Foreclosure rate

Ezra Klein posts this chart and writes, "What we had is less a foreclosure problem than a foreclosures in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida problem. The way you get 42 states with foreclosure rates beneath the national average is that those last eight states are post-crash dystopias inhabited mainly by squatters and feral dogs. And the way eight states bring down the economy is that the foreclosed assets were heavily leveraged: The whole country might as well have been the Golden State given that Citibank would bet $56 dollars on every buck of California mortgages."

And it's certainly striking how high foreclosure rates in those four states climbed above the national average. But it's important to keep in mind that this was all happening against a backdrop of rising national foreclosure rates. Obviously California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida contributed enormously to that increase, but it would be interesting (though probably impossible) to know how things would've panned out for the banks and the greater economy if these areas hadn't been hit so hard and if foreclosure rates had been spread out more evenly across the country.