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Walk Aways - The New Foreclosure Trend

Voluntary Defaults

America's house price time bomb

"It's a business decision for their family that the smartest thing they can do is walk away from their home"

Faced with seemingly never-ending falls in the value of their properties, some American home-owners are taking radical action; they are choosing to walk away from homes and their mortgages.

Worrying development

Ms Trainer says she feels no moral obligation to go on paying a loan on a property that is going to go on losing her money. She says her friends support her decision.

"I think people are taking a more cold-hearted look at it," she says.

"Is the bank going to pay for my retirement because I was a good girl and paid my mortgage, even though legally I didn't have to?"

Professor Wachter believes that, to date, most people have had their homes repossessed because they could not manage the repayments.

The trend of people now positively choosing to walk away because it makes financial sense to do so is a worrying new development.

"The dangers are extraordinary," Professor Wachter says.

"If all that is needed is that the house value is less than the mortgage value, there is a large number of homeowners in the United States who are in that situation".

"This is becoming a tsunami of voluntary defaults"

Total disaster

It is impossible to know for sure how many of the people who are now walking away from their homes could have gone on paying their mortgages.

But Professor Nouriel Roubini of New York University, one of the first economists to warn of the dangers of the American house price boom, believes the number of people positively choosing to walk away is growing rapidly.

"This is becoming a tsunami of voluntary defaults," Professor Roubini says.

"The losses for the financial system from people walking away could be of the order of one trillion dollars when the entire capital of the US banking system is only $1.3 trillion.

"You could have most of the US banking system wiped out, so this is a total disaster."

Which is why it is not just US policymakers who are hoping America's new, multi-billion dollar initiative to stabilise the housing market will succeed in its aims and thus make walking away less attractive.

Because if it fails, the economic fallout could be felt far beyond America's shores. Complete Story

Source: BBC News by Michael Robinson 

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