Housing bailout

I've been watching Bloomberg TV on the President's speach on the housing mortgage bailout. (Yea... they won't call it that.) In my opinion, this is a non-starter.

Oh, they'll start the program, throw money into it, and save a few FB's. But let's put this into perspective.

Last year ziprealty never broke 1 million homes for sale. Now, I know they've added more "territory" to their listing, but go look at their national inventory. But today there is 1,365,705 homes 08:21am PDT. They'll try to save 80,000. Ok, 80,000 people who were idiots but are staying in their home can have loan forgiveness from their banks and not be taxed for it. Now the other 400,000 additional homes? And only 100,000 can be explained away that ziprealty expanded territory...

So this is curious. It only helps loss mitigation. I'm actually ok with that. Why? It effectively lowers the price of homes out there!

Not to mention, this is a FHA bailout. Exactly what does a FHA bailout mean for California? Yep. Exactly NOTHING! What does it do for people who inflated their income with fraud? You got it, NOTHING! Ski lodges at Mammoth? NOTHING! And how does this help the credit markets? Bwaaa ha ha!

Got popcorn?
Neil