The headlines blare. The Media blitz is on. So what are the details of today's U.S. Treasury released Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan?
Well, we have an executive summary:
The plan claims it will not aid speculators or house flippers, but how specifically it does not specify.
Stabilize home prices by reducing principle of the loan and the U.S. taxpayer ponies up the cost.
They are also reducing interest rates and the refinancing past the actual current home value. Also, they are allowing bankruptcy judges to reduce the principle owed on a home and mortgage modification.
My fundamental problem is home prices are still too high relative to wages. Propping up over inflated prices and ignoring wages is beyond logic. Yet the Obama administration ignores the over supply in the labor market through guest workers, illegal labor, global wage arbitrage and offshore outsourcing.
Why isn't wage deflation front and center in these policy proposals?
CNBC quotes economist Mike Schenk:
Labor markets are deteriorating and will continue to deteriorate,'' Schenk said. "Regardless of how affordable things get, those trends in labor markets are having a huge impact on confidence and on people's ability and willingness to make large financial decisions like purchasing a house.''
Hello! Thank you, someone is pointing out to buy things one needs a solid, stable income which supports the costs of owning a home!
Below is the CNBC report:
Stabilize home prices no.
The plan may slow foreclosure rate but the problem now is that with Jumbo loan market in trouble whether this too little too late.
I totally agree with wage-home price argument. Home prices will continue to drop because there are very very few buyers in the market. People are not going to buy a house if they are not confident about their job. What is so difficult to understanding? The problems we face are solvency, confidence and trust. So far, Geithner/Summers policies have done nothing to address these three issues.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
global labor/wage repression is not addressed....period
They won't deal with these issues of methods to labor arbitrage U.S. workers.
That's what I see. They are even trying to block enforcement of any kind to hire legal workers.
Where I live, the unemployment rate is over 10%, yet if I go to any of the shipyard areas, construction, even Burger King and McDonalds....all of these companies have a sea of illegal workers....
Will these various companies even consider a U.S. worker, an unemployed teenager, a middle aged woman? Not in a million years....it's like "all U.S. citizens need not apply" might as well be written on their doors.
It's beyond stupid and when will this shit end and they start looking at labor supply reality and do something?
Even worse, any attempts to put a domestic workforce first is hit with the most inane special interest B.S. I have ever seen.
I mean literally they are trying to claim that not allowing foreign guest workers to take American jobs is "discrimination". Can you believe that? Now the United States is "discriminatory" unless we allow the entire globe to take U.S. jobs?
It's just turned the original intent of diversity and discrimination into a mockery of the terms.
Millions of federal and state jobs are offshore outsourced, these are paid for with taxpayer dollars....
but the mention of doing a temporary freeze right now to employ U.S. workers with taxpayer money (that already exists, that would not expand the deficit) never even came up as a possibility.
They import 1.5 million foreign guest workers and literally we are hearing about "discrimination" because there was a token appeal that maybe jobs in the United States should first go to U.S. workers.
Does the U.S. consider a temporary freeze on these programs or reforming them to stop labor arbitrage? Of course not!
They will not acknowledge how the China trade agreement especially created a mass exodus of U.S. manufacturing and jobs to China and that in 2000 corporations could not labor arbitrage fast enough.
Don't even breath a word of this today in the press.
We heard a token "stop corporate tax incentives to offshore outsource jobs" but when the wage ratio is 100:1, 12:1, even 5:1, well, corporations are going to continue to wage arbitrage unless the government steps in with other policy.