patrick.net

How you like your big gov dems now?

Obama's statement was just lip service bullshit.
The only thing that they can do is buy some mortgages from guys paying 7% and replace them with 4%.
House prices are going down, it's gravity. The bubble will deflate after it has popped.
Nothing Obama nor anyone else says can create the ability of people to get a down payment and a job out of thin air by Obama running his mouth.
Who cares who is underwater in his mortgage and how far? He should either 1. pay the mortgage or 2. leave it to the bank.
Places like Seaside, CA had houses go from $300K to $700K in 6 years. Now they are $269K and falling. They fell 7.2% in 2011.
Nothing anyone can do can stop this. Why? because the houses are still too expensive for the incomes of the people who live there, $49K.

So far, these things have generally been passed by our congress regardless of party affiliations.

If you think about it, borrowers don't really choose whether the loan held is fannie/freddie or private. The private loans are probably held by the banks because of lower risk profile. It only makes sense to bring it up to par with Fannie and Freddie.

The banks are no longer lending money to just anyone who can hold a pen. Why do you think those times are coming back?

My friend here who has a house that was once "worth" a small fortune always moans and complains that the govt. is not "helping" housing. He is of course a hypocrite: he likes Ron Paul, he has a safe with some silver and gold coins in it, has guns in case of a zombie apocalypse, etc. His business is under the radar using craigslist/ebay and multiple paypal accounts.
He starts to get upset when I tell him that those short brown people pushing baby strollers, those panhandlers, those baristas, those dilettantes hanging at Starbucks, Verve, Lulus, Santa Cruz Roasting Co, are not going to scrape together $120K to put down on a house around here. Not ever.
I tell him to look around him when he's buying his macadamia nuts at Trader Joes and tell me which of the kooks in there will have that $120K jingling in their jeans.
Forget them qualifying for a $500K mortgage.

clambo says

I tell him to look around him when he's buying his macadamia nuts at Trader Joes and tell me which of the kooks in there will have that $120K jingling in their jeans.
Forget them qualifying for a $500K mortgage.

You want kooks? Try The Food Bin and The Herb Room!

But in all seriousness, I think that most people are somewhat like your friend in that housing is an entitlement. Aspiring-to-home-ownership is thrust into Americans' faces from the day they are born. Lots of us are on here venting because we see how messed up the system is, and despite that, we are all still complaining because we WANT to own houses. Home-ownership is sort of a sacred cow politically, and people also see it as such.

The bubble years really messed up people's mentality toward housing, and many people bought into it (and are still bought into it). It is just going to take time for the rosy vision of housing to die. You would think that it would go away fast given the market's behavior in the last 5 years, but people are eternally optimistic. It is fairly easy to convince someone of a good thing, and once you get them to buy-into it, it will take a lot longer to get them to give up on it than it took to get them into it once they are personally invested.

The market will continue to correct itself. Having big government and crooked private party cartels involved makes the process agonizingly slow. Despite this, the foundation of our economy is rotten and we can only put fresh paint on the exterior walls so many times before it actually comes apart. At that point, we will at least be forced to deal with the foundation issues. Yay, metaphors.

Sometimes I watch an old netflix movie. In Barefoot in the Park, 1967, Robert Redford is a lawyer in manhattan and he and Jane Fonda have their honeymoon in the Plaza hotel. The rate=$30/night.
Later they have an overpriced crummy apartment in the Village downtown: $125/month.
Robert Redford complains because he has so little dough left over.
Rents and real estate values generally went up at the rate of wages rising (inflation).
ONLY when banks started opening the floods of easy money to anyone breathing to buy houses did the value of houses rise anywhere above inflation.
Those days were an aberration. They were a mistake, and they won't be repeated (at least for mortgages).
Renting is not a death sentence. My businesswoman grandmother 1. always had dough 2. always rented houses 3. died with dough
She had an interesting business, that some readers may like. She had an antique business in New York.
Who were her suppliers? Some were those who sold her awesome things for cheap because they were WIPED OUT in 1929!
Grandma had some cash and she could buy their nice antiques for cash on the barrel head and later sell them.
Maybe some of her sources were widows whose husbands jumped off tall buildings when they were wiped out in the stock market crash of 29?
Maybe she had an irrational fear of: 1. debt 2. leverage 3. risk. This might explain her dislike of mortgages
Either way, she had a wonderful lifestyle, lived in awesome places, and didn't die broke.