Have you seen the pictures of Detroit on youtube? Man someone sold them a pup (as we say in England)

Is that pup like in the saying dropping the pups off at the pool?

''Is that pup like in the saying dropping the pups off at the pool? ''

kind of. It means the person who sold you the pup sold you something next to worthless, in other words they conned/fleeced you. Does that make sence, particularly in this context?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6WKMNmFsxM&feature=fvsr

There are 125 million homes in America. So the government owns 0.2% of them...

Chew gotta leave.

My god, the government owns 0.2% of America's Homes! This is Communism in action!

Tettie! WE MUST DO SOMETHING!!

Binkman, Don't quit your day job, you won't cut it as an analyst.
If you read the original post again you see that out of 800,000 foreclosed homes in the United States the government owns 248.000 out of 800,000.
So the government owns only .2% of all homes, but 31% of foreclosed homes are owned by the government.

You seem to have a problem grasping the obvious.
I'll spell it out for you, government intrusion into the home ownership market through the FHA, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac was a disaster for the country because even though those government programs only owned .02% of the homes in the country they ended up owning 30%+ of the foreclosures.

The government obviously can't write a good home loan.
DUH!

It is so easy to tell who is in business and who isn't.

It's land that could be used for better purposes, like lumber mills or power plants, so give the economy power to make more money to solve recession.

http://johnrlott.tripod.com/Liebowitz_Housing.pdf

Anatomy of a Train Wreck: Causes of the Mortgage Meltdown

It is the thesis of this chapter that, in an attempt to increase homeownership, particularly by minorities and the less affluent, an attack on underwriting standards was undertaken by virtually every branch of the government since the early 1990s. The decline in mortgage underwriting standards was universally praised as an ‘innovation’ in mortgage lending by regulators, academic specialists, GSEs, and housing activists. This weakening of underwriting standards succeeded in increasing home ownership and also the price of housing, helping to lead to a housing price bubble. The bubble increased the number of housing speculators with estimates indicating that
one quarter of all home sales were speculative sales prior to the bubble bursting. The recent rise in foreclosures is not related to the subprime/prime distinction since both markets had similar size increases in foreclosures that occurred at exactly the same time. Instead, the adjustable-rate/fixed-rate distinction is the key to understanding the rise in foreclosures. This is consistent with speculators turning and running when housing prices stopped rising.

The data that shows that the US government owns over 30% of the foreclosed properties in the United States is a direct result of the govenrment's demand that underwriting standards be lowered and the government guarantee of those loans, either subprime or to speculators.

@TC - There is a difference between writing the loan and guaranteeing it. The FMs and FHA guaranteed the loans. The banks wrote them. But, the feds did encourage the banks to write loans to people who should never have had a home loan to begin with and to write "Ferrari" loans to people who should have owned a "Ford". And for that, the feds are to blame. That is the real source of our housing crisis. Had the feds not tried to force banks to make homes available to every idiot who could write their name, we wouldn't be in this fuck up.