The economy and the stock market may be recovering from their swoon, but more homeowners than ever are having trouble making their monthly mortgage payments, according to figures released Thursday.No fucking shit. Unemployment is high and if you don't have a job, it's pretty fucking hard to make a mortgage payment.
So we have gone from the foreclosures that were part of the Great Mortgage Swindle, as perpetrated by Countrywide and Goldman Sachs (among others) and now we're into the foreclosures that are happening because millions of people have lost their jobs because of the financial collapse that those fraudsters on Wall Street perpetrated.
Make no mistake about it, it was fraud. They knew what they were doing. They knew that the "securities" they were selling had no core value, their sole worth was that some sucker tomorrow would pay more for them than they sold for today. They had every reason to know that the mortgage companies were creating a huge bubble by deliberately giving mortgages to people who couldn't pay them, which was all done on the sheer speculation that the housing market would go up forever. I say "deliberately", because when the banks were making loans without requiring any proof of ability to pay or any asset verification, then the whole thing was set up to be gamed. It was fraud, a real estate backed Ponzi scheme.
The people who put those deals together made a shitload of cash. Everyone else, even people who had no part in any of it, got screwed. That is why the "official" unemployment rate is 10.2% and the real unemployment rate may even be twice as high.
No fucking shit.
1 comment:
What the media and the political elites regrettably fail to understand is the the economy is not "recovering." It has merely halted its freefall. It is still a much smaller economy with less output (and therefore fewer jobs) than it was two years ago. The annualized 2.5 percent growth of the third quarter is actually pretty anemic and is not enough to absorb even the new entrants to the job market, far less the millions who are still trying to get their old jobs back.
That is, even if this was not the tail end of a devastating downturn, 2.5 percent growth would be cause for fretful concern among policymakers, yet right now they're all high-fiving each other because the economy didn't roll all the way back to the Stone Age. Way...to...GO, Fed.
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