DrHousingBubbble.com has a sobering post at the end of November 2012 here looking at the big picture for American homeowners in the wake of the bursting of the housing bubble.
Out of 10 million foreclosure filings since the beginning of 2006, about half have ended up in flat-out repossession by the banks. With 50 million mortgages out there, that means roughly 9% of mortgaged homes have ended belly up over the period.
With 5.3 million mortgages currently 30 days or more in arrears, a similar repo rate would mean we could expect another 2.5 million mortgages to go to the dogs.
It's still my opinion that housing in the United States is about 12% too expensive overall at the very minimum, and that federal interventions on a massive scale are prohibiting price discovery for this and other asset classes.
Probably more than anything else, however, those interventions are not designed to obscure these matters intentionally, nor to help individual Americans with their financial problems even as they protest to the contrary. Instead the interventions are primarily designed to rescue the biggest banks which have all these non-performing loans turning their books into Swiss cheese, not to mention helping their pals in Congress who need the cheapest dollars they can get to finance all the overspending which keeps them in power.
