There's a lot more excess to work through in the housing market. It still is unfair that the bankers who organized and profited from the excesses are recovering so quickly while everyone else is stuck with the bill. The TARP program that rescued the bankers as well as the banks was a huge mistake and probably has a lot to do with the current public position on the national debt. Sure it's crazy, but Washington only has itself to blame for the poor bailout that nobody quite understands even today. It's asking a lot for struggling families to care when they just watched the bankers get away with their excesses.
Banks seized more than a million U.S. homes in one year for the first time last year, despite a slowdown in the last few months as questions around foreclosure processing arose, a leading firm said Thursday.
Banks foreclosed on 69,847 properties in December, bringing the year's total to 1.05 million, topping the prior record of 918,000 homes seized in 2009, real estate data firm RealtyTrac said.
The number of foreclosure filings, which includes default notices, auctions and repossessions, was a record 2.9 million last year, including 257,747 filings in December.
