The subprime events of the last half of the last year of the Bush presidency got more intense attention, but for some time the commercial real estate market was said to be trailing housing in terms of wrenching adjustments. Opus grew and florished, and is still alive, but scaled back and not likely to be contemplating many new ventures.
The firm's website
http://www.opuscorp.com/
still gives the intriguing appearance of an ongoing viable chest-pounding Tarzan of a company, not one dead or hibernating.
Hibernation is my guess. Poised with business scaled back but as much liquidity as feasible, awaiting a change. The Japanese 1990 real estate bubble burst, however, suggests long recovery times in mature economies - ours being yet the world's largest, despite China's current eight percent growth and India's seven percent.
Charge it to global warming, cutting back on US domestic energy usage?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. By 2010 that debate might prove interesting.
On the severity of the housing situation, still while some are singing false "recovery" songs such as "Happy Days are Here Again," there is this link, from California, but covering a nationwide scope.
Mortgage Bankers Assn. says delinquencies and home repossessions have hit a new high. Blaming job losses for most of the pain, it sees a continued surge in foreclosures through all of next year.
By E. Scott Reckard - November 20, 2009
Home foreclosures are likely to keep climbing through all of next year despite stabilizing housing prices in some areas, a major lender group said Thursday as it reported that the level of delinquencies and repossessed homes had jumped to a record.
One in seven U.S. home loans was past due or in foreclosure as of Sept. 30, putting that quarterly delinquency measure at its highest level since 1972, when the Mortgage Bankers Assn. began reporting it. At the beginning of this year, 1 in 10 loans was past due or in foreclosure.
The continued surge in delinquencies suggests that a recovery in the housing market could be stalled by the worsening job picture as well as by further fallout from the easy-money lending that prevailed during the boom years.
Signals about housing have been decidedly mixed. On the bright side, median home prices appear to have stabilized -- for the time being, anyway -- in hard-hit areas of California such as the Inland Empire, and have begun to inch up again in San Diego and Orange counties and in San Francisco.
But recent negative indicators, in addition to rising foreclosures, include the home lender group's report Wednesday that applications for mortgages to buy homes have declined for six straight weeks despite interest rates below 5% on 30-year fixed-rate loans. Also Wednesday, the Commerce Department said the seasonally adjusted rate of housing starts fell more than 10% in October from the previous month.
That's the article's opening, the link to read it all is above, but the next two paragraphs are included for those who like irony as much as true candor:
Overall, 14.41% of all U.S. home loans were in foreclosure or at least 30 days past due at the end of the third quarter -- 1 in 7 -- and up from 13.16% in the second quarter.
As it has for some time, the group's report on delinquencies blamed job losses, not tricky adjustable-rate loans, for causing most of the recent pain.
The mortgage group's chief economist, Jay Brinkmann, said he expected the delinquencies to keep rising until the unemployment rate tops out in the first or second quarter of next year.
Normally, foreclosures would continue rising for two quarters past the peak in delinquencies, he said. However, given the extreme decline in home prices, Brinkmann predicted the foreclosure rate would continue to rise longer than usual past the peak in delinquencies.
Yes, I said two, then gave four paragraphs, but aside from the "not us, not our rapacious lending tricks nor our co-conspiring rapacious developers and their excessive but long-sustained overpricing" thing; aside from that amusing duplicity the remaining factual presentation appears fair, but bleak.
Those developers (and allied lenders) have been the Crabgrass on the lawn of American life, so should I add lenders to the blog title?
A CLOSING THOUGHT: Those presently not in dire straits have much to be thankful for, this Thansgiving holiday.
We all hope for a prompt recovery, but the mood is to not really expect one, and that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mood and expectations are a big part of the grand game we call a national economy, and the grander one, a world economy.
Fiat money and all, trust and belief is a big part of what's holding things up -- while, what, Wall Street's been holding us up? If it were not Goldman Sachs, it would be somebody else.
Audit the Fed. Audit FDIC. Start there, since not knowing facts puts you in a one-guess-is-no-better-than-the-next state, awaiting the deluge of politicians next year.
Be thankful the political deluge is only starting, this year. And for the ones promising, "jobs, jobs, jobs," does anyone really expect such individuals can deliver, deliver, deliver?
I don't.
________UPDATE________
Explore this Google.