Last month we noted that US foreclosure filings jumped 17% in Q3 of 2025 vs. Q3 2024, with Florida, Nevada, South Carolina, Illinois and Delaware leading the pack, based on research by ATTOM. 

Now, ATTOM is reporting a 20% monthly spike in October vs. 2024 – marking the eighth straight month of YoY increases. 

Breaking it down:

There were 36,766 US properties with some type of foreclosure filing in October, which include notices of default, scheudled auctions, or bank repossessions – a 3% rise over September of this year, and a 19% jump vs. Oct. 2024.
Foreclosure starts – the initial phase of the process, were up 6% vs. September and were 20% higher than October 2024. 
Completed foreclosures – the final phase, jumped 32% YoY for October. 

That said, Attom CEO Rober Barber doesn’t think it’s a big deal.

“Even with these increases, activity remains well below historic highs. The current trend appears to reflect a gradual normalization in foreclosure volumes as market conditions adjust and some homeowners continue to navigate higher housing and borrowing costs,” said Barber. 

Similar to last month’s report, Florida, South Carolina and Illinois led the nation in state foreclosure filings. City-wise, the following metro areas led the pack:

Tampa, FL
Jacksonville, FL
Orlando, FL
Riverside, CA
Cleveland, OH

When it comes to completed foreclosures, Texas, California and Florida had the most – suggesting that those states will see more inventory available for sale at distressed prices. As CNBC notes, there’s strong demand for houses in these price ranges, so it’s likely that those foreclosed properties won’t last long on the market. 

Putting things in perspective

All of the above translates to less than 0.5% of mortgages in foreclosure. At the peak of the Great Recession, over 4% of mortgages were in foreclosure – so we have a ways to go, and are currently well below the historic average of between 1% and 1.5%. 

Also right now, 4% of mortgages are delinquent, which as 12% at the peak of the financial crisis.

What is concerning are FHA loans: 

“So, no foreclosure tsunami to worry about,” said  Rick Sharga, CEO of CJ Patrick Co., a real estate market intelligence firm. “That said, there are a few areas of concern. [Federal Housing Administration] delinquencies are over 11%, and account for 52% of all seriously delinquent loans; we’re likely to see more FHA loans in foreclosure in 2026.” 

Sharga also pointed out that states which are experiencing falling home prices with rising insurance premiums are seeing an uptick in defaults. 

At the end of the day, in most major metros – anyone looking to buy a home is still better off renting that same home for a fraction of the mortgage, property tax, and maintenance – with the wildcard of course being the potential for capital appreciation. 

Update: As ZeroHedge reader Montana Cowboy notes in the comments below – it’s even worse than that…

The real problem arrives when the lender becomes the owner. This happens when the lender’s demand exceeds the highest bid.

A foreclosure is not automatically a process where the lender becomes the owner. A foreclosure is a forced public sale. The lender makes the first bid for the amount owed, which includes missed payments, unpaid property tax, forced insurance, foreclosure costs, and other costs. It typically comes to about 110% of the loan balance but can dramatically exceed that amount if the lender stalls. If there is no cash buyer for that total amount, the lender is the highest bidder and becomes the owner. 

The fun really starts when the lender becomes the owner. GAAP and FAFSA accounting rules permit that lender to hide the loss by presuming the value of the property exceeds the lender’s investment. Once the lender re-sells that property, there is no way to hide the loss on the lender’s books. This is why lenders delay foreclosures, sometimes for years. They don’t want to start the process because they know where it ends. It gets worse if the market is declining. Foreclosures accelerate that decline by increasing supply.

The foreclosures reflected in the article do not account for loans in trouble where the initial step of foreclosure (a Notice of Default) is being deliberately delayed. Things are much worse than this article shows.

Let’s Compare

Take a $2.2 million home in San Diego, for example… Someone with excellent credit will pay $13,859 per month when you include taxes, HOA, and home insurance, and cough up $439,000 for the 20% down payment. 

If interest rates drop to 4%, you’re still paying $11,480 per month…

Meanwhile, this almost identically sized house around the corner (literally) rents for $6,200 / month –  which is $7,659 less per month than the mortgage (or $91,908 less per year) and includes a landlord to pay for that broken washing machine or whatever, plus you can bail when the neighbor kid drops a 2000W stereo in his Acura you can hear from 3 blocks away coming home from his Drakkar Noir-drenched attempt to get laid in the Gaslamp (did not get laid).

Either way you’re paying for a McMansion on a postage stamp.

Via Middle East Eye

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman wants a defense deal that outshines Qatar’s, AI chips and AI-powered drones, and potentially, American nuclear weapons stationed in his country.

The wishlist reveals the confidence of a leader who arrives in Washington on Monday, having withstood pressure to normalize ties with Israel amid alleged genocide in Gaza. Then over the summer, he emerged unscathed, if not relatively stronger, by sitting out a direct war between Israel and Iran. On the opposite side of the aisle is a US president willing to put up his country’s crown jewels for negotiation: nuclear and AI technology.

The success of the crown prince’s visit will be a reflection of President Donald Trump’s core instinct to bypass the American security establishment’s concerns about China and safeguarding US technology in exchange for racking up foreign sales from one of the world’s few major economies that has the cash at hand, despite stretched budgets, to splash big. 

There was a time when Middle Eastern leaders came to the White House to discuss deals that basically just kept Boeing and Lockheed Martin humming. The shah of Iran, with his encyclopedic knowledge of weapons systems, was notorious for such visits. But experts say Mohammed bin Salman’s sophisticated shopping list reflects his view of a much more mature and forward-thinking kingdom.

“MBS is not looking for cooperation in a single area, but to strengthen US-Saudi cooperation in the long term. That is a two-way flow of technology and trade,” Ayham Kamel, Middle East president at Edelman Public and Government Affairs, told Middle East Eye.

“Saudi Arabia still wants to be part of a multipolar world order, but it is pivoting to take advantage of its closeness to Trump,” he added. 

Nukes and defense agreement

One of the areas to watch, experts say, is a Saudi push to be included under the US’s nuclear umbrella. Days after Israel attacked Hamas negotiators in Qatar, Saudi Arabia signed a defence pact with Pakistan, the only nuclear-armed state in the Muslim world. Pakistan is estimated to possess around 170 nuclear warheads. Saudi and Pakistani descriptions of the deal said it encompassed all military options.

The Americans’ nuclear talks with Saudi Arabia have been kept under tight wraps, but one former US intelligence official said the idea of extending protection to the kingdom could serve a purpose.

“It would pull them [the Saudis] out of the Pakistanis’ nuclear umbrella and make the Saudis feel better than the Qataris,”  he said. “I think we should look for some language next week that points to Saudi Arabia being linked to the US nuclear arsenal,” the former official said.

MEE reported previously that the Trump administration gave its approval for the Israeli attack on Qatar. The decision discredited the decades-old foundation of the US’s status as the security guarantor of the oil-rich region.

But for Saudi Arabia, that image started to fray as early as 2019 when Iran attacked its Aramco oil facilities. The first Trump administration refused to retaliate against Tehran or its allies, the Houthis, whom Saudi Arabia was fighting at the time. “The memory of September 2019…still looms large,” Hesham Alghannam, a Saudi defence analyst in Riyadh, said at an event hosted by the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington on Wednesday.

In a bid to mend ties with Doha after the Israeli attack, Trump signed an executive order that guarantees Qatar’s security and says the US will regard any attack on the Gulf state as a threat to its own “peace and security”. Few officials in Washington or the Gulf put much stock in the pledge. Unlike the US’s treaty commitments to Japan and South Korea, executive orders can be revoked at any time, and incoming governments may not honour them. 

Experts say Saudi Arabia wants something stronger, with the knowledge that it will not get a Senate ratified treaty. “Riyadh is not seeking symbolic protection. It wants a credible and clear defense arrangement. Not MOUs with no action plan. Something more than the partial offers the kingdom is getting now,” Alghannam added.

Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman and national security adviser Musaad al-Aiban were in Washington earlier this week to iron out the potential defense pledge. Before he has even landed in Washington, one of the successes of the crown prince’s visit has been the Saudi’s ability to disentangle bilateral deals with the US from Israel, experts say. 

The US and Saudi Arabia had been discussing a Senate ratified defence treaty as part of a quid pro quo for Riyadh to normalize ties with Israel.

Before Trump visited the kingdom in May, Saudi Arabia had pre-negotiated the talking points to make sure normalisation was not on the agenda, MEE was the first to reveal. Despite a fragile ceasefire holding in Gaza now, and Trump’s claim that Riyadh will normalise ties with Israel before the year’s end, western and Arab diplomats tell MEE that Saudi Arabia is just as reluctant to return to those discussions.

In addition to a ceasefire, the kingdom wants to see steps towards the creation of an independent Palestinian state, something Israel is loath to agree on.

Can Saudi Arabia enrich uranium?

Saudi Arabia and the US were also in talks about reaching an agreement on civilian nuclear energy as part of a reward for Riyadh to establish ties with Israel.

Those talks are still on – even if normalization is off the agenda. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright visited Saudi Arabia in the spring to discuss cooperation in nuclear technology.

While Trump considers the Abraham Accords a key success of his foreign policy, he is also seeking business deals. The allure of US companies like Westinghouse and Bechtel, which build nuclear reactors and the infrastructure to support them, profiting from a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, may be enough to overcome sidelining Israel, experts say.

In 2009, the UAE signed a so-called 123 agreement by which they promised not to enrich uranium in order to receive US permission to start a civilian nuclear program.

The crown prince and his advisors have pushed for a deal that will allow them to enrich uranium, which they say the kingdom holds vast reserves of. “We will enrich it and we will sell it and we will do a ‘yellowcake’,” Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said at the start of the year, referring to a step in the process that comes after mining, but before enrichment.

“Not enriching would be a major concession by the Saudis. It’s an economic issue because the Saudis know they can make more money off their uranium by enriching themselves instead of exporting it. But it is also a matter of national pride. The question is, if they don’t enrich, what is their pay-off from Trump?” a Saudi-based analyst told MEE.

Bernard Haykel, a professor at Princeton, said at the Arab Gulf States Institute event that the trade-off could be nuclear weapons. “I suspect for now that they will give up on enrichment and processing, but they will want a nuclear umbrella protection from the US,” Haykel said. “Which may involve the deployment of US nuclear weapons systems on Saudi soil.”

Gregory Gause, a visiting scholar at the Middle East Institute think tank in Washington, told MEE: “Historically, we have had nuclear weapons stationed all over the place. It doesn’t require Congress to approve the stationing of nuclear weapons in Saudi Arabia.”

“We also have nuclear-armed submarines that can go anywhere in the world. Trump could just say we will commit to nuclear-armed submarines patrolling the Indian Ocean.”

Will Saudi Arabia get F-35s?

Saudi Arabia is bringing 1,000 officials on 18 planes to Washington for the visit, a US official briefed on the preparations told MEE. Monday will mark the first time since 2018 that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman will visit the White House.

Seven months after that trip, he ordered the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, triggering a torrent of criticism by human rights groups and former US President Joe Biden when he was campaigning for office. Riyadh’s ties to the US were strained during the Biden administration’s early days, but by 2022, they recovered, in part because the US needed Saudi energy after it sanctioned Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman emerged from that rupture in a much stronger position. He sought a truce with the Houthis in Yemen and has patched up ties with Iran. The crown prince moved out of isolation long ago. This visit, experts say, is about consolidating the raft of deals that the US and Saudi Arabia committed to when Trump visited the Gulf in May. 

The two announced $142bn in defense sales. At the time, MEE revealed that F-35s, stealthy fifth-generation fighter jets, were part of the prospective agreement. Reuters reported last week that the sale could include up to 48 F-35s.

Some US and Israeli officials have been concerned about the sale for months, as MEE and others have reported. Israel is the only country in the Middle East to operate the F-35, which it views as a key part of its qualitative military edge against its neighbours.

Plans to sell F-35s to the UAE as part of its establishment of diplomatic ties to Israel stalled during the Biden administration over concerns that China could gain access to the technology. US officials have been raising those concerns about Saudi Arabia for months also, current and former US officials tell MEE.

Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace expert at Aerodynamic Advisory, said if the deal went through, they wouldn’t start getting deliveries until three or four years from now, as they would be behind several European countries that have already placed orders.Aboulalafia said concerns about maintaining Israel’s qualitative edge have been a perennial issue in warplane sales to Saudi Arabia.

In the 1990s, the US sold the kingdom F-15S strike eagle warplanes with downgraded radars and inferior electronics countermeasures, in part to appease pro-Israel lobbying groups. “The Israelis will be a little concerned, but usually, that is addressed because Israel gets technological rights to enhance their stuff, that the Saudis do not get,” Aboulalafia said.

“The F-35 is also, to a far greater extent than any other aircraft, vulnerable to a kill switch,” he added, meaning that the US can remotely disable the warplanes.

President Trump is planning a formal dinner for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during his trip to Washington, a man the U.S. intelligence community concluded approved the killing and dismemberment of Post opinion columnist Jamal Khashoggi. https://t.co/TCT4hzLLtW

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) November 14, 2025

Israel itself has pioneered advancements on the F-35 with the US’s support. Israel modified its version of the warplane, the F-35I Adir, to carry external fuel compartments without compromising on its stealthy features, MEE reported. That modification allowed Israel to fly the F-35s thousands of miles round-trip to Iran, without refuelling, during its surprise attack on Iran in June.

Alghannam, the Saudi analyst, told the Arab Gulf States Institute that this is the kind of cooperation, what he called “the localisation of content”, is what Saudi Arabia is really seeking from Trump. He said, “without US assistance”, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned weapons manufacturer, Saudi Arabian Military Industries, could not become a “serious” player in the industry.

Drones to data centres: Saudi Arabia’s AI agenda 

In addition to F-35s, the US and Saudi Arabia have been discussing the sale of hundreds of MQ-9 Reaper drones. However, defense industry insiders and officials say that the kingdom is becoming more selective, and the space to watch for deals during this visit is with smaller defense players.

Saudi Arabia has been in talks with Shield AI, a US start-up whose AI-supported V-Bat drone is operating in Ukraine. The company is also working on a so-called vertical takeoff drone that carries both air-to-air and air-to-surface weapons.

“Riyadh is a big area of interest,” one person briefed on the discussions told MEE. “The Saudis are looking at mid-sized drones. They want Collaborative Combat Aircraft that can fly alongside warplanes, and they want drones suitable for maritime surveillance.”

Like its smaller neighbor, the UAE, Saudi Arabia is also eying American AI chips. In May, Nvidia announced plans to sell thousands of its advanced Blackwell chips to Humain, an AI firm owned by Saudi Arabia’s $1 trillion Public Investment Fund.

The kingdom is pitching itself as an AI hub with cut-rate electricity prices to power data centers. Humain is building data centres from Riyadh to Dammam, which it says will have 6.6 gigawatts of capacity by 2034. Saudi AI company Datavolt is building a $5bn data center on the kingdom’s Red Sea coast.

While AI deals were announced with fanfare during Trump’s visit to the kingdom in May, the delivery of chips has stalled, with no public announcements. Some US officials have raised concerns that China could gain access to the US’s AI technology in Saudi Arabia. The crown prince is expected to push for progress on the deals in Washington.

Goldman analysts led by Evan Tylenda published a note on emerging labor-market risks and how companies are adapting to aging demographics and shrinking labor pools.

One section stood out in particular: the widening mismatch between an oversupply of college-educated workers and a deepening shortage of talent for non-degree, hands-on jobs.

Tylenda and others on the team spoke with labor demographer Ron Hetrick, who outlined how the U.S. labor market is entering a structural slowdown driven by aging demographics, a falling birth rate, and weakening participation among older workers.

Hetrick outlined that baby boomers once supplied 65 million workers, but only 25 million remain, and no younger generation is large enough to replace them. 

He noted that BLS data show the workforce adding just 5.9 million workers by 2034, with nearly half of that coming from workers aged +65, even as participation among those +55 continues to decline.

Here’s where things get spicy: This demographic squeeze is creating a skills imbalance: an oversupply of college-educated workers and a shortage of vocational and lower-skilled labor for non-degree jobs.

From the note:

Shortage of skilled / technical labor: The Demographic Dilemma and resulting labor shortages make automation and AI success essential while simultaneously threatening to constrain AI’s physical scale-up via potential skilled labor shortages. The emerging bottlenecks lie in power generation, transmission and grid modernization, and upstream industries required for electrification and digitization such as manufacturing, and critical minerals mining and processing — industries with long project cycles, high regulatory friction, and limited talent mobility from displaced knowledge-worker pools.

Shortage of low-skilled labor in high turnover industries: where recent graduates and knowledge workers displaced by AI are imperfect fits. This is driving rising automation for low-skilled jobs, driven by rising costs, declining labor pools. For example, the U.S. added 4.5 mn workers with a college degree since 2019, while losing 800k workers without a degree. Automation in low-skilled roles (especially ones with repetition) has potential to help improve worker safety and pay for remaining workers, potentially driving lower employee turnover in the medium to long term.

We hosted Ron Hetrick, a labor demographer, to highlight the structural issues forming for labor markets in the U.S. coming from declining labor pools, particularly in lower skilled fields not requiring a degree. Mr. Hetrick sees mounting challenges for the aging and declining workforce in the U.S., with industries like Healthcare and Construction most exposed to disruption, driven by limited availability of labor solutions.

Companies adapting, and key solutions for addressing labor challenges. Corporates, across industries, are taking different measures to remedy risk of labor shortages, mainly around 1) Automation upgrades to boost productivity and consistency; 2) Retention efforts, including increased pay, better work conditions, enhanced benefits packages, providing childcare service etc.; and 3) Training & Upskilling through the expansion of their own training infrastructure and partnerships with external institutions.

ZeroHedge Pro subscribers can read the complete note in the usual spot. It’s loaded with far more detail on the shifting labor market, a framework that’s increasingly important to understand before the 2030s arrive. 

The most appropriate way to end the note is an epic quote by Palantir CEO Alex Karp:

The average Ivy League grad voting for this mayor is annoyed their education is not that valuable, and that the person who knows how to drill for oil has a more valuable profession.

I think that annoys the f*ck out of these people. 

Palantir CEO Alex Karp on Zohran Mandani:

“The average Ivy League grad voting for this mayor is annoyed their education is not that valuable, and that the person who knows how to drill for oil has a more valuable profession”

“I think that annoys the fuck out of these people” https://t.co/uYA54AYAJN pic.twitter.com/46XmHSB1gb

— Jawwwn (@jawwwn_) November 6, 2025

These days, college is a woke indoctrination factory pumping out our purple-haired creatures who are confused about their gender and rave about Marxism.

College is not like it used to be. There is an oversupply of unproductive “woke” degrees. Don’t be woke. Be productive, find a solid trade job that won’t be automated into extinction by 2030, and start a family; this is one pathway for GenZers.

Authored by T.J.Muscaro via The Epoch Times,

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins suggested on Nov. 14 that everyone registered for the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits should reapply as a result of ongoing fraud discoveries.

At least, that is what she said when she shared what the Trump administration was planning to enact during her appearance on Newsmax’s “Rob Schmitt Tonight.”

“It’s going to give us a platform and a trajectory to fundamentally rebuild this program, have everyone reapply for their benefit, make sure that everyone that’s taking a taxpayer-funded benefit through SNAP or food stamps, that they literally are vulnerable, and they can’t survive without it,” she said.

This decision comes after Rollins disclosed on X that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) discovered that nearly 200,000 deceased people across 29 states received benefits.

The remaining 21 states sued to keep their data from being disclosed, according to the post.

The states that chose not to cooperate were mostly Democratic-run states.

More than 500,000 people were registered twice, she revealed.

She also said that the program experienced a 40 percent increase under the Biden Administration.

About 42 million people, or one in eight Americans, use the federal food program, and they receive $177 per person per month, on average, according to the latest USDA data.

Rollins, in an earlier interview, said that 80 percent of people using the program were able to work and described SNAP as one of the “most corrupt, dysfunctional programs” in U.S. history.

Those who choose to reapply would have to verify that they could not survive without it, she said. She also argued that the cutoff of some SNAP benefits would also incentivize more illegal immigrants to self-deport.

“In just the states that cooperated, we’ve already uncovered massive fraud,” Rollins said on X at the beginning of November.

“The Democrat Party has turned its back on working Americans and built its entire strategy around protecting illegal aliens. They know if the handouts stop, those illegals will go back home, and Democrats will lose 20+ seats after the next census.”

“There’s a new sheriff in town. @POTUS will not tolerate waste, fraud, or abuse while hardworking Americans go hungry,” she wrote.

SNAP beneficiaries became a poignant topic after the USDA ran out of funding for the program during the record-long government shutdown. Distribution of benefits was ordered to resume immediately after President Donald Trump signed a continuing resolution to keep the federal government funded through the New Year.

“The reduction in maximum allotments for November is no longer in effect,” the USDA said on Nov. 13. “State agencies should immediately resume issuing combined allotments for November and December for newly certified applicants who apply after the 15th of the month.”