According to the people who have to get the payments, as opposed to those who benefit from making things sound better, 13+% are behind on their mortgages and the reason is lack of employment.
Choose your poison.
Financial Times:
Mounting joblessness fuels US housing crisis
By Saskia Scholtes in New York
Published: August 20 2009 17:59 | Last updated: August 20 2009 17:59
More than one in every eight homeowners with a mortgage was behind on home loan payments or in some stage of foreclosure at the end of the second quarter, as mounting unemployment aggravated the housing crisis, the Mortgage Bankers Association said on Thursday.
The percentage of loans that were in foreclosure or at least one payment past due rose to 13.16 per cent, the highest increase since the MBA began keeping records in 1972 and a jump of more than a percentage point since the first quarter. Jay Brinkmann, chief economist at the MBA, said signs were growing that mortgage performance is being affected more by unemployment than by the structure of risky home loans, indicating a new stage in the foreclosure crisis that may not be easily addressed by government loan modification programmes.
So if there is no rise in employment quickly, and there will be no further TARPs...what does that predict?
And what is the reason for the lack of employment?
We're all trying to sell insurance to each other, setting up special education programs, and engaged in social services (all necessary in a functioning society like ours, but besides the point, those are all derivative employments).
We're not engaged in the production of things for a profit. That includes intellectual property which needs no or very few line workers.
In Goa they are making Lipitor for a resultant 40% (or less) of the retail price of actual Lipitor here. They are making Plavix for half. In Maylasia Kia was producing cars for what labor cost?
The American worker won't work for those kind of wages, you say? Fine. Then our leaders instead of offering free medical insurance, should be (and should have been) spending that same kind of money on nuclear fusion research. Battery research. Photovoltaic Research. Microwave transmission. Teaching engineering. Enlarging schools and research institutes.
And the housing and mortgage issue which caused all this?
Remember JUST the first $787 billion TARP?
We have 330,000,000 Americans. We have about, 90 million families. $8,800 per family.
A check right to each family instead of who? We don't even know. The govt REFUSES to say. Think the families would have then have avoided being current? Or late on other payments? The money would have immediately gone right (back) into the banks with mortgage problems, as the TARP fund were supposed to. And citizens MIGHT have been willing to buy a few things and keep the wheels turning, the rest would have gone into savings (i.e. THE BANKS ..making them liquid ..and the proof? Americans have QUINTUPLED their savings rate). And nobody would gripe about corporate socialism. Clearly that didn't satisfy the leaders, Democratic OR Republican.
But that still doesn't solve the underlying problem. One which can no longer be solved by rising real estate equity values (based on ....what?) ... the USA no longer makes enough things for a profit to employ all the people who want to be employed ...rather we look to organize, administer, and hire people for reeducating line workers who have to do something else. What is that something else?
Data entry jobs for 'free' publicly paid medical insurance?
Probably denials, you say?