Trying to make sense of the financial "bailout"

I’m going to preface this by saying

#1 – I am not a mortgage broker and

#2 – this is just plain confusing even to those in the business of explaining to the rest of us.

That said….

The Page Lake Powell area has always had a rather insular real estate market. ie. people come here on purpose. Most don’t just wake up one morning and say “hey, lets move to Lake Powell”. Our housing market has remained stable through the up’s and down’s as people who choose to come here know Lake Powell and know our industries, ie. the power plant and the tourism.

Doing a search this morning I can find two bank owned properties in Page for sale. I am sure there are more, but it give you a feel for the idea we did not hit a huge “boom” here. The market was brisk for a couple of years but not crazy. And yet we are all involved in the bailout.

Rather than try to explain this, I am going to offer a couple of links to the experts, who have clearly written, informative posts.

Tom Vanderwell, who has Straight Talk About Mortgages is always an excellent source to follow. Bookmark it now as he can help decipher whatever the terms of the bailout end up being.

From his post “to bail or not to bail” a couple of things really struck me

• I think that the American people are getting fed up with Wall Street. They are getting sick of Wall Street playing fast and lose with their and our money and then crying to Washington, “Save us!” I heard one congressman yesterday say that the calls to his office (and the phones were ringing non stop) were running 150 to 1 against the bailout. That’s not a small majority, that’s a pretty convincing majority if you ask me and right before an election, that speaks loudly.

and in another section of the post from Friday

• The Biggie (so far): Last night, the FDIC came in and finally shut down Washington Mutual. They are the largest bank failure in the history of our country. The interesting thing is that they did the shut down in a way that isn’t going to cost the FDIC any money (Whew – that could have been a big one!). No word that I’ve heard of yet on what happens to their loan portfolio.
  

The post to Bail or Not To Bail is well worth the read.

Another post making waves in the blogosphere this weekend is

An Alternative Plan for Fixing Credit and Housing
on Barry Ritholz blog, The Big Picture. Tom V. who I read most everyday, thought the post was important enough to repost it on his blog. That is a statement. The comments section of the above post has great information in it as well.

Another great idea over on Steve Belts Blog

With the rush in congress to get this bailout, all 700 billion dollars of it, passed by Sunday night, Monday morning should prove interesting. Stay tuned……..

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