Serious credit-card and auto-loan delinquencies have climbed to 2008-09 recession levels. The housing market shows cracks while the labor market is weakening. You wouldn’t know it from the buoyant stock market and consumer spending.…
About 69% of borrowers who took out a mortgage insured by the Federal Housing Administration last year had debt-to-income ratios that are considered risky, compared with 28% in 2012. For Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the share was 38%, up from 16% in 2012.
More borrowers are struggling to pay mortgages, yet it isn’t apparent by official delinquency rates. The reason? The government and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are effectively buying down the mortgages of distressed borrowers to prevent foreclosures.
The FHA has waived or reduced monthly payments on nearly 1.2 million mortgages over the past two years—about 15% of its portfolio. Without such forgiveness, delinquencies would be near the levels of the 2008-09 meltdown. Fannie and Freddie have also been slashing and deferring payments on hundreds of thousands of mortgages….
Margin borrowing—when investors borrow to buy stocks—has surged this year amid market exuberance and anticipation of more easing by the Fed….
Issuance of junk-rated debt hit a record this summer as investors demand less of a premium to buy risky debt. Spreads between high-yield bonds and Treasurys have shrunk to levels seen during the dot-com and housing bubbles…. [end quote]
This is late-bubble behavior.
Will the government and Federal Reserve bail out underwater debtors when the next recession hits, people lose their jobs and the bubble bursts? Will we see 2009 again?
The USA has become like a drugged and drunken, spoiled rotten, immoral, spendthrift heir to a rapidly depleting fortune. I have to deal with enraged ancestors in some of my dreams, but I am glad I am mostly out and growing roots in far more civilized sane places.
Mexico in the understated hardworking State of Guanajuato, the place where the silver for almost all the Pieces of Eight and also arguably paid the cost for Phillip II’s Spanish Armada.
I have a fair amount of bare land and built property Mexico at various price points, none of it within popular tourist zones. I am starting to liquidate my properties on a decade long plan to pay the cost of my “old man home” at a very quiet location part way up a steep high slop overlookng the Pacific Ocean in Southern Oaxaca.
I also own a home in Soller, Mallorca, Spain. The local population there has known my husband and me for over 20 years, and they make us feel very known, welcome, happy, and safe. Most years we make it available as cheap sleeping quarters for young working locals (restraunt and construction workers mostly) who cannot affored to sleep in the town where they were born. We go there twice a year for a month or so, husband often gives concerts (he is a gifted professional countertenor). The house is now skyrocketing in value, even though the local scattering of Russian Oligarch “wives” and their families are selling and leaving.
Both Mexico and Spain do have real difficulties to overcome, mostly rooted in slovenly political corruption and sheer idiocy, but neither at a level anywhere close to what I am now seeing in full flood in the USA. In the USA I now (absurdly and outrageously) often feel hated and despised, both directly ito my face as well as abstractly at a distance. As a lifetime (since age 8) mostly loyal Democrat, Civil Rights marcher and poll worker, and one of the surviving early Gay Rights organizers, activists, and businessmen, I know that hate feeling all too well. As I am getting old enough to perhaps be useless on the streets, I am absent but on call. However, for the sake of my familial life and happiness, better sleep about the safety of my portfolio, I will soon have a Mexican Passport. I have a useful special residency thingy from my town hall in Mallorca that greases bureaucratic wheels in other locales at times.
My ancestors have come to me in my recent dreamlife and seem to be forgiving my absesnting myself at this point, but only so long as I stay fully engaged and fighting even from afar.
The progressives folded tent. No arguments for DEI, no mentions of misogyny, no mentions of homophobia, no mentions of racism…the progressive have all of their emotions in antisemitism. Ironic. It is many progressives not all but the movement for DEI was declared dead. So it rolled over and is now dead.
The American public has skipped over being confused. People who have no clue about the Middle East know it all.
People talk and yell but the reality most people have no dog in the fight.
The fight Americans have a dog is being forgotten.
The nationalists won because many people who had a problem with them agree on antisemitism. For now the nationalists are not antisemitic.
those “progressives” were/are mostly (By NO Means ALL) publicist academics who had nothing but illusory obsessive “tents to fold”. After decades of being no more than just another instance of Bureaucratiz, the acronym Diversity Equity Inclusion suddenly became a symbol of some form of weirdly described oppression or other.
“DEI” was/is a bureaucratically minded abbreviation and distortion of simple crux aspects of basic civility and humanity that apparently still terrify unhappy, sensibly allergic to bureacratically abbreviated diktat, mostly white people, uncertain of their own worth, fearful and disoriented by a simple basic self-assertion of “others”. I prefer, “Be kind and open to strangers, do not hurt or attack people solely because they are different from you, and (by the way) “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.” But that sort of basic morality, easily comprehensible to children, is waaay beyond the current endlessly hyped obsessions and madnesses and (boogy beings in the closet!!!) childish terrors, all being served up primarily to make money rather than to support and enrich actual political discourse. E.G., emotionally comprehensible but nevertheless absurd statements such as “progressives have all their emotions in anti-semitism.” (there there, now now).
Nevertheless, this is a golden very accurate BINGO statement: The American public has skipped over being confused. Yes, as they seem to have become so exhausted by the emptiness and manipulations of our pseudo-politics, they now often value only Strong Willed Divinely Inspired Leadership so much they have no time for the crucial step of being uncertain, the step that opens the doors to actual knowledge instead of re-echoing ignorance and fear. But who needs knowledge when the world runs on likes and dislikes, just like a day care center catering to fussy spoiled two year olds creates lunatics.
Politics is about creating a “safe place” for humans to be humane and thrive.