you'd think the fat slob would have the decency to stay out of it rather than get free air time for his "going nowhere" presidential run..... pandering to 5 million subprime borrowers is the lowest of the low
If he didn't just take the hedgies money, and monitored what they were doing, we wouldn't be in this mess. Now, taxpayers get to bail out the Greenwich billionaires. Brilliant. Just Brilliant.
I'm no fan of the Dems, but Dodd seems to be one of the more common sense Democrats out there. Why shouldn't the caps be raised? If FNMA job is to promote housing why have some artificial cap? At least they could base it on regional values the way HUD does. $417,000 may be a lot in Alabama but it's not in CA or NY. If FNMA became a buyer of these higher limity loans it would promote conformity in the underwriting process therby making them more attractive to investors.
You seems to have mixed up two things: the limit on conforming loans and the limit on the size of portfolio the GSE can hold. Dodd was talking about the latter and you about the former.
Both need to be raised. I also believe this is precisely what Bush is being told must happen by the bankers. Now for you dogmatists. The level of Clinton era corruption in these GSEs was off the charts. Raines was just a scumbag and he's gotten off easy because of the race angle - that's a plain fact. But this isn't the Clinton era anymore. And the Bush era love affair with the privatized alternative to the GSEs - unregulated, wild west, insane securitization and ponzi finance has exploded. It's done and it's never coming back like it was. That's a plain fact too. The problem right now is the secondary market is still dead. The lender financing is just short term, temporary warehouse lines, stop gap, internal. Nobody wants anything final that isn't GSE grade and guaranteed. What's the alternative? Anyone?
Mea culpa I saw him on teevee and thought he said something about the mortgage caps, not the portfolio caps.
Paulson's making a fool of himself on CNBC "Bad lending practices?" Hank, they're gone. All of them are bankrupt. It's past. What are you going to do Right Now? With the wreckage? Does he really want this to fall to the level of the lawyers, liquidators, and states? Political suicide.