Originally Posted by
retailguy
Tex, one more thing. You talk about the "fallacy" of mortgages being valued in "pools". Well mortgages are sold in pools so why shouldn't they be valued that way?
Yes, some mortgages are being unfairly devalued, but others, are being unfairly overvalued. If you look at the pool as a whole, the value is probably pretty close to correct. Just because a home doesn't foreclose, doesn't mean that there is no risk. The risk of default is there and it's REAL.
The point is not the "pool" it's the RISK. People finally see it exists. In the long run, that's a GOOD thing.
If it is an average value in the pool, where a bad one or two knock down the average, that's fine--that's mathematically sound. But to take the few rare exceptions, and pretend that's the norm--by artificially valuing on paper ALL the mortgages in the pool at the low value of the rotten ones, that's just wrong. How can you claim otherwise?
And yes, the risk of default is there and real. However, other than in a deflated real estate market, there is no stigma at all for mortgage holders to end up foreclosing and owning the property. And even in the down market that a few areas of the country are seeing these days, those foreclosed properties stiill have half, maybe 2/3, or whatever value.
THAT is why I claim that this whole mess is a contrived crisis. There just aren't that big a portion of all mortgages that are "bad"--defaulted, foreclosed, whatever, and even a large portion of those are secured by property as valuable as the face of the mortgage note--and even the ones that aren't are secured by properties that have some decent percentage of face value. Could you possibly disagree with that?