By Mandelman
So, it appears that there are two unprecedented developments in the news this week related to the housing market and ongoing foreclosure crisis.
ONE: At both state and federal levels throughout the country, governments are having an incredibly difficult time spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. TWO: Someone apparently woke up the guy who I presume usually sleeps in the office that says, “Office of the Special Inspector General,” or something like that on the door… and he actually investigated this lack of spending difficulty and reported on it.
Don’t ask me how it all happened… I’d rather field questions on the harmonic analysis of differential equations or black hole thermodynamics.
(I guess you could point out the irony and at least double entendre of “uncertainty principle,” as applied to this situation, but that would make you such a Heisenberg… an uber-nerd or highly respected mathlete because those are the only ones who will get that joke.)
It’s no surprise, however, that people are lining up to explain the phenomena… that was a fait accompli destined to happen. None, it should go without saying, have the foggiest idea what they are talking about, I mean, it’s quite clear at least half didn’t even know about any of this until the OIG report came out this past Tuesday.
I, on the other hand, have written about the topic so many times and for so long that I’m entirely bored to tears with it. In case you ever wonder, it’s weird at first, but then it gets kind of fun to be completely ignored when you’re the only guy with umbrellas during a 40-day and 40-night Biblical sort of rainstorm.
But, no matter… moving on.
What I’m talking about are the “Hardest Hit Funds,” which were the roughly $8 billion provided by the federal government in the beginning of 2010 to the states hardest hit by foreclosures in order to help their respective housing markets.
Off the top of my head, for example, California received almost $2.8 billion… Arizona got something like $270 million… Florida just over a billion… New Jersey for $300 million… Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina and Illinois each picked up $500 million, give or take… currently, I think the number of hardest hit states is 18-19.
None did anything to help housing markets in any meaningful way with the money… a whole bunch barely even spent any …read more
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