foreclosures

In February 2008, the headline on the cover of Arizona Business Magazine stated: “The Subprime Storm: Can the state’s economy weather this financial monsoon?” We all knew the housing market would be hard hit, but few of us imagined the near-total collapse that took place. Even by the end of 2008, we still hadn’t seen the extent of the damage. That would come in the late and unlamented year of 2009.

So how bad did it get? According to a recent Realty Studies report from the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, the Valley real estate market tallied a record number of foreclosures last year. About 41,000 single-family homes were foreclosed on in 2009.

The grand economic pooh-bahs have spoken and the major economic hole we’ve just begun to crawl out of now has been dubbed “The Great Recession.”

I first began seeing and hearing the phrase last week. Now, first and foremost I am a wordsmith. So when I see the words The Great Recession, I can’t help but think that they don’t quite carry the emotional wallop of that granddaddy of economic meltdowns, The Great Depression. After all, we’ve all been depressed sometime in our lives, but how many of us have been recessed? Depression or recession, for the millions of Americans affected by this disastrous economic skid the results are the same: unemployment, reduced work hours, foreclosures, devastated 401(k)s, crippling debt.

Why the tangent on The Great Recession? I saw the phrase again today, this time courtesy of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE), which declared that, “The Great Recession is over.” And as other economists have predicted, the recovery will be far from robust.

Arizona has joined a multistate task force designed to fight the growing national problem of mortgage fraud. The task force was announced today by Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna, who co-chairs the State-Federal Task Force on Mortgage Enforcement along with Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller.

The task force is described by McKenna's office as an "unprecedented partnership to target fraudsters."

Additional members of the task force include representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice, Department of Treasury, Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as the attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Missouri and Ohio.

"Since Arizona is one of the states hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis, our state is also a prime target for mortgage fraud," said Attorney General Terry Goddard in a statement. "Our office is doing all it can to prevent mortgage scams and prosecute unscrupulous operators. This task force promises to help strengthen these efforts."