California's economy and how California foreclosures affect it as well as the broader nationwide economy should be studied, if only to figure out the existing recession and what touched it off. This is important because anything that takes place in California eventually makes its way east, as was demonstrated when California real estate helped to touch off a collapse in real estate markets around the country.

Most economic experts look at Wall Street and California as the twin epicenters of the current steep recession. Whether Wall Street and its problems would have still existed without a collapse in California real estate markets is a question for debate, though it's accepted that California helped to serve as a warning sign for what was to come. Unfortunately, many ignored that warning, it would seem.

For at least several years before the financial markets suffered their deepest decline in ages back in late 2008, California had been sending out smoke signals (which were actually fires from the economic conflagration the state's deepening budget woes was creating) that were being mostly ignored by real estate speculators, not only in California but also in Florida and Arizona among several states.

It would seem that real estate values had been declining for well over three years prior to the final 2008 descent from which home values in California and elsewhere are only now just finally starting to recover from. Make no mistake, though; this "recovery" is very minor, very fragile and very much in danger of collapsing at the slightest panic in the markets and especially in California.

CA foreclosures, then, might be looked at as another sort of warning sign because there are at least six California cities in the top 10 cities across the country in terms of their own rates of foreclosure. In fact, three states -- Arizona, Florida and California -- are contributing 44% of the total number of foreclosures in the country as of late.

Combine all of this and mix it together with the fact that California has been having trouble for a decade or more in getting a handle on stabilizing its housing markets (some experts maintain, as well, that the state's famous Proposition 13 exacerbated the situation) and it's easy to see how CA foreclosures begin to affect much of the rest of the country. This rate tends to put a scare into investors just about everywhere, for a fact.

The reason why much of this is so and why many investors are so jumpy is that they aren't exactly positive that the economy and housing markets have completely bottomed out in many parts of the country. Therefore, they are a bit hesitant to get back into these markets without at least a chance of getting out what they plan on putting into the market over the short and long run. Markets stay depressed when this is the case, for a fact.

Because of all this, it's fairly certain that California foreclosures affect California economic activity. Not only that, but they tend to also spill over into the broader economy to at least a small extent. When rates in California begin, at last, to decline and then stabilize it might be that investment around the country will finally increase as people jump back into the housing market in a significant manner.