The Coming Collapse of the Real Estate Market

Of Two Minds ^ | 14 Oct 2010 | Charles Hugh Smith

[highlander_UW]

Wow, 70% of homeowners in NV have negative equity?! Ouch.

[Erik Latranyi]

With the “financial reform” legislation in place, the federal gov’t can dissolve banks at will and takeover others.

As the mortgage meltdown takes place, the federal gov’t will take near-complete control of our banking system, leaving only a handful of small, private banks competing against a massive federal monopoly on lending.

Just think, nearly all deposits will be under the control of Uncle Sam, allowing them to use it for whatever purposes they wish.

[giotto]

what we have is a system of private ownership of the revenue and profits generated by the mortgage industry and public absorption of the risks and losses.

In other words, "Heads, they win, tails, we lose."

[pepsionice]

Just a simple observation...but if you had bought a house four months ago and moved in completely....then in the midst of November...you got court papers to move out because of the bank’s screw-up....you’d turn awful hostile.

Imagine thirty thousand folks being asked to leave a house they bought in the last six months. Imagine a hundred thousand families told to vacate.

This is the biggest mess I’ve seen in years, and it’s state attorney general’s fixing it? That’s really the kicker to this whole thing.

[Talf]

the article is misleading.

the 1.2 trillion buy of mortgage-backed securities
by the Fed
happened in Oct ‘08

[rrrod]

four months? this may go back yrs. We have a total disaster in the making.

[LomanBill]

"The system for financing mortgages and regulating that financing has failed, completely and utterly. "

 

 

"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/

[justa-hairyape]

And 1/3 of homeowners in Kalifornia are underwater.

[catfish1957]

millions of underwater homeowners realize they can stop paying their mortgages with no near-term consequence because the foreclosure system is frozen.

So those like myself who were frugal, responsible, and paid off the mortgage are the real ones getting screwed.

[Psalm 73]

Yup - I've got "near negative equity".
Bought my 1st home at the peak of the bubble (well, I know that now, I had no way of knowing that when I bought).
Yet I pay my mortgage faithfully every month - a contract is a contract - besides, I have to live somewhere.
Recently re-financed and shaved off 1.5% and six years.
Still waiting for Obama to pay my mortgage, though..........

[raybbr]

Hmmmm.... This doesn’t even address commercial real estate.

[motor_racer]

bump for later

[surfer]

That’s the other foot...all of it right now is being artificially kept afloat...sooner or later it will drop.

These numbers don’t even represent the entire picture it is estimated that banks are holding off “reporting” over 7 million additional mortgages that should be in foreclosure.

Sooner or later the piper has to be paid...we are at least 8 years before this mess is cleared up.

The bottom line...no one will be able to get a mortgage until this is cleared up.

[LomanBill]

>>the buyers who fix up foreclosed homes for resale.

Let them eat soup along with the rest of the demoralizing "fiscally conservative" Rainbow predators.

 

Predatory Interior Decorator/Flipper:   Waiter therthz a bar of thoap in our thoup!

 

Tyler Durden:  Maybe somebody's telling you to clean up your act, Sir... err Maam; err....  say - WTF are you pretending to be anyhow?

  Ameriquest -  Natural Born Predators  

 

"What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.

 

It's a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided into four basic stages.

 

The first stage being "demoralization"...."

---KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2095202/posts

 

[SomeCallMeTim]

bttt

[sodpoodle]

Y’all see where this is going.

Every ‘underwater, mis-titled’ home will be confiscated by HUD, re-classified as public housing and the government will collect rent based on the ability to pay.

Never waste a crisis!!!!!

[LomanBill]

[So those like myself who were frugal, responsible, and paid off the mortgage are the real ones getting screwed.]

 

I hear ya.  But when I'm tempted to think that - I just remember being a debt-free home owner is  a whole lot better than living under Section-8 / McFeudalism (or whatever mutant variant arises from this mess) the government teat sucklers indenture themselves and their children to.

[LomanBill]

>>and it’s state attorney general’s fixing it?

 

The same legal suuuper geniuses who did the Ameriquest settlement?

 

"Argent is safe from investigation because the government got their $325 million settlement from Ameriquest and won't be looking into Argent, per the settlement agreement. "

 

Dear Mr. Lee:   I was previously employed by Argent Mortgage for two and a half years and managed, among other areas, the corporation's fraud investigation, borrower complaints and repurchase departments. There are currently over 568 open fraud investigations involving hundreds of brokers and hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent loans that are being covered up by top executives in the company. If a broker sustains a certain monthly volume, Argent management looks the other way and, not only does not suspend the bad brokers, but knowingly sells these fraudulent loans on the secondary market to unwitting investors.
  I was terminated today and left with just my purse in tow, but I have names of individuals in the company who need to be served with subpoenas to enable them to turn over their spreadsheets and boxes full of documentation and evidence of all the fraud they have found that is being covered up by Argent Mortgage's executive management. The state regulators need to know the truth about the blind eye Argent turns to the fraud perpetrated on innocent consumers by high volume brokers. They also need to be aware that Argent knowingly bundles these fraudulent loans and sells them as mortgage-backed securities on Wall Street, thereby compromising the SEC, as well as our country's economic stability.
  At a recent fraud seminar attended by hundreds of mortgage lenders in Washington D.C. a week ago, an attorney who works for Argent's retained law firm, Buchalter Nemer, stood up and told the seminar attendees that the wholesale lenders in the audience had better beware, unless their name is Argent. Argent is safe from investigation because the government got their $325 million settlement from Ameriquest and won't be looking into Argent, per the settlement agreement. I hope this isn't true because Argent Mortgage funded over $50 billion in 2005 and is gearing up to fund well over $80 billion dollars of fraudulent loans in 2007.

http://www.innercitypress.org/ameriquest.html

[InterceptPoint]

What was the mechanism for the Fed’s $1.2 trillion MBS purchase? Who were the sellers? The money the Fed used was, I assume, created from NOTHING. Such a deal.