I’m writing that FIRE will burn in 2012. The working thesis is that all the lies and the fraud and the abuse that have been visited upon the American middle class over the last several years will finally ignite a very powerful blowback. We are just now starting to see some sparks as people wake up and begin to resist the attacks and question the prevailing political, social, economic and legal theories that are utterly unworkable in this new environment.
What’s most disturbing to me is the lack of truthful or accurate information for individuals to rely upon. Two examples that are of particular concern to me are the National Association of Realtors and the admission that their sales numbers were completely wrong and the widely-published numbers from RealtyTrac which I think are dead wrong. The RealtyTrac numbers always felt out of whack, but I never really dug deep into them before an article was published in the St. Petersburg Times, with the headline:
SECOND WAVE OF FORECLOSURES COMING!
But immediately after I hung up the phone with the reporter, I looked at the actual foreclosure numbers at the courthouses and found that the RealtyTrac numbers were all wrong. Now, I don’t know the methodology or the context of the numbers, but the information was just wrong, wrong, wrong…..and this is repeated over and over again all across the country. It was as if Paul Revere came riding through town screaming his head off like a madman but he was twelve months too early….
Which brings us to the story that ran in the Palm Beach Post yesterday, their Top Stories of 2011 Their number two story of the year is the continuing problems related to foreclosure. Here’s the headline for 2012:
“We’re nowhere near the level of foreclosures that could be filed based on the number of loans in default.”
Florida foreclosure defense attorney Matt Weidner said in November.
