Another doom and gloom report was issued by the Mortgage Bankers Association today, Thursday, June 5, 2008. As usual, the headlines of this article blare "Home Foreclosures Soar to New Record."
It is just one more blatant example of the media painting the nation's real estate market with a very broad brush.
Jay Brinkman, vice-president of research and economics with the Mortgage Bankers Association, had more nasty news for us. The following is from the Thursday "quarterly snapshot" of the mortgage market.
"The number one problem is the drop in home prices," Brinkman said. Declining prices, especially in newer built areas, "are hurting people's ability to recover when they run into trouble - a divorce or loss of job," he said. "In other days, you could sell the home. But because home prices have fallen so much, in many of those cases, the homes are going into foreclosure."
Mr Brinkman continues to say the following:
"California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona accounted for 89 percent of the total increase in new home foreclosures, he said. Those are places where prices have fallen sharply and there was a lot of home building, creating too much supply, Brinkmann said."
Why do they do this ? If you simply subtract the 89% of the current foreclosures in these four states from the total 100% of the foreclosures... the article could have been presented in a much different manner.
What a different picture it would paint if the real truth of Mr Brinkman's study said that "The Great Majority of States... 46 out of 50 states in the United States... had only 11% of the national foreclosures.
There are "two sides" to the current statistics from The Mortgage Bankers Association report. One side is straight out of hell. The other side... well, it says that things are nowhere near as bad as the national media portrays the real estate market to be.
Presenting economic news in such a jaded way could be labelled "economic terrorism." My question is... How Do We Bring Some Accountability to the National News Media ?
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