You may recall that a week ago I reiterated my mantra when yet again blowing the US ‘recovery’ bollocks out of the water: the unemployment figures are a fraud, and no US recovery has ever taken place with a flatlining property market.
Hat-tip now to RealtyTrac, a US research concern, for pointing out to me why the fall in US home values is about to worsen markedly.
The $26 billion mortgage foreclosure settlement recenty approved between the Big Five lenders and Congressis expected to speed up the foreclosure process dramatically.
The big five in this context are Bank of America, JPMorgan, Citibank, Wells Fargo and Ally Financial.
Lenders hit the pause button on foreclosures during 2010 because they were afraid that anything they did would be under a microscope…richly deserved, given their previous behaviour. Thus, the average time it takes to foreclose on a home in the US went up to 370 days. In Florida, the average time was 861 days, and in New York it was 1,056 days.
Now, the backlong of one million or more insolvent mortgagees face eviction in short order. And the signs are already there: foreclosure filings were up 10% in the 26 states where foreclosures must undergo court scrutiny, according to RealtyTrac, during Q1 2012. In Indiana, foreclosure filings are up 45% year-on-year. In Florida, they’re up some26%.
Says Realtytrac CEO Brandon Moore:
“The dam may not burst in the next 30 to 45 days, but it will eventually burst, and everyone downstream should be prepared for that to happen — both in terms of new foreclosure activity and new short sale activity,” Moore said in a statement.
Or put another way, easily in time for voters to notice during the Presidential Election. However, the problem for GOP candidate Mittllttll Rmmmnnnee is that whereas Obama will probably quietly say well, it had to happen, the challenger is more likely to suggest that delinquent homeowners can be shot given they are trespassing on lender property.
But that isn’t the point of this piece. The self-evident point of this piece is that the US is not in recovery, and to be honest even if it was, the size of US debt coupled with the coming eurovirus would swamp even the Chinese economy, let alone the American one.
The Slog 