STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Monday, 11 March 2013

[jtuck004]

14. “If it weren’t for the activity of investors, including large hedge funds, there would be no market

recovery.”

– Larry Roberts, O.C. Housing News

That is the quote quote kicks off the following article by Mike Whitney in Counterpunch,

US Housing: Is the Recovery Real?

...
Housing experts figure that roughly 40 percent of the people who would normally put their houses up for sale, are unable to do so because they are still underwater on their mortgage and the amount they’d get from the sale would require them to borrow money to pay the balance. Who wants to do that? It’s cheaper to just stay in the house and stop making the mortgage payment, which is what millions of people have done. Now they’re waiting for the bank to foreclose, but the banks are in no hurry because foreclosing would just add to their mountain of distressed inventory which would push prices down further. So millions of delinquent borrowers are presently living in their homes for free as they have been for the last two or three years. The “housing recovery” cheerleaders rarely mention this part of the story.
...



See that little squiggle at the end of the red line? That’s the housing recovery. That’s what $1.5 trillion dollars worth of mortgage backed securities (MBS) will buy you these days. Such a deal!

Now check out this excerpt from The Burning Platform:

“The contrived elevation of home sales and home prices has been engineered by the very same culprits who crashed our financial system in the first place. This has been planned, coordinated and implemented by a conspiracy of the ruling oligarchy – the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, U.S. Treasury, NAR, and the corporate media conglomerates.
...

To keep the ongoing criminal enterprise intact the Fed is buying $40 billion/mo in securitized loans, with additional profits sustained by zero-cost loans which they loan out at a very healthy markup, with little to no risk. The bankers who are primary dealers are making out like the bandits they are,.

BLS stats make it plain that hard-working Americans at age 60+ are working in greater numbers than they have in years, and that a large portion of the 26 million people wanting jobs are in the 20-50 set, people for whom there are no jobs available. 65 is the age at which, historically, people would be selling their homes to the next generation, but that group has little or no money to buy, with millions of mid-wage jobs having been replaced, if they are replaced, by lower-paying jobs, as much as 30 to 50%. Those that are getting loans may well find themselves in the same underwater situation as millions of people are today, yet the banks are writing all this paper guaranteed not to lose. Courtesy, again, of the American worker.

...
The decrease in household income from 2009 to 2011 almost exactly equaled the decrease in income in the two years of the recession. During the Great Recession, the median U.S. household income (in 2011 dollars) dropped from $54,489 in 2007 to $52,195 in 2009, a loss of 4.2%. By this yardstick, the recovery from the Great Recession is bypassing the nation’s households.
...

Here

I wonder how much longer this "recovery" can be floated for the few on the backs of millions of people with less and less?