However, this is not surprising considering that "creative" mortgage lending by financial institutions to put billions more into their pockets included scamming home buyers with interest only payments that then ballooned, pushing unreliable ARM's, sub-prime duplicity, and other types of cheating, and in league with the real estate and homebuilding industries, artificially inflating home prices with blue sky appraisals.  

The housing bubble burst with a loud bang, as predicted by progressive economists and these artificial prices are now falling to realistic levels or lower.

As McClatchy Newspapers reports: "The Bush administration's pledge to rescue ailing housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac raises anew questions about just when the nation's dismal housing market will hit bottom.

"Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have suggested over the past year that an end is in sight. But with each prediction, things have grown worse. For many homeowners, the deep housing slump feels like a drop off a skyscraper. Every time another 15 floors have passed, there seems to be more room to fall.

" 'I don't think we get strengthening in the housing market until late 2011 or 2012,' said Mark Vitner, senior economist for Wachovia, the nation's fourth largest bank and one that this month hired the number-two man from the Treasury Department as its new chief executive officer to shore up its own growing exposure to mortgage debt.

"Before bottoming out, prices nationwide should fall 22 percent to 29 percent on average from their peak, according to a report that Wachovia released last Monday.

" 'I think we're somewhere between halfway and two-thirds of the way through the correction,' said Vitner, who closely studies the trends in home prices and home sales nationwide.

"And historical trends no longer may be a valid basis for judging a market that's undergoing an unprecedented decline.

"Until the current downturn, median home prices had declined more than two months in a row only once, in 1990. But the decline now has lasted 22 straight months."

The so called rescue by the Bush administration is ironic and hypocritical.  This criminal regime is complicit in perpetrating this financial crisis with deregulation, no regulation, and self-regulation of Bushite mortgage lending, Wall Street corporate crony scammers and fraudsters.

Bushites are trying to bail out their fellow perps and again screw those poor saps, the home buyers, who bought into in this administration's phony "ownership" society claptrap, a profit by any means vehicle for Bush administration contributors, the mortgage lenders and other financial institutions.