Home Values - Still in the Tank

It's good news if you never owned a home and want to buy one, but it's bad news if you want to sell your home or are upside down on your mortgage. (LINK) Standard & Poors Composite Home Price Index shows that the price of homes will fall 5% in 2011 will remain static or fall lower in 2012. So much for the promise of "happy days are here again" refrain that we've heard from Vice President Biden, the 'Recovery Czar'.

Home sales have generally been falling since the expiration of popular home-buyer tax credits (made at VAST public expense) last year. Home sales in April, the most recent month available from the National Association of Realtors, was 12.9 percent below its year-ago level.

(Reuters, op cit) With home prices still falling, many potential buyers are sidelined and banks are more stringent with loan applications and credit scores, Wells Fargo's Vitner said.

"It is not that I am pessimistic about the housing market, it is just that I am not optimistic and a gradual recovery probably will not happen until 2013 or 2014, with a full normalization not until 2015," he said.

Another contributing factor to the dour outlook for the U.S. housing market is stubbornly high unemployment and underemployment.

Home prices will fall another 3 percent from their current levels, according to the median forecast in the poll.

The hope and change mantra that has echoed through the country (promise of the ObamaNation) is very clearly reflected here. There are [conservative] areas of the nation where the economic problems we face

are not as severe - such as Texas. There are other [mostly liberal] areas where it's felt like a depression. And wherever you are and whatever you're feeling - the forecast is that there is really no end in sight. Best case you're looking at the end of the decade to see an improvement in the economic condition providing that Obama is removed by the voters.

Retaining the Obama Administration in power would sink us deeper into the hole. Obama clearly can't run on his record -- and he hasn't put forth any sort of coherent plan as his financial advisors regularly quit for "health reasons" or "to return to academic life".

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