The Government forced loans to bad lenders under Deval Patrick. So, yeah, those bad risks who had no business buying a house are not making their mortgage payments.
Foreclose and kick the bums out: take the hit. They're not going to turn into good debtors anytime soon.
She sounds like a decent person. We should demonize her...
A fluff piece meant to primp a left wing Republican who supports the current administration. There’s nothing the leftmedia loves more than a “conservative” catching that old-timey tax-and-spend, big-government religion.
That said, her focus on housing has some merit. Even a blind squirrel gets a nut every now and then. Ultimately, the financial issues that we face right now stem largely from the overinflation of housing prices and the excess levels of debt that encouraged it. Yet government policy to date has been to hand large amounts of money to the failed banks who made the bad loans in the first place. Presumably so they can fail on an even more spectacular scale?
Personally, I think the best alternative is to simply stand back and let the markets take their course. Where there should be intervention, and I don’t there should be much at least on the part of the government, is in encouraging the lenders to work with folks who are more or less on time with their payments and who have some hope of getting current. The lenders who have a clue are already working to identify those folks and work deals. The lenders who aren’t are clueless and deserve to fail anyway.
The problem is that due to FDIC insurance, the taxpayers are on the hook to bail out failed banks regardless of their demonstrated stupidity. To the extent that they need to pushed to do something moderately intelligent, the FDIC should take that role in order to mitigate the damage.
"The sense of hostility from that audience was overwhelming," said Howard Glaser, a Washington-based mortgage industry consultant who sat at Bair's table that day in October 2007.