At the end of 2009, nearly eight million households, or 15% of those with mortgages, were behind on mortgage payments or in the foreclosure process;
Why So Glum? Numbers Point to a Recovery: . . . Firms have begun to hire and consumer spending seems to be accelerating.
At a median home price of $165,000, eight million mortgages going belly up represent assets of $1.32 trillion of an undercapitalized, indeed, insolvent banking system whose insured deposits total something in the neighborhood of $4.6 trillion but whose cash on hand is presently $1.2958 trillion, nearly the equivalent of those troubled assets.
How the banks have managed to increase their cash so dramatically from the less than $300 billion on hand just two years ago is another question. Are they counting increases to the base money supply provided by the Federal Reserve in the wake of the financial meltdown, which went from $800 billion to over $2 trillion? Almost overnight? Talk about monopoly money.
With over 700 banks on the FDIC "troubled" list and the FDIC openly stating it expects bank failures over the next few years to cost $100 billion on top of last year's $30 billion, does any of this sound like a reason to be happy? Like the worst is over?
I don't think so.
