Since yesterday, rates on the 10 year treasury are up. That's not going to help mortgages.

Ultimately, this was just a bailout for the rich and powerful, with "people in foreclosure" as the excuse. The people in or close to foreclosure will not be helped. The people who took out mortgages with low teaser rates or reverse amortization terms will not be helped. Only the people who borrow money to leverage questionable assets and then award themselves large fees for taking irresponsible risks will be helped.

Yes, the market will "unfreeze." But really it has not been frozen. People and companies with good credit and responsible habits and capital structures have not been impacted. Companies that sought to "enhance shareholder value" by using all their cash to buy back stock, borrowing even more to buy back more stock, and then depending entirely on commercial paper for working capital because they have no money in the bank found themselves frozen out. There's a term for what those companies did. It's called "irresponsible risk taking." The payback should be a whole lot of CEOs losing their jobs, and a whole lot of private equity investors and "activist" hedge funds losing their shirts for being so short-sighted. And the markets for those bad debts should be "frozen," because nobody in their right mind should want to make those loans in a normal environment.

[And just to be 100% clear, I don't think all "activist" investors are bad. Many are truly engaged with the companies whose stock they own and try to maximize long-term value. The ones whose idea of "adding value" can be summed up as "issue debt, buy back stock and give ourselves huge 'consulting' fees for coming up with the idea" are toxic and really need to die off, along with probably 2/3 of the hedge funds out there.]

In the meantime, I'm not looking to buy a condo just yet. I've got a couple of ideas in mind, but believe there's still plenty of time.

-btc