Form an orderly line here for your rent-free cardboard box

HAVE you heard of jingle mail? It’s the practice in the US of sending your bank manager the keys to your house when you can no longer pay your subprime mortgage.

Instead of hanging on despite crippling mortgage payments, you find an envelope (any old one will do), put your house keys in it and mail them to the bank.


Then you pack up the missus, the kids and the pets and begin your new life in a cardboard box under a highway overpass.

Before the move, as you are packing, the banker arrives, lifts your flaxen-haired daughters’ chins and says: “No need to take the little ladies.”

Your bad home loan — and of course, your daughters — are now the bank’s problem.

In housing-poor Australia, flogging the house wouldn’t be a problem for the bank, not with new immigrants driving up our housing prices.

But in the US, with its huge population and huger housing stock, selling the millions of houses that have suddenly come on the market is a problem. And so is the reason for all those defaulters: peak oil.

The Australian