That's what RealtyTrac says anyway. Seems September forclosures are down 8% from August - but up over 100% from last September. (Hat tip, The Consumerist):

Foreclosures are deepening the U.S. housing recession by pushing more homes onto a market where sales and prices are dropping. There's a 10-month supply of unsold homes, the highest in at least eight years. As many as half of the 450,000 subprime borrowers whose mortgages will re-set through November may lose their homes because they can't afford the higher payments, according to a report by Credit Suisse Group.

``The truth of the matter is that borrowers are going into default as soon as they hit their adjustments,'' said Rick Sharga, executive vice president of marketing at Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac. The company sells foreclosure information and has a database of more than 1 million properties from 2,500 U.S. counties.

The big wave of mortage resets doesn't begin till next year. Which is to say, at double last year's level, we haven't even really seen how bad it's going to be.

Once again - there will be absolute levels of decline in housing prices, especially in major metropolitan (ie. overheated) areas. The bubble's deflation will take 5 to 7 years, though the worst will occur over the next 18 months to two years. There won't be a new run up till the deflation has subsided. Imports to the US are down, which suggests that while consumers haven't stopped spending yet, retailors are betting that they're going to, and that the Christmas season will be a bad one. Given how much consumer spending was based on borrowing against inflated housing values I can't see how the American consumer isn't going to wind up tapped out and how spending won't suffer an absolute decline next year. Granted, there seems to be a real willingness to give consumers even more credit (in part because the bankruptcy bill's protections makes lenders think that the government will do their leg-breaking work for them) but as the pain deepens I think that legislation is going to get revisited at some point. And, more to the point, you can't get blood from a stone, as my father's generation liked to say. The truly poor are judgement-proof.

I remain convinced that this will lead to an effective recession for most of the economy. When the high-flying financial sector, which seems to believe it has cut its final tethers to the planet earth and floated off into a magic happy place where endless debt, arbitrage and the wonder of leverage combines to make billions of dollars in an essentially lackluster economy will come crashing back to earth is harder to predict, but I am quite sure that at some point enough, or big enough, people, are going to insist on cash and bring the entire house of cards toppling down.

While that will hurt a great deal, the financial markets have become so divorced from the real economy, and so non-functional at actually producing capital for real growth that raises all boats, that I also believe it will essentially be a good thing. Financial systems which become ends in themselves, rather than means to direct capital where it is can be put to real productive use are incredibly destructive and need to be controlled. The generation who lived through the roaring 20's and the Great Depression knew that, but we, ignorant and feeling ourselves more "sophisticated" than they, destroyed most of the protections they put in place to ensure finance served the rest of the economy -- not the other way around, and have defunded and crippled what few remnants (like the SEC) remain.

Pity we couldn't learn from the mistakes of others. Hopefully we'll learn from our own.