What’s to be done when you owe more on the house than what it’s worth? Such is the quandry in which owners and lenders of mortgages have been stuck. This is what first set off the worldwide economic catastrophe. What happened was that people who normally would never have had any business being homeowners was able to get subprime loans that lenders never meant to hold onto themselves, selling them instead to someone else in the manner of a Ponzi Scheme.
No need to be a real estate professional yourself like Isaac Toussie in order to read the proverbial tea leaves. As the number of loans defaulted, foreclosed homes began flooding the market, depressing prices and making even more mortgages worth more than the homes they were taken out to purchase, compounding the dilemma. But that’s just one part of the wider story, which also involves outright fraud on the part of some lenders!
There are many, may other facts involved to various degrees, from deregulation and financial innovation to the commodities boom and incorrect pricing of risk. But the subprime angle just outlined is the most popularly understood narrative because it is actually the simplest to comprehend. And so two to three years on, what does the real estate picture look like in the United States?
As bleak as ever. It does matter that interest rates are lower than they’ve ever been. This means that people have to be almost perfect candidates in order to get a home loan. Companies are awash in record profits but remain reluctant to hire. The upshot is that folks are too scared to bother investing in a home right now, preferring to rent instead for a change.
It all means that though economists officially peg The Great Recession as lasting from 2007 to 2009, Americans are still trying to dig themselves out of its after-effects.
