Posts Tagged: Mortgage Crisis

Health Care Bill Passes
Think “medical tourism”!

Samuelson rides his hobby horse but makes good points on Greenspan

Samuelson, like most guys with  big idea, wants to fit everything into it these days. But it is his defenses of Greenspan that are most interesting. We used to be always attacking the fellow back in his maestro days, but [...]

Forget how sleazy this is. How stupid is it than someone with this kind of access is BUYING AIG in January 2008. Just goes to show how hopeless any regulatory solution is. This woman, along with Dodd himself, has privileged access to the best information available to the government. She is chief counsel to the [...]

Sorkin has the politics of this exactly right

Arguing over the street address of the consumer financial protection  agency makes the GOP look dumb and on the take. (Sort of like real life.) There are really principled and therefor persuasive arguments against a consumer agency, like “consumer protection” in the form of forcing banks to make [...]

The whitewash of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has to be numbered among the most successful spin operations of our time. Within days of the market collapse in September ‘08, both Senator Dodd and Representative Frank were marching stooges up to Capitol Hill to testify that Fannie and Freddie—virtually run by the congressional committees chaired [...]

Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante column that appeared on RealClearMarkets.

Commentary By Capitalism Betrayed’s Redleaf and Vigilante in MarketWatch today:
Forget regulation, just make the banks open their books.
By Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante
MINNEAPOLIS, (MarketWatch) — Sen. Dodd’s new and not-very-improved financial reform bill, like the House bill passed last December, is driven by two of the most cherished popular myths of the financial crisis. [...]

Tamny is always good but this is a great point “a vanilla loan is every bit the speculation that a risky trade is”

The single biggest reason the current proposals for financial reform are all either irrelevant or destructive is that they are based on a faulty premise: the banks got in trouble because they were [...]

How is it that one man can be so wrong, so often, about such obvious things. Here he takes up the mantra that of course we need a consumer financial protection agency. If the banks are not duping the gullible then “ why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers.” [...]

This is among the most sober and well-argued pieces we have seen on the flaws of the administration’s financial reform proposals. We thought we might end up disagreeing more strongly when Wallison pulled out the old chestnut of the “moral hazard” supposedly created by too-big-to-fail. We have always been skeptical of the moral hazard explanation [...]