to his credit, it’s his job to inspire confidence in the market knowing that his words carry the possibility of dismantling entire economies. The Administration still maintains a delusional optimism that things really aren’t as bad as they seem.
This month we hit a new bottom… Foreclosures are at an all time high….unemployment is exceeding gloomy expectations… the Fed doesn’t have a lot of wiggle room to lower interest rates… the stock market had its worse selloff since June. Fortunately, the price of gasoline has finally started to drop… easing the pain on the middle class. Visa and Mastercard are having a great year, as many Americans leverage their credit again to maintain some quality of life.
OK… you remember all of that supply talk about gas… how there just isn’t enough oil to go around and China is sucking it all up. Now, mind you we were supposed to “buy” that this all converged in a short three year span to be a supply crisis… Because the price of a barrel of oil tripled in three short years. Remember. And PR firms representing the finest of the oil industry insisted that this was all just supply and demand in the market… remember. Well, the US lowered its consumption by 5% this summer in response to the price of gas…in the last month, we have seen that this caused a 25% reduction in the price of gas since its acme? You can add… I can add… and all I am saying is – um, that dog doesn’t hunt. This isn’t the market… this is Wall Street’s ability to move the market through speculation.
Just because they moved from the uber-lucrative MBS desk to the now uber-lucrative commodities desk doesn’t mean that they learned any lesson about unacceptable risk or about the consequences of massive transfers of wealth. And if the speculators are able to influence the consumer habits of our ENTIRE country… could we maybe toss a little oversight in there? I mean, I remember Gordon Gekko… I wanted to be an honest version of him… but maybe it’s time to stop allowing the sole pursuit of a house in the Hamptons to frame our economic policy. Their outlook is so granular and sees profits in seconds, minutes and days… whereas homeowners and common Americans look at our profit in investments in terms of years and decades.
It just seems that in the pursuit of staying true to bad and flawed ideology… like unfettered free market… we don’t react to reality. Because like the price of gas, it isn’t really based on supply and demand but speculation on supply and demand… that isn’t a true free market, unless you are the one getting the new home in the Hamptons on a short sale.
Stumble it!