[quote=The-Shoveler]Interest rates and enabling selling blocks of REO’s to Big investment houses.
Also Ben (official statement) denying that QE had any effect on Stock market and housing.
These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
Really there was no pressure applied to banks (not).
In a larger sense, even without housing you would still need a fair amount of inflation to monetize these debts.
Housing is just the most direct way to inject money into state coffers.[/quote]
Starting at the end…
How so? Specifically, how is housing a direct way to inject money into state coffers?
Now, back to the beginning…I asked about government (not the Fed) action which had as its intent to re-inflate housing prices.
I would accept that the Fed, is at least in part, motivated to inflate housing prices, but it’s not their primary motivation. The Fed is bankers. The vast majority of housing debt is not owned by bankers. It was almost all private money and the GSE’s.
It’s unclear to me how selling big blocks of debt, or REO inflates housing prices. Bankers suck at dealing with distressed assets. They always have. It has always been the way that large quantities of REO and distressed debt has been dealt with. They sell them cheap, the faster the better. In the past, it has at times stabilized prices, but I can’t think of a single RE bubble in the past that it has re-inflated prices. (This IS different than past bubbles. The question here is not outcome, but rather motivation.)
I’m not sure how Bernanke’s claim that the QE programs have not had any effect on housing or the stock market is the least bit pertinent to the discussion. Nor do I have any recollection of him actually saying that. It seems contrary to the stated aims of the programs.
