Record US Foreclosures? Excellent News!

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 5/20/2010 12:01:00 AM
Call it schadenfreude, but I cannot but help applaud news that the United States is suffering record delinquencies and foreclosures (also see the MBA press release). Remember, these are the same folks who tried to impose upon the world "Washington Consensus"-style strictures of liberalization, privatization, and deregulation on the road to some sort of economistic paradise. Yet, when faced with troubles have happened at home, they've undertaken unprecedented deliberalization, nationalization, and reregulation. While this sort of double talk is to be expected from Americans (as other who've aspired to similar hegemonic entitlements in history), the only real question for me is why the rest of the world allows the United States to get away with this boorish behaviour.

What rising delinquencies and foreclosures demonstrate are obvious things folks in the blogosphere aside from me have reiterated over and over:
  • You can't fix a problem caused by excessive borrowing by borrowing trillions more;
  • Helping wipe out private finance for housing isn't a characteristic of a market economy;
  • Massive losses by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac indicate the rot of continuing patterns of government involvement in the US housing market;
Alike with the subprime crisis, the whole point is to reveal that massive state supports to housing are fiscally wrongheaded and, ultimately, senseless. The American Dream is a farce. Ditto for pretending that the fiscal consequences of extending a limitless lifeline to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac do not exist. When you lie so much to others that you believe your own lies--Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's deficits don't matter--don't expect sympathy from anyone else. Such is modern America; the "ownership society" is, in reality, the tent ownership society [1, 2]. This emperor has no clothes.

So, may the fates deliver those participating in these housing shenanigans to a very, very well-deserved fate. Our only regret should be that the US isn't being slammed even harder. Thankfully, we're getting there. Quit this nonsense or suffer the consequences. Throw them out. Throw them all out.