Open Thread: HP'ers let Ben Bernanke and the Fed know what's on your mind

And advice for Ben for Monday?

Cut 1/2?
Cut 1/4?
Hold?
Raise 1/4?
Quit?

HP's advice: Hold steady, and send this message to failed flippers, housing gamblers, reckless lenders, stupid builders, ramen eating realtors, immoral mortgage brokers and brain-dead bankers: We're done with bubbles. You made your bed, now sleep in it.

Fed Treads Moral Hazard

Wall Street has a dream: that the Federal Reserve will rescue financial markets with a sharp cut in interest rates.

Behind that dream lurks a problem, something financial people call moral hazard.

Moral hazard is an old economic concept with its roots in the insurance business. The idea goes like this: If you protect someone too well against an unwanted outcome, that person may behave recklessly. Someone who buys extensive liability insurance for his car may drive too fast because he feels financially protected.

HousingPANIC Las Vegas Housing Crash Quote of the Day

"‘What are we doing about it?’ Toll asked. ‘We are out there with the rest of the builders in Vegas praying. There’s not much you can do."

-Bob Toll, August 2007, no longer "dancing on the bottom", but crashing right through the floor now

"We've hit bottom" McMansion builder Bob Toll now likely hitting the bottle as the housing market falls apart

"This past week was the worst week for traffic in our history"

-Bob Toll, September 2007

(It's all falling apart now HP'ers. Faster than anyone thought possible)

Right on schedule and proving they're run by monkeys, the NAR lowers their home sales projection again

Seriously, the NAR's monthly lowering of their forecast is comical. In all my days I've never seen an advocacy group do such damage to the very group they were advocating. Proving our point though - realtors are not very bright people.

Note to the NAR: You're completely discredited, and a national joke. In regards to your forecast, instead of looking dumb every month, month after month, just look dumb once and come out with a forecast you can stand behind.

And I guess "bouncing along the bottom" stock-dumper Bob Toll just found out that there is no bottom... Here's the latest:

Toll Brothers Reports Sales Decline; Trade Group Lowers Forecast

The luxury home builder Toll Brothers reported a 21 percent decline in preliminary home building revenue for the third quarter and said the housing market was so volatile that it would not give earnings guidance.

Meanwhile, the National Association of Realtors, a trade group for real estate agents, lowered its outlook for existing-home sales this year by 1 percent, or 70,000 homes.

Robert I. Toll, Toll Brothers’ usually ebullient chief executive, remained cautious. “With the uncertainties roiling the mortgage markets right now, the pace of home sales could slow further until the credit markets settle down,” he said.

At least 2.1 million vacant homes for sale in America, millions more on the way, and people are still calling "bottom"

Highest number of vacancies every recorded (goes back 40 years). More unwanted unneeded homes being added to inventory everyday by builders and desperate homedebtors. Demand cratering just as supply overwhelms.

Yup, looks like a bottom to me.

Not.

I don't get people who keep calling bottoms. Sure, you have The Corrupt David Lereah - he's paid to lie. But then you get the Lowes CEO this week saying that even though retail sales at his chain are plummeting, "We are encouraged by indications that our sales trends have bottomed."

Man, talk about missing the memo.

Even Bob Toll isn't calling bottom anymore, realizing he not only looked the fool last time he did that, but that there's this little thing called the SEC, and this little policy called Sarbanes Oxley, and you can't go out and just tell bald-face lies when you're the company's largest shareholder and CEO. No matter how much you want to pop your stock so you can keep unloading.

And finally, with those 2.1 million vacant homes, with millions more on the way, with nobody interested in buying them, my only questions are....

How fricking ugly will this get? And what year will we truly bottom?

Vacant Homes For Sale Cloud Economic Hopes

Amid brightening hopes that the U.S. housing market is stabilizing, some economists are zeroing in on a piece of data that could augur badly for the consensus view: the homeowner vacancy rate.

That figure, an often-overlooked measure of how many homes for sale in the country are empty, has climbed to its highest level since the Census Bureau began tracking it four decades ago. Last week, the bureau said that in the final three months of 2006 there were about 2.1 million vacant homes for sale.

That brought the national homeowner vacancy rate to 2.7%, up from 2.0% a year ago.