I know, we’re only supposed to talk about green shoots and recovery, but I can’t help but wonder why Mortgage delinquencies hit another record in 3Q.

The pace at which people fell behind on their mortgages slowed during the summer for the third consecutive quarter, but the overall delinquency rate hit another record, a new report shows.

For the three months ended Sept. 30, 6.25 percent of U.S. mortgage loans were 60 or more days past due, according to credit reporting agency TransUnion. That’s up 58 percent from 3.96 percent a year ago.

Being two months behind is considered a first step toward foreclosure, because it’s so hard to catch up with payments at that point.

The rate was up 7.6 percent from the second quarter. That’s a much smaller jump than the 11.3 percent rise in the second quarter from the first, and the 14 percent leap seen in the quarter before that.

While the slowing growth rate is a positive sign, the increase shows there’s still a lot of problematic mortgages out there, said F.J. Guarrera, vice president of TransUnion’s financial services division. The company doesn’t expect the figure to start declining until the middle of 2010.

The middle of 2010? These guys are dreaming. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that with job losses mounting, wages deflating, and consumer credit going down the toilet, we’ll have no such ‘slowing’ in the delinquency rates.

We have yet to see Alt-A resets hit, plus we’ve got a whole new boatload of sub-prime, Zero-down loans just dispatched by the FHA.

Real estate delinquencies, along with consumer credit delinquencies, will continue to mount for a while, perhaps several more years.

There is no recovery. In fact, this isn’t even a recession. For those who haven’t guessed yet, we are in the midst of a Great Depression.