A recent pickup in sales and home prices in some regions has been heralded as a sign that the crisis in residential real estate may be close to bottoming out, after the steepest price decline since at least 1890.

But nearly half of recent sales have been attributed to foreclosures or “short sales” at bargain-basement prices.

Meanwhile, BofA (Bank of America) which is currently facing the wrath of government lawmakers and regulators for alleged misdeeds, is trying to placate government’s social justice bulldogs by modifying loans to keep people out of foreclosure. According to a CNBC report, in August 2009 “one in every 357 homes received a foreclosure filing.” The numbers in the states with the highest rates of foreclosure are amazing. In Nevada (#1), it’s 1 in 62, in Florida (#2) it’s 1 in 140, and in California (#3) it’s 1 in 144.

“Today, we’re pointed in the right direction,” Obama said in brief remarks in the Rose Garden hours after the report was released. “While we’ve rescued our economy from catastrophe, we’ve also begun to build a new foundation for growth.”

Even so, Obama said: “We have a lot further to go. As far as I’m concerned, we will not have a true recovery until we stop losing jobs.” He also said he won’t rest until “every American that is looking for a job can find one.”

An entire economy has been “rescued” in just a few, short months. No long-term effects of a steal-and-spend, rob-peter-to-pay-paul, nationalized, centrally-planned, corporate-state economy!

Interviewer: What surprised you most about the current financial crisis?

Suze: That it happened at all.

Surprised at that response? On what did she blame the general lack of foresight? CEOs who “went on television and looked in the cameras and told everyone it was going to be OK, that they were fine.” This is just another example of the rampant economic and financial illiteracy that permeates the “expert” ranks on such matters. That Orman didn’t have a clue, and that she said, “I saw the stock market might be a little whatever,” reeks of professional incompetence. She gets even more stunningly stupid:

Why did I believe them? I believed them because do you think a normal human being, which I am, would think that after Enron, after WorldCom, after all those debacles and Sarbanes-Oxley and having to sign financial statements, would any CEO be that stupid to go on national television where everything is recorded and look in the camera and lie through their teeth? In a million years, I never thought that would happen.

Suze is right in that she is a personal finance counselor (she says “expert”), and though she says her job is “to look at what happened in the economy and what is going on in the world of finance and to tell people, based on fact, this is what’s happening now,” she says she has no responsibility for understanding the economy? She’s right that the recession (Depression, Suze) is a good thing – it’s a necessary correction to flush out the consumers-gone-wild spending habits she deplores. Strangely, she talks about a market strategy for investment, when asked, even though she says earlier in the interview that she is not a “stock market guru.”

I do like her show where she talks people out of stupid expenditures they can’t afford. She’s always given consistently sound advice to financially unsophisticated people, however, this interview makes it impossible to take her seriously as a professional. She is clearly a result of great marketing.

Note: for those new to the site, Mises University is the great, annual conference from the Mises Institute which offers the most comprehensive economic education ever offered to students of economics.