Every time Bubble Boy brags about the record levels of home ownership under BushCo, I just have to laugh. In the most ironic way, of course:

Cook County is on pace to record at least 30,000 and as many as 36,000 foreclosure filings this year, according to Cook County Circuit Court Judge Dorothy Kinnaird, who presides over the Chancery Division, which handles foreclosures. That would mean a 35% to 62% increase from 2006, when 22,248 filings were easily the highest in county history after having risen 36% from the previous year. (The court combines both commercial and home foreclosures, but residential mortgages comprise the vast majority of its cases.)

The driving force behind the foreclosures: adjustable-rate mortgages, which proliferated during the housing boom, according to a new report by the National Training and Information Center, a Chicago affordable-housing advocacy group. The mortgages offered low interest rates for a limited period and often let buyers skip down payments and get approval without showing proof of income, or both. Many buyers landed in trouble when their interest rates — and their monthly payments — adjusted upward, the NTIC said. [...]

Slightly more than half of the mortgages that went bad in Chicago last year had been made in the past two years. And nearly all of those — 97% — were adjustable-rate mortgages, according to the NTIC, which performed a detailed review of foreclosure data in Chicago and the suburbs.

Yet another reason why Alan Greenspan should spend eternity in the seventh circle of hell…