The several years of "loose lending" by mortgage lenders helped bring a surge of bad loan programs with borrowers that were either overextended from Day One or should have been unqualified to begin with. This surge has now become a tsunami of foreclosures and short sales, which Jeff Allen and I have lumped together as the term: "Lender Mediated Sales." Now that lenders, banks, retirement funds, investment bankers, average investors and everyone else have all been bitten by the fallout from this housecological … [Read more...]