Buried deep inside the 'Newspaper of Record' are the latest foreclosure figures.
They are sobering, but ya gotta love da spin:
“What continues to drive the national numbers,” Mr. Duncan said, “is what is happening in the states of California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona.”
Home buyers in those four states relied on the low introductory costs of adjustable-rate mortgages. Payments on many of those loans are expected to climb over the next year or so.
The national foreclosure rate excluding those four states actually declined in the quarter, Mr. Duncan said.
If you take out those four states over the last six years, there would not have been a housing boom that, when times were real bad in this economy, was the only good news and driving force we had out of Bush's first recession.
It's preposterous to even make a statement like that. Let's just eliminate the foreclosure numbers from the four most prosperous states in the last decade and gee-whiz, we don't have a mortgage crisis at all.
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Thought I'd straighten out a few misconceptions. There was a gigantic, epic housing/real estate boom in the four states mentioned. There was a garden variety boom everywhere else. The vaunted foreclosures that everyone is so exercised about are concentrated in those states. Of the "skyrocketing" foreclosures, that are in fact declining everywhere else, in Cal,Fla, Nv and Az, as many as half are taking place in homes that were never occupied, i.e. owned by speculators.
The overall rate of mortgages in foreclosure is 0.65% It is decidedly NOT a crisis.
It's a little disingenuous to refer to "the first Bush recession". The historical record is completely unambiguous. The economy officially went into recession in March, 2000, under Clinton. Bush took office with a full blown recession and a stock market collapse already well underway. Then we had 9/11.
It's important to point out that there has NEVER been an instance of recovery after a bubble economy like the dot-com bust.
The subsequent economic recovery was nothing short of miraculous. Someday, perhaps historians will recognize how truly dire our circumstances were in 2001 with the economy and markets in complete free fall and a giant hole blown in Manhattan.
So, I think the Bush economic record is actually pretty good.
Democrats should be careful not to be seen as rooting for a recession. It seems to me that Democrats are always hyping some sort of media-manufactured crisis in the belief that that will drive voters into their waiting arms. So we get the mortgage crisis, and the healthcare crisis, and the global warming crisis, and the heartbreak of psoriasis.
It's all very tiresome and transparent.
The problem Democrats face is that they now control Congress. So, if something bad happens, they're going to get some of the blame.
Be careful what you wish for!
www.incontext.indiana.edu/2002/nov-dec02/spotlight.html
The experts tell me you're wrong. The Bush recession was all his, you broke it, you own it!
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