Salon-

How far have we gone in fixing the mortgage crisis? We have no idea, because no one’s counting foreclosures

If you read the headlines on the ongoing foreclosure crisis, you’d get very confused. Are “Foreclosure Filings Increasing In 60% Of Large U.S. Cities“, as Bloomberg reports? Are “Foreclosure Machines Still Running on ‘Low‘, as the Wall Street Journal says? Or are we in the midst of a “Foreclosure Surge“, as CBS News would have us believe? The answer, unfortunately, is that we don’t really know.

Six years after the foreclosure crisis began in earnest, as former Congressional Oversight Panel Vice Chair and current AFL-CIO General Counsel Damon Silvers put it, “it’s impossible to get reliable comprehensive information on foreclosures.” The government is still not effectively measuring the single biggest weight on the American economy, the foreclosure epidemic that has claimed millions of homes.

[SALON]

image: reason.com