Think it’s bad now, economically speaking? Just wait. The rest of the iceberg is coming into view:
The long recession and rising joblessness are taking an increasing toll on the nation’s most credit-worthy borrowers, who are now falling behind on their mortgage and credit-card payments at a faster pace than people with poor financial histories.
The mortgage-delinquency rate among so-called subprime borrowers reached 25% in the first quarter but appears to be leveling off, rising only slightly in the second quarter. The pace of delinquencies for prime borrowers is accelerating. Since prime loans account for 80% of U.S. bank exposure to mortgages and credit cards, these losses could ultimately exceed those from weaker borrowers.
“The subprime pain is in the rearview mirror,” says Sanjiv Das, head of Citigroup Inc.’s mortgage business, which is seeing delinquencies rise among prime borrowers, who make up three-quarters of its mortgage portfolio.
In many cases, these “prime” customers, whose high credit scores afforded them the best interest rates on mortgages and credit cards, lost their jobs over the past few months and only now are running out of temporary fixes that have been keeping them afloat.
Joe Biden’s vehement defense of how much wonderfulness was being done by the Obama ”stimulus” was pretty much ignored by the media yesterday. Even the Obama-worshiping media had a hard time swallowing that particular bit of political malfeasance. (How many times can one claim to have saved 20 gazillion jobs before even the math-challenged media realizes that the numbers don’t add up?)
People who have played by the rules, built their credit up the old-fashioned way – by working for it – are now falling. Our president continues to push his leftist agenda rather than trying to fix the economy.
There is a mis-match here. One that won’t be fixed by massive government intervention in health care, with even more spending, even more centralized control of our lives and ever-increasing taxes.
They really do not get it.
The economy is job one for every administration. Not more spending, not defending troofer-trash, communist, cop-killer defenders.
The economy.
God help us.
UPDATE: Thanks to The Other McCain for the link.
And to think … Canada ADDED jobs last month.
I believe this posting pretty much sums things up (and gives lots of handy links):
Ready for the Mother Of All Bailouts?
Our president continues to push his leftist agenda rather than trying to fix the economy.
This is wrongheaded.
It is not an either/or (rather) situation. The leftist agenda he is persuing is specifically one of the things that is keeping the economy down. Obama is not unsupportive of the free market economy, he’s opposed to it. Nobody who currently has anything wants to risk what they have when faced with that.
Presidents (and government at large) only ‘fix’ the economy to the extent that they stay the hell out of the way of those who actually create wealth and value allowing the economy to effectively fix itself.