More fallout from the burst housing bubble comes in news that ward of the state Fannie Mae is telling potential “strategic defaulters” that, if they choose that option, they won’t be able to get another Fannie Mae mortgage for seven years. As detailed in this report at Fortune, since the U.S. government now is the U.S. mortgage market (and that’s not likely to change anytime soon), that means they won’t be able to get another home loan.

Fannie cracks down on walkaways

The government-backed mortgage company said Wednesday that borrowers who default while they are able to pay won’t be able to get another Fannie Mae (FNM) mortgage for seven years. The company said the stiffer terms would “encourage borrowers to work with their servicers and pursue alternatives to foreclosure.”

Fannie also threatened to sue homeowners who walk away from their mortgages in states where such deficiency judgments are permitted.

The moves come as falling house prices leave more homeowners under water on their loans, and weak employment and income trends are putting pressure on debt-soaked households. Officials fear a spate of walkaways could send house prices tumbling again, renewing pressure on the banking industry.

Meanwhile, those who do walk may have few alternatives, given the near total government control of the mortgage market now.

It’s probably safe to say that this is the final “nail in the coffin” for the whole idea of a U.S. “ownership society”, a notion that was once endorsed by the U.S. government. Now it seems they’re much more interested in the citizens continuing to own the debt than the house.

It’s hard to believe that, after continuing clear evidence of an extraordinarily weak housing market that only improves temporarily when the government applies cardiac defibrillator paddles, some are still optimistic. The fact that consensus estimates were so far off the mark this week – by almost 10 percent for existing home sales and by a whopping 30 percent for new home sales – is a good indication of how wrong “the consensus” has been.

The latest slant on the data, uttered by Franklin Templeton’s Michael Materasso in this Bloomberg interview, is that if you average the data, somehow, things aren’t as bad as they seem. I don’t know, does this look any better to you?

However you look at it, new home sales aren’t improving from levels that – for more than two years now – have been below the pre-2008 low and that’s before adjusting for the growth in population. Prior to the housing boom going bust, the worst single month homebuilders saw was an annual sales rate of 400,000 in January of 1991 – that’s better than what we’ve had since late-2008 and today’s population is about 25 percent higher.