Posted on 02/13/2014 10:28:40 PM PST by Nachum
Wolf Richter www.testosteronepit.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
From Federal-Reserve-fueled bubble to debilitating return to reality – reality being a financial calamity – to Federal-Reserve-hyper-fueled bubble: that’s the US housing market over the last ten years. There are many places around the country, including some cities in Silicon Valley, where home values are now higher than they were at the peak of the last bubble. Of course, no one at the Fed or in government calls it “bubble.” They’re talking about the housing “recovery.”
But the excesses and speculators are back, and private equity funds and highly leveraged REITs are all over it, buying up every single-family home in sight, and now Wall-Street-engineering firms have come up with a new and improved contraption, a synthetic structured security that on its polished surface looks like that triple-A rated mortgage-backed toxic waste that helped blow up the banks. But this time, it’s different. The securities are backed by sliced and diced rental payments from single-family homes that are, hopefully, rented out [read.... Another Exquisitely Reengineered Frankenstein Housing Monster].
So wither this “recovery?”
Foreclosure filings – default notices, scheduled auctions, and bank repossessions – suddenly jumped 8% to 124,419 in January across the nation, according to RealtyTrac. Which left some people scratching their heads. A mild uptick was expected after the holidays, but 8%? And what about the polar vortices – weren’t they supposed to have slowed things down to a crawl?
OK, foreclosure filings were still down 18% from a year earlier, the 40th month in a row that they declined on an annual basis. But it was the smallest annual decline since September 2012. And the 8% jump from December was the largest such increase since May 2012. Crummy as they were, these national averages covered up some, let's say, interesting phenomena in a number
(Excerpt) Read more at zerohedge.com ...
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the article doesn’t go into it but there were a great many banks holding off on foreclosing at the govts request. Maybe that just ran out. While i think the economy sucks the number could be an anomaly.
As goes Caifornia.....so goes the rest of the states.
Not sure that’s true anymore, now that CA is (purportedly) bright blue.
TEA might sweep through that wholeseome once-mighty State this Nov, you never know.
All the numbers being reported by this government is phony. Certainly a lot of this is politically motivated and the dishonesty of the news media. But I also think it some of it is to prevent panic.
That info about the economy not being good was certainly unexpected...
wig, I agree. the banks are unloading the loans they’ve been holding on the books.
An addition is this: some above talked phony numbers and here it is. Banks could carry bad loans and many do and the derivative market is saturated with them. As long as they carried these bad loans ( whether the homeowner is still living in the dwelling even after 2+ years of no payments or being vacant for 2+ years) banks still carried these loans as at loan value vs real worth.
The Federal Reserve is trying their hardest to back these banks with 0% loans via $85 billion (now $75billion) to lend out to you to help you keep spending (on credit) to help the banks.
Had to keep things under the lid ‘til after the elections, they did.
Who is NOT compromised, by this *administration*, any more?
This is the start of another clean-out phase. Prices have risen to where it is now advantageous to foreclose, write off the bad loan, and then re-sell the property for a minimal net loss - before the housing market crashes again due to the glut of homes dumped on the market by the foreclosing banks during the endless Obamanomics depression.
Anybody hear anything from Christopher Dodd or Barney Frank?
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