Don't believe what your seeing or hearing

Editor's Analysis: The Banks have been paying a lot of money to plant articles around the country and in media generally to give us the impression that the recession is over, they did their job in preventing it, and the housing crisis has turned the corner with prices rising. Housing prices are rising in some places because of a glut of cheap money (see mortgage meltdown 1996-2008); other than that the whole thing is an outright lie. Even their own analysts don't agree with the articles and statements made on behalf of the megabanks.

You can't take half the blood out of a person and expect them not to be anemic, weak and dizzy. The megabanks took more than that out of our economic system and parked it around the world out of reach of all but the select few who are members of the club. For the rest of us, earning a living is becoming increasingly difficult, getting approval for a reasonably priced mortgage is difficult unless you go for one of the new deals that are out there at 2.5%, 15 years fixed rate, supposedly. Besides the fact that they are going to steer you into an entirely different loan product in the classic bait and switch, they are restarting the "securitization" scheme that wrecked us in the first place.

Who is making money at 2.5%? How can you even have a budget for advertising much less appear dozens of times per day on TV, radio, magazines and newspapers? The answer to these and other similar questions lies in the fact that on average, the mortgages are going to be at much higher rates than those advertised, the incidence of force-placed insurance on fully insured homes will be increased to become a regular major contributor to income to the megabanks in the form of kickbacks or commissions and simply price gouging, and no doubt someone has come up with a really creative way to make certain the loans, on the whole, go into default decreasing the value of a "portfolio" or "pool" of loans to less than half of the nominal value placed on the note --- but increasing the profits from betting against the same mortgages they represented as being underwritten according to industry standards.

The fact is that the Federal Reserve cannot keep rates down indefinitely, and the rush to gold and other currencies shows that the big players who know more than you do are getting ready for a major devaluation of currency in the U.S. The "inflation" that accompanies a devaluation might work to the benefit of the homeowners who owe the old dollars but can pay with the new dollars (if they have any). But increased rates mean higher payments, and higher payments combined with no credit and low wages and low median income spells disaster for the demand side of housing. Simply  put: housing prices are going down again and they are already starting to slip.

The only reason inventories of homes for sale are "low" is because of the shadow inventory of homes set for foreclosure sales, the zombie houses that have been stripped and are worthless and the homeowners who are so far underwater that they can't make it to the closing table. It is a very unpersuasive recovery. Zillow outlines it chapter and verse.

Working backwards, the reason for all this is simple theft using exotic sounding names of financial instruments that were never funded or used. In the end, the loan was from the investors and the debt was and is between the investors and the homeowners. Everyone else is an intermediary. Those conduits for the loan have no stake in it. They have their agreements for fees but that is about it.

There are only two ways of going on this: (1) do the same thing all over again and kick the can down the road to the next blowout recession or (2) stop kidding ourselves that housing prices are going anywhere but down unless we expose the truth of what happened in these so-called mortgage loans funded with money stolen from investors under the premise that the money would fund a REMIC trust which would then acquire loans and be secured, on record, for their interest. Anyone out there see the trust on any document in any loan closing that didn't end up in litigation? No?

That's because the intermediaries were and are asserting ownership stakes in loans that never came out of their pocket, loans for which they have no risk of loss and loans that were acquired on paper by other intermediaries when the debt was at all times material hereto owned by the investor lender. AND THAT is why you must LEAD with the deficiencies in the money trail and NOT with the DOCUMENT trail, which will merely have you running down a rabbit hole dug special for you.