More US housing market

A great post today from M. Morgan on the blog: Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis. It has some specific examples from each of the "tidal waves" that are coming.

They have a 600 unit project that is 100% up for resale. This means no one is going to close when the building is completed in January. Every single buyer will walk from their 20% deposits. The developer will simply going to turn the keys over to the bank.

Then later in the post Mish adds some commentary on report by Meredith Whitney, Executive Director, CIBC World Markets for the FDIC: Scenarios for the Next U.S. Recession.

The conclusion to the article is that we will have a "segmented consumer recession that will impact 10% of U.S. consumers". I dismiss such a limited impact because it does not address a rolling cascade of layoffs that I believe are coming as a result of the housing slowdown. Nonetheless the case is presented extremely well along with charts and data that everyone can use to draw their own conclusions.

A real eye-opener for me was chart 41:

We estimate that 26 percent of the U.S. population lives at, near, or below the poverty level