Quote from slapshot:
This is exactly right. Take it from a person inside the mortgage industry (me).
Why the housing market will have a very difficult time recovering:
1) Before the banks got stupid and started giving 80/20 combo, zero down loans to people with 620 credit scores on Stated Income/Stated Assets, the Jumbo/Stated (verified assets) market was THE best performing portfolio with the lowest default rate of all for decades, even better than pure Full Doc.
This has always been the loan needed for high net worth, business-owning borrowers with complex taxes because it is tough to decipher their returns - but you could believe they made $10k or $20k per month if they Stated it because you could verify their $100k or $200k in cash assets. They would always put at least 10% down if not more on a $500k house - $50k+ is a lot of skin in the game.
And make no mistake, these are the buyers that support a housing market, not people flipping $80k or $120k houses over and over like we have now. We are selling the same house 3 times to equal the same revenue that used to flow through the mortgage finance pipeline. This is why "affordable housing" initiatives are market killers (the only thing that this Congress/President have tried to do to stimulate housing)
These are the high-end people that are almost completely frozen out of the housing market now. I have had several literal millionaire clients over the last 2 years that can't get a mortgage, but some loser with no money and a 3 month job's paystub can get a cheap FHA loan.
This is the main reason why housing prices continues to dive - because there is simply no one that can get a Jumbo Full Doc loan. People who can do Full Doc with a paystub and W-2's are few and far between and there are only so many rich cash buyers/investors.
If no one can get a Jumbo loan, then every house over the Conforming Full Doc limit of $417k is doomed to drop in value. And FHA loans only go to about $262,500 in most areas.
Congress, in their stupidity, as part of the Financial Responsibility Act, has now etched in concrete that all mortgages from now on must be in the tiny Full Doc box. They have doomed the housing finance system indefinitly.
You cannot lift a housing market (or any market) from the bottom up. The market is too heavy to lift that way. It has to be a stronger top of the price range pulling up the bottom. A rising tide lifts all boats. The lower end of the economic caste does not a healthy market make.
And that is what left-wing dumbfucks out there in the world don't understand. Why every giveaway and entitlement to the lower classes only serves to drag down the prosperous and does not creat anything but dependency and less future opportunity for the lower income folks.