In the new TAC, Allan Carlson ponders what George Bailey of "It's A Wonderful Life" would do to resolve the home mortgage crisis. Excerpt:
First of all, I think he would want to examine the sociology of the crisis. How many of the imperiled homebuyers are actually young families with children? These he would want to help. How many are singletons who used this speculative opportunity to jump onto the housing escalator? How many are empty-nesters who rode the bubble to move into a McMansion? How many are would-be investors looking for quick turnarounds in a rising market? There would be little sympathy for these latter cases, I suspect.To help threatened families with children, George Bailey would support private and public efforts that put them first in line for access to renegotiated and publicly guaranteed mortgages. “Households with dependent children” would serve as the defining criterion. He would also probably agree with guidelines recently offered by the Heritage Foundation, including:
All government-assisted refinancing should go only to homeowners who use that home as their primary residence.No help should be given to investors, speculators, owners of vacation homes, homebuilders, realtors, mortgage brokers, or bankers.
Help should also be denied to anyone who lied or made misrepresentations on their original mortgage applications.
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Here's a better take on the mess we're in that ties into your education hoax meme:
http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/the_great_education_bubble/
Or The Atlantic's Ross Douthat take on an Ivy League higher education "$40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University."
http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/05/harvardiana.php
@DavidTC:
You are almost exactly right. I came on here to make the very same point -- I would add only that mortgage brokers are often the source of falsehoods on loan applications.
This semester I worked at a legal aid clinic doing mortgage foreclosures, and we have several clients who discovered that the broker had written down that they had a second job on the loan application -- typically indicating that they owned a home cleaning business. We did some investigation, and discovered that brokers had used to put down that applicants ran a pet kennel, but banks started checking that so they've changed their stories.
There is a lot of mendacity in this foreclosure mess, but denying help to anyone whose application contains a falsehood gets it exactly wrong. The practice seems to be widespread, especially among the subprimes, and seems to be driven by parties other than the mortgagor (i.e., realtor and mortgage broker, both of whom stand to benefit from closing the deal.)
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