STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Tuesday, 24 January 2012

[Demeter]

43. Mitt Romney Talks With Florida Foreclosure Victims

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/23/mitt-romney-foreclosure-florida_n_1223394.html

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney spent nearly an hour talking to struggling home and business owners Monday morning in Florida, the next stop in the Republican primary contest and one of the states hardest-hit by the foreclosure crisis that wrecked the economy in 2007...At a round table in a Tampa, Fla. hotel, Candice Tammey told Romney about how she'd lost her job in the staffing industry three years ago and eventually stopped paying her mortgage after her bank wouldn't negotiate a loan modification.

"I'm going to be living in my home until I'm kicked out. I don't have a choice at this point," she said, adding that employers seemed "inundated" with other job applicants. She said she had her health and that she's keeping a positive outlook. "There's light at the end of the tunnel," she said. "I don't see it quite yet but I know that it's there, so I'm encouraged -- I know that there's something better out there for me and for us as a country."

"It will get better," Romney said, according to CNN's online video stream of the event. "It will not always be like this. This is a detour from America's history. ... I can't predict when it will get better but if I'm fortunate enough to become president, I will care very deeply about getting it better in a big hurry." It's the first time Romney's talked foreclosures since he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the only thing the government should do is get out of the way. "Don't try to stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom," Romney said last October. "Allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up and let it turn around and come back up. ... The Obama administration has slow walked the foreclosure process ... that has long existed and as a result we still have a foreclosure overhang." Romney stuck to that message as homeowners told him of their struggles.

Richard Wood of Bradenton, Fla., told Romney he'd folded his title insurance company in October 2010. "I invested in some real estate, some rental properties, made what I considered to be very conservative investments during the boom times and right now I am negotiating with the same bank who has mortgages on each of those and an approximate $200,000 deficiency," he said. "We have been exploring the possibility of moving to another country where we might be able to live on our retirement and our Social Security."

"Yeah. It's just tragic, isn't it? Just tragic, just tragic," Romney said. THE COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATIVE AT WORK

VIDEO AT LINK: MITT ROMNEY'S TERRIBLE WEEK