commentaries

Here's what I'd like to hear from the two campaigns: "I pledge to limit government's involvement in the housing market."

At least one of them is. Housing turns as those retiring move to smaller quarters and the youngest buyers move into the market. When a preponderance of the youngest buyers are indentured to banks for 20 years for education loans, they cannot enter the housing market. One of the candidates has been working to lift some of the education debt from the present and future housing buyers to free up some of the young so they can enter the housing. market. (And, btw, to limit health care costs on that sector as well)

I want the candidates to promise to stay out of the mortgage businesses. I don't want them passing laws/policy that pushes banks to loan money for homes to those who cant afford or qualify for the loan. I want them to promise that the Federal Government will not buy up or cover those toxic loans. I do not want candidate to artificially try to enhance the wealth of a socio-economic group thinking that if its given to them rather than earned it will work

Learned observers will recall that government intervention in the housing market is what caused the housing bubble in the first place. Government requiring banks to lower their lending standards to reach a public policy goal (more home owners, regardless of their ability to afford the home) artificially inflates housing demand and drives up prices. When those underqualified borrowers inevitably default (as do other qualified borrowers who paid inflated prices because of the excess of buyers), the market crashes and everyone loses: the foreclosed homeowners, who have their credit ruined, the non-foreclosed homeowners, who see their home values plummet and fall underwater, and the banks who take losses on the bad mortgages. And yet still this editorial writer demands a plan for the government to intervene in the housing market? Economic illiteracy runs rampant.

I want the Goldman Sachs, the Freddy Mac and Fannie May execs to serve hard time. I want the president, congress and treasury people that haven't used 10% of the money that was alloted to help homeowners recover from the Goldman Sachs Paulson contrived financial massacre for the average homeowner to explain why. I want the whole mortage and realestate business to be revamped along with wallstreet. It doesn't work anymore. It's all corrupt and should be declared illegal, null and void.

If the candidates *truly* want to offer a "solution" to both the housing loan and the student loan crisis, they should mandate better economic education classes in high school. That way, so many folks wouldn't have gotten way-in over their heads.

Seriously? What do you expect the Republicans to say? "We caused this mess by deregulating the financial services industry because we want to limit government's involvement in housing and lending, we screwed it all up so badly that millions of people lost their homes. Please give us the opportunity to do it to you again" ??

And if the unregulated wallstreet genius' would have had the same free reign thirty years ago home buyers would have been in the same sinking boat then. Very few are that genius not to buy. The old saying was "Always buy a little more home than you can afford" The average home buyer is trying to work and raise a family, there is no way they have the time to outsmart the tens of thousands on wallstreet and government that were hired to create this total housing depression while enriching themselves. Don't break your arm while patting yourself on the back. These are different and very corrupt times in America.

Romney is right that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played a big part in the housing crisis. They pushed for lower money down and lending to anybody who wanted money, regardless of their credit rating. The reason was to get everybody into their own house. Villains in this fiasco are mainly Democrats-- Bill Clinton, Barney Frank, Minnesota's own James Johnson (Mondale's 1984 campaign manager and head of Fannie Mae in the 1990's), Bruce Vento, and many others. Read the book Reckless Endangerment by St. Olaf alumna and NY Times financial reporter Gretchen Morgenson.

Well actually it was the Dems, starting with Carter and then Clinton that caused the housing crisis by passing laws requiring banks to loan to people that were not qualified in order to give everybody a chance at the American Dream of owning their own home. The Repubs tried to warn of the housing crisis that would be coming because of this law and nobody would listen. It was called the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.