Another Sign of New Life for Housing Market

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These are the million or so homes that have already been foreclosed on. Selling for 50% of their former value. And good luck giving birth to a mortgage without 20% down. 

NAR puts car dealers to shame with it's hype.  So home sales are 20% roughly below the norm and down over the spring in peak buying season and this means that housing will charge forward in Sound of Music splendor to the sky of bubble highs?  All in the face of new job layoffs, the market downturn today and articles warning of a possible new recession?   I can't wait to see what NAR will be puffing in November. 

What is most telling about these numbers is the quote at the very end of the article.  Purchases are being restrained by low levels of homes available for sale and tight credit standards.  When the mortgage crisis took hold and the housing market collapsed as banks foreclosed and repossessed millions of homes people forget that those homes are still in existence. It isn't like the banks took them over and burned them all down there are huge numbers of vacant homes in America all controlled by big banks. They aren't being put on the market since to the banks they are more valuable as collateral assets to secure inter bank lending (which due to rate fixing they make big returns on) and since a large number of the mortgages were erased through TARP they basically have these properties for free and the proceeded of any sale would have to be paid back to the government. So it is actively against the interest of the banks to sell these properties even though the housing market would benifit greatly from additional homes on the market. Because the banks want to use these properties as collateral for risky or shady lending and ignore their responsibility to tax payers by paying back at least some fraction of TARP they are directly hurting people looking to buy a home, communities the ignored property reside in, and tax payers as a whole. These corrupt bankers are the ones Romney and Ryan throw their full support behind. Wealth takes care of it's own, as for the rest of us I hear there are these places called trailer parks, after all home buying is over rated.