Mish’s links to the scoop (PDF) and quotes:

More than 15.2 million U.S. mortgages, or 32.2 percent of all mortgaged properties, were in negative equity position as of June 30, 2009 according to newly released data from First American CoreLogic. As of June 2009, there were an additional 2.5 million mortgaged properties that were approaching negative equity. Negative equity and near negative equity mortgages combined account for nearly 38 percent of all residential properties with a mortgage nationwide.

66% of the mortgages here in my State of Nevada are under water – with “near negative” bringing it to nearly 69%. That’s a lot – and its why the bottom here in Nevada is no where in sight. This is a State which is getting crushed between a collapsed housing market coupled with a heavily distressed tourism industry (more and more casino operators are reporting losses and indicating possible bankruptcy…if a casino is going broke, you know you’ve got some problems). How do we fix this?

Essentially, we need to reorganize our housing system as if it were going through bankruptcy. Do the best we can to determine the real value of the houses, adjust the mortgage amounts to fit and then just start building our way out of the mess by hard work. And don’t get me wrong, it means the $130,000 I’ve put in to my house is gone for good (or bad, as the case may be). Everyone bet wrong, everyone has to pay the price – well, except for those wise people who bought pre-boom and didn’t sell or refinance their house during the bubble…they’re sitting pretty on equity and deserve it for being wise.

While the mortgage crisis has hit worst just a few States, the fact remains that housing prices are dropping almost uniformly around the United States and it appears that no State has less than 15% of its mortgaged residential properties under water. It will be very painful to get out of this, but any attempt to put the matter off or hide it under various government and federal reserve schemes will just put off the day of reckoning, and make it worse when it finally arrives.

A look at the cold, hard facts is necessary – and the courage to ruthlessly cut to the chase and set things to right. We won’t get that from Obama, Reid, Pelosi and their Democrats, so we’re going to have to do it ourselves starting in 2010.

And it looks good to me:

Republican hopeful Mark Kirk finds himself starting out even in a Senate race against his likeliest Democratic competitor, State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in the state shows Kirk, a member of the House from the northern suburbs of Chciago, with 41% of the vote while Giannoulias attracts 38%. Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate, and 17% are not sure.

The sole Republican in the race fares much better against the other top Democratic contender, Cheryle Jackson, president of the Chicago Urban League and a former top aide to disgraced Governor Rod Blagojevich. Kirk beats Jackson by 17 points, 47% to 30%. Six percent (6%) like another candidate, and again 17% are undecided.

Giannoulias is tied to Obama, and tied to Tony Rezko…a scion of a Chicago banking family which has had its share of questions, we couldn’t script a better example of what is wrong with politics to run against (except for whomever the GOP picks – wink, nudge – to run against Harry Reid). If we’re expecting someone to rise out of Chicago finance and banking to have a clean record, then we’re really hoping against hope. Well, more accurately, the Democrats are hoping against hope – we’ll just reap the electoral benefits.

A timely bit of info if there ever was:

The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says this country’s health-care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it.

Dr. Anne Doig says patients are getting less than optimal care and she adds that physicians from across the country – who will gather in Saskatoon on Sunday for their annual meeting – recognize that changes must be made.

“We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize,” Doing said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

“We know that there must be change,” she said. “We’re all running flat out, we’re all just trying to stay ahead of the immediate day-to-day demands.”

The pitch for change at the conference is to start with a presentation from Dr. Robert Ouellet, the current president of the CMA, who has said there’s a critical need to make Canada’s health-care system patient-centred. He will present details from his fact-finding trip to Europe in January, where he met with health groups in England, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands and France.

His thoughts on the issue are already clear. Ouellet has been saying since his return that “a health-care revolution has passed us by,” that it’s possible to make wait lists disappear while maintaining universal coverage and “that competition should be welcomed, not feared.”

In other words, Ouellet believes there could be a role for private health-care delivery within the public system.

Anyone want Obamacare, now?

Look, liberals, government can play a role in helping manage funds to ensure that people without coverage aren’t left out in the cold – though, even there, the actual dispensing of the money would be best left to private charitable organizations. What government can’t do is run the system – even in the military, staffed with brave and dedicated men and women, things get screwed up…if the military can’t get the bureaucracy right, what makes you think anyone else will? All these boards and all the piles of bureaucratic flapdoodle proposed in Obamacare would, indeed, crush those private insurers your side is demonizing, but they would make the system bureaucrat-centered, rather than patient-centered. Canada is just learning this, the hard way.

We don’t need to – we can get quality, inexpensive health care to all Americans (don’t you mean “affordable”? No, “affordable” is liberal-speak for “costs like the Dickens but not directly” – inexpensive means precisely that). We can’t get it with Obama and his Democrats, but we can get it…it’ll just have to wait until at least 2011.

Is another economic bubble about to burst?:

A massive rally in U.S. stocks since March has reawakened bullish spirits, but insiders are jumping out of the market in a sign the run up is getting stretched.

Company executives are selling stock at a rate not seen in two years after a near 50 percent rise in the S&P 500 from a March 9 low. That suggests directors and managers may think stock prices are nearing the top end of their range in the current economic climate…

…Increased insider selling has in the past been an indicator of an inflection point for equity markets, said Ben Silverman, director of research at InsiderScore.com.

Sales of stock by company insiders suggests managers have a dim view of the market’s prospects…

This would be because there’s nothing to the so-called “improvement” in economic prospects. A huge infusion of cash – most of it created out of thin air by central banks – caused a temporary slow down in the collapse. This was coupled with a bunch of “ye-haw, everything’s great, again” economic spin to create the recent stock market boom – and not just here, but around the world and especially in China, where the bubble has risen higher and faster than anywhere else (this fueled by the Chinese government increasing the money supply by 26% and then essentially ordering banks to lend it on easy terms). But, meanwhile, Chinese exports – the thing which makes the Chinese economy tick – have fallen for 9 straight months; US consumer sales are down (in spite of alleged bumps up which are actually just price fluctuations on necessities); bankruptcies and loan impairments continue to rise; commercial real estate is in the midst of a collapse which may beggar the residential home melt down…on and on it goes, not a scintilla of good economic news, and now the piper will have to be paid.

Added to this is clear evidence of deflationary pressures (such as grocery stores cutting prices, etc. here and around the world). What we’ve got is all the elements of a Depression without anyone wanting to admit that is what we’re in. No admission – but as I always say, look at what people do as opposed to what they say. For all the talk of “green shoots”, the actuality is people in the know (about their own corporations as well as others) are bailing out a rapid clip.

It going to get a lot worse before it gets any better – and it won’t get better until we realize that only hard work will get us out of this. There’s no Economic Fairy named Barack Obama who will wave his magic wand of stimulus and make it all better – we’ve screwed up for generations, and now we have to pay up.

Want to avoid another Great Depression? Then understand:

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy. – Milton Friedman

The story:

The popular “cash-for-clunkers” program is boosting U.S. auto sales and manufacturing but is also slashing donations to charities that rely on gifts of cars to fund social programs, charity officials say.

Volunteers of America and other charities that receive tens of thousands of cars each year said such donations have quickly fallen up to 12 percent — and fear a 25 percent drop eventually, or over $100 million — as owners rush to trade gas guzzlers for new fuel-efficient models while federal rebates last.

“We started seeing it right away in July” when the program began, said Jim Hartman, vice president of vehicle donations at Volunteers of America, a nationwide charity. “It varies by market, but there’s been an 11 to 12 percent drop compared with last year.”

“The cars I’m seeing cashed in as clunkers, like older SUVs, are absolutely the typical donation to us,” he said.

Now, why didn’t Obama and his Democrats not see this coming? Because you can’t run the show from DC – its impossible. What we’ve got here is what happens when government steps in – because no one in government can possibly know all that is going on, any government action, even the most well-intentioned, is almost certain to have a baleful effect somewhere. In this case here, its crushing some charities and, of course, making used cars more scarce for poor Americans.

We can’t pick the winners and losers – the only thing we can do is help the losers to bear their burden. But it is beyond our power to figure out just who should get what from whom…we don’t know who should pay and who should benefit and we’re almost certain to punish and reward the wrong people.

Perhaps now some of you liberals will start thinking about things.

Rather disgusting the way Washington works, but with Obamacare floundering, the Democratic leadership and the kook left will demand their revenge for failure, and Obama’s official news organ, the New York Times, tees up Obama’s Chief of Staff:

… Seven months after moving into his office in the West Wing, Mr. Emanuel is emerging as perhaps the most influential White House chief of staff in a generation. But with his prominence in almost everything important going on in Washington comes a high degree of risk.

As the principal author of Mr. Obama’s do-everything-at-once strategy, he stands to become a figure of consequence in his own right if the administration stabilizes the economy and financial markets, overhauls the health care system and winds down one war while successfully prosecuting another.

If things do not go well — and right now Mr. Obama’s political popularity is declining, his health care legislation is under conservative assault, the budget deficit is at an eye-popping level and Afghanistan remains volatile — it is Mr. Emanuel whose job will be on the line before Mr. Obama’s…

Yeah, no kidding – Emanuel will be out the door by January if Obamacare fails to pass this fall. Watch how fast Emanuel goes from “super genius” to “you moron” around the left blogosphere and MSM talk shops. Truth be told, of course, Emanuel will deserve part of the censure for failure – one doesn’t hire a CoS to lose…but at bottom, it is Obama’s political tin ear which has brought him to this condition. Just a little bit of respect for the right and Obama could have got 90% of what he wanted…now, he’ll be lucky to even get a legislative fig leaf on health care to cover his failure.

The perils of politics – especially when the top dog is the most clueless man in the room.

So much for the “green shoots”:

Halfway through the back-to-school shopping season, retail professionals are predicting the worst performance for stores in more than a decade, yet another sign that consumers are clinging to every dollar.

Fears about the job market have resulted in sluggish customer traffic over the last few weeks, spurring the gloomy sales projections. Parents who do shop are aggressively trading down, informing status-conscious teenagers that notebooks from the dollar store or shirts from Costco will have to do this year.

Stock analysts at Citigroup are predicting a decline in back-to-school sales for the first time since they began tracking the figures in 1995. They estimate August and September sales at stores open for at least a year — known as same-store sales — will fall 3 to 4 percent, compared with an increase of nearly 1 percent in the same period last year.

Its not so much a matter of holding on to every dollar but having far less dollars to spend. I know my income has gone down – not by much, for now, but it is less than it was last year and looks to get worse as time goes on. This shows up in large and small things – from as large as denying myself a new car, to as small as just not buying that shirt I saw at the store. The money just isn’t there for as much as I might have wanted a while ago – and this is getting general around the economy and for 500 points, who can tell me what we call a deflationary spiral combined with a recessed economy?

Yes, kiddies, its called an Economic Depression. The only question is whether it will be a “Great” one, like the last one – and the answer to that will lie in DC. The more we ape Hoover/FDR’s asinine response to the Great Depression, the more like it our Depression will be.

As I keep saying, we have to earn our money – we gambled it for nigh on a century and the house has called in our chips. We’re done. Broke. Wiped out. The sooner we get back to work and start creating wealth the sooner we’ll get out of this. I know I’m getting boring about this – but Make, Mine, Grow is the only ticket out.

Ahh, what a beautiful day in America.

I am probably not the first person to say this, but, Obama is such a loser. He lost a lot of political capital from this heath care debacle, and it is sweet indeed to see that people are starting to realize what an incompetent fraud he is.

UPDATE: Obama Administration now says Sebelius “Mis-spoke” on dropping “public option”. Someone in kook-left-land must have sent a rocket up to the White House.

He wants us to help people rent, rather than own, their homes:

The Obama administration, in a major shift on housing policy, is abandoning George W. Bush’s vision of creating an “ownership society’’ and instead plans to pump $4.25 billion of economic stimulus money into creating tens of thousands of federally subsidized rental units in American cities.

The idea is to pay for the construction of low-rise rental apartment buildings and town houses, as well as the purchase of foreclosed homes that can be refurbished and rented to low- and moderate-income families at affordable rates.

Analysts say the approach takes a wrecking ball to Bush’s heavy emphasis on encouraging homeownership as a way to create national wealth and provide upward mobility for low- and working-class families, especially minorities. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan’s recalibration of federal housing policy, they said, shows that the Obama White House has acknowledged that not everyone can or should own a home.

Which is just typical liberal, elitist hogwash – they don’t want people to own their homes because home ownership means independence. Obama and Co would rather have people stuck in a modern version of the old, hateful “housing projects” of the past…there to remain mired in poverty and government dependency.

Of all the things Obama has done, this tops then all in cynicism – to use the liberal-created financial crisis as a means of taking over the stock of American housing to rent it out to be people financially wiped out by the very same financial crisis which allows Obama’s Administration to buy the property. And how much would any like to bet that the groups set to manage these properties will be (b) in Obama’s hip pocket and (b) given plush contracts for doing it? This will be a windfall for ACORN and other such corrupt, leftist groups.

This is a program we have to stop – the goal of US policy should be to get us as far as possible towards 100% home ownership for the American people. If we wish to remain free people, then we must have property the government doesn’t control – its be owners, or be owned.