In no particular order…
- Raging unemployment and the true economic malaise have only just begun and already 9% of U.S. home-debtors are either delinquent on their mortgage payments or currently facing foreclosure.
- The “actual” free market clearly indicated that it has absolutely no faith in the ability of U.S. home-debtors to pay back their massive, misguided and misappropriate housing debt when the private market collapsed last year never to be seen or heard from again.
- FICO scores mean nothing… period. The world will soon find out (as “prime” borrowers go belly-up or walk away at historically significant rates) that attempting to crunch the sum total of a human beings ability and/or willingness to make good on a startling debt-load into a single ranking score was foolhardy at best and never will it again pass as a proper risk management technique.
- “Housing is contained” gave way to “Subprime implosion” gave way to “Jumbo market collapse” gave way to “Bear Stearns Bailout to stabilize market” gave way to “Fannie Freddie tools that Paulson didn’t plan to use” gave way to “Paulson used the Fannie Freddie tools”.. you get the picture.
- The full bailout will cost many hundreds of billions of dollars. Where will the money come from? If from taxpayers… the economy will go much further into the dumper… if from national debt expansion, the U.S. will have its debt rating downgraded and the empire will truly be over… You can’t get something for nothing.
