More Homeowners Falling Behind on Mortgages

[steven johnson]

A rising proportion of fixed-rate home loans made to people with good credit are sinking into foreclosure with the crisis projected to persist well into next year. High unemployment is pushing more people out of homes aand pulling down housing prices. Last year subprime loans drove the housing crisis.


The chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, feels that foreclosures are not going to abate anytime soon and projects that nationwide home prices will fall up to 10 percent before bottoming next fall. About 4 million homeowners were either in foreclosure or at least three months behind on their mortgage payments as of September, according to the mortgage bankers group. Even if some of them manage to stay in their homes, the market is likely to absorb a wave of new foreclosures.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jYpmPSg0IbaMEFonSzy5g-fIAR0gD9C2RBJO0

By JAMES R. HAGERTY
About one in seven American households with mortgages is behind on payments or in foreclosure, according to new data from the Mortgage Bankers Association. That is up from about one in 10 a year ago.

The trade group reported Thursday that 14.4% of first-lien mortgages on one- to four-family homes in the third quarter were 30 days or more overdue or in the foreclosure process. That is the highest since the MBA began reporting such data in 1972 and works out to about 7.5 million households at risk of losing their homes. The percentage is up from 10% a year earlier and 7.3% two years ago.

Loan defaults have been rising swiftly for more than three years. At first, the problem largely reflected loose lending practices during the housing boom that allowed millions of people to buy homes they couldn't afford. Now the problem is compounded by rising unemployment, which hit 10.2% in October, the highest since 1982.

Unemployment may start gradually declining in next year's first half, said Jay Brinkmann, the MBA's chief economist. If so, he said, the percentage of loans that are delinquent could start to decline by mid-2010. But he said the number of loans in foreclosure is likely to remain elevated longer as banks struggle to figure out which borrowers might be able to stay in their homes if payments are lowered.

More Homeowners Falling Behind on Mortgages

[wuvuj]

1. Watch the jobs disappear....

http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html

[angryfirelord]

2. Looks like I'm going to Slope County, North Dakota

[barb162]

4. what's there?

[AtheistCrusader]

8. Nothing and no-one.

Well, 700 people or so.

[barb162]

3. Expect this for at least two or three more years

or longer.
:(

[wuvuj]

5. The Great Disconnect Between Stocks and Jobs

http://www.rgemonitor.com/financemarkets-monitor/257997/the_great_disconnect_between_stocks_and_jobs


How can the stock market hit new highs at the same time unemployment is hitting new highs? Simple. The market is up because corporate earnings are up. Corporate earnings are up because companies are cutting costs. And the biggest single cost they’re cutting is their payrolls. So they let people go and, presto, their balance sheets look better and their stock prices rise.

In the old-fashioned kind of recession decades ago, big companies laid off people with the expectation of rehiring them when the economy turned up. Then a few recessions back, companies started laying off people for good, never rehiring them even when the economy recovered.

In the Great Recession of 2008-2009, companies are going a step further. They’re using this sharp downturn to cut payrolls even below where they were when times were good. Outsourcing abroad, setting up shop in China and elsewhere, contracting out, replacing people with software and automated machines – they're doing whatever it takes to get payrolls down so earnings bounce up.

Caterpillar earned $404 million in the third quarter, or 64 cents a share. Analysts had expected only 5 cents. Caterpillar’s stock is up 165 percent since March. How did Caterpillar do it? Not by selling more bulldozers. It did it by cutting over 37,000 jobs.

The result, overall, is an asset-based recovery, not a Main Street recovery. Yes, the economy is growing again, but the surge in productivity is a mirage. Worker output per hour is skyrocketing because companies are generating almost as much output with fewer workers and fewer hours.

....

Where is this heading? No place good. Without a major shift in policy -- both at the Fed and in the White House -- the economics point to a big stock-market correction and a double dip. The politics point to substantial losses for Democrats next year.

[wuvuj]

6. Roubini on jobs....

http://www.rgemonitor.com/roubini-monitor/257978/the_worst_is_yet_to_come_unemployed_americans_should_hunker_down_for_more_job_losses


Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 17.5%.

While losing 200,000 jobs per month is better than the 700,000 jobs lost in January, current job losses still average more than the per month rate of 150,000 during the last recession.

Also, remember: The last recession ended in November 2001, but job losses continued for more than a year and half until June of 2003; ditto for the 1990-91 recession.

So we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest. In other words, if you are unemployed and looking for work and just waiting for the economy to turn the corner, you had better hunker down. All the economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs just are not coming back.

MORE....


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SO...DON'T WORRY....BE HAPPY! :hangover:

[phantom power]

7. There are *consequences* to 500K people losing their jobs each month.

:scared: