Wonkette
Remember the Housing Bubble and the gazillion bullshit mortgages that caused the entire global economy to collapse and send us into a terrible World Depression? It’s still going down! The housing crash, that is — one in eight homeowners is now either in default or in foreclosure, a new record!
And now that subprime foreclosures are “only” 43% of the failed loans, prime borrowers have an equal percentage of defaults — 19% prime fixed-rate and 24% prime adjustable-rate mortgages. (The rest are FHA loans and whatever.)
Florida leads the nation in pathetic failure, once again, with 11% of all mortgages in foreclosure. Nevada and Arizona take the silver and bronze (of failure), and California is looking relatively less doomed with 5.2% of all home loans in default.
New home sales tanked again, mortgage rates are creeping back up, and nearly half of all existing home sales are “distressed,” as in foreclosures or short sales or bank-owned or auctions. The median sale price plunged to $169,000 nationwide, 9.5% less than last year — the biggest drop since the Great Depression and only the second decline on record since then.
In other words, Expert Economists say the bottom is here, maybe 5% more price declines this year, and everything is recovering nicely by 2010, the end. Of course, these are the same economists who never saw this coming, because of course you can just loan $400K to an unemployed dishwasher so he can “buy” a stucco box hours from anywhere because that same house will of course be worth $450K next year and the guy can refinance, forever, right?
Mortgage Delinquencies, Foreclosures, Rates Increase [Bloomberg]
Unfortunately the market isn’t failing hard enough in Austin to allow me, on my meager Jiffy Lube/plasma-selling combined salaries, to afford anything. In fact, the pictured tenement would probably still fetch $450,000 if it was located in Hyde Park or Tarrytown.
those stats are wrong…
there is a 100% chance I am not making my house payment
If they moved that house to the Sunset District of San Francisco, they could still sell it as a $500,000 “cozy, bijou fixer-upper”.
Depression era chicks were so hawt! All sinew and gumption.
Man, this would be a great time to buy a house except for the being unemployed and all.
Back during The Boom I heard a real estate guy on the radio pitching condos in Phoenix. He said, “Okay, you buy it for $200K with 5% down. The price goes up 10%, so your place is now worth $220K, and you’ve doubled your money!”
Needless to say I bought six, and have now moved permanently to my beach house on Aruba. Or would have if there hadn’t been all those closing costs, carrying costs, and if the value hadn’t actually gone down 45%.
I highly recommend The Ponzi State from the Feb 8 edition of The New Yorker. The article is subscription only, alas. OTOH, I’m sure everyone who reads Wonkette also subscribes to The New Yorker right? I’d be shocked if you didn’t.
Of course that also means you probably read the article in question so I’m just wasting your time with my comment anyway. oh well, sue me.
Serolf Divad: What do I look like — Eustace Tilley? Sorry, I only read Cigar Afficionado and Juggs.
I borrowed money from B of A today for my bus ticket at 87% interest. I think it was a good deal.
I hear caves are the hot new real estate item now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHPOzQzk9Qo
The smart money is in Coleman tents.
Servo: That would be in-tents speculation. And I’ll be here all week, unfortunately.
V572625694: How about Cigar Afficionados with Juggs? Limbaugh’s on the cover every time. Hawt!
This fallout from the casino economy reminds me of Casino the movie.
Only difference between the bank and the mob is that the mob has the decency of killing you fast when they stick your head in a vise.
Let’s sell Florida to Cuba for a quick ca$h $4,000,000 down using an adjustable-rate loan.
V572625694: Eustace Tilley…very sly. Incidentally, milk makes cigars hard to light.
Those depression peoplez are going to run right into their shack and make some depression babies, that’s what they’re gonna do. I would. Babies don’t cost nuthin’.
V572625694: National Review; Civil War Times; and any paper that carries Savage Love.
Or as Moosekiller Barbie would say, “All of them.”
Internally valid: Awesome, if only we could find a graphic designer who could do the layout without puking every month.
Of course, we’ve got lotsa vacant FEMAdehyde trailers.
mollymcgwire: Narrow Gauge & Short Line Gazette and National Review
And what’s happened to Snowbilly lately? Has she failed to say anything newsworthily stupid for three or four days because she’s on a meth run?
This thirteen percent of America was too busy to pay their mortgages because they were reading all of Judge Sotomayor’s opinions, and finding them poor.
I tipped our Overlords on this but it is not Wonkette post-worthy— but still, it is awesome:
Wasilla’s local Newspaper knows who the anti-Christ is. THEY REALLY DO.
http://www.shortsshortsshorts.com/?p=3430
It’s— THE GAYZ.
Subprimes got by the bitters are still the problem: http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/2009/05/27/real_estate/MBA_mortgage_delinquencies/chart_loan_delinquency.gif
But they all voted for Palin and Senator RetirementVillage, so fuck ‘em.
snideinplainsight: And look what happened to all those Depression Babies? They became the Greatest Generation and saved the world from Nazis and Commies and gave Tom Brokaw a subject to write hundreds of books about. We should all be having babies because maybe they’ll be the Even Greater Generation!
shortsshortsshorts: ““Neither shall he [Antichrist] regard… the desire of women …” for … pedicures, new clothes, girl talk, food/diets, putting clothes in the hamper, etc.
Call me AntiChrist.
4 out of 5 of your paragraphs included numbers, Ken. We are not good with the numbers, as you know. We need more shiny, shiny, jpegs, and gifs.
Why not pay off the defaulting mortgages and be done with it? Make it a bailout of the homeowner and it’ll be cheaper in the long run. And while we’re out it I’d like a used RV in which to live & travel to the great Northwest.
bitchincamaro: Gazillion is an eminent number too, so make that 5 of 5 paragraphs.
shortsshortsshorts: Dumbshit put his PHONE NUMBER on the Jeebus editorial/speculative fiction thingy.
SmutBoffin: For bonus larfs, click on “View Front Page”.
V572625694: I’ve been sorely disappointed that she has yet to weigh in on our new Guatemalan Supreme Court Justice overlord.
SmutBoffin: HAHA I didn’t notice that. *dialing*
shortsshortsshorts: So this antichrist can show up and start the Final War and bring drought and pestilence and fire and famine to all the land, but we won’t be sure if he’s a bad guy until we see him sticking his cock in someone’s ass?
Serolf Divad: The “abstract” is available for free: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/02/09/090209fa_fact_packer. No Wonkette commenter has the patience to read the whole article, anyway. I did, and it was chilling/interesting.
Don’t worry, Florida may be ahead in foreclosures, but we’re still building new houses! Nothing short of Godzilla will ever check Florida sprawl, and even that’s doubtful.
Ken - re photo and tag - don’t believe anyone would be mistaking that place for Paradise…..
Neato, it’s so awesome when *I* am on the news! All this time I thought job loss, pending bankruptcy and eviction were “bad things”. Silly me.
S.Luggo: But the Option Arm shit is still a year away from hitting the reset fan. Only SUPERprime borrowers got Option Arms.
http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/6/6/3/5/8/ar12285043885366.JPG
You know the saying: We are all sub-prime now.
snideinplainsight: Depression couples couldn’t feed babies or afford condoms, either, so assume a lot of buttsecks!
Zhu Bajie
It looks like someone stole the wheels off their Crysler.
I hope the other 87% are paying their bar tabs.
GreyPanter: Serolf Divad: As a New Yorker subscriber and former professional editor I’ll be happy to further abstract the abstract:
“The Florida real estate boom, then bust, of the last ten years proves Americans are stoopid. Especially in Floriduh.”
Yea…. but Congress got a raise, so we should all be happy.
Hooray For Anything: OK, just in case you were not kidding, and since I am a graduate student of history dropout (no advanced degree, not even the masters thingie) let me point out, pedantically, that the babies, the actual infants of the Great Depression, could not, mathmatically-speaking, have been the Greatest Generation who fought & won The Great Patriotic War. Even if born at the beginning, 1929, they would’ve only been 16 at war’s end in 1945.
I mean, I know you were kidding, overall, because that’s what we do here, but specifically about the Greatest Generation, they couldn’t have also been Great Depression babies. Unless they were a breed of super babies who grew to maturity in half the time of regular babies, in which case, yeah. Then they were the Greatest Generation and deserve our thanks, though Tom Brokaw deserves our punch in the face.
I mean, this was the time of eugenics, and who knows what great advances in baby-producing were made in the name of progress and science but which since have been shut away, unknown to the world, like the UFOs in Roswell. The great Lysenko made incredible progress in destroying Soviet harvests with his phenomenal genetic theories, so it could’ve happened here as well. Also.
Pffft Brokaw Opportunist
About.com is registering record hits on it’s “How to build a sod house” section of it’s website.
Pioneer mud-hovels are the new black. Learn all you can about edible weeds while you still have access to the internet.
The Return of Darwinian economics! There are many examples in history of companies who thrived during the Depression. Many of them are now iconic American companies. From Edison’s electric company now GE, IBM, Microsoft McDonald’s they all did one thing in common. http://bit.ly/billionaire_idea