Congratulations Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer.
This is the 500lb anchor Hank Paulson slipped around you ankle while you were hanging out over the weekend. It was another busy Sunday for Hank and the boys. Insolvency never sleeps.
So get back to work America, your financial system needs you—especially on the way down.
This will cost every penny of $200 billion and then some. But at least the Chinese and Bill Gross are happy now.
Housing meanwhile is still falling…..
From Bloomberg by Dan Levy entitled: U.S. Foreclosures Hit Record in August as Housing Prices Fell
“U.S. foreclosure filings rose to a record in August as falling home prices made it harder to sell or refinance homes to pay off the mortgage, RealtyTrac Inc. said.
Owners of 303,879 properties, or one in 416 U.S. households, got a default notice, were warned of a pending auction or foreclosed on last month. That was the most since reporting began in January 2005. Filings increased 27 percent from a year earlier, about half the annual pace of previous months, because of high default totals in August 2007, the Irvine, California- based seller of foreclosure data said in a statement today.
“The chickens have come home to roost,” Jim Croft, founder of the Mortgage Asset Research Institute in Reston, Virginia, said in an interview. “Real estate inflation bailed out an awful lot of bad loans.”
The worst housing slump since the 1930s shows little sign of abating. Home prices in 20 U.S. metropolitan areas declined 15.9 percent in June from a year earlier, according to the S&P/Case- Shiller index. Prices may fall another 10 percent through the end of 2009, according to analysts at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
There are 3.9 million unsold existing single-family homes, the most since at least 1982, according to the Chicago-based National Association of Realtors. There is an 11.1 month supply of existing unsold homes at the current sales pace, up from 4.6 months in September 2005, the Realtors said.”
By the way, you really didn’t expect the banks to be left holding the bags did you?
Now that would be comical.
Some day this war is going to end.
