It's bigger than subprime...

Highly recommended piece in Time about how the mortgage issue has gone beyond just those impacted by the subprime crisis, how it happened and how that impacts you. A selected portion:

The thing is, subprime isn't the entire story. In fact, looking forward, it's not even the biggest problem. While the raw percentage of subprime loans in delinquency and foreclosure still far outstrips any other sort of mortgage, the types of loans that are now going downhill the fastest are ones that were generally sold to more credit-worthy borrowers.

"Originally, the loan product was driving a lot of the delinquencies," says Steve Berg, managing director of loan-tracker LPS Applied Analytics. "Now you have widespread house-price deterioration and people losing their jobs. If you lose your job, it doesn't matter if you have a good loan product, you still might not be able to make your payment."

It's easy to see the shift by looking at bands of FICO scores — a popular measure of a borrower's creditworthiness. In January, 18.58% of loans associated with a FICO score below 688 were delinquent by one measure — a large number, but just half a percent more than in December. By contrast, the number of delinquent loans in the top tier (752 or higher), jumped by nearly 7% in January. The overall percentage of problem loans remained small by comparison — the delinquency rate rose from 1.45% to 1.55% — but the quickening pace of homeowners falling behind on their payments signifies more trouble ahead. "Those are tomorrow's foreclosures," says Ted Jadlos, senior managing director of LPS, which provided the numbers from its database of 40 million home loans, which covers about 70% of all mortgages.

This means of course any governmental action planned that only addresses the subprime issue is not going to fully address the foreclosure impact this is going to have in communities all over America.