5 Things You Wouldn't Know From Listening to Obama's Financial Crisis Speech

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Weak employment: The administration's financial crisis anniversary report touts "strong employment growth" since the recession: "[A]s of July 2013, the economy had added private sector jobs for 42 consecutive months," it says. But the portion of Americans with a job or looking for a job is at its lowest level since 1978. Last month, the unemployment rate dropped to 7.3 percent, but mostly because more Americans stopped looking for work and so were not officially counted as unemployed by the government.

Foreclosure relief fail: The report boasts that the administration's primary foreclosure relief program—the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP)— "has directly helped more than 1.2 million borrowers to date." One problem: It was originally meant to help 4 million homeowners.

Though the administration initially allocated $75 billion for HAMP foreclosure relief, only about $7 billion has been disbursed, according to the Treasury Department. And a total of just $12 billion is expected to be disbursed by end of program. Meanwhile, more than 20 percent of mortgages remain underwater.

Household wealth non-recovery: American households lost between $16 and $19 trillion in household wealth as a result of the financial crisis. But "by the end of 2012," the report says, "Americans had recovered $14.7 trillion of aggregate household net worth." The administration admits that "there is still far to go" and "progress has been uneven." As we noted earlier this year, here is just how uneven it has been:

The financial crisis destroyed some $16 trillion in household wealth [according to a May Federal Reserve report]. Americans have only recovered 45 percent of that amount, according to the Fed report. But when you break down that wealth recovery by income level, it gets worse. The Fed estimates that 62 percent of that wealth people have regained since the depths of the recession has come in the form of higher stock prices. And 80 percent of stock wealth is held by people in the top 10 percent of the income distribution. "Recent gains in the stock market mean that the recovery of wealth is nearly complete for white and Asian households and older Americans," Ylan Mui reported at the Washington Post...

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http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/obama-financial-crisis-anniversary-speech

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1. Those Pesky Facts - Where Is That Rug

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