Wave after wave

And then the two
Dropt to the cove, and watch’d the great sea fall,
Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame.

--Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Holy Grail”

Matthew Padilla writes today on debunking the idea of distinct foreclosure waves, pointing to research that shows while completed foreclosures have been going up and down delinquencies are headed one way--up:

There is no second foreclosure wave coming, says Sam Khater, senior economist, First American CoreLogic.

“To say there is a second wave implies the (current) wave has receded,” Khater told me. “I don’t see that the wave has receded.”

I've been arguing for a while that any apparent abatement in foreclosures is due to the system becoming clogged. Based on this chart it seems there may even be a positive feedback effect--as delinquencies spiral out of control banks are less able to cope with work load and so fall even further behind on the process.

On a side note that Tennyson poem inspired the title of one of my all time favorite albums, Kate Bush's The Ninth Wave so here's a little musical interlude you can fire up while you catch up on the rest of EoL.