The following information from Bloomberg Businessweek is scary enough:
For sale or rent by distressed owner: 248,000 homes. That’s how many residential properties the U.S. government now has in its possession, the result of record numbers of people defaulting on government-backed mortgages. Washington is sitting on nearly a third of the nation’s 800,000 repossessed houses, making the U.S. taxpayer the largest owner of foreclosed properties. With even more homes moving toward default, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration are looking for a way to unload them without swamping the already depressed real estate market.
Trouble is, they haven’t figured out how to do that.
It’s even scarier if you’ve read Thomas Sowell’s Housing Boom and Bust and have contemplated the role government intervention played in creating the mess.
Another Thomas — Thomas Woods — discussed government’s missteps in the housing industry during an interview with Carolina Journal Rasio/CarolinaJournal.tv.
