Gandalf you make it sound as if the govt had no idea of what was going on. Really? Do you really think the govt saw none of this coming?
While idiot bloggers like us were spouting about insolvency of the GSEs Barney Frank goes public and says the GSEs are in great condition?
Come on now…really?
Honestly as long as officials who are elected can be lobbied, and lobbied by ANYBODY be it corporations or individuals, the game is crooked and will always be so. It doesn’t matter who or when. There is corruption now, there was corruption in the 90s and in the 80s and guess what even before Reagan there was corruption.
Now the numbers are just much larger. It is a bigger game with bigger numbers. The larger a beauracracy becomes the more inefficient it gets and the more rife it gets with corruption. Growing our govt so large that it employs half the population is not the answer. Nor is creating a regulatory society.
Dumbing things down, making them very simple and promoting efficiency is a perfectly valid solution. Yes credit expansion is the root of the problem but the govt has failed to regulate and the job of regulation is immense. Back in the day unless you were a veteran you were coming up with 20% down period. No way around it.
Prices may not go down immediately but they will eventually. Strict enforcement of tracking downpayment money for seasoning, along with a hard line that you can never borrow more then a given equity amout through seconds and such will also serve to prevent the home from becoming an ATM. All that equity (and we talking trillions here) will not be able to inflate any other markets.
The problem with this is that it is to simple and it scares people. It promotes saving and responsibility for homeownership which is unheard of. It is to easy to say keep things as they are and let the govt babysit the entire industry because the govt surely is a superior entity that we can rely on for honesty and airtight regulation.
That is fairly laughable. I guess it is always easier for people to live with mediocrity and fall back on big brother to regulate things rather then accept radical change that would sharply reduce the regulatory structure and actually make things simple.
