Looking At The Ways California Foreclosures Affect Broader Economic Activity

March 1st, 2010 by Guest Author Leave a reply »

California’s economy and how California foreclosures affect it as well as the broader nationwide economy should be studied, if only to figure out the existing recession and what touched it off. This is important because anything that takes place in California eventually makes its way east, as was demonstrated when California real estate helped to touch off a collapse in real estate markets around the country.

The seeds of the current recession seem to have been planted in two places; California and Wall Street. Whether one could have happened without the other is a discussion for other far more highly trained people such as economists and the like. What’s obvious, though, is that California was at least the fabled canary in a coal mine that nobody paid attention to when it finally fell to the ground.

It seems that for a least a few years before Wall Street took its deepest dive in late 2008, the Golden State had been serving as the fire alarm that many people playing in its real estate markets continue to disregard. This isn’t to blame everything on California, though, because Arizona and Florida also began sounding alarms and their own markets sometime after California first did. All were ignored, of course.

It would seem that real estate values had been declining for well over three years prior to the final 2008 descent from which home values in California and elsewhere are only now just finally starting to recover from. Make no mistake, though; this “recovery” is very minor, very fragile and very much in danger of collapsing at the slightest panic in the markets and especially in California.

CA foreclosures, then, might be looked at as another sort of warning sign because there are at least six California cities in the top 10 cities across the country in terms of their own rates of foreclosure. In fact, three states — Arizona, Florida and California — are contributing 44% of the total number of foreclosures in the country as of late.

Put everything together in terms of what was going out in California (which had been dealing with building issues for a decade or more when it comes to its property inventory) along with the possible effects of Proposition 13 — which may have intensified the problem — and one begins to understand how CA foreclosures can affect the broader economy. At the least, the rate scares investment off.

The reason why much of this is so and why many investors are so jumpy is that they aren’t exactly positive that the economy and housing markets have completely bottomed out in many parts of the country. Therefore, they are a bit hesitant to get back into these markets without at least a chance of getting out what they plan on putting into the market over the short and long run. Markets stay depressed when this is the case, for a fact.

It can then be said, with a great deal of certainty, that what goes on with the rate of CA foreclosures affects not only California’s economy but the nationwide economy to some extent. When foreclosure rates out in the Golden State finally begin to decline appreciably and steadily it might be that investors across the country will feel better about getting back into the markets in a big way.

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