Thursday, August 20th, 2009
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. [
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.
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.
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
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson announced a