Housing Crisis

Advocates and economists say support for such a program misses lessons from the housing crisis.

Minnesota home prices have declined by as much as 20 percent. More than 27,000 will have their homes foreclosed on in the next year. Twenty-five percent of ARMS in the state have yet to adjust. And thousands of more homeowners are struggling with negative equity in their homes as the housing market continues to be hit with serious aftershocks.

So how will homeowners caught up in the crisis fare under the Bush Administration’s Wall Street bailout? U of M law professor and former assistant attorney general Prentiss Cox says the bailout is “like a reverse criminal action where you give restitution to the criminals and put the victims in jail.” He talks to MnIndy about how we got here and why the bailout needs to change.

Think of this as a precursor to Molly’s Friday Financials roundup (here): Yesterday the International Monetary Fund released its semi-annual Global Financial Stability Report, and the news was fairly staggering. The IMF now estimates the losses through the housing-induced US credit crunch will come to about $1 trillion. Quoting the authors: “The events of the [...]

NY Daily News: “Key McCain advisers were lobbyists for shady lender”:

“John Green, the senator’s chief liaison to Congress, and Wayne Berman, his national finance co-chairman, billed more than $720,000 in lobbying fees from 2005 through last year to Ameriquest Mortgage through their lobbying firm, disclosure forms reviewed by the Daily News show.”

NY Newsday: “Clinton campaign [...]

As we noted recently, all three remaining major party presidential candidates have largely avoided the subject of the housing bust and the financial crisis that it’s engendering. Yesterday John McCain (who has said in more than one setting that he doesn’t really understand economics [1] [2]) finally weighed in with a policy speech of sorts [...]

All three of the remaining major party candidates for the White House have assiduously avoided talk of the present economic mess, so it seems noteworthy that Hillary Clinton broke the official silence yesterday in a speech at Penn, where she touted a $30 billion package that would have the FHA buy and restructure non-viable mortgages [...]