Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The American dream of homeownership has felt its biggest drop since the Great Depression, according to new 2010 census figures released Thursday. The analysis by the Census Bureau found the homeownership rate fell to 65.1 percent last year. While that level remains the second highest decennial rate, analysts say the U.S. may never return to its mid-decade housing boom peak in which nearly 70 percent of occupied households were owned by their residents. The reason: a longer-term economic reality of tighter credit, prolonged job losses and reduced government involvement. Unemployed young adults are least likely to own,...

By Sammy BenoitBarney Frank is the "Teflon Congressman. He was a leading OPPONENT of regulating of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac (see video below) and was able to transfer the entire blame on President Bush. He never had to answer why he fought so hard to squash regulation, was it the tons of campaign cash Frank got from Freddie and Fannie OR the fact that Frank's former lover was the former director of housing initiatives for Fannie Mae. The July 3, 1998, Reliable Source column in The Washington Post reported Frank, who is openly gay, had a relationship with...

Stop This Crazy Thing [John Hood] I second Yuval’s point. Regarding the bailout/government takeover bill, the political class in DC appears to be out of its gourd. Kevin Hassett of AEI has just written a must-read commentary on the Wall Street mess for Bloomberg (via the Web Briefing). It's an excellent response to the past week or so of preposterous analysis in the media that blames the mortgage crisis on the free market, despite its origins in the massive government manipulation of the mortgage market. Hassett explains: Enough cards on this table have been turned over that the story is...

ABC News' David Wright reports: At a joint rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa Thursday, Republican John McCain slammed the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) for being "asleep at the switch" saying that if he were president, he would fire Chris Cox, the chairman of the SEC since 2005 and a former Republican congressman. McCain said the SEC has allowed trading practices such as short selling to stay in place that turned the "markets into a casino." "The regulators were asleep, my friends," McCain said. "The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the president. And in my view...

It's not often that one person plays key roles in two -- count 'em, two -- trillion-dollar disasters. Welcome, my friends, to the world of well-connected Democrat Jamie Gorelick. In 2004, observers were "astonished" to discover that a key member of the 9/11 Commission had a fatal conflict-of-interest. Jamie Gorelick had served as a Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton from 1994 to 1997.....

The Federal Reserve is the latest agency to inject itself into the subprime-mortgage-industry meltdown with back-to-the-future rules intended to protect home buyers from "shady lending practices." They include prohibitions against loans to anyone who can't verify his income or repay. Lenders will have to hold in escrow cash from borrowers for taxes and insurance, and will be barred from issuing loans without disclosing data about rates, monthly payments, etc. These rules used to be the norm until the industry relaxed them in response to claims from liberals in Congress and others that lenders were discriminating against — "redlining" — would-be...

$376 Billion in Chinese Agency Bond Holdings Subject to Taxpayer Bailout Proposals According to FreedomWorks Analysts WASHINGTON, Jul 11, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- As politicians call for taxpayer bailouts and a government takeover of troubled mortgage lenders Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, FreedomWorks would like to point out that a bailout is a transfer of possibly hundreds of billions of U.S. tax dollars to sophisticated investors and governments overseas. The top five foreign holders of Freddie and Fannie long-term debt are China, Japan, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. In total foreign investors hold over $1.3 trillion in these agency...