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The sky IS falling -- and not a minute too soon

By Michael J. Smith on Tuesday July 10, 2007 08:52 AM

I know I'm trespassing on Owen's turf here, but since I've been waiting for a real-estate crash for, oh, thirty years or so now, I had a lot of fun this morning reading patrick.net:
US Housing Crash Continues
It's A Terrible Time To Buy
Why?

1. Prices still disconnected from fundamentals. House prices are still far beyond any historically known relationship to rents or salaries. Rents are less than half of mortgage payments. Salaries cannot cover mortgages except in the very short term, by using adjustable interest-only loans. Anyone who buys now will suffer losses immediately, and for the next several years at least.

And so on. Man, do I love a really convinced and energetic doomsayer -- and damn, I hope he's right.

Comments (3)

Scruggs:

If you're looking for a little sweet schadenfreude,

It turns out there is no such thing as a typical subprime borrower. The standard picture of a struggling low-income home buyer with a patchy credit history in an economically troubled neighbourhood only goes so far.

That image does reflect the roots of subprime lending as a business that served out-of-pocket borrowers in troubled areas with "hard money" or heavily secured loans. But subprime lending has grown in the past decade on the back of targeting a much broader group with so-called "affordability products".

Even the famous Beverly Hills "90210" zip code, with all its celebrity residents, has 420 subprime home loans outstanding. Here, it seems, subprime home loans were a way to keep up with the Joneses rather than just a way to put a roof over one's head.

This underlines how subprime mortgages have helped borrowers stretch to buy homes in overheated property markets. They were particularly in demand in some of the fastest- growing areas of the US, not the most disadvantaged.

Recent research from Deutsche Bank shows that, since 2000, areas with high home price appreciation saw the biggest usage of subprime mortgages

Link

op:

i shall not participate
in this rad PB
loathing of the other PB self
the road not traveled by ...US

the revenge for me
is the thoughtthat maybe maybe
a few of those "inside "
synthetic security players
may get their
up to the short hairs
leveraged hi fi balls
snipped off
during one of the coming
relentless and swift
done slicings of the value edge

sledge the hedgers !!!!!
----------------------
ps getting real is not
my turf entirely father

the bloody spot price
for one
of god's little acres
over there at ...the holy land
has always been
on your beat

Scruggs:

I still say, mind, that the outcome of this is going to be a bail out for the yuppie lifestyle borrowers and their creditors, with the poor left gasping for air on the rocks. "Corrections" of this kind have yet to induce any serious effort at fixing or even patching a structural problem. I'm not sure anyone but the ridiculed and ignored even see that there's a problem. The same people have once again been recognized as creators of their own disasters, and they'll once again try a different trick as soon as possible, to the cheerleading of the media's johnny come latelys.

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