Hopeless And Changeless

OK, so the Obama Administration is only “improving our image abroad” in the most cosmetic, least-meaningful possible way. 

But at least he’s cured the whole housing crash, right?

Oh, what do you think?

Whitney Tilson has another take on the August Case-Shiller numbers, which sent housing bulls into spasms of glee a few days ago.

The sequential increase in prices in August was less than the sequential increase in July.  This, Whitney believes, is the start of the seasonal downturn that will take house prices down another 10%-15% by the middle of next year.

 Sigh.

Well, at least Obama’s gotten the government out of the mortgage business – right?

You still don’t see the pattern, do you?

But we were wrong — the housing bubble is back. Sure, prices aren’t at their old levels, but everything else is in place.

Generous government involvement is back. Fear of missing out on good deals is back, and yes, even no-money-down is back.

And Freddie and Fannie have to buy all the squibs back, right?

Just a wild guess.

One thought on “Hopeless And Changeless

  1. It’s Cash For Clunkers all over. The home buyer credit has timed out, essentially. It takes a minimum of 30 days to qualify, so we’ve essentially drawn forward all the demand we can and now we’re starting the crash again.

    Figure it out. We had growth of 3.5% in GDP last quarter, which officially ended the recession.

    But the bump up from Cash for Clunkers was 1.8% of that growth. I’ve not seen figures for the home credit, but that’s probably on the order of 1.5% or so just extrapolating from the CS numbers. Between the two, that pretty much blows away the entire “recovery.”

    Welcome to the new normal.

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