Posted on 06/22/2017 4:35:35 AM PDT by IBD editorial writer
You'd be forgiven for thinking that all is right with the housing market these days. With prices and sales both soaring nationally, the housing panic of 2007 seems like an all-but-forgotten nightmare. But it's still very much with us.
The prestigious State of the Nation's Housing report for 2017, published by Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies just last week, touts the newfound health of the housing market.
"A decade after the onset of the Great Recession, the national housing market is finally returning to normal," the report says. "With incomes rising and household growth strengthening, the housing sector is poised to become an important engine of economic growth."
Indeed, the trends outlined are impressive. In 2016, U.S. home prices rose 5.6%, "finally surpassing the high reached nearly a decade earlier," the report said. And the number of homeowners still underwater on their mortgages now totals just 3.2 million, down from 12.1 million in 2011.
Given such bullish housing trends, Americans might be tempted to think that 2007 was an anomaly, a one-off disaster that won't be repeated. But, in a new first-person account of the financial crisis, a leading housing economist...
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
They also might believe that the Soviet Union was a one-off economic disaster, and that East Germany was one, and Romania, and Ethiopia, and Cuba, and Venezuela, etc., etc.
The laws of economics are as real as the laws of physics. If you violate them, you get a crash, sooner or later.
Balloon mortgages are still a major problem. With Interest rates ready to rocket, a new bubble is likely to burst.
It would be interesting to see graphed just how much of an interest rate rise would put, let’s say 50%, of AMerican mortgages underwater.
This is a site that tracks the liberalism of businesses: https://2ndvote.com/
A “boom” that relies on effectively zero interest rates can’t last.
Exactly. Like a “perpetual motion machine”. Friction eventually wins.
That being said, retail is in total flux right now, and there will be issues there.
I've been in the business since childhood - the market we're in is nothing whatsoever like "perfect storm" crash we went through.
IBD needs to - please - stop preaching BULLSHIT on their pages.
The Fed is in an interesting place. And by interesting, I mean dangerous. They’ve fueled a second housing bubble, but only in select markets, making housing unaffordable again. Now they need to raise rates to “reload” so they can ameliorate the next market meltdown, but raising rates will likely trigger the next market meltdown and raise monthly housing costs for those with adjustable rate mortgages.
The more the government tinkers with the economy, the more economic distortions occur, the more they tinker, the more the distortions.
The best thing they could do is to stop tinkering, but they would have to admit they can’t really control or fix things, and their whole purpose is wrapped up in believing they’re masters of the universe.
Excellent summary!
Does the idiot "expert" in your article even touch on any of that? Ask him this: "When was the last time you sold a piece of residential or commercial real estate?"
His answer might actually be "never."
Barney Frank, head of the Congressional Banking Committee responsible for this travesty, was warned about this very end result in those Congressional meetings, and he uttered his famous line, "We want to roll the dice", and we did... and we lost trillions of dollars in home values and hundreds of billions in tax dollars on guaranteed loans, all to "be nice" to those Special Groups that the SJWs adore and dote upon. For some reason, CNN does not tend to recall this line or this gamble when discussing the Housing Crash.
Having proven that they are beyond stupid, Liberals once again pushed for rules to make mean ol' banks give loans to the Sympathy People yet again, this time under threat of jail from Obama's "Just-us" Department, and so the banks made more bad loans, once again based on Group Identity rather than income, payment history, assets, or home value. Last time, it took 4-6 years for the accumulating failures and defaults and bundling to take their predictable toll, and housing prices went from their high in 2006 to their lows in 2012. The process takes about 5 years after it gets started. Look for the next failure to begin around 2019, just in time for Trump's re-election bid... one of the many landmines left behind by the Obama Administration for CNN to blame on anyone and anything else... and look for prices to tumble for the entirety of his second term to their new lows, just in time for the Pence election bid.
"I do think I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] and OTS [Office of Thrift Supervision]. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing."
- Barney Frank, 9/25/2003
I expect it, and soon.
Isn’t Canada just getting one going as I type this?
An acquaintance of mine bought a house just before the last meltdown. She immediately stopped making her payments while the bank gets its paperwork in order and negotiates with her.
Meanwhile, to this day she is living there rent free. It’s in the Seattle area.
Overall credit quality for all mortgages issued since the recession has been like what it was pre-2003 when standards (or lack thereof) start to get out of control.
Click-bait beats good journalism ...
A recent article in a major local newspaper indicated that there are more than 385,000 vacant homes in New Jersey, which amounts to nearly 10% of the homes across the entire state. Nearly 80,000 of them are in some stage of foreclosure. Think about that for a moment and ask yourself if you would ever underwrite a mortgage here.
My advise would be to get out of debt as fast a possible and to refinance these to 15 Year Fixed Rate or better if at all possible.
We have a 15-year fixed at 4.25%. It has about 7 years to go.
I do not understand that sort of behavior.
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