-Nearly one in 10 households with a mortgage had zero or negative equity in their homes as of September 2005, according to First American Real Estate Solutions, an arm of title-insurance company First American Corp.
-One in 20 home borrowers was upside-down by 10% or more.
-Of those who bought or refinanced homes in 2005, 29% had zero or negative equity, and 15.2% were underwater by 10% or more.
-Interest rates on about a quarter of all mortgage loans outstanding, or $2 trillion, are scheduled to reset this year and next.
None of these statistics is new or surprising to this group, but it’s startling to see them bulletpointed in a mainstream article. It will be interesting to see how fast things unravel when information begins reverberating in the new media echo-chamber.
It will be hard to predict how fast and in what direction the tree will finally fall or what collateral damage it will cause. As some of the other posts here suggest, some of us standing on the sidelines might get hit by the falling tree in unanticipated ways.
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