Originally Posted By: KY Jon
I know that banks have more homes than they ever dreamed of having in their worst nightmare. Soon Banks will be spending real money on upkeep of repos that they can not sell. My bank is trying to get tax assessments reduced because they are having to pay real estate taxes on homes they can not sell. This glut is a major problem. This is depressing other home sale values in my area by about 25-30%. Then if the market does recover they will have another round of foreclosures to work through. My bank has stopped foreclosing in all but extreme cases. Until home values return and the glut of used homes sells this economy will never recover. Welcome to change.


We got a chicken and egg problem here.

Home values won't return and the glut of used homes will not sell until there are people out there with money to buy them and banks willing to loan them money to buy them. Right now, we've got neither. The people who might buy them can't because they don't have jobs or the jobs they do have don't pay nearly enough. The banks won't loan for any number of reasons.

The problem is exacerbated by Treasury. They do not want to recognize that a lot of fraud - on all sides - went into making this bubble. They are perfectly willing to go after individual borrowers who might have fudged their loan app or something, but are just as desperate to avoid going after their buddies in the banks (and mortgage originators and title shops and everywhere else in the financial industry) because they want to be able to get jobs in those banks after government service and because those bankers make campaign contributions. The banks - which are insolvent and should have been allowed to fail (or even been pushed, like Lehman and Bear) - took the money they should have used to loan, and lined their own pockets. It's all high times now if you're a banker. They're making money hand over fist.

But, when McDonalds announced they'd be hiring 50,000 people last month, at f'g minimum wage, they got over 1,000,000 applications. They wound up hiring about 60,000 people. In other words, for every job flipping burgers, there were 16 applicants.

We should be getting a WPA - the roads in Maine are beat to hell - but instead we get a whizzing contest about how we have to cut Medicare and let old folks die so we don't have to borrow any money.


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