HARM

Credit Suisse: Housing Bottom More Than a Year Away

@jimmy46,

Let's also not forget more recent "incentives" for Wall Street and reckless borrowers & lenders:

2008: Congress & Bushco raises the CLL from $417k to $729k, hands the Fed a blank check to bailout the GSEs, passes "Hope Now", Fed bails out Bear-Stearns, etc.

And yet, despite all the tax breaks, incentives and plain-old taxpayer bailouts, prices are still falling. Guess all the king's men can't put Humpty-Bubble back together again...

Plotting the April Case/Shiller Housing Numbers

Want to know where housing prices are likely to go between now and (at least) 2013? These two charts ought to help clarify things:

www.housingwire.com/wp...
www.financialsense.com...

Biggest. Housing Bubble. Ever.
(game over)

U.S. Home Prices Go From Bad To Worse

@User 118927,

Amen!

U.S. Home Prices Go From Bad To Worse

Even though this was a fairly straightforward data-driven post, I thought it was interesting it was titled "U.S. Home Prices Go From Bad To Worse".

Why are falling prices (especially in hyper-inflated markets) invariably interpreted by the media as a "bad" thing, while rising prices are invariably greeted as a "good" thing?

When prices were rising at double-digit clips, reckless lending was going gangbusters, and affordability levels dropped to single digits here in CA, very few pundits showed much concern. And yet this was a very real bread-and-butter problem for the 98% or so of residents whose main reason for purchasing real estate was for (*gasp*) actual shelter --not speculation.

What falling prices means to me (and I suspect, the vast majority of the home-buying public) is a long-overdue correction, and a much needed boost to real affordability. I could give a rat's ass whether some crooked Wall Street financial alchemist gets his multi-million-dollar bonus this year, or whether some lazy, greedbag Casey Serin clone can retire rich at 30 by driving up prices on me (preferably 'not' to both). However, I DO care whether or not I --and millions of other working class people like me-- can afford to buy shelter in the communities in which they live and work.

I tend to put working-class peoples' interests ahead of speculators and Wall Street banksters, but I guess I'm just crazy that way.