IT’S LIKE A RECOVERY, BUT WITH NO EQUITY, SAVINGS, CONSUMER SPENDING, JOBS, RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS, INNOVATION, STRONG CURRENCY, AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE, BASIC SHELTER, OR LONG-TERM PROSPECTS FOR A COMPETITIVE MODERN ECONOMY: “The housing market continues to threaten signs of an economic recovery, with new data released on Thursday showing an all-time high of Americans falling behind on loan payments and the rate of home foreclosures unlikely to peak until late in 2010.” But the stock markets are up! Everyone in America owns bundles of good stocks, right? Right?? [The Hill]

NATION OF UNDERWATER HOMEOWNERS: According to some estimates, about 20 percent of people with mortgages owe more on their homes than what they’re actually worth. Your mileage may vary depending on whether there are a lot of foreclosures in your area, because fire-sale pricing will naturally depress surrounding home values even more than just a gradual dropoff in the sales price of non-foreclosed homes. Also, owing 105% of your house’s value is a hell of a lot better than owing, say, 200%, but both count as “underwater.” The bottom line is this: if you own real estate of any sort, you are DOOMED, forever, to an eternity of anal invasion by Mortgage Demons bearing poison-tipped pitchforks. [Wall Street Journal]

Remember back in the early days of the Iraq War when President Bush repeated dumbly, month after month, “We’re turning a corner,” and things just got worse? That’s basically the situation in our domestic housing market: a relentless onslaught of bad news, brief hope that things could not possibly get any worse, followed by unspeakably awful news. MORE »

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs has had the tendency, early on, to embarrass himself during press conferences by turning snippy as a defense. But this comment about Kathryn Jean Lopez’s pretend boyfriend and preferred vice presidential candidate, Rick Santelli — a rich ex-financial rich guy who now (rather brilliantly, we admit) manages to win over unemployed, poor white people with rants on the Wall Street tips ‘n’ cheats teevee channel about how he and his money friends who ruined the economy WILL NOT ALLOW $75 billion in government money to go towards resuscitating millions of salvageable mortgages that are currently impossible to price and spreading death everywhere — is somewhat perfect. Wry, mocking, and even somewhat informative! [Huffington Post]

Here’s one of the more unlikable people we’ve heard of for the first time today, CNBC’s Rick Santelli, at some trading floor in Chicago, going *apeshit* over Barack Obama’s $75 billion mortgage plan to keep “the losers” in their homes. Maybe Obama’s plan isn’t so great, who knows, but one thing is clear, and that’s that Rick Santelli hates poor people — and by poor people we mean the bottom 50-90% of per capita income earners. How else would you explain the fact that he and his trader friends are *just now* starting to worry about Moral Hazard? [Calculated Risk]

Criminy! We have been hearing a lot about mortgages that go into default or foreclosure, and how the people holding these mortgages should talk with their lenders about renegotiating their loans. As a normal person with more than two (2) neurons flickering on and off in your brain, you probably assume that the goal here is to make the loans more affordable, which is to say, LOWER IN COST. Apparently banks sometimes disagree. MORE »

Oh hey it’s that mob rule and class warfare we’ve been told so much about! A SEETHING MOB of, uh, peaceful protesters who were not arrested by police visited the homes of two “financial predators” over the weekend. Financial predators are like sexual predators, only without the sex perversions. Instead, they like to lure youngsters into the backs of windowless white vans and force them to sign zero-percent down no-interest ARMs with a $400,000 balloon payment after five years. MORE »

After the economy and capitalism completely died in September because one freaking company called “Lehman Bros.” was denied billions of dollars from the Federal Government, the liberal New York Times has been running a weekly-ish series called “The Reckoning” about the various Wall Street jackals — i-bankers, hedge fund managers, risk-rating companies — who pooled their talents together to somehow, magically, destroy the entire world with a mere HOUSING PROBLEM. All of the articles in this series are well reported and subtly vilifying. The best part about reading them, though, comes as you scroll down to the fifth or sixth paragraph and see an accompanying picture of some douchebag you’ve never heard of with a caption describing how this person ruined your life. We’ve compiled screenshots of these instances from many stories in “The Reckoning” series and blown them up, to heighten the embarrassment. MORE »

Money-printing liquidity trapper Ben Bernanke has been a Local Loser in recent months after rapidly cutting the federal funds rate to negative 1,000% to no effect whatsoever, except national embarrassment. He’s had to print Master Paulson’s money, alone, every night, as punishment. He is not allowed to shave. But as Paulson and his flack Neel “Chump” Kashkari refuse to do anything right, Bernanke’s had enough and he’s just going to sing it from the rooftops of America! Today, in a big speech, he declared that the “government must step up efforts to prevent home foreclosures, with options including buying delinquent mortgages and providing bigger incentives for refinancing loans.” Meanwhile, back in their lair, Paulson and Kashkari are discussing what evil they must next bring to the global economy. MORE »

So, uh, the economy doesn’t seem to be doing much, uh, better. The S&P 500 is back down to 1997 levels. 1997! Everybody’s losing their jobs, if they still have jobs. Some are suggesting it will not even be a Merry Christmas, and that the real (Muslim) Jesus is sort of getting a kick out of all this. But do not worry, because some of you will evade foreclosure until January 9. Christmas is back! MORE »

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson announced a major shift today in the Troubled Asset Release Program (TARP!) — or, as the kids call it, “n00bama bailout $ocialism” — and we do not necessarily know to what the shift is. We know from what Hanky is shifting away, though, and that is the plan to buy toxic mortgage-related assets from financial institutions so as to loosen credit and save America. You may recall this instrument Hank is now abandoning: it was the whole point of the bailout, the thing Hank and his chum Ben Bernanke DEMANDED Congress pass within 20 minutes or the child would die. MORE »