“All humor aside, I do find it mind-boggling that the foreclosure madness has gone on this long. I sure woulda expected pitchforks and torches in the hands of angry mobs of the dispossessed.”

So far, most that have been foreclosed on think they got over on someone for awhile and finally got caught…they never qualified to own homes in the first place and should be renters. They were pawns, used ultimately by Wall Street, to facilitate selling so much securitized product that the losses seem to never end. They can always go back to renting.

About “recovery 2015″, yeah, I sugar-coated it…what I really see is “major declines over 2015″…but they will spin it as a recovery.

“Recovery in 2015.”

Sir, you are an incorrigible optimist. The Japanese are still in decline, entering their 19th year following their own real estate bubble imploding in 1990. We are following a very similar policy to date, pouring government funds (i.e., borrow money using the taxpayers’ credit card) into the dead/dying financial industry and generally wrecking the financial infrastructure on a quasi-permanent basis.

2015! Ha!

All humor aside, I do find it mind-boggling that the foreclosure madness has gone on this long. I sure woulda expected pitchforks and torches in the hands of angry mobs of the dispossessed.

Well, he certainly has been consistent. Either that or his speech writers are kept on a steady cocaine diet.

So the old guard puts Obama in charge for a new takeoff of our economy. The American people are mostly on board. The crew is disciplined and well trained. The “geese” filibuster to destruction the engines of economic takeoff for a healthy economy rather than allow success. They destroy their carreers (career suicide) by their actions. Obama “lands” the “economy” softly on a river of liquidity. The economy “sinks” but the people survive, poorer but thankful of having a skilled pilot. Next up are determined efforts to keep “geese” away from the “airports”.

There is nothing that can be done short of armed conflict that will stop the ongoing international wage arbitrage where, for example, the Chinese peasant enters the industrial work force making widgets to get better pay than he got at subsistence farming, but his doing so drives down the wages of the American worker that was already making widgets for a princely salary, with benefits. Until the peasant’s wages and the American worker’s wages roughly equillibrate in terms of buying power, the arbitrage will continue. When an hour’s worth of labor in China (or elsewhere–pick a trading partner) buys a Big Mac combo, supersized, like it does for min wage workers here, then wages in America will stop dropping.

As for housing, wages did not drive the prices up. Plain and simply, too much money/credit did, causing housing to become a speculative investment vehicle instead of a home. Wages for American workers have barely risen, on a real, inflation-adjusted basis, since the 70’s (international wage arbitrage, above). Housing prices have much left to fall to return to the fundamental value in the main benefit of ownership, i.e., as shelter. Anything, including preventing (which is really only forestalling) foreclosures that tries to make an artificial bottom in housing will only delay the inevitable.