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Get Ready for the Housing Bailout

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December 23, 2008 RSS Feed Print
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News like today's terrible housing report makes me ever more sure a federal housing bailout is on its way. Here is what IHS Global Insight has to say about the day's news:

The November home sales report illustrates the ultimate risk in a situation where negative business cycle momentum persists for an excruciating length of time.  The home sales market has been in recession for over three years. Builders have been reducing supply since the first quarter of 2006, and housing starts and permits were further collapsed to record low levels in November.  The housing industry in the U.S. in the process of reducing capacity to dangerously low levels.

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I as everyone became affected by the downturn in the housing market. Though not everyone trusted a broker to complete all the details of closing the home. How would you feel to have payed seventeen thousand for a loan that strangles the home owner then at the end of the thiry years with a hundred thousand dollar down payment, end with a balloon payment of three hundred and eighty thousand. This is what has been done to many I spoke with. What recourse, but to hope for a bail out from the government, before you can no longer live in the home you worked all your life for?

Bill rezentes of CA 7:47PM December 27, 2008

I don't get it: Two post ago, you quote Goldman Sachs saying "Prospects for a housing recovery...are extremely dim given the huge excess supply that hangs over the market" as justification for a $600Bn bailout in 2009.

Now you quote IHS Global Insight remarking on the "dangerously low levels" of housing capacity as justification for a housing industry bailout.

So is this "huge excess supply" also a "dangerously low level" or is EVERYBODY just grabbing at taxpayer money? This whole bailout thing is absurd--but the genie is out of that bottle now and we're treated like fools being parted from their money.

SAS in Denver of CO 9:56AM December 24, 2008

Yes, all the bailouts bother me, but because the economy is so bad and people aren't making as much money, they're also not spending as much with businesses such as mine. I have vacation rentals. My type of business has fallen 50-80% below what it did just last year. So, after being able to stay at home and run my business the way I've done for years, I had to get 2 jobs to help pay the part of the mortgage my vacation rental business no longer is capable of. I am not above getting a job, mind you I already had one with my business. I just wouldn't mind a little help as far as getting a lower interest rate for the mortgage I've already got on my house I just moved into 3 yrs. ago this February. And of course had no signs of my business in the near future not being able to carry the part of my mortgage I'd become use to it doing for the past 2 1/2 yrs. Depending on my business for money to pay my mortgage is the same as you depending on your paycheck from you job to pay your mortgage. So, I don't want a bailout, just something I can manage while my business suffers.

Tammy of NC 1:56PM December 23, 2008

Capital Commerce

U.S. News business reporter Matthew Bandyk examines the issues, people, and debates that shape the nexus of political and economic life in the nation's capital.

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