US home foreclosures top one million mark

[Neubarth]

US home foreclosures top one million mark


The number of US homes in foreclosure topped the one million mark for the first time ever, according to figures released this week by federal agencies. The continued deepening of the housing crisis is being driven by the relentless economic squeeze on working people, confronted with declining wages and persistent and growing mass unemployment.
US home foreclosures top one million mark

 

[Neubarth]

And some people actually believe the Obama administration lies that the economy is improving.

Each foreclosed home adds to the economic blight. Things are getting worse and worse, NOT better and better.

 

[waltky]

Obama gonna fix it...

Administration proposes banks spend $20 billion to fix botched foreclosures
Monday, March 28, 2011 - Congressional Republicans are moving to shut down President Obama’s $30 billion program to help struggling homeowners pay their mortgages, but the White House appears to have already found a substitute plan.

The administration has proposed requiring the nation’s largest banks to spend $20 billion modifying loans of delinquent borrowers to make them more affordable as part of a deal settling charges that the banks botched the paperwork on thousands of foreclosures. If the plan succeeds, the president would attain a key goal sought by community groups and Democratic grass-root constituencies whose support will be critical for his re-election without having to spend further federal dollars on the program. But House Republicans are also seeking to make good on campaign promises to unwind the unpopular housing bailout programs set up in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

On Tuesday, they will unveil bills to try to phase out government assistance to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and are moving on plans to scrap the $30 billion program Mr. Obama set up in 2009 to help homeowners who are underwater or behind on their mortgages. Legislators are motivated not only by their drive to eliminate what they view as unnecessary spending but to kill what remains of the bank bailout program or TARP targeted by tea party groups, which is the source of funding for the homeowner assistance program. Some conservative Republicans are concerned that the program sets a bad precedent by helping a minority of deadbeat borrowers who have stopped paying their mortgages even as the majority of homeowners struggle to keep making payments despite financial strains.

Legislators say such debt-forgiveness programs can create a kind of “moral hazard” that could encourage more of the one in four homeowners who are underwater to stop paying their mortgages in hopes of receiving federal help and forgiveness. “Congress should move swiftly to end the presidents disastrous mortgage program,” said Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican and co-sponsor of a bill to end the administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP).

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[william the wie]

There is some demographic and mortgage data 2011 will be the worst year of the housing downturn:

At 5 years past the boom the last of the reset foreclosures should be this year.

This will be the worst year for the age related buying market for several years.

The other side of the coin:

The financial reform act is going to make housing harder to buy. 20% minimum downpayment is really going to shrink the buyer market.

The cumulative pipeline of foreclosed housing is now at more than 16 years backlog of current sales rate.

Energy and housing costs are driving migrations primarily to the southeast and away from the northeast and to a lesser degree the southwest and west coast. The Okie and Black migrations are reversing. In the case of Black flight from Jim Crow the reversal of migration pattern, if current trends continue, will lead to absolute population loss of northern Blacks this decade. That is going to ruin the urban real estate market throughout the northeast.

 

[waltky]

Is like bein' in housing market quicksand...

Foreclosures crush home prices
May 10, 2011 -- Home prices continued to plummet during the first three months of 2011, falling 4.6% from a year earlier.

The U.S. median price, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), dropped to $158,700 for a single family house. Condo prices fell even harder -- 10.4% to $152,900. The median home price has now slumped 30% from its 2006 high of $227,100, and prices have fallen nearly 7% so far this year. "We're seeing prices dropping faster than they did in 2010," said Pat Newport, an analyst with IHS Global Insight. "That's troubling. Falling home prices precipitated the recession and are slowing the recovery."

NAR blamed much of the latest price drop on sales of foreclosed properties. These "distressed" property sales accounted for 39% of the market, up from 36% from a year earlier. Distressed properties, often in poor condition and are priced to move, sell for about 20% less than conventional home sales. Those sales attract speculators, investors and cash buyers who gravitate toward lower priced homes, said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for NAR. (How to buy a foreclosure)

The market for distressed properties may further expand over the next few months. Falling prices have sent more mortgage borrowers underwater, owing more on their mortgage balances than their homes are worth. That makes them more likely to default on loans. "That's a key problem," said Newport. "There are a lot of bad loans in the foreclosure pipeline and we don't know how many strategic defaults [people walking away from their mortgages] will result."

Of the 153 home markets covered by the report, Honolulu recorded the highest median price, $579,300. San Jose, Calif., the heart of Silicon Valley, was second at $545,000, and Anaheim-Santa Ana, Calif. was third at $511,800. The lowest priced markets were in the Rust-Belt: Youngstown, Ohio ($55,400); Lansing, Mich. ($64,400); and Toledo, Ohio ($64,900). The biggest losers were Gulfport, Miss. (down 22.8% to $99,400); Akron, Ohio (off 21.4% to $74,900); and Salem, Ore.(down 20.6% to $153,500).

Source

 

[waltky]

Still not seein' the light at the end of the tunnel of foreclosures...

Foreclosure flood may not have crested yet
5/20/2011 - More than 4 million seriously delinquent borrowers are at risk

If the national foreclosure crisis were a baseball game, we would be in about the top of the sixth. And we may have to go to extra innings. Since the housing market peaked in 2006, some 6.5 million homes have been lost to foreclosure. There are likely another 4.3 million more homeowners who are “seriously delinquent,” meaning they are more than three months behind in their payments, according to data released by the Mortgage Bankers Association this week. Many of those homeowners will soon enter the foreclosure pipeline.

Though the pace of new foreclosures has fallen recently, that is largely the result of lenders choking on the torrent of paperwork created by the millions of foreclosures already in progress. After lenders tried to speed the process and cut corners by “robo-signing” documents, bank regulators last month ordered them to clean up their act – saying those practices had jeopardized the “safety and soundness” of the banking system. Some 14 of the biggest mortgage lenders were ordered to come up with a plan to fix the problem within 60 days. When they do, analysts expect the pace of foreclosures to pick up again.

There is some good news in the latest data. The number of “early-stage” delinquencies —people who are between one and three months behind in their payments — has fallen, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist with Moody’s Analytics. As of April, 1.9 million first mortgage loans were 30 to 90 days overdue — down from a peak of 2.7 million in April 2009. Zandi says the “normal” level of early stage delinquencies is about 1.5 million. That means the flood of people falling behind on their mortgages — due to exploding mortgage payments, job loss or other reasons — may have peaked. But those 4.3 million “seriously delinquent” homeowners have yet to receive foreclosure notices, which means the river has not yet crested downstream.

When those foreclosures occur, they will create another wave of “distressed” sales as banks move quickly to move those properties off their books. Distressed sales have been the major force pushing home prices lower; if the price of the foreclosed house across the street falls by 25 percent, you’ll have a pretty hard time convincing someone to buy your house at “full price.” Falling prices mean many homeowners owe more than their home is worth. As of the end of last year more than 11 million — or 23 percent — of borrowers were in a "negative equity position," according to the data out this week from CoreLogic. Collectively those homeowners owe their lenders $750 billion more than their properties are worth. With very few lenders willing to modify mortgage terms, some of those homeowners are opting to walk away.

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[sparky]

If you believe that economic treason can exist, and can be a threat to our national security, you may wish to consider this>

A New Wall Street Investigation: Is the Hammer Finally Coming Down? | Rolling Stone Politics | Taibblog | Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy

This investigation has the potential to be a Mother of All Nightmares situation for the banks for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the decision to go after the securitization process is a total prosecutorial bullseye. This is the ugly heart of the wide-scale fraud scheme of the bubble era. Again, the business model during this time was a giant bait-and-switch scam. Sleazy lenders like Countrywide and New Century first created huge masses of bad loans, committing every conceivable kind of fraud to get people into loans (from doctoring income statements with white-out to phonying FICO scores to engineering fake appraisals). They then moved the bad loans quickly to the big banks, which pooled them and chopped them up (this is the “securitization” process), sprinkled hocus-pocus math on them, and them sold them to suckers around the world as AAA-rated securities.



The questions Schneiderman will seek to answer are these: did the banks securitize loans they knew were fraudulent, throwing the rotten mortgages into the stew before serving them to customers? Did they also commit insurance fraud by duping the bond insurers (known as “monoline” insurers) into thinking the mortgages were not as risky as they really were? And did they participate in the fraud scheme on a more basic level by lending huge amounts of money to the Countrywides of the world, knowing that they in turn would immediately use that money to create the bad loans? In other words, did the banks finance the fraud in addition to brokering it?


Those of you who would coin yourselves conservative alongside the shenanigans of corporate whores might want to rethink your position in light of the growing status quo epithanys>

The Washington Current: Massive 6-to-1 Majority Favors Tougher Regulation of Wall Street

An overwhelming 83 percent of adults think that recent events have shown that "Wall Street should be subject to tougher regulation." At the same time, by almost 2-to-1, a strong 62 percent to 34 percent majority believes that "Wall Street is absolutely essential."

The problem is that few U.S. adults trust or have confidence in the people who run Wall Street, and think they are overpaid. By more than 2-to-1, they believe that most people on Wall Street would be willing to break the law if they could make a lot of money and get away with it, and that most successful people on Wall Street do not deserve to make the money they earn.

 

[B. Kidd]

Wall St. no longer has any allegiance to the United States. That generation of businessmen (returning WWII vets) have died off.

 

[Truthmatters]

this whole thing could ahve been prevented if the safgaurds in the Gramm leach biliely act had not been held up by the Cox SEC.

They held up the broker definitions for years and did not impliment any until right before Obama took office.

Bush and team gamed the system to allow the banks to make anyone a broker and with that the banks could make tons of cash writing sub primes and then rolling them into securities with dupe brokers selling them to unsuspecting buyers.

If there was NO ONE to buy these shit sandwhiches they would not have been written.