Posted on 08/25/2007 12:09:28 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Edited on 08/25/2007 10:13:31 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
The last politician who took advice from the bond market was Bill Clinton. When he pushed for a tax hike back in 1993 to cut the budget deficit, it was under the assumption that bond investors would respond by bringing down interest rates. (The theory here is that deficits are inflationary. Inflation is bad for bonds.) Yet long-term interest rates surged from 6.45 percent when Clinton signed his tax-hike bill on Aug. 10, 1993, to 8.16 percent on Nov. 7, 1994, the day before the midterm congressional election where Republicans won back the House and Senate.
Now PIMCO's Bill Gross, perhaps the most well-known bond fund manager in the world, is giving President Bush and the GOP some advice. He wants the government to start cutting checks to struggling homeowners, as both good policy and smart politics. (Bush has already ruled out any direct payments.) As Gross wrote in his recent letter to clients:
"The ultimate solution, it seems to me, must not emanate from the bowels of Fed headquarters on Constitution Avenue, but from the West Wing of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Fiscal, not monetary policy should be the preferred remedy, one scaling Rooseveltian proportions emblematic of the RFC, or perhaps to be more current, the RTC in the early 1990s when the government absorbed the bad debts of the failing savings and loan industry...This rescue, which admittedly might bail out speculators who deserve much worse, would support millions of hardworking Americans whose recent hours have become ones of frantic desperation...And if you're a Republican office holder, you'd win a new constituency of voters—"almost homeless homeowners"—for generations to come. Get with it, Mr. President and Mr. Treasury Secretary. This is your moment to one-up Barney Frank and the Democrats. Re-establish not the RFC or the RTC, but create an RMC—Reconstruction Mortgage Corporation...Write some checks, bail 'em out, prevent a destructive housing deflation that Ben Bernanke is unable to do. After all, "W," you're "the Decider," aren't you?"
My take on this:
1) This would totally alienate conservatives, many of whom were pretty disgusted heading into the 2006 election with what they perceived as the free-spending ways of the White House and the GOP-led Congress. Here are three pretty typical responses to the Gross bailout idea posted on the conservative Free Republic message board: "Using whose money? Mine? In a pig's eye. I work for MY home, not yours." "Why is it that I, who [watch] what I spend, put 20% down on my home, got a conventional 30-year loan and make my payments on time get nothing while some want the government to bail out stupid people?" "I hope every home squatter that signed those mortgages gets put out on the street!"
2) Talk about playing on someone else's home turf. Any Bush bailout idea, if he should propose one, would inevitably start a bidding war with Democrats. Hillary Clinton, for instance, has already proposed a billion-dollar fund to boost state programs that help at-risk borrowers avoid foreclosure. I don't see why the Republicans would get more credit than the Dems.
3) We're not talking about a very big constituency here. Research firm First American CoreLogic projects 1.1 million subprime-related foreclosures, spread out over a total period of six to seven years. And it's blue state California—which Democrat John Kerry won by 11 points in 2004—where most of the trouble is, with a reported 39,013 foreclosure filings in July, the most of any state for the seventh month in a row and up 289 percent from July 2006, according to RealtyTrac.
4) Not that politicians necessarily care, but the economics of a bailout are pretty iffy. As U.S. Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner, a guy who specialized in the effect of economics on law, notes in the blog he shares with Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economist Gary Becker:
"The only justification for bailing out risk takers is to avoid a depression (or as it is politely called nowadays, a "recession," but, oddly, the worse the macroeconomic consequences of a speculative boom and bust, the stronger the argument for punishing the risk takers (which include both borrowers and lenders) by not bailing them out. ... If the government relieves risk takers of the consequences of their risks, there is a divergence between social and private risk. An example is subsidized flood insurance, which leads to excessive building in floodplains. ... Moreover, government intervention to help lenders and borrowers invites further government regulation—for example, limits on subprime lending. There is no more reason to discourage risk taking than to bail out the risk takers when the risks they have voluntarily assumed materialize."
REAL bad idea.
Precisely.
So the GOP can "save itself" by "one upping" a great lot of rotten socialists? That's going to endure the GOP to it's conservative base, the same base that didn't even bother to show up at the last election because the GOP was acting too much like corrupted socialists?
Great thinking there...
Now I know why I constantly run across articles like these regarding Bill Gross:
June 13, 2007 Pimco's Bill Gross has been grossly off
Quote : "Why am I so entertained by Gross's predictions? Because if you look at Bill Gross's track record as a market prognosticator, the reaction to the PIMCO don's latest call should be hoots of laughter, not a panic to sell. In fact, for the past few years, you could have made plenty of dough betting on the opposite of whatever Big Bill said was about to happen."
LOL!
The strong will survive, new companies without intractable bureaucracy will get a chance to rise up, capital will be allocated to those who can make better use of it!
For me the fact President Bush hasn't done anything really ups him in my book... and makes me happy to have voted for him twice. And his choice for the federal reserve Bernake seems to have a level head about him, and carefully thinking through his actions. Versus the ECB which seems to have panicked nearly.
Not only that, but I can do a sub-prime loan today, right now. It will be a little harder to qualify for than August of 2006, but it can be done. There will always be a market for borrowers with a score of 619 and below.
Ownership of a home is, in terms of eternity, a deception. It is really borrowed money for 30 years, and then the owner is in his 50’s or 60’s when it is paid off.
The real truth is that it is borrowed time. You don’t get it and neither does anyone else.
For everyone gets to die and after that there’s a judgment.
And you can’t take it with you.
Vanity & deception. Better for a “homeowner” with a bad loan and a low income to rent. We’re all just renting anyway.
I hope that happens. Bad behavior only stops when people are truly held responsible for their actions. As I tell my adult children, “Your financial problems are not my financial problems.” Basically your debt is your debt. That was advise I got from my dad decades ago. It set me on the right path.
I agree with this. However, in this mortgage mess, the bad behavior was on both sides - the borrowers were borrowing more than they could afford to borrow based on their incomes, and the lenders were allowing these borrowers to qualify for 1-year or 3-year ARM loans knowing that they would very quickly jack those rates up as soon as they had the opportunity. The lenders bear some responsibility for it as well.
Suppose a lender gave a borrower $250,000 for a home that was probably only really worth $175,000 in a "normal" housing market. In addition, that lender allowed the borrower to just squeak by on their debt to income ratios to qualify for the $250,000 loan by offering the borrower a 3.5% rate on an ARM loan, while financing 100% of the home's "value". Now the borrower is struggling to make the payments, which have gone from around $1100 a month (plus PMI) to over $1500 a month or more.
Now, many of you say "screw the borrower", but the reality is that the lender is screwed too, because the home has now returned to a pre-runup value of closer to the $175,000 figure that it should have been worth in the first place. So, the lender can foreclose on the house, but then the lender is left with a home that will not cover the money the lender handed out to the borrower.
A bailout of the borrowers is not the answer, nor is a bailout of the lenders. I'm not sure where the answer lies, but it probably has something to do with "encouraging" lenders who have a certain percentage of these loans to readjust the loan amounts and interest rates to more favorable terms that can work for both parties. How you do that, I don't know, but there's got to be a better way than just having a million foreclosures on properties that are worth less than the lender has at stake anyway.
Does that make any sense? Any other suggestions, other than the standard "Screw 'em - throw them out on the street" response so popular around here?
I remember you just mentioned this recently. Maybe a better assumption is that tax hikes are inflationary.
Because many people wouldn't be in trouble if the Federal Reserve hadn't kept interest rates too high.
The article is contradictory. Did Bubba make a bad assumption or did he take bad acvice? Otherwise, I think using the bond market as an indicator is a pretty good idea. And apparently so does the author, who cites the jump in rates after the tax increase.
Just because we haven’t had a mortgage in years, why should we be paying for other people’s mortgages?
What do I get for being able to afford my home/pay my mortgage?
Who would take advice from a guy who is the head of a corporation called PIMPCO?
Oops! It’s PIMCO. My bad!!!
I love the idea that deficits are bad, because they raise interest rates, because they reduce the amount of money available for borrowing. It's better to just take the money, permanently, because that doesn't reduce the money out there. LOL!
Maybe a better assumption is that tax hikes are inflationary.
Well, if the hikes reduce economic activity, but the money supply remains the same, that would be inflationary.
In many parts of the country where median housing prices got up to 8-10 times median income, housing deflation is not only not "destructive", it's positively necessary.
I cannot understand why so many think it's terrible that Americans are paying more for gas than their parents did, but wonderful that they are paying far more for housing.
W’s already said “NO”.
In other words, life sucks and then you die.
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