Free Republic

WASHINGTON — Now it’s Newt’s turn to take the heat. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, rising in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination, is coming under fire for a $300,000 consulting contract he got with home-loan giant Freddie Mac before the housing market collapse. Gingrich, asked at a Republican debate Saturday night about what he did under the contract, said he lectured company officials on their lending practices. “As I said to them at the time, ‘This is a bubble. This is insane. This is impossible,’ ” he said he told them. Gingrich, who has slammed Democrats Chris Dodd...

Burning Down The House George F. Will, Friday, July 1 “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” — Emerson The louder they talked about the disadvantaged, the more money they made. And the more the financial system tottered. Who were they? Most explanations of the financial calamity have been indecipherable to people not fluent in the language of “credit default swaps” and “collateralized debt obligations.” The calamity has lacked human faces. No more. Put on asbestos mittens and pick up “Reckless Endangerment,” the scalding new book by Gretchen Morgenson, a New York Times columnist,...

Beijing Property Prices Collapse Vincent Fernando, CFA May. 12, 2010, 3:26 AM We've been waiting for tightening measures to hit the Beijing property market, especially after the city's real estate association itself said the situation was a bubble. It looks like the government's clampdown is starting to bite, hard. Average Beijing transaction prices collapsed 31% month on month: Capital Vue: The average transaction price of commercial residential properties in Beijing for the week ended May 9 fell 1,790 yuan per square meter or 9.6 percent week-on-week to 16,898 yuan per square meter, reports The Beijing News, citing statistics released by...

This is a link to the Reform act (S.2733) that forced banks to write bad loans according to quotas from the Congress, which led us to the housing collapse of 2008.

Wall Street, the losers in the collapse of the housing market are legion. The biggest winner looks to be John Paulson, a little-known hedge fund manager who smelled trouble two years ago. Now, in another twist in financial history, Mr. Paulson is retaining as an adviser a man some blame for helping feed the housing-market bubble by keeping interest rates so low: former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Like many legendary market killings, from Warren Buffett's takeovers of small companies in the '70s to Wilbur Ross's steelmaker consolidation earlier this decade, Mr. Paulson's sprang from defying conventional wisdom. In early...