To the surprise of no one (who was paying attention), the U.S. housing market is once again flooded with excess supply – and worse still, the situation is guaranteed to get much, much worse in the months (and years) ahead.
The situation is very simple: there are no buyers and more “homeowners” than at any time in history are incapable of servicing their mortgages (in other words, they aren’t really home-owners).This means that inventories will go straight up, and prices should go straight down. Of course, as I pointed out in a previous commentary, massive U.S. mortgage-fraud (which is greater today than at the heart of the first U.S. housing-bubble) means that even price-data from the U.S.housing market is hopelessly flawed.
To be specific, fraudulent transactions reporting supposed “price gains” of 1000% and more have totally poisoned this data. As a result, no one is capable of saying exactly how fast U.S. house prices are really falling. Using fraud to lie to Americans is nothing new for the U.S. government – and undoubtedly it considers itself very clever to use mortgage-fraud to feign price-gains in the U.S. housing market.
However, all that is being accomplished is that instead of an horrific crash – which finally results in an equilibrium price-level, the U.S. government continues to delay the real, necessary correction in prices. Instead of this crash being spread over merely five to ten years, the U.S. government is ensuring a full generation of slow, steady decay...
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