Fixing the Housing Market So It's Safe to Buy or Hold

August 27, 2012. Neil F Garfield. Mainstream media and in particular Krugman and Ritholz have echoes what Simon Johnson and I have been saying for years. It’s not a question of theory or ideology. It’s a question of reality.

Citizens of Iceland were not in the least bit interested whether the “conservatives” or the “liberals” had compelling ideological arguments. They wanted jobs, economic stability, and decent prospects and opportunities. Citizens of Iceland were not interested in the concept of change or even change in government.

They wanted their society fixed, after being used and thrown under the bus by Wall Street using Icelandic banks as a conduit for international exchange of derivatives that turned out to be worthless. The Banks tried throwing Iceland under the bus, but Icelanders defied the power and wealth of the world’s largest banks and executed simple policies that followed the advanced thinking and analysts all over the world, past, present and future.

Bill Clinton was asked by many how he managed to take an ailing economy and turn it into a booming source of innovation with giant government surpluses. His answer was “arithmetic.” When I was a security analyst and investment banker on Wall Street the primary theme was that before investment, underwriting, or performing any act or making any decisions we had to start at the beginning — the fundamentals. Money may be hard to define but it is easy to measure.

At the end of the day if you taken more real money than you have spent, then you have more money at the end of the month. If some thief steals from you, your wealth drops. If someone claims to own your property and doesn’t own it, your wealth remains unchanged — but Wall Street, bucking the obvious proof in Iceland, says otherwise.

Wall Street says they can “borrow” the identity of homeowners and use it to create the equivalent of bank notes that can be accepted as cash equivalents as long as they dress it up with triple A ratings, and insurance companies that cannot pay for the loss and wouldn’t even if they could because the offer to buy the credit default swap, the insurance and other hedge products were based upon blatantly false premises.

Iceland simply did arithmetic and they continue to do arithmetic. They are reducing household debt, letting creditors suffer the risk of loss that was part of their contracts but now they don’t like their contracts. In Iceland too, the Banks demanded bailout money to save the financial system. But Icelanders rejected that on both legal and moral grounds.

They were not going to reward the perpetrators of fraud tooth further detriment of their victims, they would prosecute them and punish them for breaking the key laws and premises of a stable society — accountability to and for the truth.

They were not going to further burden the victims of the crimes with taxes to reward the perpetrators and their counterparts, they were going to provide as much restitution of wealth as possible and necessary to stabilize an economy that was crashing.

The financial system did not crash and burn as Wall Street had sternly predicted to the Bush and Obama administrations in the U.S. With more than 7,000 smaller banks ready and waiting pick up the pieces. They did not debase their currency and their prospects by saddling future generations with the mistakes of remote greedy bankers. They took the money that existed and disregarded the fake money, the ” cash equivalents” created all over the world allowing the shadow banning system to collapse under it’s own worthless weight. Nothing bad happened.

What did happen is that Iceland now enjoys normal economic growth, sharply declining unemployment and underemployment and does not consider trading paper whose value is based upon false transactions to be part of a their GDP. Produce real goods and services while in the U.S. And other “advanced ” superpowers they have turned themselves into paper tigers. While financial services went from 16% of U.S. GDP before this mess, it now counts for half. Arithmetic: if those shadow banking transactions are worthless then our real GDP is 34% less than what we are reporting.

In Europe where they have their heads partially in our sand, they are trying to sit on two chairs with one ass. They too understand that nothing trumps reality but the people who run government here and abroad are simply making far too much money pretending that shadow money is real money. The real value of our stock indexes is around 7500 for DJIA.

The facts are that housing is still in the dumps even if some reports show “signs of life.” to allow Foreclosures to proceed when the creditor had an undocumented c,aim without any real mortgage lien is absurd, bit it is done everyday. It isn’t a matter of defective documents, it is a matter of no documents, while the banks stole the identities of the pensions funds and homeowners for their own personal Profit,  and buried the losses until they were done trading worthless paper. THEN they gave the “ownership” of the worthless paper and the loss to the investment funds that thought they had purchased them years ago under rules that were never followed by Wall Street.

The foreclosures must end because they are illegally based upon a chain of paper without any money transactions (consideration). The “completed” Foreclosures should be disallowed because the transactions on which they were based were void for lack of consideration wherein the signature of the homeowner was procured by fraudulent premises and promises.

The real money transactions should be documented and the real loan status should be disclosed so that homeowners and investors can come to reasonable settlements and modifications without regard to the consequences to Banks whose continuing fraud is causing the U. S. And Europe without applying basic emergency procedures to stop the bleeding.

The loans are not secured by perfected liens and the principal loan origination was outright theft from investor-lenders and homeowners. But they could be secured and people could pay for the real market value of the deal they were tricked into, if we simply go back and do the arithmetic — and play fair.