Our huge socialist experiment attempting to prevent true price discovery and by implication real affordability through taxpayer funded market manipulation in an attempt to save the banksters from their own folly continues….
Some excerpts below.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank wrote, “To save homes on a large scale, we must move past temporary modifications in interest rates or terms and focus on permanent principal reductions that result in truly sustainable mortgages.”
The problem is prices. Home prices have fallen so far in the hardest hit areas, the areas where the bulk of the troubled loans are, that banks would have to write down principal 30 to 50 percent to put borrowers back in the green. Accounting rules require that banks write down the value of those loans on their books, and experts tell me that if banks really accounted for all the losses in the home loan market, they’d all be insolvent.
I stole that shell game idea from housing consultant Howard Glaser: “We’re spending tens of billions of dollars on a tax credit to get people to purchase homes, we’re spending federal money to keep them in their homes through the modification program, and now we’re going to pay them to move out of their homes. This is not a sustainable system for the housing market. It’s a shell game. Bernie Madoff could have created this system,” Glaser told me today.
As for the borrowers, the rental market is ripe. Rent rates are low, vacancies are high, and the hit to personal credit isn’t going to matter as much a few years from now when banks are desperate once again sell mortgages.
Mortgage Principal Writedown Won’t Save Housing
Source: Diana Olick | CNBC
Monday, 8 Mar 2010
Hi and welcome to The Profit Motive, I’m your host Caleb Lawrence. Once upon a time in America the media acted as the watchdog of the corporations and the state. In the modern era it’s all about ratings and profits, opinion has been substituted for news and frequently is presented as fact. 
